America has become the supervillain of the world. The land under North America swims in a consumer culture where purchase power is practiced like a daily prayer, starkly identifiable in other rapidly expanding economic centres of the world as an Americanisation. Beyond having a monopoly on geopolitical power, military dominance, and monetary capital, America also imposes its behemoth through language and culture. A specific kind of imagery, a specific kind of American English travels across global trade currents, carrying the effect of western knowledge systems, through the world wide web, broadcasted by the lens of American media. Perhaps every story, every age, requires a villain, but good stories have good villains. They are complex and sympathetic, and they compel their protagonists to be changed by their cause. The atrophied face of Donald Trump has reduced an intricately-designed, loved, and lived-in empire into a veneer of childlike egoism. Unimpressed, desiring a monster that makes sense, I feel compelled to excavate the heart of the free world and listen to its beating.

I. Seduction

There is something shocking about the mind that desires to break free from the charged hold of a social status quo; it is more shocking that some minds are able to achieve this. The villain of our story — America’s hero — is Thomas Paine, the founding father who died an alcoholic’s death in a hovel in Lower Manhattan. Paine was born working class in Norfolk, England, leaving him a lifelong inheritance of rebellion. He was introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London, who wrote him a letter of recommendation to migrate to the American colonies. In Philadelphia, he became a magazine editor and pamphleteer, writing the incendiary Common Sense in 1776, one of the most important texts of the American Revolution, encouraging ordinary people to fight against the monarchy. Paine was deeply affected by the French Enlightenment, which was spreading across the globe like wildfire. In France, Paine wrote the Age of Reason, a treatise on how he was ruled by no faith other than the church of his own mind. Back in America, a religious movement had swept the country, and Paine’s writing had cast him out as a heretic. Although disavowed in his final days, modern critics find Paine’s rejection of the paternalism of the church impressive, restoring his name on the mantle of America’s heroes. 

The American Revolution was radical. The United States of America is a country made of legislation, laws, and a constitution, writes Ed Simon, but “America,” as drawn up by Paine, is a mythos, made of poetry and utopianism. It is a world where dreaming limitlessly is possible. America is not a country, America is an idea. But where the French Enlightenment uttered it into existence, America dared to materially manifest it into being. The idea became a watering hole, feeding millions of mouths who do not know how else to soothe their pain, who seek an end to their suffering, who seek to be free. Reason allowed man to make himself.

So, the individual was born. An agent, a nation within a man, with his own voice, his own mind, and his own inalienable rights. Individualism allows a certain passion to flow through and reveal itself with ease. It allows individuals to revel in their own effect. Desirers of individualism are bewitched by the formlessness of ‘freedom,’ where, unconstrained by material or society, one might achieve anything, writing his own destiny. Its seductive power is unmistakable. However, its promise, its Hollywood glamour, is incomplete. Its turn into narcissism is inevitable, for the powerful individual does not know what to do with his effect once he achieves it. It is a powerful means to no end. 

II. Betrayal

Before settlers arrived, the land under North America held a different meaning of sovereignty. Indigenous nations had long relied on strategic interdependent networks and alliances, not only with other nations but with non-human entities like the land and animals. Governance required a hierarchical structure of leadership, based on merit and founded in reciprocity and generationally-cultivated wisdom. The land around Lake Ontario is occupied by the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, who had a carefully balanced system of governance, in which men and women took equal part. They elected royaners, leaders held to high standards, expected to be proofed with thick skin, hearts full of goodwill and peace, with the ability to stand firmly, looking to the future not only for the wellbeing of the living but also of the unborn. This was the Haudenosaunee Great Law. Colonial conquest and the War of Independence would override Indigenous interdependencies through the spread of disease, genocide, and forced displacement. The unique threat of a singular military power, too large and too rapid in its onslaught, violently eroded a carefully constructed, deep-rooted civilisation. 

The American Revolution, which sought to free all men, did not indeed free every man. Thomas Jefferson, like many wealthy others, depended on the labour of enslaved people to secure his own independence. While some enslaved people benefitted from the right to self-purchase in the new world, this would not guarantee their physical safety against violence. White women, who had never been free under the patriarchal bonds of marriage, also lost looser rights they had under the monarchy, as the new constitution’s binary concept of citizenship was reserved only for white men. Paine believed in a natural right to the earth and that civilisation would advance if individuals were to cultivate their own land. However, the “natural right to land” in the context of slavery and genocide bears a different flavour. The agrarian justice Paine dreamt of had already been developed by the land-based societies of Indigenous nations. Instead of defending them and learning from them, the revolution decimated them and razed their histories. Without valuing the generational knowledge which allowed these nations to thrive, any dream Paine had remained hopelessly naive. 

This vision of land cultivation, ignorant of the stories of the land itself, prized individual autonomy with no respect to an individual’s ties to land systems. Reciprocity was supplanted by private ownership. In Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations of the new America, he reflected that revolutions would become rare, as Americans had now discovered something they could not stand to lose: private property. Eventually, this would sow the seeds for a laissez-faire economy entrenched in narrow-minded objectivism, an endless thirst for material wealth, and distrust in legal regulations. The United States of America was a fundamentally altered empire, but remained at its core, an empire — violent, extractive, and unequal.    

III. Sedation

Whom did the empire serve? What is freedom when one lives in conditions of total abundance and plenty? The constitutional, material United States of America is preserved by the ideal utopian America, yet, the two are paradoxical. On one hand, it is untrue that all Americans have a chance at total abundance. On the other hand, those for whom total material abundance may be achieved are held hostage in the very system that replenishes their bowls. Material abundance can only be achieved through an individualism which severs its connections and atrophies its ability to form relationships with the living, human or nonhuman, the dead, and the abiotic — the earth that it claims to inherit. At the same time, this individualism rejects the limits imposed by the human body. There is a danger in the individual who perceives himself as being burdened by a body, or subjugated by the masses, because he never learns how to receive the wisdom, the grounding, and the tether of a collective sense. He finds himself also formless, much like the freedom he strives after. Separation becomes synonymous with freedom, and to what end? What is the rising cost of loneliness in our present age? In 1897, Émile Durkheim revealed that suicide, long considered a private problem, was in fact caused by a social condition called ‘anomie:’ a boredom and a detachment, an untethered state of being, a separation from norms or any integration to society.

Paine’s dedication to thinking freely was remarkable. Yet, his dream is incomplete, because it stands alone looking into an unfeeling void instead of a cause. Individualism is not the condition of one, but of a collective. Belief in individual reason is necessary, but so is the faith in collective consensus indebted to the critical reasoning capacities of those around us. Without it, we would cease social function, including its protection; long before this, we would lose our ability to feel at all. To achieve such a capacity can only be done by opening our insecure resolute selves to the wearing weather of others’ resolution. Without this, scholarly pursuit embedded in a consensual scientific process cannot take place. Worlds cannot be built together, meaning cannot be made together, individuals cannot find emotional safety, be present with each other, and raise each other up. Our reasoning is intricately entangled with our emotional curiosity, strength, and openness and with our willingness to not take our own will too seriously. This does not only require collective consciousness or an individual pursuit of free will; it requires the ability to practice both at the same time. 

America is not a dream of freedom. It is a dream of painlessness. If the earth is our natural inheritance, then, naturally, we also inherit pain. Today, we rarely talk of our own desires. Instead, we parrot ideas we hear on the internet as trendy things to say, and we cringe at the expulsion of real emotion from bodies capable of experiencing pain. Alas, when I cannot bear pain, I cannot live. I cannot labour in a way that brings my body relief and allows me to sleep well and dream natural dreams. I cannot bear a child and I cannot birth her. I cannot work away ascetically towards an artistic pursuit. Slowly, I stop living. Slowly, I start to decay. I sedate myself and accept being dominated, used, and abused. A painless future is a fixed future, constrained by this condition. The religious and autocratic paternalism that Paine rejected has reinforced its way through our sedation.

IV. The utopian

When I was twenty, I fell deeply in love with a boy who spoke passionately about justice, people’s rights to self-sovereignty, and the freedom that comes from being truly understood as an individual. I felt free around him, because I felt he understood me, maybe because I felt he understood himself the way people are meant to be understood — not as distant ideals or archetypes, but as animals who feel and need to be felt. In the dark hours of an early morning, he sat on my bedroom floor and grieved over our political structures, how one nation state could not govern a body of vastly different, complex kaleidoscope people, writhing in unique forms locally across a vaster land. He did not preach, complain, or condemn. He mourned. 

When sincerity writes our dreams, it often lacks the glamour of the perfect political statement. It is not a seething polemic, but a love song, infused with hope. It is not a pamphlet called Common Sense, but a plea for acceptance, a shared moment of speechlessness held between two friends trying to make sense of why people commit genocide. How can I desire painlessness and be free, when my pain demands, more than anything else, to be witnessed and understood, to be freed? 

A utopia is a fixed future, and painlessness is a fantasy conjured up by the utopian. My first instinct is to call the utopian a coward. Yet, we live in a world which does not accept us when we convulse in pain, when we cry, and does not make room for us to unravel and be vulnerable. Hoping for a world which will witness our pain requires accepting that in many ways, the present is broken, ugly, and difficult, and our human hearts are choking in it. To be witnessed, I have to have faith that someone will rise to witness me. In these conditions, I am called instead to pity the utopian, for he must be made to feel that he is also human. 

I do not know who the villain of this story is. For all of our struggles are still natural ones, and perhaps evil is a dark perversion of our natural world that resists being peered into, lit a flame inside, and understood. We must not deny that ugliness co-exists with us, but we must also not accept that our futures will remain so heavy, for the flame can be lit inside. 

I seek the freedom that comes from being understood as a whole being, from being strong and able. For the individual to stand upright and thrive, other people are needed to do the same, so we may take each others’ weight, including our pain. This is the freedom my natural inheritance affords me, that the rebellion that flows in my blood compels me to claim. Tom Paine had rebellion in his blood too, with which he dreamed, not of a new type of nation, but of a new type of person. Only someone with strong character, integrity, and groundedness can weather the challenges the earth has in store for us and build collective strength with others to create futures that are more just, more free, and more true.