A Theory(?) of Social-Sacred Power

This article is an interesting piece of writing that got cut for space in other piece of writing our Comrade was putting together for our community. We thought it might be of interest to our community as a stand alone piece of thought. 

A Note On Power

When we use the word power in this essay we define it as:

a context specific relationship--to people, resources, materials, ideas, narratives, organizations etc--that allow beings and things to influence other beings and things and make changes in the world. 

We believe that there are at least three kinds of power energy-power, social power and sacred power. Energy power are things like electricity that allow machines to move and change things or calories that allow animals to move and change things. Social power is the power that arises from social life, from the things that living beings do together to live together. Social power includes political and Geo-political power.  Sacred power is the aspect of social power that comes from our grounding in our web of inter-relatedness with the whole world. 

We think that colonial knowledge systems and capitalism systems have alienated us from sacred power and turned it into superstitious or worse sold it back to us as conspirituality. Yet our ability to make changes in the world is fundamentally enhanced by our connection to sacred. This article tries to articulate how we think these aspects of social power relate. 

A Note On Theory

All theory relies on abstraction. Theory does not even start with the world as it is, but rather the world as it appears to us in our mind. Our mind takes a world that is far too vast and varied for our empirical senses to make a coherent rendering of and creates an internal model.

 The rational mind then takes this mental model of the world and begins labeling its various parts. This act of labeling takes experiences already filtered through imperfect senses and chooses which of them are essential to the thing being labeled and which are accidental or irrelevant. The dirt on the apple for instance is not essential to what an apple is (though all apples seem to have dirt on them when we find them). 

The mystics mind is much less concerned with labeling and identification. Rather it seeks to understand a sense of the whole. Not just the apple with its dirt but the tree it comes from and deer it feeds. The mystical mind attempts to intuit reality by embracing its vastness and suchness prior to its collapse into a semi-coherent internal mental model. In doing so the mystical mind grants us access to a grounding and insightful sense of connection to all that is while also providing us a space to embrace the contradictions inherent in our social world in ways that offer more liberatory options for being in the world. 

For this reason, trying to theorize the mystical does it a grave disservice. It amounts to what Paul Feyerand referred to as the conquest of abundance. It is to try to capture love in a bottle by photographing young lovers. Yet rationality has proven useful to learn things about a world that is far too complex to be rationally modeled. We have used it to discover medicine and go to the moon. To paraphrase Fritjof Capra mysticism does not need science and science does not need mysticism but humanity needs them both. 

So it might be more accurate to call what follows suppositions on social-sacred power.

Suppositions on Social-Sacred Power

WildSeed Society has its roots in class based socialist movements as much as it does in the Churches of the Wild of enslaved African workers. We believe that movements that seek to change the world without being grounded in the Sacred will end up dehumanizing its members and killing the planet. Here we use the word Sacred to refer to those things that reconnect us to the felt sense of our being part of a larger whole, caught in a life-affirming web of relationships. We believe that movements of the Sacred that ignore building social power through organizations and institutions will find themselves either crushed into irrelevancy or worse, coopted to support the mechanicians of the Empire.  

We believe that material relationships of production and reproduction structure shapes the movements that arise in a society. A movement based in the white professional managerial class of a capitalist society will look fundamentally different than one based on rural indigenous peasants. 

The types of social change each movement within a class-based society can catalyst is both constrained and enabled by its class character. Yet unlike Marxists we believe that class is one of many decisive factors that shapes our collective action. We believe that our social world is based equally on the actual material conditions on which we live and the individual and collective rituals that humans use to make sense of their worlds. 

This means that the things our bodies do like cook, clean, work on computers or hunt mammoths shape our brains and ideas. For instance, people who work with their hands tend to use more body metaphors to make sense of the world. People who live in tight knit communities tend to think of themselves primarily through the lens of group belonging. 

Yet we are also consciously taught how to see, feel and sense. The more words we have for colors for instance, the better we are at noticing the differences between them. The more we are taught to attune ourselves to the needs of others the better we can read body language and judge the needs of others. Further, we are also taught symbols, metaphors and associations as we are socialized into a society. We are taught about kinship or “the system of meaning and power that cultures create to determine who is related to whom and to define their mutual expectations, rights and responsibilities.” 

This socialization shapes our brains and bodies in measurable ways. One useful way to understand how the material and social world shape socialization and the creation of workaday ideologies (the day to day assumptions we make about “the way the world works”) is through ritual theory. 

 “Ritual theories assert that focused interaction, which these theories refer to as ritual, is at the heart of all social dynamics. Rituals generate group emotions that are linked to symbols, forming the basis for beliefs, thinking, morality, and culture. People use the capacity for thought, beliefs, and strategy to create emotion-generating interactions in the future. This cycle, interaction à emotions > symbols> interaction, forms patterns of interaction over time. These patterns are the most basic structural force that organizes society….”

Here, what Summers-Effler is saying is that ritual theories are those which say that the direct interactions of people and the meanings that those interactions carry is the force that animates society. This, in many ways, echoes how scientists talk about emergence in systems theory. What ritual theory adds is a very descriptive sense of just what happens psychologically in many (though by no means all) of these interactions. That is the creation of meaningful symbols through action. 

So a ritual is any time two or more people get together to interact with each other or with an object that produces emotions that are shared by multiple people and these emotions get linked or projected onto symbols. So when we are in the fourth quarter of a basketball game, waiting in hushed silence for a shooter to make a free throw, only to erupt in joy when she makes the shot putting her team up by three we have experienced a focused interaction that generates group emotion. When we hoist that local basketball player into the air as a symbol of our high school or town pride we have participated in a ritual. 

We can see these dynamics play out in all sorts of social interactions. Our elections are layered with rituals as we wait for winners to be announced, erupt in cheers or tears at the result and (until recently) wait for the loser to concede and victory to take the stage and make a speech. Weddings and funerals are often layered with multiple layers of ritual. 

Some of these rituals might be ceremonial. That is to say, they conform to prescribed forms of action and outcome in which their power is tied to those forms being carried out. This is often how weddings work. You are married BECAUSE you said the right words in the right order in front of the right people. Any deviation from the form might make the whole thing illegitimate. Ceremonies are predictable. 

Some rituals are also sacred. That is to say that they serve to connect us to our felt sense that we are a part of a larger whole. When we operate from a sense of wholeness and connection we relate to the material world fundamentally differently. We can solve the challenges of daily life in more creative and long term ways. 

Our rituals can also attune us to a whole world of information and somatic awareness that can help us be in better relationships with each other and the natural world. There is nothing supernatural about rituals that connect us to nature. By that I mean, we do not need to believe in a set of forces that operate outside the laws of physics to commune with nature. 

Contemporary science has shown that we do not live in Newton's world of mechanical clocks. Rather we live in a fundamentally entangled and interrelated universe full of emergence, fields of interaction and information that never dies. We live in a world full of mystery, ironically the kind of indeterminate mysteries not stuck to objective space or time that mystics have always described. 

Plants, animals, fungi and bacteria all evolved ways to send signals to each other that would allow us to collaborate for mutual thriving and generative competition. Rituals can sensitize us to the fundamental reality that we are part of a natural world full of conscious beings co-creating the means of our shared existence. 

Likewise rituals can connect us to our needs and the needs of our comrades. It can connect us to dreams and hopes our ancestors had for us. It can bring us into the right relationship with the natural world we are an integral part of and without which we cannot survive. Ritual can process hurt and trauma while freeing up capacity in our nervous system to act with integrity and passion. 

There are many ways of successfully interacting with such a complex reality. Science and mysticism represent two such ways. Yet it is our belief that to move forward towards liberation we need to find a way to synthesize the insights and practices of both science and mysticism in order to transcend the limitations of each. This new way of interacting with reality must then be integrated into our social practices so that we can best understand and interact with the world that is in order to build the worlds we want.