How to Self-Rule When Everything Around You Says Submit

Or the primal wisdom of Yellow Wolf

Christ in Limbo. Jan Brueghel the Elder. 1593

“Therein, as far as I by listening knew, There was no lamentation save of sighs.” —Dante

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Along with much worth loving, the state has brought much to be lamented.

Dante’s poem Inferno breaks hell into nine circles. The first is called Limbo, a sort of border place. It is neither heaven nor hell, freedom nor slavery, but a passive drift, a place where a soul is not so much punished as it is deprived of eternal joy.

I have a hunch the state has brought Limbo unto earth.

How so?

There are those who claim militarizing an environment—such as TSA at airports—stokes fear.

I walked through TSA on a recent trip and looked around for this fear like an ethnographer in a strange land. The scene spoke of danger: metal detectors, plastic fences, red tape, uniformed guards with faces as bland as cattle herders moving their herd to and fro. If the walls could talk, they would say, Something terrible will happen at any moment. And yet what could we do? Where, exactly, was the threat?

I did not see fear, but I did see something more subtle: pensive body language, quick movements at a word of command, and rapid halts at raised voices. I saw an sort of pending fear in response to this environment. Let us call it pre-fear.

How, then, can this pre-fear lead to a classic fight response? How can it lead to a flight response? How can it lead to anything other than what evolutionary psychologists call the fright response—playing dead? The sense at present is you can neither fight this doom nor run from it. There are whispers of 1984 in it: Do as told. Lay down. Submit.

I believe this pre-fear is far more destructive than the true fear of the past. Our modern environment, TSA being one small part, leaves us with a paradox: it is designed to protect us from fearful consequences and instead keeps us in perpetual anticipation of something fearful. What truth does this paradox reveal? What can we do about it?

Let us set a counter example.

Yellow Wolf was one of the last Nez Perce warriors to surrender to U.S. forces. His memoirs are a running stream of hardships: water fasting, frigid winters, bullet wounds. One story stands out to me. He got shot in the head, a paltry “scalp-wound” as he called it. Three days later, he fell asleep watering his horses and warning shout jolted him from his slumber. Struggling to gain his senses, he turned and saw a grizzly bear growling and sprinting toward him. The bear was so close when Yellow Wolf raised his rifle that the barrel brushed up against the bears fur when he squeezed the trigger. The bear fell and Yellow Wolf struck it with his war club.

When asked if he was scared, he laughed and said, “No, I was not scared. The bear had no gun.”¹

He did not play dead. He did not run away. His first intuition waking from a deep sleep after getting shot in the head was to fight. Fear involves the possibility of losing your life and it served us well in the past. If we are trained to respond to fear proactively, we run if we have the time, we fight if we must, or we play dead if it is too late. The point is we choose to play dead only when the colossal paws and claws are already wrapped around our necks. If Yellow Wolf had waited for the wand-wavers at TSA and orders from loud speakers on the walls and asked, “Why is no one telling me what to do?” then he would be dead.

We carried a rifle to kill bears before being eaten. We carried tinder to make fire before freezing. But what do we carry for terrorists on planes? Nothing. We are stripped. We are disarmed. We are made inert. Terrorists are TSA’s job. Zooming out from the airport to view the earth from the moon, where is our tomahawk for nuclear war? Climate change? Pandemics? We cannot raise a rifle to an asteroid as if it were a grizzly. My point is we have been deleted from the ancient equation and our sovereignty has been outsourced to the state.

Yellow Wolf may have laughed when he said “The bear had no gun,” but there is wisdom here. He knew what it was to fast in the mountains for fifteen days without food, alone, as a thirteen year old. He knew what it was to be shot in the skull by a savage painted red. What, then, is a bear? My point is we master fear by habitually overcoming micro-threats first and macro-threats last. But without knowing what it is to sustain a scalp-wound, the grizzly may have been terrifying for Yellow Wolf. Without knowing death-by-grizzly, might our warrior be terrified of a snowstorm? And then the dark? A sprint up a gloriously muddy hill? A bit of solitude alone with himself inside of his own skull?

Is this, then, what is happening now? This brings us back to pre-fear. It makes true fear foreign, evil, a reminder we are passive victims in an ocean of uncontrollables. Macro-threats from above have replaced micro-threats from below. Rarely do we climb the ladder of incremental hardships. Rarely do we carry rifle or tinder. Standing on the bottom rung looking up at the soaring heights above, it is easy to become terrified of a hard run on the trail. If we do not know what a hard run is, the trail itself becomes a thing of fear. If a trail becomes fearful, merely leaving the house may feel like willfully stepping into in the lower rungs of hell to face uncountable torments.

At last, the blackened heart of pre-fear is laid bare: it is an engineered fear of existence implemented from above. Only when fear of bear and bullet is removed can fear of existence course like a cancer through the mind. The modern threat, then, is not a terrorist on a jet, a scorched ozone, or an asteroid striking earth—it is never becoming a fully actualized human being.

Let us sum up. The pre-state bristled with danger and yet we stood a chance with a knife for slaying and tinder for warmth; the state is exceptionally safe and yet one press of the Nuclear Button can end all life on earth. Savages make masters of themselves in overcoming their environment; moderns make slaves of themselves by delegating their survival. Ancestral men and women feared losing life; modern men and women fear living it.

At this collision of ancient and modern we find a truth of the human condition: the muscle in our skull is not wired for safety and existential threats but struggle and concrete threats—earthquake, mudslide, bear, spear. It is in overcoming we find our humanity: overcoming for ourselves, our kin, and for love of a good fight.

What, then, can we do about it? Is the nuclear bomb all that different from the grizzly? Objectively, there is little we can do about a mushroom cloud but much we can do about a grizzly. Subjectively, the grizzly and the mushroom cloud differ in scale but not in essence.

And so both are opportunities. Both offer a thread winding back to the savage era of autonomy where we may find something ancient, something that may never be taken away: self-rule.

Yellow Wolf said, “I made defending myself a study.” I believe we can riff an entire philosophy off of this. An anti-Limbo philosophy. A pre-state philosophy modified for the state.

Let us lean into it.

How, then, do we banish pre-fear on a societal scale? We can spread the gospel of self-rule through combat arts—Muay Thai, jiu jitsu, boxing, shooting, and so on. But combat without strength is useless. So we can teach fitness which harkens back to the athleticism of our ancestors—crawling, sprinting, throwing, jumping, lifting, and playing. But there is no point in either without community. Let us then build community—sport, military, mountain excursions with all the vigor of Nez Perce rituals. Gradual exposure to fear does not produce wide-eyed submission but an open armed bring it on. Who, then, would fear existence any longer? Who would not feel empowered to do something about macro-threats as warriors, scientists, and philosophers?

Our true measure is not what we fear but how we respond to fear. And so we can walk through TSA as if we were Yellow Wolf and meditate on mushroom clouds as if they were grizzly bears. The Yellow Wolf mode of mind does not seek control of cloud or bear, but of itself.

It is a matter of the mind.

It is a decisive orientation to reality.

It is a fear of nothing but a life unlived.

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1. McWhorter, Lucullus Virgil. Yellow Wolf: His Own Story. Revised and enlarged ed., Caxton Printers, 2020.​