The Purple Thread of Epictetus and the States War on Individuality

Or how to remain free

Thomas Cole. The Voyage of Life: Manhood. 1842.

I debated long and hard about sharing my thoughts here on Substack, but the humans I’ve met along the way have made every word I’ve written here rewarded ten times over.

Thank you for taking part in this journey.

Let’s dive in.

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I wrote a few weeks ago about the dehumanization of the “other” in our political rhetoric. My thinking, however, was not subtle enough. The right term would have been subhumanization. This distinction is more important than I thought.  

I realized my error when I read about a peasant during Stalin’s Great Purge named Sidorov. When he was arrested, he owned a small wooden house covered in sheet metal, one cow, one horse, two pigs, and four sheep. He had a wife and a daughter.¹

He was accused of saying, “Stalin and his gang won’t give up power. Stalin has killed a whole mass of people, but he doesn’t want to go… you can’t even talk about that, or you’ll end up in a camp for 25 years.”

Sidorov pleaded not guilty. A few months later, the verdict came back: “SHOOT Sidorov Vassily Klementovich; confiscate all his goods.” He was shot on August 3^rd, 1938.

Sidorov did not understand the full madness of his own state: words like this do not lead to a work camp, but to a bullet; and a bullet is not merely for what is said, but for what is thought. The slaves of states are not allowed to acknowledge their own slavery. The significant point is that they are not even allowed to have a self.

What made Communist Russia unusual – and the totalitarian states that followed in its wake – is that it treated its own people as if they were the enemy. The Black Book of Communism notes that it “was not a traditional confrontation between two opposing political groups, but a conflict between the government and the majority of the population.”

Soviet tyrants did not try to mold their vision of utopia to the masses. Instead, they tried to mold the human masses to fit their vision. Tens of millions died as a result. In contrast, utopia to our hunter-gatherer forebears meant laying down at the end of the day with a beating heart and a full stomach, a warm human nearby and a swath of stars overhead.

Let us turn to the Araweté of eastern Amazonia to view a different form of government.

One ethnographer² observed that if an Araweté man sits down and starts making arrows, other men sit down and start making arrows too. If a woman starts cooking maize, other women will start cooking maize. In this way, everyone within the band has the chance to be a leader at something, whether climbing for honey, hunting monkeys, or building a hut. This is true in matters of life-and-death as well. If a leader wants a war expedition, he must walk first along the narrow forest paths. He must carry a bow, risk his life, and have skin in the game. Theirs is a government of self-rule, common to most South American bands.

We can imagine an aspiring tyrant lifting his head from his hammock and saying, “You will not criticize me or my administration of this band under penalty of death.” What would follow? He might be laughed at until he lays his head back with crimson cheeks.

If the tyrant takes a nap instead of hunting and says, “I will take all of your monkey meat, honey, and açaí, and then redistribute it according to my own vision of utopia,” I can hear the twangs of bows and see an arrow or two lodging in his chest. Woe the tyrant who played such games with free men and women. Hunter-gatherers were the original free market capitalists.³ Their lives depended on maintaining a deadly distinction between those who contributed to the bands survival and those who were free-riders.

All states would have us believe that we need a strong government with a strongman at its helm. A Father. A Leader. On the other hand, it was an axiom of our ancestors that a leader was no better than those he led because each member of the band knew they were masterful, autonomous, and self-reliant human beings. They knew their worth.

What then do we learn about human nature? We were not built for submission. We were built with a forest at our backs. A deep forest, one we could get lost in. If a leader abused his power, we were free to walk a few miles beneath banana trees to start a new camp. My hunch is that the only humans who survived were those who obeyed the creed of self-rule.

The problem with states, then, is not human nature, but something to do with the state and our relation to it.

It has been said that the wanton murder of millions was due to the animalization of the other. Actually, it was also due to the insectification and germification of the other. But then a problem arose: even a gnat and a bit of E. coli have a self in a way, in that gnat X differs from gnat Y. What then did the state do? It resorted to objectification. It turned human beings into objects.

If there is no self, then there is no life or death. There is only “physical liquidation” which became the Soviet term for murder. If the object threatens the political ends of the party, that object must be liquidated… nothing more. The snot pouring from the tortured man’s nose and the sweat from his hair and the wobble of his legs and the feces in his pants and the urine down his leg and the pounding of his heart and the flush of his face – this means nothing. All that matters is the Party. The Cause.

I want to drop Stalin in an Araweté camp to see if he could still put bullet holes in the skulls of everyone around him. I imagine it would be more difficult if he gazed deep into the eyes of those his life depended on as they looked back at him across a stone ringed fire, and after he had crawled on hands and knees with their children, and after he knew the way they liked their açaí fruit prepared.

Now I wonder what would happen if we took an Araweté man and placed him at the helm of the USSR. Would he weaponize famine? Would he murder millions? Would he jettison the self-rule of the forest and embrace the dehumanization of the state? The question then becomes: are tyrants inevitable when humans live in states? History solemnly nods yes. It seems then that neither human nature nor the state are the issue, but it is the marriage of the two that opens the gates of hell.  

The significant point is that the ancestral self is forever in conflict with the state. The state has been nothing less than the annihilation of human liberty, dignity, and individuality, though there are some exceptions. My feeling is that a thread of ancestral respect for the self is woven through the fabric of American society, for example, and that this has made it allergic to tyrants and the lie of utopia. America has not yet walked through the gates of hell into the red glow beyond.

What then is this thread of pre-state freedom? I believe it is a purple thread.

When a man asked Epictetus why he would not take part in one of Nero’s decadent festivals when he could have his throat cut for refusing, Epictetus replied that the man asking him that question views himself as a single white thread in all that make up a tunic, and must therefore seek to resemble all other men just as a single thread seeks to hide in the multitude. “But I,” said Epictetus, “want to be the purple thread… Why then do you say to me, ‘Be like the majority of people?’ If I do, how will I any longer be purple?”⁴

There is no longer a forest at our back. It may be that the only forest that ever mattered — the only freedom that every truly existed — was the one that lies within us, dangling at the end of that purple thread.

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Thank you for reading What then?

See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. The same source is used for the information regarding Sidorov and the quote about Communist Russia: Courtois, Stéphane, and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism : Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press, 1999.

2. de Castro, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros. From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

3. The Araweté are technically pre-state horticulturalists, but the point still stands in this case.

4. 1.2.18. πορφύρα refers to the “purple dye” which was woven into the hem of the pure white toga praetexta worn by magistrates. Epictetus’s point was that the purple was different, unique, and stood out so as to make the rest appear more beautiful.