How "High Thinking" Can Free Us

Observe your fellow New Yorkers. Look at their faces. What do you see? Are the signs of constant strain clear? Watch their feet. What is their rhythm? Hurriedness? Doesn’t their jerking gaze tell you something about the state of their inner self? Have you found one whose spirit is pensive, whose intellect has found some truth to hold onto?Few I have seen are completely untouched by this hastiness, with settled thoughts amongst the cloudiness.

Those that spend their nervous existence campaigning for contemporary causes are not even exempt, instead largely misunderstanding the nature of their prisons. I am inclined to admit, though, that many, particularly in the Labor camp, have begun to become aware, to glimpse how interconnected profit is with almost all forms of suffering our society contains today. Debs perfectly presents the perplexity I share, writing that “getting a living under capitalismis so precarious, so uncertain, fraught with such pain and struggle that the wonder is not that so many people become vicious and criminal, but that so many remain in docile submission to such a tyrannous and debasing condition. ” Even so, most Labor crowds still err in their assessment of avenues that might lead to their freedom, believing the illusion that the strike and a few subsequent lost profits have the power to crumble the entire system. I pity the suffragists who hope the vote will break their chains, and the workers that assume gaining slightly less life-threatening working conditions will equate them with their masters. The woman who votes and the worker who enjoys the momentary relief of an 8-hour workday will soon still be running thoughtlessly to and fro at the whim of the timeclock, furnishing their bleak lives with the very products they and their neighbors have suffered to produce, perfectly upholding the capitalists’ true design. I keep many strikers and suffragists as friends, with many of whom I share in the struggle to refine our progressive ideals on many topics. Yet, I still can’t help but disagree when even Mary Vorse says things like, ”You may break any written law in America with impunity. There is an unwritten law that you break at your peril. It is: do not attack the profit system. ” How do the ushers of the current revolt possess such a shrunken scope?

What of the capitalist enterprise is eternal? Do they now own all philosophy of life? Can our thoughts now be taxed?No, the mind is where subversion can exist freely. Has not all true revelation resulted from unburdened curiosity? If antsy argumentation and desperate demonstration are not necessary, doesn’t pure joy seem much more attainable? No one models this better than the immigrant in our streets. Observing him, I have reinforced my notions that unfettered exploration is where freedom originates. Perhaps it is easier for the immigrant to embody the “unamerican” aspects of Bohemianism, since he is already pushed to the fringes of our society, shame as it is, as he is responsible for every shred of vitality in this city. Those that don’t recognize his contributions or at times his humanity continually belittle him, which makes enduring the berating which accompanies Bohemian pursuits at least nearer to reach from his own lived experience. Nevertheless, there is so much to learn from him, from his withstanding unconcern with the affairs that entrap the rest of us. His ability to entertain deep wonderings of the mind within his despicableness has changed my perspective of the “low” life, and convinced me of the pure nature of Bohemianism. “Low” is any pattern of life that is contrary to that which receives much praise, contrary to the gilded, robotic existence which the “High” enhabit. This includes the impoverished existence of the immigrant, which I conclude that to an extent “poverty frees [him] from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work,” leaving him to spend his energy and his thought how he pleases.

This leads many to assume that the Bohemian demeanor is only attained through poverty. However, the immigrant is not only “low” because he is poor, nor does his poverty guarantee he will think like a Bohemian. It is no wonder to me that If he does desire to think like a Bohemian, he often must defend his thought-space from the poison of practical thinking. Orwell provides a raw look into this struggle when he quotes Bozo, a man he encountered who guarded his contemplation of things greater than his circumstance as a beggar, saying “If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right. ” And this is what the High Livers lack, the essentiality of Bohemianism they never grasp. It is the willingness to wrestle, to be bruised in one’s search for revelation. We all must tap our foreheads and say “I’m a free man in here. ” Our minds may remain as the only unexploited thing Don’t you see this evident in how the Bohemian walks the streets in a different manner, his joy evident, with the knowledge that his nature posits himself within the true revolution?Means of insubordination, his posture free to straighten, unburdened by the self-sacrificing pursuit of wealth or entertainment or social approval.