Outside of Society

There have always been warriors. That is to say that war and warriors have been a caste in cultures almost universally, even before tribes began putting walls around agricultural communities that evolved into cities and nations. Societies have classically been partitioned into four classes: Warriors, Priesthood, Administrators, and Workers. Then there are rare individuals who simply don’t fit in. There is nothing within the social confines for them behind walls and they must go outside of society either of their own will, or forced out by one or all four of the classes within the walls.

Outside of society are the mentally ill, the criminal, the artist, the poet, the shaman and so on. I might add the alcoholic and addict or just plain ole F” ups but these are luxuries in one sense and the wise ones know it. To serve no useful purpose inside the walls of social norms is a frightening thing for those who are forcibly exiled for one reason or another. This can be true for artists, poets, alcoholics and addict who want nothing more than to “fit in”… to be in the “in crowd”. I hear it all the time from those in recovery who wish “to be productive members of society.” But, to a few, criminals or artists and shaman, nothing could be more repulsive than to be accepted by the norm. We go where we don’t want to be protected by Warriors (and, in many cases, we have more in common with the Warrior than any other class), blessed by the Priesthood, categorized and taxed by the Administrators, or to be welcomed back into serfdom as a Worker.

Patty Smith sang it best; “outside of society, that’s where I wanna be!” Is it so wrong that some of us don’t want to become a cog in the machine… a part of the meat-grinder? Is it a compromise if we yield to leaching off the excesses of it? I think so… but then it is hard to escape it… only a few… only a few.

If there were a Mount Rushmore of the few who succeeded, whose four images would you carve on it? I can draw my four from four of these:

·         Buddha

·         Jesus Christ

·         Boudicca

·         Miyamoto Musashi

·         San Juan de la Cruz

·         Galileo

·         William Blake

·         Red Cloud

·         Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei)

·         Mark Twain

·         Jack Kerouac/Alan Ginsberg/Neal Cassidy

·         Alan Watts

·         Mother Teresa

All of these and more. I have left out the great reformers of our time because they were working within the frameworks of Society. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and so on were indeed great enough to be put on a Mount Rushmore but these aren’t striving to be outside.

geo 5,626