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Hello. Phoenix Quinn here, your resident spaced-out philosopho-geek commentator. Hello, hello.


Kindly bear with me as I outline, only briefly, some notes about the real world history of the Western movement of the free spirits. I think this might have some bearing, as a reference anyway, on what it means to be "free" in the New World...


This is more or less a follow-up to my previous notes on The Revolution of Everyday eRepublik, which stated that:

"The desire to play, to really play, is a political decision."





A few gentle readers might recall that Jehan Cauvin, aka Calvin, the French godfather of the Reformed Church, once wrote two nasty little pamphlets, one called "Treatises Against the Anabaptists" and the other "Treatises Against the Libertines".


Calvin and his erstwhile competitors for leadership of official anti-establishment protest at the time, two infamous German anti-semites named Melanchthon and Luther, despite their mutual hatred, tended to agree with each other and even with the "devils" of Rome on this point: that those dang pacifist Anabaptists were a really serious problem who are best dealt with via torture, public burning, chopping-off-of-heads, book-burning, banishment and so on.

And that the "Libertines" were even worse.


Calvinists and Lutherans alike, as well as their frenemies in the inquisitorial offices of the 4th Lateran Council, despite their deep mutual hostility, were horrified by the expressions of free thought and free spirit sprouting up around them. They were united in defending their monopoly over at least a significant segment of the marketplace of ideas.







Expressions of free spiritedness of both the passive and the more aggressive sort began to reach epic proportions as early as the 13th century AD and spread even further after that. This occurred because literacy had begun to grow in Europe. The belief-market controlled by the Imperial Church-State Hierarchs faced opposition not only from the "official" competition of rapidly bourgeoisifying German Princes and Franco-Swiss grandees, but -- and this is really the reference I want to emphasize -- very much from "the street" too.


As reading spread and gnostic talk spread even faster, it dawned on a good number of intellectuals and "simple folk" alike that the only major thought that had been embodied in the statist religion had actually been extricated from it a good while back, using the still-potent weapons of the Greek dialectic.

A most-excellent example of such predecessors: as early as the 900's, an amazing Eire-born Gael, the theologian John Scotus Eriugena, had dared to posit that philosophy in fact exists separately from theology. His profound 5 volume work De deivisione naturae synthesized the philosophical work of 15 centuries; it was a work that laid the foundation for Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind, one of the most profound works of Western philosophy, nearly 900 years later.


The work of John Scotus was condemned as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity" by Honorius III (Big Potato of Rome, 1216-1227), whose own major claim to literary fame was compiling the Liber Censuum Romanae eccliesiae, an account of taxes, donations and privileges owed to the Roman Papas Exchange, plus writing a few rather oddball grimoire pieces on how to make demonic entities do your bidding by means of animal sacrifice.






Though this is now a rather old story, it feels like we still have a hard time moving from the old world of exchange-driven economics and hierarchical mechanics to a world of pleasure and autonomy, even, quite oddly, in a fantasy world.

Sure. The marketplace of ideas is a good deal more competitive now than it was when old Jean Cauvin was busy fulminating against the proto-Mennonites and gay liberationists of his day. So that's a good thing.

But the way to transform the materia prima into a condition in which it can tolerate control only by itself, the means to imagine and create a truly New World that can authorize playerdom to resist the absurdities that are killing it, the abolition of guilt and the discovery of innocence: this philosopher's stone is at the heart of the experience of play, which is the same thing as love, and it is calling us, it is calling playerdom to the life from which we has been separated by the economics of exchange and the falsehoods of hierarchy.






The Anabaptists did not believe in childhood baptisms and refused all military service on religious grounds. The Beguines, another group persecuted by Calvinists, Lutherans and Laterans alike, were lay women who managed their own funerals, moved in and out of religious life as they pleased, and did their own charity work.

The so-called "Libertines" had a wide variety of organizational and disorganizational forms. They acted on their belief that those possessed by the Holy Spirit were innately free and therefore had no need to pay attention to any kind of established hierarchy or dogma, including things like so-called traditional marriage, various types of sexual prohibitions, the need for priestly interventions, the idea of working to survive taking precedence over living freely, or indeed, the idea that anyone other than their own freed selves could represent them in any way.

Withdrawing from the monopolized and standardized markets and mindsets is seldom met with open arms.





Five hundred years ago, the defenders of orthodoxy, as well as the official defenders of "proper" heterodoxy, got all super-freaked-out -- to the point of ordering or calling for executions, tortures, confesssions and banishments -- for those who just wanted to withdraw from the standardized market and take care of their own needs, as well as those who simply found the whole darn hierarchical mess full of idiocy.


Out there in the wetness and morass of the burning world, amidst the collapse of failing zombie capitalism and the ruins of authoritarian "peoples democracy", awakening at last from the terrors of the 20th century, our modern, republican and "democratic" treatment of this topic seems poised, perhaps, for a new and hopeful rise of the movement of the Free Spirits.


Can we, should we, aim for any less here in our fanciful and imaginary New World?





That's the kind of stuff I wonder about in between clicking buttons and whatnot.

XOXOXOXXOXOXO,
PQ