Not Livin'By Default Two

So, we were on hippies gone south, and the poster phrase, "Live by Choice, Not by Default".

I think in order to understand 'choice' in the phrase, we have to understand 'default'. Viewed from the secular self-actualization, these are the two exclusive options: it is either default into a Stepford Wife (and at Curves, they mean a fat one, at that), or (wind blowing hair fan starts along with Braveheart theme music) start making choices about your life, determine where you are headed.

In the Ellulian society (cities escaping from God), default is allowing yourself to become what your environment, your place of origin and your genetics determine. It is the easy route, the way of the cow crossing. It is acting like a cow because that is what you know. It is holding onto certain values because they are simply what you know. It is getting married because your parents did, or not going to college because no one in your family has ever gone. It is the unthinking man, Marx's common man on religious opium. Default is, to the City of Man in our day, hell. It is the worst thing you can do in the eyes of the cultural elite.

The other secular option: Choice. Instead of a cow, you can be a god. You can take each day and choose to be in it, you can send out positive energy to those around you and change the world, one ripple at a time! You can begin to be the self that you are truly inside- or better yet, since the days of EST seminars and encounter groups when people found out that they couldn't get to anything but an empty hole after stripping everything away- you can create the self you would like to be (and by the way, there's lots of great products like hair colors and psychoanalysts out there which can help you do it). You can follow the ones who are self-creative, like the woman named after the Mother of God who seems exactly the opposite of her name saint. Or you can go along with "The Secret" and THINK about what you want in order to get anything (on the downside, anything bad that happens to you is totally your own stupidity and result of negative thinking: and what kind of negative thinking does that engender towards Christ's crucifixion? I can hear it now: "Oh, of course Jesus was a great teacher, he just needed to work on His positive thinking skills"). If you wind it out far enough, it gets scary.

Enough. We know we aren't gods. A bunch of us with divinity with no redemption would make up exactly the image that Lewis paints of Hell in The Great Divorce: a bunch of selfish, oppressive ninnies building more and more palatial homes but farther and farther away from each other. That is what is the end of this "Live by Choice" mentality: if you are making up your own existence, then in effect you are alone, because all real relationships come from God.

Then let's turn from this cacophony of choice-making and towards the Catholic thing: the real thing.

We are endowed with free will, and this is never taken from us. We have a will to choose: find God or to lose Him forever. That is the choice upon which all other choices rest, the foundational choice. However, after Adam and Eve fell, we did inherit a terrible default: original sin. Our bent will is skewed towards the self, towards the three-fold sin of the Man of Lust: lust of the eyes, of the flesh, and the pride of life. The real default of a bent will is exactly what the secular culture defines as "Choice": choose what to wear, let that be self-expression; choose how to live out your sexual nature; to be self-actualized and a positive part of the culture, choose your lifestyle.

In the true sense, choice is freedom: but it is the choice to find God at all costs which gives us true freedom, for He knows how we are made to live as only the Creator can know. It is beyond us, as the EST people found out. We have to make that choice, but because of the default of a bent nature, we need help to continue to choose God and freedom. That is the very purpose of right religion, of orthodoxy and orthopraxy: to assist us to make the choice for freedom, to become truly ourselves by paradoxically losing ourselves in God.

The ten commandments, the inspired writings of the New Testament, the saints, the doctrines and traditions of the Church: all these are assists in each person's choosing God every day. This kind of life is the true wind-blowin' hair fan Braveheart hippie life: it is what the hippies were almost on to in their hippie way at the very beginning and then lost. This kind of life takes the William Wallaces and the St. Joan of Arcs. It is the only choice worth dying for. The default is unthinkable, as Hell is unthinkable.

The poster should read : "Live by God, Not by Sin". Then it would truly express the nobility it aspires to, even in the fat-farm outlet.

Not Livin'By Default

There's a poster that says, " Live by Choice, Not by Default". That is the kind of poster that should be charged with Spiritual Assault. Maybe it will be on Judgement Day. I can't wait to see the exquisitely shorn, bottom-wisp coiffed woman named Jewel Iksen-Radcliffe standing on the dock that Day, answering for those words (and then I'll be right after her for judging her- but wait a minute, she doesn't exist. ha.)

Now, let's dissect that phrase. "Live by Choice" first: what does that mean? Is this a subtle sexually liberated, pro-abortion phrase? For as we all know, a woman just can't be free unless she has the right to kill someone. Wait. Oh, yeah, the truth is exactly the opposite. A woman can't be free unless she has the right or the ability do do what is right; that certainly doesn't include killing someone. So perhaps that isn't what they mean. I suppose we'll have to look at the context then, in which we find the words. I have to admit, I suppose, that I was in an outlet akin to a fat farm. It is called "Curves" (Why don't they call it "Sleek" or something like that? I thought I was trying to get rid of those five or six extra curves). Well, anyway, I was at "Curves", finishing my workout, and there was the poster. So the context is that we are all, most of us, out of control, eg. Food Chooses Us. So, we're all a bunch of poor oppressed women, oppressed mainly by the weight: literally oppressed to the point of not being able to breathe well when sitting in the car sucking that sixth soda.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a good intention there in that phrase: Take Control, Baby. Choose your food to the proper end. Well, they should have said that. "Live by Choosing Your Food to Live". No, that doesn't work well. This phrase on the poster seems to suffer from the same problem that many advertisements do: they make a universal, philisophical statement about something that doesn't warrant it: "Have It Your Way" or "Do What Tastes Right" or something like that. It is depressing, really: when noble values are used to sell burgers, it somehow demeans the noble value. Not in its objective value, doing what is right will still be noble, but it will lose its attraction and nobility in a subjective sense, to the teeming masses, of which I am one.

So, "Live by Choice", if it is about dieting, seems to devalue the grand romance of free will. But perhaps the statement in it's entirety, IS at a higher level than fat farm or burgers- which may make it all the more subtle and possibly dangerous.

The statement, "Live by Choice and Not by Default" reminds me of a return to the sixties slogans, but for the common man, not the blowin' in the wind' hippie. It carries the same value that the hippie ended up with. It is truly a statement about self-actualization, of stripping all the values put into one by the traditions and culture, the media and the consumer-driven interests, and THINKING about what you want.

Sounds good.

Not.

The hippies in the sixties had, I think, a brief golden moment where they were on to something, but then it went south. Way south. To hell. In the golden moment of partial clarity, they were realizing that their values were being driven, in the larger culture, by the interests of big business and advertisers, and those in power who wished to control them by arousing and satiating their desires for goods and self-images. They started fighting back, eschewing materialism and wishing to build a 'love-culture'. If they had turned to Love Incarnate, ah, there would have been a golden moment shining out for generations- the Kingdom of God ever-nearer.

Instead, they went the direction of self-actualization, of stripping the self of all indoctrinated values, good or bad, to a point where there was nothing left. And then, instead of recognizing the hole in us where God belongs, the Source of all real value and identity, they started creating themselves. They began to Live by Choice and Not by Default. This was, though, a Satanic chimera: individualism, self-image, self-esteem: the true and freeing realities are ever out of their grasp. They succeeded in making dolls of themselves, ever more able to be manipulated by the culture at large and big business.

Part Two will, well, finish it.