Secession was my first original political thought.    

When Thomas Naylor, Kirkpatrick Sale, and I went on WDEV's Free Vermont Radio program this past fall, Kirk answered the question about how he came to favor secession, speaking of it as a political strategy with solidly argued economic, social, and political foundations. Asked the same question, I found myself speaking from intuition about a knowing that resides within the human soul. As a child caught in the chaos of a violent household, I came up with a plan:  to secede to an island with my friends.   

Domestic/child abuse of the kind I endured does not stand alone. Rather, it mirrors the institutional abuse perpetrated and sanctioned in public, and the result – mass technological civilization, what Native people call the “dominant society” – could not exist without both levels of control. In an essay drafted 50 years ago, “Prologue to Our Time,” social critic Lewis Mumford observed this propensity to social control and predicted that a “dominant minority” – the masters of technology and accumulated wealth – would forge “a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation.”  He was on target , and in this context today’s re-emergence of secession as political strategy becomes a choice not only for renegotiating controlling power relations, but for re-creating human-scale community, sustainable economy, and homegrown culture.     

I never did secede to an island per se. I live in the opposite kind of ecosystem: the wide-as-the-eye-can-see upland desert of northern New Mexico. But a template of an idea was formed in my child’s mind and has served me many times since.   

When the Black Panthers arrived on the UC Berkeley campus circa 1968, their post-civil-rights strategy to build a base that was completely their own was not foreign to me. In the 1970s the feminist movement pulled away from the male world in order to define itself, re-member female cultural values, and forge its own definitions of power – and I was right there. At the start of the bioregionalism movement in the ‘80s, Leopold Kohr and E.F. Schumacher alighted on my psyche with the same “A-ha!”  And as hundreds of peoples succeeded at breaking off from nation-states in the post-World War II decolonization struggles (Ghana, Algeria, Cuba, Uganda), and hundreds others are still making the effort (Cataluña, Scotland, Kashmir, Quebec, Puerto Rico), I have cheered them on.   

I’d have to say, secession is in my bones. But am I unusual? I doubt it.  Rather, I propose that the qualities promised through small democratically run groupings are built into our expectations through millennia of evolution, and that the recent empire-built aggregations with their impossible tangle of bureaucracy, militarism, and mechanization are anathema to all that we are.   

Yet, in a world where we become trapped by untenable survival Catch-22s, our psyches’ ability to muster defense mechanisms works to protect us from the pain of awareness. After generations of acclimatization to the demands of mass society, we will defend its ways and values – even in the face of blatant destruction of people, cultures, ecosystems, and the planet itself.  “But we can never go back!” we insist.  “I need my Blackberry! … my 200 TV channels! … my hedge fund! … my nuclear weapons!” The earliest defense mechanisms of repression, numbing, and denial, originally fashioned for immediate self-protection, have been re-configured for evolutionarily unheard-of situations.   

For those of us with an ability or desire to ease our way from the clutches of mental defense, evidence suggesting that humans were meant to thrive in face-to-face, knowable community abound.   

To begin, using the most conservative archaeological/anthropological data, we might posit that humans have existed for one million years. Imagine that stretch of time as a basketball court – approximately 100 feet long. For the majority of that period we humans lived in land-based, small-scale groups, and our brains, bodies, and expectations evolved in synchronicity with that experience.  Only in the last fifth of an inch of that 100-foot stretch have people lived en masse in technological civilization, with its gigantic hierarchical techno-politico-economic structures.   

What are the assumptions about life that hail from the other 99 feet 11-plus inches?  Evolutionary psychologists posit that our expectations and behaviors were fashioned in synthesis with our ancestral environment, the natural world, and our ancestral ways of surviving, in small self-determining groups.  We humans have a marked capacity for cooperation in small groups, can keep up intimately with about 13 people and casually recognize – ballpark – 3,000. Rather than accepting cruelty we feel wronged, and each of us has an innate sense of justice.  Psychological well-being thrives not amid machines, concrete, and guns, nor while barraged by electromagnetic waves – but rather in the company of others in nature.   

Aside from regaling ourselves with such instructive works as Mark Nathan Cohen’s Health and the Rise of Civilization, Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept,  Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness, and Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, I find that a good way to refresh a dulled memory is the encounter with those who know.   

Here in the Indo-Hispano village of Chimayó, the urge to place-based sovereignty has survived into the age of globalization. After stealing the common lands from the villages of what became New Mexico, the U.S. government sent the Forest Service to oversee the mountains… and the locals clipped its barbwire fences, burned down its cabins, and used the land for traditional wood gathering and deer hunting anyway. One year a bank rebuilt the old shed by the apple coop into an ATM… and the men got out their hunting rifles and shot the machine to shreds. If I go to a meeting in a village other than my own I am welcomed … but I have zero authority to offer an opinion.    

Read:  sovereignty defines both possibility and boundary.

Lessons

A telling vignette about cultural knowledge comes to me via anthropologist Frances Harwood.  “Fiz” was doing her field work in the Solomon Islands in the 1960s, and one day an assemblage of village leaders came to her hut to ask how to make the miraculous material of her see-through cup: glass. Using a language she had barely mastered and that had no words for the fragmented processes of industrialism, Fiz hemmed and hawed her way through a description of cooking sand with fire, but when the villagers challenged her to meet them on the beach to heat up some sand, in shame she didn’t show. The village leaders then had their own “A-ha!,” solving the nagging question of why Fiz had arrived to their island in the first place: she was an incompetent in her own culture, incapable of doing the most basic things.   

Read:  in sovereign, land-based culture every person is self-sustaining.   

Another anthropologist friend, Francis Huxley, was party to an event in Brazil’s Xingu Valley that revealed an aspect of democracy. The year was 1955. Because of a medical emergency local medicine was unsuited to address, Francis transported a Native man to the city of São Paulo. As the two men made their way through the sooty streets amid the traffic jams, they came upon a bank. Standing at the entrance were two stern guards, each with Gestapo-like boots and a loaded machine gun. The Native was puzzled at this spectacle. Francis tried to explain, saying the bank was a “house” where the “chief” kept his “riches” – to which the Native declared, “Well then, if he needs this much guarding, he cannot be a very good chief.”  

Read: social control and democracy are not made of the same cloth.   

The essence of true democracy resides in scale. As Austrian philosopher Leopold Kohr put it, “When something is wrong, something is too big.” The typical size of a tribal village throughout prehistory was 500, while a band had between 15 and 50. Our villages in northern New Mexico vary from a few dozen in Servietta Plaza to 3,000 here in Chimayó.   

Read: the fewer people, the easier it is to consider, discuss, decide, and enact.   

In an age of mass-society sovereignty the older standards – cultural participation, consensual leadership, and face-to-face democracy – may seem wispy as actual experiences, but such qualities do reside within our expectations. Why else would people continue to risk their lives for self-determination?  Why, throughout the U.S.’s history of exploitation and expansion, do themes of social justice, democracy, regionalism, and ecological protection swell up again and again and again? Why, after centuries of colonial control, have people all over the world battled for sovereignty in the decolonization movements? And why, despite backlash to the point of genocide, has that process continued to this day?   

My answer? Efforts to revitalize ways of life that are human-scale, in harmony with the natural world and truly democratic, spring from within – still and always. Their rekindling at this moment is a historic event worthy of our participation – and a reiteration of the urge to re-member, downsize, and live as who we truly are. Secession is in our bones.

Chellis Glendinning is a New Mexico psychotherapist and the author of five books (including My Name Is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization). He is the newest member of the Second Vermont Republic Advisory Board.