For What Are You Willing to Die?

And what systems are you willing to let die so that something healthier can take their place?

Consider giving the gift of Underthrow.

In June 1963, a car turned up at a Saigon intersection, a few blocks from the Presidential Palace. Thích Quảng Đức emerged from the car along with two other men in saffron robes. One monk placed a cushion on the pavement while the second monk opened the trunk and took out a five-gallon gasoline can. Thích Quảng Đức sat down on the cushion and formed his body into the traditional lotus position. He calmly began to meditate as marchers encircled him. 

One of the monks poured the contents of the can over Thích Quảng Đức's head as he rotated a string of beads.

Homage to Amitābha Buddha

“Nam mô A Di Đà Phật,” he repeated before striking a match and dropping it on himself. As black, oily smoke and flames engulfed his robes and body, he sat completely still. 

“His body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring,” writes journalist David Halberstam, who watched from the crowd. 

In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think ... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.

Thích Quảng Đức’s act of self-immolation is disturbing.

The Question

But it should prompt us to ask: For what are we willing to die? Thích Quảng Đức had chosen to die in the service of his faith and for the Buddhists of Vietnam who, at the time, were being persecuted by a Catholic authority. 

Here’s what Thích Quảng Đức said in his own words, which he left on a note:

Before closing my eyes and moving towards the vision of the Buddha, I respectfully plead to President Ngô Đình Diệm to take a mind of compassion towards the people of the nation and implement religious equality to maintain the strength of the homeland eternally. I call the venerables, reverends, members of the sangha and the lay Buddhists to organize in solidarity to make sacrifices to protect Buddhism.

Such is the power of Thanatos, leveled at the heart of injustice. 

Maybe you have heard the story of the burning monk. Maybe you think the act is zealous or crazy. It’s hard for me to grok such an act, steeped as I am in my comfortable Western life and habits of mind. But behind the sensation and shock of the event, I see a man with a commitment and an enormous presence of mind. He was willing to end it now and let it go.

Like Thích Quảng Đức, we must at least come to think that endings make beginnings possible.

Eros Masculine – Make it so. 
Thanatos Masculine – End it now.
Eros Feminine – Let it flow.
Thanatos Feminine – Let it go.

End it Now, or Let Things Go

When it comes to America, we still expect national greatness. Our status as a world power is an unquestioned faith, which stands in for a collective feeling of inadequacy and loss of close community. It’s not just that this thing we call America has become neither just nor sustainable. It’s that we have forgotten how to let die and die well. 

Think about leaving a company you are loyal to but whose work no longer fulfills you. Think about living with a terminal illness in great pain compared to its absence upon death or the sense of relief you might feel knowing that a loved one is no longer living in pain. Even the most ambitious among us have had to learn to accept failure. Accepting failure is healthy. Too often, we cling to systems, relationships, or other arrangements well beyond their expiration date—usually out of obligation. Maybe you can think of a time when one of those arrangements came to a healthy end. Whatever new story came afterward wasn’t possible without that chapter coming to a close. 

Though Thanatos is a drive, we often seek to suppress or avoid it. The very thought of the end is depressing. The very thought of ending ourselves is positively morbid. National self-immolation seems hard to imagine. But not all death is to be avoided. Not all endings are bad.

Christians accept that the incarnate Jesus had to die for subsequent generations to experience the living Christ and to be saved.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Vishnu appears to Arjuna and offers a vision of the end, which is just the start of another cycle.

I see all the sons of Dhritarashtra; I see Bhishma, Drona, and Karna; I see our warriors and all the kings who are here to fight. All are rushing into your awful jaws; I see some of them crushed by your teeth. As the rivers flow into the ocean, I see all the warriors of this world are flowing into your fiery jaws; all creatures rush to their destruction like moths into a flame.

Sometimes, we must find the courage to end something, even a life. It’s courageous and good to have a sick pet put down—to end it now, which is healthier Thanatos Masculine.

Other times, we must find the wisdom to let it go. When a conscious decoupling is better for the children than staying together, such wisdom originates in Thanatos Feminine. In the moments just before letting go, we can feel conflicted, which shows up as guilt, anxiety, or inner turmoil. But relief can flow over us once we let go—signifying a healthy close.

Thanatos Masculine speaks to us in words like “Revolution!” The tree of liberty, said Jefferson, must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. As a man and an integral liberal, I certainly relate to that revolutionary fire. But we are living in different times. Thanatos Feminine says let it go.

Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation symbolizes not suicide so much as sacrifice.

What America has become is not something Jefferson would recognize. Still, to refresh the Tree of Liberty, it’s gonna take more than tyrants’ blood. What is needed is not the violent resistance of overthrow but for a people to engage in a different kind of insurgency.

If what is left, a remnant, can reconstitute itself, it will enjoy a renaissance. Even if we call that reconstituted thing “America,” it will have become something else. And you and I will have to become someone else—someone more courageous and more resilient—which means aspects of ourselves will have to die, too, whether in a holy blaze or slow dissolution.

Then we can credibly ask: For what are we willing to live?

After America

Some of us feel the first stirrings of that inner turmoil as we reckon with the possibility of America’s end, at least of America as we know it. Ghosts of history tell us to keep it together at all costs.

It. This. The Republic. We the People. The Exceptional State.

We have long labored under the idea that without a national father figure presiding over armies and functionaries, we would cease to be a people. Abraham Lincoln, despite being melancholic, suffered bouts of unhealthy Thanatos Feminine. Why? To keep himself intact. To keep the union intact. That he was murdered in Ford’s Theater is an irony that will always haunt us. “Sic semper tyrannis!” cried John Wilkes Booth as Thanatos Masculine ravaged his disordered mind. There is a sense that if we let the Republic fall, we are turning our backs on the sacrifices of figures like Lincoln and those who died under his command.

What about the Founders who, despite their sins, gave the world its first liberal order? What about the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy or battled at Iwo Jima? What about those who marched on Washington, suffered in Selma, or were otherwise set upon by attack dogs and fire hoses and humiliated at the hands of bigots in the Jim Crow South? Won’t all those rights, so long fought for, be washed away as America 1.0 disintegrates? What unimaginable theocracies, retrograde regimes, and backwater factions await, ready to rise up from the hinterlands to seize power? Without the welfare state, won't an army of the penniless storm our gated communities or comfortable universities, ready to kill for a tin of fish? Without the warfare state, won’t some rogue nation or rising power destabilize the world? 

Maybe we can become something more than liabilities for technocrats to manage—or herd animals for functionaries to prod, surveil, and “protect.”

Fear and history sit on either shoulder, whispering warnings. We have to keep it together. But keeping the nation-state together at all costs is a false directive from Eros Masculine. The dam is holding back the forces of change but can’t hold forever. In other words, America as we know it is on a death watch. That means we might not have a choice but to let this all play out in its way.

When the dam breaks, we can be more or less radical in our response. We should explore various approaches but underthrow will surely seem radical to anyone who has sat pickling too long in the status quo. What once seemed radical might soon seem commonsensical.

In a time of transformation, what becomes is what becomes. We can only hope to steer the transformation.

The possible worlds we explore here at Underthrow are not impossible. And they are far preferable to complete totalitarian power or chaotic, fractured warlordism. My Burkean side understands the need for marginal reforms, but the Jeffersonian in me knows that underthrow must outpace dystopia.

That fence has become a cage, Dear Chesterton.

From reading up to this point, one might assume we’re still moving toward collapse. I worry the process has already begun. It might seem like slow motion today, but it will likely accelerate. After that acceleration, the pain will set in, and it’s in that liminal phase that more people will wake up. But then, of course, it will be too late to avoid the worst.

The remnant will have to be ready. And we will have to ask ourselves:

For what are we willing to die? And for what are we willing to live?