Monasteries, Consensus Processes, & Nudity

In my final year of high school and the time immediately after I graduated, I was experiencing a profound sense of self-loathing coupled with alienation. I struggled with sexual addiction and perverted fantasies and had very little self-control. I gravitated towards the far right. I was deeply influenced by Calvinism, presuppositionalism (more specifically, the writings of Cornelius van Til), and right-libertarianism. I was essentially a conservative rebel, a right-wing “anarchist.” I sympathized with anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-monarchism, and Hayekian libertarianism. (None of these ideologies are actually anarchist or libertarian, but their adherents believe they are, as I did back then.)

This is not to say that I started on the right. I was originally a communist anarchist, basing my anarchism in Eastern Orthodox theology and the ideas of Georges Florovsky, Nikolai Berdyaev, and John Chrysostom. Nevertheless, I had a tendency to gravitate towards the right. I was far too sympathetic to the far right, so my political views were schizophrenic at best. I even sympathized with theonomists and reconstructionist, those fundamentalists who advocate biblical law. At the same time, I was certain that Orthodoxy was the only form of Christianity that could possibly be true, and that kept me from joining the far right, since communist anarchism follows from Orthodox dogma.

A couple years ago, I went through a life-changing experience. My life had spiraled out of control. I was isolated and alienated and self-destructive. Between addiction to pornography/fetishes and heavy drinking, I lost my grasp on anything real or substantial in this world. I ran away to a monastery for a while. A close friend of mine died. Another person I knew was suicidal and constantly reaching out for help. She had been sexually abused and was psychologically unstable. Work was pretty crappy and they put us on mandatory overtime. To make matters worse, I was working for an unethical organization that contributes nothing to society. I had a crush on a girl and went out on my first date. I came on way too strong and was honestly only thinking about sex. Naturally, the girl did what any sane woman would do when a fanatic becomes obsessed with her and creeps her out; she distanced herself and ignored my calls and texts. Life was pretty much a living hell that I couldn’t escape from. This is just scratching the surface. I won’t even tell you the details of the terrible things that were going on. Most of it is too personal and too graphic to record. I actually considered running away to a monastery permanently. I went and visited a monastery for a short time.

I had started reading some of the individualist-mutualist anarchists and got interested in the ideas of Kevin A. Carson and the C4SS crowd. I synthesized the ideas of right-libertarians like F. A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard with the ideas of distributists like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and created my own political philosophy of “anarcho-distributism.” I later came to reject that philosophy in favor of more traditional left-wing anarchism.

The time I spent in the monastery was brief but otherworldly. I stayed in the guest area with a couple other individuals. One of the other guests was a very peculiar individual. I’m still not sure whether I consider him to be a charlatan, a lunatic, or a saint. He was Orthodox but came from a Protestant background, and I got the impression he had been heavily involved in the religious right before becoming Orthodox. I didn’t talk to him much about his past, but I would not be surprised if he had actually known Francis Schaeffer. I learned that he had done some missionary work. And he had convinced me that I should make a commitment to becoming Orthodox and encouraged me to turn to Fr. Joseph, the abbot of the monastery, as a spiritual father to guide me into the faith. I never did make a full commitment and I was never baptized. This eccentric man was traveling with a friend, a man who was inclined towards Vedic (Hindu) spirituality. (I found this interesting because I was first introduced to religion through the writings of Srila Prabhupada.) Time flowed differently in the monastery. I arrived there on a Friday night. After the morning service on Saturday, which starts at 3am and last for about 3 years, I had to ask somebody what day it was. After the service, I just hung out in the guest quarters and tried to read a little and then I took a nap. The abbot sent a novice monk, Isaac, to see if I wanted to help prepare food in the kitchen. The monks were blanching and cutting fruit, which I got to help with. The meals in the monastery are entirely vegan, and the monks and guests eat together as someone reads a sacred text out loud. I learned that it’s important to eat quickly in a monastery, because as soon as the abbot finishes eating and sits down his fork, everyone else is expected to quit eating and stand. The meal itself was a sort of liturgy, a church service, and the entire thing is part of some ritual.

After returning home from the monastery, I started an anarchist meetup group in the hopes of meeting a few like-mined individuals. By this point, I was gravitating towards the left and identifying as a “left-libertarian,” although I was very market-oriented and not fond of direct democracy (or any sort of democracy). The meetup group was mostly a failure. It attracted mostly “anarcho-capitalists” and even a Marxist. The first few meetups actually brought quite a few people, but I only met one person who I would regard as like-minded. That person is still a friend of mine to this day. To be honest, that individual is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met and I had a crush on them for quite a while. In one of the meetups, I started talking about activism and the notion that we should do something instead of just sitting around and talking about “anarchism.” I asked if anyone was familiar with Food Not Bombs (FNB). My new like-minded friend said that they were a member. So, this failed meetup group served as a catalyst to connect me to the FNB community.

FNB was amazing. It recreated the atmosphere of the monastery in the real world. The first time I went to FNB, they were blanching fruit, just like in the monastery kitchen. I stopped going to church and began going to FNB every Sunday instead. We would give people free food and hang out. The local FNB members became more than friends to me, almost a family. The friends I made through FNB were diverse, some of them were LGBTQ, some of them were other races, and some of them had radically different worldviews from my own. With the exception of my time spent in the Orthodox Church, this was the first time I had ever been exposed to anything other than white middle class American culture. Somewhere along the way, I became an atheist and started reading Karl Popper and Sam Harris. I was introduced to the epistemology of science by a friend from FNB. I embraced Darwinism; and science took the place of religion—science furnished me with a new epistemology and ethic that saved me from the nihilism that Christianity told me was the only alternative to faith.

My radical political views led to me having a falling-out with my real family and I needed a place to live. Many of my FNB friends were living together in a housing co-operative, which was really almost an anarchist collective. The rent included utilities, food, and so much more. The co-op had a consensus process for decision-making. I had started dating one of the members of the co-op by this time and was good friends with most of the members. The membership of the co-op fluctuated, but it generally stayed around 10 members. I had helped many of the members move into the co-op house when it first started, which was shortly after I got involved with FNB, so I had a good rapport with most of the members. After attending a few co-op house dinners and a meeting where the members interrogated me to see if they thought I would be a good match for the co-op, I got accepted into the house and moved in.

Several of the members of the co-op were freegans, so I learned about dumpster diving while I was living there. (The freegan culture is something I still have mixed feelings about. Some freegans tend to pay too little attention to safety.) Grocery stores across America throw out tons of perfectly good food every day. There is no scarcity of food in America, only corporate greed. Corporations find it more profitable to throw away good food than to donate it to charities that feed the homeless. I only dumpster dived on a few occasions myself, but I learned that there is enough food discarded by grocery stores to feed tons of people. In fact, most of the food I consumed while living in the co-op was probably recovered from a dumpster somewhere. I learned that not only do grocery stores throw away perfectly good food, but they actively try to keep homeless people from getting the food. In our city, there was one store that poisoned their dumpster so that homeless people would get sick if they took food from it. There was one major grocery store that actually paid an off-duty cop to stand guard at their dumpster. I learned that the America we live in is one where food is wasted while disabled vets and mentally handicapped homeless people starve because corporations hire men with guns to keep homeless people from eating the excess food that they just throw away! And it really wasn’t about safety or anything like that. If a not-for-profit approached these grocery stores for donations, they would turn them away because there is no profit in charitable donations once you exceed the maximum that you can write off on your taxes.

I miss those times with the old FNB group and the housing co-op. Those were the best times. I long to recreate that atmosphere and environment. It was a tragedy when that era came to an end, but the days when the old FNB group and the housing co-op came tumbling down were a life-changing epoch. I had a falling-out with the main organizer of the old FNB group here in our city, so my friends and I broke away and started a new group. Most of our disagreements involved another FNB member who was socially awkward and tended to behave inappropriately and lacked certain standards of food safety. A main concern of mine was that dumpster-dived food should not be served to the public and food safety should be of the utmost importance. We (myself and the other two FNB members with whom I had a falling-out) all lived together in the same housing co-op. The main organizer of the FNB group was a charismatic figure. He was pretty good at manipulating people and playing on their emotions in order to get them to behave as he wanted them to.

The house had a lot of problems and so did the FNB group, but they also both had a consensus process and lacked any sort of hierarchy. I was always a quiet individual, so I started off by voicing my concerns one-on-one with other members of the group(s) on a personal level. I found that many (perhaps most) of the others were on the same page and feeling the same way as I was. So, I began by writing emails to the whole group in order to bring up my concerns. This opened up the discussion, and when I found that many others were on my side, I felt empowered to speak up. Some of the more vocal members of the group had become disillusioned and had given up, so it felt like it was my turn to take a stand. The consensus process empowered me to become a leader of sorts. Ultimately, a faction of us split off and founded another co-op and some of us started another FNB. If there are irreconcilable differences and consensus cannot be reached, then dissensus and separation—secession—are the only viable option. For better or worse, that’s the route we took.

As this falling-out and breaking up of the groups was taking place, we all got back together for a regional Burning Man event, a “burn.” The burn was kind of like being transported back into the 1960s for a weekend. When we arrived the first night, we set up our tent and began socializing with our friends. The event had a really liberal/libertarian culture, so I took the opportunity to express myself by dressing in a manner that I would not usually dress. After hanging out for a while, we retired to our tent and laid down. Upon waking up the next morning, I crawled out of the tent to see a swimming pool full of lube directly in front of me and a couple naked women wrestling. I decided to take a stroll and explore the burn. As I rounded the first corner, there were a dozen or so naked women doing yoga and they just happened to be facing away from me in the downward dog pose. And in any direction that I looked, there were more naked people running around. At first, this was all exciting for the same reason that pornography is exciting, but that soon wore off. You’ll find that when nudity becomes normalized, it also becomes desexualized. The normalization of nudity that took place transformed my mind’s way of fixating on women as sexual objects, so that the fetishization subsided: the beautiful naked women became people. They weren’t just pretty objects that I was peeking at through a magic box in my bedroom. They were flesh and blood human beings. I no longer felt the need to strain my neck to check out every woman that passed by, as I used to do when a clothed woman passed me in the hall or on the street. It was after this experience that I began to think that maybe public nudity should be legalized and normalized. I don’t want naked people hanging around in restaurants where I am eating, but I think there ought to be naked people walking in the park or down the sidewalk on warm summer days.

Perhaps the reason women are treated as sex objects in our society is the fact that they are all covered up, wrapped up like Christmas gifts or prizes to be won. In our society, women get harassed for breastfeeding in public, and men fixate on women’s bodies all the time, but perhaps that is just because women’s bodies are always covered up so that the only time a man sees boobs is in a sexual context. A man can’t help but sexualize the breasts of a breastfeeding mother if porn and the bedroom are the only place he’s ever seen a tit. Nudity is not naturally a sexual thing. It becomes sexualized by cultures that forbid it or try to hide it. In tribal societies where women never cover their breasts, the men don’t constantly stare at women’s tits and drool on them. The “breast fetish” is a cultural phenomenon. From a strictly natural and evolutionary perspective, breasts are only sexual in the same way as a face is. Erect nipples are an indication of a woman’s sexual arousal, but her facial expression and her eyes can also indicate that. The size of the breasts can tell you something about fertility and whether they might be a suitable mate for procreation, but the width of a woman’s hips can also indicate that.

In societies where women are veiled, the face becomes fetishized as something inherently sexual. In societies where women are covered from head to toe, the ankle becomes fetishized. And in a society where breasts are always hidden and covered up, the breast becomes fetishized. Every part of a person’s body is sexualized to some extent due to nature. If a person’s eyes are too far apart, one might find them unattractive. If their ears are too big, one might find them unattractive. And breasts are just the same, but their role as a primarily sexual feature in our society is an unnatural fetish. Naturally, beasts are just one amongst many features that a male will look at in a female, like eyes and hair. They are a feature that would naturally lead to a male finding a woman attractive in conjunction with other features, the same way a woman’s pretty eyes makes a woman attractive but doesn’t sexually arouse a male in and of itself. Just to see a woman’s breasts shouldn’t naturally give a man a boner. We are aroused by breasts because they are fetishized. The butt is also fetishized in our culture. The fact that this occurs is because we have a depraved culture that hides women and treats them as objects, so that their hidden parts all become fetishized. By hiding secondary sexual features, societies can cause those secondary features to become fetishized and exalted to the status of primary sexual characteristics. In older times, women’s ankles were regarded as inherently sexual because women always covered them up. We no longer think of women's ankles as "sexy" because our society no longer covers them up. So normalizing nudity would go a long way towards correcting some of our unnatural and unhealthy societal fetishes.

All these experiences took place in a short period of time, but this period was the time when I became a true anarchist and a member of the radical left. I became a feminist, an advocate of LGBTQ rights, and a libertarian socialist to the core. Mostly though, I just became fully human. I became a person rather than a cog in the machine of our dehumanizing society. And I met the woman that I would go on to marry.