Chapter 1: Agency—Almost
Nothing Matters More
The word agency
may bring to mind a governmental group such as the Central Intelligence Agency, an insurance company,
becoming a free agent in professional sports, a city in Iowa, a booking company
for Hollywood stars, or a television drama. There’s another meaning, however,
of great significance. Agency is the
freedom and opportunity each person has to choose his or her course in life; free will is a synonym for agency. The thesis presented in the next
two-hundred pages is that your daily choices give you either more agency or
less agency and that agency is your most precious possession, excepting your
life. When
agency is lost, the rest of life is spent living under oppressors’ whips either
in submissive compliance or in attempts to recover your lost rights and
privileges. Nations as well as individuals can lose agency. Throughout the
history of the world, when a nation loses agency, the process of reclaiming agency is war, and the price of reclaiming agency is blood, the blood of the rising
generation. When individuals lose agency, inner conflict and turmoil cause an
internal war. Agency brings happiness, confidence, self-respect, opportunity,
trust, and love. Losing agency is slavery.
When you’ve enjoyed personal and national freedoms all of
your life, thoughts of living without those freedoms seldom surfaces, excepting
when those freedoms are threatened. My father used to tell me in vivid detail
about where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news on December 7,
1941 of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I was in my first year of college on
November 22, 1963 and recall after eating lunch that day, walking into a
building for a class and immediately knowing something terrible had happened.
And more recently, of course, September 11, 2001. These moments become markers
by which the rest of life is defined and divided. In an instant, suddenly, the
normal duties and cares of the day disappear as fear for personal and national
safety capture every thought. This can happen to some degree vicariously. I
remember being in the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C., going deeper and
deeper into the museum floor by floor. At some point I blurted out, “How did we
let this happen?” I felt I was suffocating and had to leave the museum.
Agency is your ability and opportunity to exercise your
will, to make choices, to act for yourself. Agency is embedded in “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and in “according to the dictates of
conscience,” two phrases from Samuel Adams 1772 treatise: “The Rights
of Men. Adams, speaking of national freedom, said liberty is a gift from Heaven
that comes at a price and then links liberty to individual behavior and
explains the price. He said: “He therefore is the truest friend to the Liberty
of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.... The sum of all is, if
we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous
people.…” Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “Only a virtuous
people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they
have more need of masters.” Since a nation is the sum of its citizenry, it
follows that as individuals become “corrupt and vicious,” needing more and more
masters, a downward spiral occurs in subtle stages. In equal but opposite
junctures the rule of law takes away increasingly more freedoms and privileges
to compensate for the loss and lack of individual integrity. If we fail to
govern ourselves, we as citizens will progressively lose more and more rights
to act for ourselves. Decade by decade, if we become more vicious and corrupt,
we will be controlled by more and more masters. At some point, the portion of
the populace that has maintained its integrity will yell as I did in the
Holocaust museum, “How did we let this happen?” My exit from the vicarious
horrors I was feeling as I viewed and read about the Holocaust was an elevator
ride up into the fresh air and sunshine and was accomplished by the push of the
elevator button. When freedoms are lost, the cost is all that is precious, most
of all agency. Agency is liberty; loss of agency is oppression.
Many good examples could illustrate this point but
airport security is easy and obvious. Who would have guessed that to board an
airplane your luggage would be subject to x-ray and inspection, that you’d have
to show identification at several checkpoints, that you’d have to put your
shoes, belt, purse, jacket in bins and your computer, keys, coins in separate
bins, and all would be placed on a conveyor belt to be x-rayed. And liquids!
Only trial-size toothpaste, shampoo, and lotions would be allowed and they also
would have to go through the x-ray machine. Then, holding only your boarding
pass, you too would have to pass through a full-body scanner. Why? The answer
is simple. It’s in consequence
of evils and designs which exist in the hearts of conspiring men and women who
want to deprive you and me of our agency.
As my daughter who lives in southern California and I were
driving home from a shopping trip to Las Americas Premium Outlet which is
located at the last exit in the U.S. before entering Mexico, we were chatting
about the bargains we’d found, what our husbands and her children had been
doing while we were gone, and what to have for dinner when all the cars in all
the lanes on the freeway slowed abruptly. We assumed there had been an
accident. Soon, however, we saw what seemed like an army of border patrol
guards had formed a barrier across the freeway and were stopping every vehicle.
Some people were standing outside their cars, watching as their cars were
searched; others were allowed to continue on to their destinations. As we
inched closer to the unfolding scene, we watched as two male occupants of a car
were ordered out of their vehicle, handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground.
While this was happening, other officers and what I assumed was a drug-sniffing
dog searched the car. I watched the guards rummage through the men’s
possessions, take what they wanted, I assumed for evidence, push the car to the
shoulder of the freeway, and put the handcuffed men into a patrol car. Moments
before, the two men were free to come and go at will; they had agency. Now as
prisoners they had lost a significant portion of their agency.
Agency is the God-given gift of choice. When you make
good choices, your agency increases; you enjoy more rights, more options, more
opportunity, more liberty. When you make poor choices, such as smuggling drugs
across an international border, you lose agency. But, of course, it wasn’t the
border patrol who took away the drug-smugglers’ agency; it was the smugglers’
themselves. The border patrolmen just enforced the consequences of the
smugglers’ unwise use of agency. Before the sting, they thought they were free
when in reality being caught was just a matter of time. Most likely, their
illegal conduct would have been repeated and escalated until they were caught.
Cause and effect is a true law of God and man. You choose your actions but can’t
choose the consequences. Even if no one ever finds out, you know. When you
break a law, you live with guilt, fear, and stress that your secret deeds will
be discovered. That’s not being free. Criminals create their own inner prisons,
their own slave quarters. Committing an immoral or illegal act is voluntarily
giving up portions of your agency, even if you haven’t been caught yet.
Oh, that this was the only way to lose agency, but it
isn’t. Agency can also be lost involuntarily. Agency is taken from innocent
persons who are forced into involuntary servitude to perform labor under the
cruelest of conditions or to live under a regime or vile persons who dominate
others. But even when a person is unjustly deprived of agency, there is still
one freedom that cannot be taken, a beautiful liberty at the core of agency. In
seventy or so page, we will meet Clair Cline who as a prisoner of war used is
limited agency in an amazing way. You may remember Corrie ten Boom's story, as
told in The Hiding Place, how she and
her sister Betsie were imprisoned in Ravensbrück for harboring Jews during
World War II. (Ravensbrück was the only major Nazi concentration camp for
women. An estimated 92,000 died there, including Betsie, Corrie’s sister.) You
recall she had a small copy of the New Testament that went undetected by the
guards and how Corrie was able to read and teach others in the camp because
there were so many fleas the guards didn’t come into their living quarters.
Though confined in the bleakest of circumstances freedom of thought cannot be
imprisoned or enslaved.
Adam
Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, tells
the story of those who fought to end the slave trade and the practice of
slavery in the British Empire. He tells of an historic meeting in a London
printing shop in 1787 when a diverse group of twelve men assembled to discuss
their common goal: how to end the slave trade in the British Empire. One of
these men, Thomas Clarkson, rode 1,600 miles on horseback in two months to
gather evidence and testimonials about the horrors of the slave trade, which
were then printed in abolitionist pamphlets. “If, early that year, you had
stood on a London street corner and insisted that slavery was morally wrong and
should be stopped, nine out of ten listeners would have laughed you off as a
crackpot. The tenth might have agreed with you in principle, but assured you
that ending slavery was wildly impractical: the British Empire’s economy would
collapse…. Within a few short years, however, the issue of slavery had moved to
center stage in British political life. There was an abolition committee in
every major city or town in touch with a central committee in London. More than
300,000 Britons were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. Parliament was flooded
with far more signatures on abolition petitions than it had ever received on
any other subject” (Hochschild, 7). In 1807, the British parliament outlawed
the slave trade and in 1838 they ruled slavery illegal. When the Absolution of
Slavery Act was passed, only Thomas Clarkson of the original twelve was alive
to rejoice. The evils connected with slavery are
many, but three are especially repulsive elements:
1. Africans sold other Africans into
slavery. Olaudah Equiano, one of the twelve men in the printing shop, was
kidnapped by slave hunters when he was ten. When he was twenty-one he was able to buy his freedom. In his
memoirs, which were published in 1789, he wrote: "When a trader wants
slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares. It is
not extraordinary, if on this occasion he yields to the temptation with as
little firmness, and accepts the price of his fellow creature's liberty with as
little reluctance, as the enlightened merchant. Accordingly, he falls upon his
neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues... if he prevails, and takes
prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them" (http://www.afbis.com/analysis/slave.htm). No one knows for sure how many men,
women, and children were taken from Africa in the four hundred years of the
slave trade; estimates range from 30 million to 200 million. Initially,
European traders captured Africans in raids on coastal communities, but soon
African rulers saw opportunity and sold other Africans. “The vast majority of
slaves taken out of Africa were sold by African rulers, traders and a military
aristocracy who all grew wealthy from the business. Most slaves were acquired
through wars or by kidnapping” (ibid). “Ottobah Cugoano, who was about 13 years
old when he was kidnapped in 1770… had no doubt the shared responsibility of
Africans for the horrid business. Referring to his own capture Cugoano wrote,
after regaining his freedom: ‘I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen,
that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were
the first cause of my exile and slavery’" (ibid). The parallel to our own
lives is that we sell ourselves into slavery by choosing the longcuts of addictive
and/or abusive lifestyles.
2.
The American Civil War began about fifty years after Britain’s Parliament
officially ended the slave trade in 1807 and about twenty-three years after the British
Empire outlawed slavery. To date, the War Between the States is still the most
costly of any American war. A civil war doubles the number of casualties
because all casualties are from the same country. In the Civil War, deaths in
the Union army were about 360,000. On the Confederate side, there were about
258,000 deaths that bring the total of United States soldiers lost, as brothers
inflicted death upon each other, to 618,000. At the battle at Gettysburg 1863,
the bloodiest of the war, between July first and third, 51,112 soldiers lost
their lives, about one out of every three who fought. We look with horror on
such statistics and ask how could a nation do this to itself, especially
because the morality of the issue had already been settled in Europe years
earlier. The parallel to our own selves is that by participating in addictive
and/or abusive lifestyles, we often cause civil wars within ourselves.
Addiction is civil war between substance/behavior and agency. Divorce is civil
war between husband and wife. Abortion is civil war between mother and baby.
Abuse and anger are civil wars between perpetrators and victims.
3.
Slave ships were floating barges of death. The fact that humans sold other
humans for money and allowed them to be ripped from their homelands is
completely contemptible. The fact that the Civil War was fought over an
ideology that had been declared illegal, to say nothing of immoral, is
difficult to understand. But add to those two facts one more fact that human
beings were forcibly transported on ships which were nothing more or less than
death traps. “The slaves were then packed
tightly into the slave ships, so that they could hardly move. Often they were
chained down; they were allowed little exercise and they were kept in
horrendous conditions in the hold of the ship. By the middle of the eighteenth
century British ships were carrying about 50,000 slaves a year. Royal Navy
sailors said that they could smell the stench of a ship carrying slaves
anything up to 10 miles downwind.” (“www.victorianweb.org/history/antislavery.html).
Sharks often trailed slave ships to take advantage of sick or rebellious slaves
who were thrown overboard. The parallel in our lives is that those who
participate in addictive behaviors turn themselves into slave ships, death
traps. Slaves were controlled with chains. Those in addictive behaviors are
controlled in chains just as real as if they were metal. We enslave ourselves
with chains that infringe upon our individual agency.
In the chapters that follow, it is my purpose to show how
nothing but life matters more than agency and that as individuals we must
preserve and maintain personal agency. Chapters two through ten explain
positive uses of agency that add to life, making life more fulfilling and
infinitely less conflicted. The eight chapters that follow are the negatives
that subtract from life; the ways agency is wasted and lost; the ways a person
volunteers to travel on his or her own personal slave ship. Part one gives
examples of how to preserve personal freedoms through wise use of agency; part
two gives examples of how personal freedoms are lost through unwise use of agency.
The purpose here is to empower you with more and more agency. The purpose is to
repair and restore but also to prevent. Hopefully chapters two through ten will
be the fence at the top of the hill. The chapters that follow will be the
ambulance down in the valley.
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