Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words remain a haunting reminder that our rights are founded upon our responsibilities: “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” There are few terrors greater than the knowledge that we are free to change the world with our choices.

Two years earlier, Butler fleshed out this reckoning with our personal responsibility to the political in a 1996 interview for the magazine Science Fiction Studies included in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).

Considering her Earthseed series “fundamentally about social power,” she reflects on the disquieting forces tearing American society apart:

Some people insist that all civilizations have to rise and fall — like the British before us — but we have brought this on ourselves. What you see today has happened before: a few powerful people take over with the approval of a class below them who has nothing to gain and even much to lose as a result. It’s like the Civil War: most of the men who fought to preserve slavery were actually being hurt by it. As farmers they could not compete with the plantations, and they could not even hire themselves out as labor in competition with the slaves who could be hired out more cheaply by their owners. But they supported the slave system anyway.

A century and a half after Walt Whitman insisted that you must “always inform yourself; always do the best you can; always vote” and admonished that “America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without,” Butler reflects on the self-destructive psychological underpinnings beneath divisive politics and adds:

Many people just need someone to feel superior to to make themselves feel better. You see Americans doing it now, unfortunately, while voting
against their own interests. It is that kind of shortsighted behavior that is destroying us.

While this perilous inner rupture seems only magnified in the America of our day, Whitman, far-seeing and unafraid to challenge the will of the world, warned about it an epoch earlier, at a time when most of us were not rightful citizens and were denied the power to shape fate with our vote. In his enduring reckoning with democracy predicated on a truly feminist society, he wrote:

Of all dangers to a nation… there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.

Couple with Winnicott on the psychology of democracy, then revisit Butler on the spirituality of symbiosis and how we become who we are.