Gus diZerega

Biographical Context

I had four enduring fascinations as a young boy, fascinations that have remained with me all my life. And I am now into my 7th decade. They are my love of nature, a sense of spiritual reality, interest in how people could live together more successfully, and art.

Nature

My love of nature and feeling at home and at peace when within it is life long, stretching back to some of my earliest memories.  From the little intermittent stream near my elementary school to my parents’ farm in the Flint Hills to the soaring peaks and tundra of the Colorado Rockies, and later all wild land anywhere, my love of nature has been a constant in my life.  So also has been my attempt to understand what that love meant.

Looking back on a childhood that was not a happy one, I can say it was this love that kept me together, more or less. Later I often described my defense of the wild as “paying nature back” for keeping me afloat during those years. Now I know Nature is much more than that, but She is also that. And I will always be grateful. If we could see Nature for what She is, we would treat not only the other-than-human world better, we would treat one another better as well.

Social Science

In grade school I wanted to be either a forest ranger or an architect.  The other-than-human community competed with the human community. I was constantly “designing” houses and what today would be called intentional communities.

Later, in the 8th grade, a different interest in these issues was shocked awake by my home room teacher’s attack on the John Birch Society because they hated democracy.  Alarmed, when I got home I asked my mom of we knew any “Birchers.”  She mentioned several friends of the family who were members, and decided I was hearing too much liberal propaganda. (I was growing up in Wichita, Kansas, which perhaps says enough.)

I was taken to various right wing gatherings, initially to talks sponsored by the Cardinal Mindzenty Society.  As I entered high school I was also invited to John Birch Society meetings and became an avid reader of their literature. With some friends I founded a Young Americans for Freedom chapter in high school and in my senior year (I think it was that year) almost became state chairman of the Teenage Republicans. During this time when hanging out at the American Opinion Bookstore, owned by the Birch Society, a pivotal event took place. Charles Koch, then a young engineer and at the time a libertarian, gave me books by Ludwig von Mises and similar conservative, libertarian, and classical liberal intellectuals.   He urged me to start reading the good stuff.  In doing so Charles opened up the life of the mind to me. I gradually stopped reading right wing propaganda, and started reading the intellectual heavyweights that helped create a now almost dead conservative intellectual tradition. I had fallen in love with research and the world of ideas.  Charles Koch seems long since to have fallen out of such a love, apparently preferring wealth and power, but I will always owe him my thanks for introducing me to the world of the mind.

Upon entering college I ultimately decided to major in history and political science because the calculus needed for an architecture degree did not agree with me.  My other interest had been a double major in political science and drawing and painting.  The university refused to allow it.

College expanded my horizons and as I turned against the Vietnam War, the right wing’s lock on my imagination was broken.  I began seeking my own understanding rather than simply aping those I had thought were my betters.

The years since then have carried me very far from my youthful right wing idealism but the fundamental motivations, as I look back on them, have not changed much, although they have deepened almost beyond recognition. If I was forced to label my work, it would be that of a “left-Hayekian,” developing an overarching ecological model integrating society and the other-than-human-world in which it and we exist.  My dissertation became a book, Power, Persuasion and Polity,  that expanded Hayek’s model of spontaneous orders to include democracy along with markets and science. Many of my published papers further developing this and related insights are available on this site, and even while retired, I continue to be active in academic research and publishing.

Art

I have always drawn and painted, and preferred scenes from nature as my subject.  When I entered college my first hope was a double major in drawing and painting and political science.  But these fields were in different schools, fine arts and liberal arts, and I was not allowed to do so.  I chose political science and history, and set formal study of art aside.

Upon entering Berkeley’s Ph.D. program, I often decorated envelopes when I sent letters to friends. Later, upon beginning my dissertation, I despaired because I did not have the money to write it, did not have a grant, and teaching gigs were too unreliable from semester to semester.  But if I got a 9 to 5 job I was pretty sure I’d never finish it.  A fellow grad student, Pearl Marsh, convinced me to make my envelopes into a small business as an alternative. Another debt of gratitude.  Probably the only thing beyond their genome that she and Charles Koch have in common.

I began my small business, and after some floundering ultimately made a success of it while learning first hand the differences between what academics do and what business people do, and why neither usually understands the other.

Ultimately I closed it down because every year I sold fewer pieces, even though people continued to like them, and I had no direct competitors.  When I got my own computer I discovered why: email.  Letter writing was on its way out as an activity most people engaged in, and my chief products were artistically integrated envelopes and stationery.

I re-entered academia.  But by this time one other major change had happened in my life.

Shipping my stuff all over the country enabled me to help support some employees, but I still needed to sell my stuff on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue  to make enough to pay the rent and still write. Along the way two things happened.  I became a pretty good pen and ink artist and I met people I never would have met in graduate school, including a man whom, just after I got my Ph.D.,  I dared to “show me some real magick.”

And with that dare the world of Spirit powerfully entered my life.

Spirituality

In my first decades a sense of spiritual reality usually provided a quiet context within which I lived my life. Occasionally it would move to the forefront, as in high school for about a year when I decided that if the Bible was the word of God, the most literal interpretation must be the best. I drove my parents crazy by becoming involved with Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. That episode, from which, happily, I soon recovered, gave me a solid inoculation against that type of religion.

In the 60s, like so many others of my generation, I got interested in nontraditional approaches to Spirit, especially the insights provided by psychedelics, or what I now think is a better term: entheogens.  But like so many others, I discovered these experiences,  on their own, did not lead anywhere much beyond providing a certainty more was involved about reality than the rigid Western mindset allowed.  After opening the “gates of perception” once they wore off the entheogens left you back outside.

Alan Watts, that emcee to the spiritual East, opened my eyes to non Christian spirituality during this time.  But I had a deep distrust of any religion claiming to have it all right, a valuable inheritance from the World Wide Church of God. Other than learning how to see ‘energy’ around people, my explorations in things metaphysical did not go far.  By the time I got to Berkeley I figured if I ever did get involved in a religion, it would be one that honored book learning, like Buddhism or Judaism. Mostly I just focused on the social sciences.

The universe must have laughed.

One of my regular stationery customers in Berkeley had once told me he studied magick.  I did not take him seriously.  This was Berkeley, after all. But right after receiving my Ph.D., and figuring that I’d soon be a professor and not a street vendor, I decided I did not have to tip toe around my customers’ delusions. I dared him to show me “some real magick.” I was curious how he’d weasel out.

He didn’t weasel out. One night on the UC Berkeley campus annihilated my traditional secular understanding of the material world. I asked him if he ever taught it.  “Sometimes.” He said.

“Will you teach me?”

“Yes.”

And my life changed forever.  Not by getting involved in Buddhism or Judaism, but in Wicca and shamanic practices. The polar opposite of book learning. I write about this in my new book God is Dead, Long Live the Gods: A Case for Polytheism.

For the first year or so I kept a journal, writing down what I experienced and the circumstances surrounding the events.  I wanted a reality check.  Finally I decided this new world was genuine. It was more irrational to doubt its existence than to accept something profound was happening.   I was publishing academic research in good journals, keeping my friends from the past, and successfully running a small business. I seemed competent at handling the world.  I was just doing this while living within a shamanic reality.  I was a late 20th century academic with a Pleistocene ontology.

For well over 25 years now I have been studying the intersection of this world with the modern scientific understanding of reality.  I believe I have gradually closed the intellectual gap between them, at least in my own mind, and now feel competent to write about this most important of issues. Some of that will appear here, and the most complete discussion is in my new book mentioned above.

Summing up

This site weaves together these various themes in my life in ways I hope you will find interesting if you have read this far. I have examples of my art work, and you may download any of them. If you use them publicly I’d appreciate receiving credit, but there is no charge.  They are disproportionately depictions of natural scenes. In addition a number of my most important academic papers in the social sciences are available here, along with my most important articles on spiritual and shamanic topics.  Finally there are descriptions of my books.

Enjoy!