Jan Diepersloot has been a teacher of and writer about the internal Chinese healing and martial arts, including several systems of Qi Gong and Taijiquan, for nearly half a century. Having studied with some of the most respected internal martial artists, he wrote a trilogy of books on the subject entitled “The Warriors of Stillness Trilogy.” His books were well received by the global martial arts community, and allowed him to travel widely worldwide giving lectures and leading workshops. Today, as an octogenarian, he is semi-retired but still actively teaches on a part-time basis in his hometown of Walnut Creek, CA.

Jan has had a lifelong interest in fighting fascism and understanding the genesis and development of the authoritarian personality/character. Born in 1941 in Nazi occupied Holland, he was a war baby born to parents who were active members of the underground.Their family sheltered Jews all through the war, and his father participated in many acts of partisan sabotage of the German occupiers. As a result, his childhood upbringing included a steady diet of anti-fascist education.

Jan’s family wound up settling in southern California in the late 1950s. It was during his San Diego college years in the 1960s and 1970s that Jan became woke and politically active in the counterculture wars of the 1960 and 70s, including anti-war demonstrations and civil rights marches. Then Dr. Herbert Marcuse, a philosophy professor at UCSD whom Jan greatly respected, became the target of a “hate” campaign orchestrated by the right-wing San Diego Union that culminated in Dr. Marcuse receiving death threats from right wing racist extremists.

In response, Jan quit graduate school and, along with a small group of co-conspirators, set out to start a progressive newspaper as an alternative source of news and commentary to the San Diego Union’s sick take on things. They were successful beyond their wildest expectations. Within a year, their small startup cadre had increased to almost 50 dedicated volunteers. With their enlarged group they decided to collectivize their personal economies. Two large adjacent houses downtown San Diego were purchased and the “People’s Commune” was born.

People’s Commune produced a steady stream of investigative journalism articles that exposed systemic corruption amongst the city’s political and financial power brokers, resulting in the indictment of the mayor, the entire city council, and highly placed police officials indicted and convicted of bribery. Moreover, since the People’s Commune had sufficient manpower to take on additional projects, they actively organized in the military with the creation the Movement for a Democratic Military (MDM); they made alliances with the Black panthers and the Brown Berets in their communities; the Commune’s women opened and operated a dry goods store; their anti-police outreach in the Beach communities featured free meals and events; and they even had an outpost in the backcounty that the intended to develop into a farm. In other words, the People’s Commune was a real pain in the ass of the San Diego power structure.

Predictably, the empire struck back harshly across the spectrum of legal, quasi-legal, and manifestly illegal retribution. Between Commune members and street vendors there were literally hundreds of arrests on wholly spurious charges such as ‘blocking the sidewalk.’ Then the threats to life and limb became very real. The Street Journal’s vending machines were vandalized and stolen. The newspaper’s offices were broken into and ransacked; their printing equipment destroyed by pouring paint in the delicate mechanisms. The car of one of the paper’s staff members was firebombed in front of the residence. And finally, a drive by shooting occurred in which one of the commune’s members was shot in the arm.

In the end it was the commune’s own internal pressures provided the proverbial last nail in the coffin. Less than two years after its inception, the Commune’s women decided to move out of the commune’s mixed housing into a women-only collective, causing thePeople’s Commune to implode and had its members scattering to the four winds.

Jan wound up in the SF Bay area , moving between enclaves in SF, Berkeley and the Russian River. These were difficult years for Jan. The San Diego experience had left him feeling burnt out, battle fatigued, and nursing psychological and emotional wounds. Physically, also, too many years of too many long days without enough sleep, running ragged on coffee and nicotine, were taking its toll on his body, and he was developing chronic migraines that further sapped his endurance and creativity.

At the same time in the early 70s, the focus of Jan’s research shifted away from uncovering the facts of financial and political corruption to the underlying psychological questions: the when/where/how/why people become addicted to power. Conveniently, Watergate was proving Richard Nixon to be the perfect subject for such a study and Jan spend several years researching Nixon, from his earliest childhood to his final days. The result was an (unpublished) case study into the roots of the human addiction to power, corruption, exploitation.

It has been said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. But when in 1975 a friend asked Jan to accompany him to a Taiji demonstration, Jan had no idea that he was in for a wholly transformative and life altering experience. As Jan watched, the relaxed, fluid movements of the Sifu (teacher), with the powerful energy rippling through his body, spoke to the long neglected athlete in Jan, and he experienced an overwhelming desire to acquire the knowledge and skills that were being demonstrated. In that moment of wow Jan knew his destiny with great clarity: he would commit to mastering these arts and skills, and embark of a life-long career of teaching them to others. That day, almost half a century ago, Jan had a vision. In his imagination he saw himself as an old man teaching his students in the park. And thus it was. Dreams do come true, and visions do become reality. For the next 40 years Jan’s life and career in these ancient Chinese health and martial arts flourished and progressed.

As Jan pursued his career in the internal health and martial arts, he also continued to deepen and widen his investigations. First, he delved deeply into biology and history to find the origins of the White Man’s authoritarian paradigm and the inevitability ofdystopia as the result of its dynamics. Secondly, he came to the conclusion that the remedy for the White Man’s pathology can only be found in the recovery of the female-centric, egalitarian and eutopian, social re-organization of society.

Then in the second decade of the 21st century, Trump’s ascendency to power in 2016 rekindled in Jan the determination to do his part in combatting the gravity of this renewed threat to democracy and universal human rights. Trump, to Jan, was an even more egregious instance of the White Man’s dystopian, fascistic instincts than Nixon ever was. Seeing the disastrous course of history Trump was embarking the nation on, Jan felt a renewed urgency to contribute his findings and conclusions in book form.

The Covid pandemic of the 2020s created the time and space for him to act on this motivation. The near total isolation it imposed allowed Jan to work undisturbed and synthesize the many strands of his continued research in the social and biological sciences with the accumulated insights gained during decades of practice of the Taoist theory of harmony and balance. The result is the ‘big picture’ book that you are now setting out to read. The “Tao of the Species” attempts to shed a new light and different perspective on the predicament and possibilities of our human species.