In a vast, irreverent, tangential conversation about following your intuition to bring about more Love, less Separation, more Equality, and less Alienation, we dive deep into what’s required to make being Capitalism’s cog cool!
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Intro!
When I hear climate activists say, “if we all chip in our little piece, our actions can be really meaningful,” I can’t help but think the inverse is also true: “My actions are meaningless because we aren’t all chipping in our little piece.”
Follow that logic: if I have no control over anyone else—if I can’t force them to contribute to the causes that I care about—I have no influence over whether my life is meaningful.
Should we be satisfied with meaningless lives?
More and more, I hear people saying, “it isn’t a few bad apples in the police, in politics, in finance, in corporations… It isn’t some small subset of outlying evil people: the whole system is set up to incentivize domination, abuse and corruption.”
Again. What can any of us do against a whole broken system? How do you keep yourself from burning out and giving up?
Brace yourself. Here’s where I unleash the woo.
You’ve got to learn to love yourself so much that the people around you are inspired to love themselves too. The world will be saved through small acts of kindness snowballing into an avalanche.
That’s the only option.
It is individual responsibility that solves political and environmental problems, but it’s not some other individual. It doesn’t involve convincing anyone. It doesn’t involve judgment. It’s my own responsibility and my own alone.
It’s my responsibility to excavate my programming, trauma and shadow, clear it all out of my backyard and landscape up a world wonder in the fresh dirt.
In my mind’s eye, I keep seeing a web of pipes with orbs of colored energy moving through them. The web is the broken justice system and the orbs are the cops that resonate within it. They’re corrupted by systemic incentives to be bastards—scummy pipes. But if a tangential junction spits love into the plumbing, it spreads and banishes the corruption.
Take a Damien Echols metaphor: imagine your aura like a cup filled with scummy water. When you add fresh, clean water to it by performing Magick to draw in divine light, eventually the scum flows over the top of the glass and all that’s left over is a beautiful, crystal clear beverage.
If each of us, individually, does the work to heal the trauma caused by being raised in a complex web of broken systems, the love we feed back into it will ripple, clearing civilization’s scummy pipes completely.
Like the Hermetists say: “as above so below, as below so above.”
A cop that loves himself doesn’t commit atrocities. An oil executive filled with love doesn’t sign off on ecosystem destruction. A politician incarnated as love doesn’t fleece their constituents.
But hey, even if my religion is an opiate, do I not have pain that deserves responsible management? Civilization is a broken arm. Give me some of that spiritual Vicodin.