Toothless Cogs

Avoid Getting Hooked by Shenpa to Dismantle the Murder Machine

They gonna rip up your heads
Your aspirations to shreds
Another cog in the murder machine

Teenagers, by the band My Chemical Romance

We live in Gerard Way’s murder machine. Why not become Toothless Cogs?

It’s not just the military industrial complex, or the prison industrial complex, or factory farming, or racism. The fundamental financial philosophy underpinning modern civilization—that all money is created as debt that must be repaid with interest—demands that there is always less around than there are people in need. 

Scarcity is built in. 

Scarcity that breeds fear. Fear that the powers that be have learned to twist into shame. Shame to fuel consumption. Shame to be twisted into anger that powers our civilization’s projects of conquest and subjugation.

Each of these systems, from the military to banks to fear itself, functions like a cog that grinds its little teeth into a million—billion—other cogs to keep the machine moving. 

We all see the problems. As cogs in this machine, as nodes in this Net of Indra, we each have a different angle, a different perspective, but I don’t know anyone who looks at the gears around them or the systems they bubble up into and thinks, “Ah, yes. All according to plan. This is exactly how I’d design society, were I the god that wrought it.” 

No one wants to be a part of this, and yet, like a mother that we keep threatening to finally run away from, Capitalism keeps us just soothed enough to prevent rebellion. 

Renouncing Privilege

Those of us with privilege, when first confronted with how we’re benefiting from these broken systems, often ask "how do I even renounce it?" We're told we’re not exactly lining up to dismantle privilege or that we wouldn't give it up even if anyone offered, but I wonder how many of us hear that and think, “Is anyone offering to take my privilege?”

I know I felt that way. Perhaps slightly petulant. Pouty.

I want to be an ally. Of course I do.

Read a fucking book or something.
Just don’t burden me with the responsibility of educating you.

How the World Works, Bo Burnham

There’s probably lots of ways to renounce privilege. There are as many ways for civilization to heal as there are people on the planet. Each of us fighting our little battle against the infection like the diverse cells of a body responding to a hemorrhage. 

So yes, I think there are those of us who are meant to protest. Probably those of us who are meant to burn shit down. Those of us meant to lead—hint hint, probably the women. Those of us who are meant to have difficult conversations with strangers. Maybe some are called to knock on doors and change minds.

I’ve personally moved through all of those phases, but something about my Liminal Trickster Mystic “Creepiness”—my inability to feel like I belong or deserve to take up space anywhere—always drew me away before I could network, make connections and find ways to make myself useful.

I’m learning to accept that about myself, and so I’ve come up with this Toothless Cog path. It’s kind of like householder activism. 

The system is designed to keep us too busy. Too worried about feeding our families and making rent to make substantial waves. Too stressed and depressed to take time out of our lives to educate ourselves about ballot initiatives that will likely end up profiting whoever spent money on the race regardless of our individual vote. 

I feel called to have kids. Perhaps part of my contribution is to raise them to be the change I’d like to see in the world. 

I feel called away from violence. It’s not in my nature to desire harm to people who have only fallen into the trap of flowering within disastrous fields of opinion through the logical steps that were unavoidable from the conditions in which they were planted. 

I frequently feel called to contract. Perhaps to hide. 

It can be described as cowardice. I recognize that. It’s probably fair. Like all shadow characteristics and “Bad Parts”, it can also be accepted into the committee of mind, embraced with warm love until it stops screaming for attention. Until it stops demanding I blow up my life or cloister myself more than necessary. 

Either is just as bad, after all.

Can I know and love my Cowardice as the helpful orientation that makes me a Toothless Cog?

So how can we exist in the murder machine, but still subvert it? How can we be householder activists?

Perhaps by being householder Bodhisattvas. 

What better way to renounce privilege than by sitting quietly in a corner, engaged in Radical Rest? Before becoming awakened, after all, the Buddha was a prince who tasted every kind of luxury and material pleasure available. He’s basically the ultimate renouncer of worldly privilege.

In that essay, fellow Creekmason Nintozen makes the case that through resting on the meditation cushion, we consume less. A good thing given how helpfully we prop up harmful systems when we contribute to Hollywood’s or Surveillance Capitalism's bottom lines. 

Plus, when the instincts bred into you by being "society's default" are to stomp around and try to make yourself Team Captain when you've only known about the sport for 15 seconds, maybe it's best to bench yourself.

But perhaps even more than that, there is something about stillness and space that has an opportunity to truly disrupt the murder machine.

The practice of a Toothless Cog is to grind down our teeth.

Teeth are triggering emotions. The feelings in our bodies to which we feel averse which make us want to act rashly. To yell or thrash or provoke shame or create drama and fear.

Essentially, these are the emotions that addicts attempt to soothe with alcohol, chocolate, or their phone.

These are the emotions that keep us functioning unhappily, but effectively, in a system that has learned myriad strategies to harness them for everything from advertiser money, to the regurgitated talking points of divisive politics, to the unfathomable tragedy of ongoing genocide here and abroad. 

These emotions arise and we react. Mindlessly. Often in service of the murder machine, because that’s how it’s designed. If you’ve ever watched Century of Self, or even Mad Men, you know our culture is built on rich men selling us stories about how to soothe these uncomfortable emotions. They use propaganda to make a “need,” then advertising to get us to fill it with a product.

That’s how we participate. Reactively. 

There’s think tanks out there trying to figure out how to use every emotion we are unable to sit with in order to deepen the divide that can lead to a civil war and ultimately a fascist ethnostate. 

We feel so averse to these somatic sensations that we’re easily manipulable. We’ll try anything for a cure.

Except simply feeling them with patience, warmth, compassion and tenderhearted openness.

And they build. They multiply and resonate. When I act out on my own uncomfortable emotions in an argument with a stranger on the internet, that Other carries it with them into their water cooler conversations at work, or their disciplining of their children at home. 

In Buddhism, the urges created by these visceral sensations are called Shenpa.

From Pema Chodron’s article on the topic, 

Shenpa is the urge, the hook, that triggers our habitual tendency to close down. We get hooked in that moment of tightening when we reach for relief. To get unhooked we begin by recognizing that moment of unease and learn to relax in that moment.

In the lecture series that acts as a wonderful companion to that article, Don’t Bite the Hook, Chodron instructs us to use Shenpa as an opportunity to cultivate greater wakefulness.

The key thing is to use the difficult situations of everyday life to wake us up. To awaken our compassion. To make us feel our kinship with each other, rather than to buy into polarization. 

This is how we become Toothless. We recognize the attempts of our environment to cause these sticky emotions in us and use those very moments as a reminder that we are here to wake up.

You can say to yourself when you note the clawing fire rising into your throat and demanding to be vented into harmful, mindless speech, “This is what awakening feels like.”

Then you can cultivate patience. 

You can watch the fire as it shifts. Watch it as it transforms. As it grows and shrinks or becomes prickly or more or less unpleasant. Watch it without acting on it.

When we look closely enough, we often find that these challenging emotions aren’t really intrinsically unpleasant at all. They’re just intense sensations, when there isn’t a story attached to them.

By cultivating that patience, that stillness, we create space for True Will to shine. Victor Frankl said that between stimulus and response, there’s the space in which free will actually exists. Meditation cranks that space wide open over time and we can begin to cultivate greater wakefulness in every moment.

When others can’t hook onto us, grinding their teeth into ours and keeping the murder machine turning, they might even spin so fast that their own teeth fly off. In other words, they detach from the machine themselves. The Buddha was great at recruiting the most unlikely people to become part of his monastic order, rebelling against the classist society of the time by doing so.

There’s a metaphor in Yoga that goes like this: you have an angry bull trapped in a small cage with an unfortunate cowboy. That guy is going to get absolutely gored. But give the bull a large enough space to wildly run and buck his emotions away, and eventually he’s calm enough to be handled. Maybe even pet.

In this small way, Liminal Creeps can help heal the planet by healing those immediately around us.

It’s hard to really know whether being a Toothless Cog can help. Maybe for some, hiding from the fight on the meditation cushion is an expression of toxic cowardice. Maybe withdrawing from life to seek enlightenment is problematic if it comes in place of direct action we could be taking to make things better. Maybe I’m just going through a timid phase because I have a baby on the way and I’m nervous about protecting him.

Maybe I’ll eventually be hit with another wave of social responsibility fervor. You’ll find me making phone calls and knocking on doors and marching again. 

In the meantime, my contributions will be householder activism. The activism of stillness, compassion and harmony. World peace through inner peace. As Ram Das said, “Loving that which I protest against as much as I love myself”—and finally learning to love myself in the process.

The results ripple.