As bold an experience as coming out felt to be at age 20, in the end it did little to impact the many manifestations of hiding that still characterize my life. Many years of therapy and spiritual work have helped me realize the extent to which fear has been the lens through which I see most things, and how hiding — thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions, desires — is my default response to try and mitigate this fear. Today, having spent the better part of the last 25 years working to clear my vision of fear doesn’t feel like much of a victory, when waiting on the other side of that struggle is a human world caught in its grip. If you haven’t yet noticed that fear is the supreme iron catechism of our day, maybe you have noticed that anyone daring to boldly break away from it has been instantly excoriated as a heretic.
The most generous, empathic view of such a reflex I could muster, would be to recognize it as a response to trauma. Not one aspect of our lives has gone untouched by the collective pandemic trauma we have been living together as a society during the past two years, or the fear which continues to characterize it. Layered on top of the trauma is a new reality in which the silencing of debate and dissent is already now a deeply-engrained response to any assertion challenging the catechism saying that the most sensible, intelligent, honourable, trustworthy, and virtuous humans are either those who are continually afraid themselves, or those at the helm of institutions ensuring you stay that way.
Subtle attention to the language used by many of these institutions in our society shows how compliance has replaced humility as the highest human virtue to which we can supposedly aspire. Institutions of government, medicine, media, academia, corporations, and others seem now to operate as a kind of collective brain-creature which ennobles the idea that transcending all human emotion, including compassion, is the path to a flourishing future of peace, health, safety, and abundance. Bottomless goblets of zombie Kool-Aid are served on tap in their canteens. In both public and internal communications, our institutions now posture themselves as the standard-bearers of virtuous compliance. While they may be influential in shaping many of our perceptions and experiences, they are also surprisingly brittle because their power rests on the presence of a consensus reality that validates it.
The reality behind the curtain is this: the entirety of the human community is where the power lies, and no individual is excepted. It has — you have — tremendous power to manifest truth, justice, innovation and progress in our world. Your power does not come from institutionalized collective brain-creatures, it comes from your thoughts and intentions mobilized by emotion into action. Your power does not come from compliance and is in no way attached to it. It cannot be bought or sold. It doesn’t need to be branded and it doesn’t need a social media account. The way to actualize this power is to allow it to run free in you, and to encourage that it run free in others. Allow it to express and manifest however it does, however simple or complex, however privately or publicly, and understand that its indispensability does not necessarily rest on its coherence. You can express it through feeling alone. It deserves air, light, and water. It deserves to grow. It deserves respect. Years spent teaching and studying and mentoring have shown me that your power may manifest in diverse and improvisatory ways, sometimes individually within you alone, and sometimes collectively, in community with others. But it is extremely important to remember that when we abdicate it to institutions asserting themselves to be the exclusive purveyors of truth, justice, innovation and progress, when we start believing that these things are born from machines rather than from the intentions and emotions generated by consciousness, we ensure that precisely all of them stay out of reach.
There is incalculable tragedy in witnessing our world liquify into a chaos of institutions hiding behind a scrim of sternly enforcing degrees of compliance which, with every passing day, very obviously have less to do with whatever substantive reality ostensibly justifies them, and more to do with engineering compliance for its own sake. In this bizarre bazaar of compliance, fear is the currency changing hands. If you don’t believe me, read the news and try to differentiate headlines written to convey information objectively, from those tailored with rhetorical flourishes which make you feel anxious and afraid without knowing exactly why. In this new world of virtuous compliance, it will soon not especially matter why we should comply, with whom or even what exactly, who the beneficiaries are, or for how long. And after we have scorched the earth this way, we will beat our chests and weep, and wonder how it happened.
How about let’s not do that. Next I’ll offer some ideas about how to change course.