Connexion
Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
For the past ten years, I've spent most of my waking hours learning how the systems we live under function and how wealth and power operate and consolidate in the U.S. as well as globally. I've learned a lot and I've shared a lot. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would.
I dedicated all that time and energy to writing and engaging on the big issues of our era for two main reasons. First, I felt there was a window of opportunity to turn the ship around and reform the system to avoid needless additional widespread suffering and upheaval, which to me was guaranteed given the destructive path to which our ruling class was obstinately committed. Second, my decade on Wall Street offered some valuable insight into the inner workings of financial feudalism and how it systematically and intentionally enriches certain small segments of the populace while enslaving the masses via perpetual colossal debt issuance coupled with reoccurring central bank bailouts for the creditor and financial asset speculator class. This wasn't widely appreciated when I first started writing about it, so it became a personal mission to inform as many people as possible.
Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive - it's that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
As things felt like they were spiraling out of control last week, as Americans and people around the world were inundated with endless videos of street violence in addition to reactionary calls to deploy the U.S. military to cities across the country, the temptation to lose control of one's mental faculties and basic humanity was heightened.
I saw evidence of this all around me. There was a dark and vicious energy in the air, and it felt contagious.
Today's post revolves around a subject I've been thinking about since early 2017, when I noticed much of the population separating into pro-Trump or anti-Trump factions that were becoming increasingly tribal, vitriolic and hostile. I wrote about it in the piece, Lost in the Political Wilderness, and things haven't improved much since. Fortunately, around the same time I came across the theory of Spiral Dynamics which provided me with a useful framework through which to understand consciousness and the importance of guarding your mind and emotional state in a world that encourages fear, tribalism and anger.
Though we live in a time where more diverse information is available at our fingertips than at any other period in human history, we're still presented with news and narratives via specific channels; whether that be an alternative media figure, a mass media outlet or a tech giant algorithm. The news and commentary that somehow gets in front of us on a daily basis shapes our view of the world just as it always has, and this in turn triggers certain emotions - joy, sadness, anger, fear, inspiration, etc. There's space for all that in a human life, but the ones I'm most interested in for the purposes of this piece are fear and anger.
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