(Do ya?) Anthony de Mello has this to say:
First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates. Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.
Hide in plain sight: What can you say about your hopes when one of the strongest but least visible social norms is that no one is permitted to find fault with the deeper forces that drive society? This is one of the primary functions of a system of social forces that coalesce into something we call a society (drawing arbitrary boundaries that are dictated by forces within the system: the system knows where its own boundaries should be drawn, how it should be perceived, so as to protect itself from attack by comprehension). A robust system, built for survival, can absorb or neutralize many types of attack, not least the attack by exposure: defense mechanisms are concealment, camouflage, apparent (but not real) impermeability, reflection of attack back on the attacker, but one of the most effective is making attack from within futile or dangerous while making the outside-the-system seem unthinkable.
Death-spiral and life-spiral: Ours is an age of contraction, withering, desiccation, loss, and failure. “All the good times have all been in vain; it’s a shame, such a shame, such a shame,” as Uncle Ray sang so sadly. Such a shame indeed. If only this were a culture that understood shame in its original meaning; but all we mean when we use that word is that the means failed to get us to the end or revealed the nature of the desired end too openly for our comfort. Shame only means exposure. And as each new grandiose project fails, the stage is set for the further normalization of failure as the best way forward. Disasters prey on hope and everything is pulled into the cycle of hopeless and gratuitous violence. The masters of the world’s surfaces have become a laughing-stock, although it’s not so funny after all. And somehow we are supposed to fight against this negative energy and find reasons to fight for positive upward movement.
No respect: Anyone out front posing as a leader needs to be examined closely. Who are these people? Where do they come from? Do they deserve our respect? What have they done for reasons of genuine altruism, as contrasted with self-promotion on the backs of the less fortunate? I will give my affection to anyone who takes seriously the challenge of staying human in a world of beasts; I will give my allegiance to anyone who goes further and shows by their actions that they know what it means to stand up for the truth. Any truth.
Without a doubt: If I had to point to one personal weakness that I wish I could suppress or grow beyond, it would be my fretful nature. Sometimes I lie awake at night struggling to sleep; other times (more commonly) I wake up early, bothered by obsessive and inescapable worries and fears. I am learning, slowly, that it’s best to suppress them when they crop up, since I have learned that they are irrational. In the light of day, these fears flicker and fade, and I am left realizing that they are… what? Some kind of perverse defense mechanism against having to become more powerful and accomplished? What drives the need to make myself feel inadequate?
From the grift economy to the gift economy: This is the project for now. It will change over time, but I need to find the escape hatch on this economy of control and forced scarcity and start developing some alternatives. If I can survive my own misgivings (see above), then this just might work out. But even as the order of the world decays, its strength in foreclosing alternatives remains. Someday that strength might back up methods of organizing that don’t wreck everything. Someday.
And by way of a coda: This is the only thing that I am sure of, and that’s all that lives is gonna die; and there’ll always be some people here to wonder why; and for every happy hello there will be good-bye; there’ll be time for you to put yourself on. Everything I’ve seen needs rearranging; and for anyone who thinks it’s strange, then you should be the first to want to make this change, and for everyone who thinks that life is just a game, do you like the part you’re playing?
