Escaping the system

There is a widespread belief that it is impossible to extricate yourself from this system. For some, this is because they never manage to part the curtain of propaganda that keeps feeding us that exact message. This is unfortunate, but understandable. But there are others who have seen the stupid little man operating the machine. They know the message isn’t true. Yet they assert it all the same, often offering it up as a reflexive excuse with only mild undertones of analysis or apology. There really isn’t anything I can do to stop the harm I am causing. This is just the way things are.

Obviously, I don’t agree or this whole project of mine would be stupid. But it is not stupid. Moreover, it is working. Not completely, not instantaneously, but it is working toward a goal that I can foresee meeting within my lifetime. I am extricating myself by simply refusing to engage with harmful practices. Yes, it is difficult because this system’s reach is so wide ranging, but it is not impossible.

I have the great advantages of having never been fully and willingly embedded in this system, of starting my project quite a while ago, and, for the last many decades, making choices to live in the edges of this system. I chose to buy a house in Vermont because I could afford it, but also because Vermont is an edge space (these are not unrelated). It too was never fully or willingly embedded in this system, it started quite a while ago making ready for this system’s demise, and its peoples have chosen collectively to forgo many of the benefits of this system in order to avoid being dependent upon those benefits. Vermont has chosen to extricate itself, and it has largely succeeded.

The reasons that I and Vermont have undertaken to get out are different. We don’t agree on everything. Our methods are not the same. But we are compatible, working toward the same goal in a mutually beneficial system of compromise. However, what we seem to agree upon is that this system is not working, not for us, not for anyone. That is, perhaps, the usual driver for getting out. But it goes further than that for me and many other people who are already living in the edge spaces. Most of us firmly believe that this system is harmful. It is harming me. It is harming you. It is harming itself. It is consuming and destroying the bases for life. It is not hyperbole to say that it is creating its own existential crisis and taking down every last thing it touches.

Most people can sense that crisis even if they refuse to acknowledge it. We know that we are not healthy, that nothing works, that we feel depressed and full of despair. We feel the harm. We feel the guilt of causing that harm. We feel isolated by this harm that we are causing. We can’t connect to the living world if we are actively hurting it — and ourselves. So all we feel is wrongness, and we carry a constant vague, yet portentous, sense of causing that wrong. No matter what we believe about this system, no matter if we are in the privileged caste or the outcasts, no matter if we can’t see that we are the cause of our suffering, this dis-ease is eating away at each of us every day.

Far from being impossible to get away from all this, I find that it is much more difficult to live with it. Removing the over-burden is a relief, a joy. There is nothing within this system that can produce the comfort and serenity of getting away from it. You see, it’s that guilt, the sense that you are the cause, that is hardest thing to live with, no matter how we try to hide from it. We do everything we can to not see the harm that we are causing. We name the guilt by any name than what it actually is. We make excuses, saying we must continue to do these things that harm us. We say that we are compelled, constrained. It is impossible to extricate ourselves.

But this is all so manifestly untrue, given how briefly we have been living like this. It can be nothing more than a flimsy lie we tell ourselves in an attempt to sleep at night.

Of course, the key to getting away is to give up the superficial benefits and privileges provided by this system to a very few people, the people who are most loudly saying that it is impossible to get out. And therein lies the rub… However, this was another advantage of mine. On balance, I did not feel benefitted. Though I had privilege, I could see and feel the harm to myself and my loved ones. I made connections between perceived benefits — such as earning more money or having high status within this culture — and the visceral hurts done to the entire world, including myself, to make those benefits possible. And yet what, I asked myself, were those benefits worth, even without accounting for the harm done to obtain them? Nothing. Money is nothing, no thing. Status is no thing. Both are only valid within this system and by forced agreement to abide by its values. So for me, there really is nothing to give up.

Impossible to get away? No! It’s impossible to stay.

Because you can’t be healthy and whole in this culture. That is not this system’s goal. If we were all healthy and whole, there would be no other goal. There would be no struggle, no search, no need to do anything more to meet needs. Ergo there would be no profits… So, of course, this culture does not value health and does not recognize wholeness. Our culture tells us that we are a gallimaufry of isolated selves all striving for superiority, all grabbing whatever we can for ourselves. We are a zero-sum game played by teeth and claws and guns. And other qualifiers in the meritocracy…

But none of this is real. Open your senses and you will know this. Tangible reality is all around us, showing up the fantasies. In our lived experience of the world, there is no such thing as isolation. We can see that every body is connected at multiple levels in myriad ways. Every body is dependent on every other body for basic bodily needs. Embodied existence is obviously impossible in isolation. An isolated thing dies. Full stop. We know this.

We know there is no isolation, no separability. But there may also be no such thing as a self. There is certainly not a self by this culture’s definition — that is, a disembodied will that defines an organism and controls its actions. For all that we put our faith in it, we have never been able to look at this definition too closely without it unraveling before our eyes. We’ve erected a whole edifice of philosophy to try and hide the chasm between our definition of the self and the embodied world as it actually exists. Where are the boundaries of this self? What part of the organism gives rise to it? When does this happen? How? We have never been able to answer any of these very basic questions. So we throw up our hands and call it all ineffable mystery.

Except it is no such thing. The isolated self and its attendant hierarchies are not mysteries. They are simply not real. They are lies we tell to maintain this system and its inequitable distribution of benefits — and universal distribution of harm. We can see that. It is obvious. We absolutely know that the self does not exist as we say it does. Which should show us that this system of striving selves is not real either. And in fact, it is only maintained through several hundred years of fabricated fantasy and main force.

In Straw Dogs, John Gray claims that Western philosophy (by which he means means “things written down by philosophers”, ie white guys) and large swathes of the East are all flawed (though he continues to quote both these traditions and rely upon them to bolster his own thoughts and conclusions). He says that our wisdom traditions are predicated on a self that does not exist. The West exalts the self to godhood. The East claims to be freeing us all from the self… except only certain special selves earn that freedom — and that freedom only comes in death.

But Gray does not delve into this far enough (likely because he is a product of his self-based privileges). He does seem to grasp that specialness, rank, and status are all built on the existence of a separable and unique self. But he does not go that last step to see that if you remove the fictional self, then there is no equally fictional status, no inequality, no divisiveness — and much less harm.

Like most philosophers, Gray fails to understand the inherent connection in life, the interdependence, the fuzzy boundaries on all beings at all scales. There are no special people. There are hardly individual and separable organisms. Gray disproves self and agency, but does not then address connection. He makes no room for reciprocity, responsibility and wholeness. He can’t see that the reality of the world — interbeing — not only does away with the self, but it does away with all that is built on that notion. There is no status, no hierarchy, no separability and specialness. We are all equally interwoven into life.

If you disprove the fantasy of the special self, then the whole project of modernity falls apart. There is no basis for divisions, no reason for some to benefit and others to bear the burdens. And the best part of accepting this reality is that it becomes very difficult to cause harm. If you have truly broken through the illusion being isolated and separable, then everything you do, you do to your loved ones, your community, your world, and your very own body. We are organisms. Anthills. Communities of interrelated beings in all directions. It’s not possible to do harm, intentionally or otherwise, when you are part of everything and everything is part of you.

And then, once you have seen how everything is connected, there is simply no way to remain in this system of perpetual harming.

See? Not only is it not impossible to extricate yourself, it is absolutely repugnant to remain.

Still, they say, what of the benefits? How do we just leave that behind? Well, first of all, who is enjoying those benefits? This culture rewards a vanishingly small number of people and forces the entire rest of the world to create the rewards that they never enjoy. And how do you enjoy these benefits knowing that so many have to give up their lives to manufacture and maintain your privileges?

But on a more fundamental level, what exactly is a benefit produced by this culture? For the moment, ignore that most of the world never gets to share in the reward. What is that reward actually worth? Is it in any way superior to the ways of being in the edge spaces?

Ask yourself this: where does healthy and wholesome food come from? Where can you breathe clean air and drink unpolluted water? When you are spending the monetary rewards you have taken from this system, what are you buying? The plastic, poisonous crap that it produces? No. You are very likely visiting the farmers’ market, the craft fair, local shopkeepers who sell high quality — all the spaces that are not colonized and degraded by this system. The one benefit you gain from this system is that you have the money to enjoy these basic goods that are produced outside the system.

In places like Vermont…

This is not unrelated…

You see, you are expending quite a lot of effort within this culture to buy the kind of life that you could live — at much lower cost to you and the entire rest of the world — if you’d only leave the system behind. You are already extricating… or more precisely extracting. So rather than take from the world, take yourself out of this system and go responsively and responsibly contribute to living. Go live your whole and healthy life in the edge spaces. And pretty soon there will be no center. (Because we all know it can’t hold…)

Free the world from your harmful self… and we all will be better off.

See now? How hard is that?