August 19, 2021 I’ve written and spoken a lot about what many see as a major shift of our time: an awakening to our interconnectedness. The age of the hero—the image of a person going it alone, as in a superhero righting wrongs—has passed. Now we need cooperation, working together, recognizing our connections—that we might survive. Capitalism as a system reliant on splitting people, which would have us compete instead of cooperate, is a death-system that we must abandon.
Less about the ‘I’ and more in terms of the ‘we.’
But there’s another way in which we really do need to break from the norms of our time, to escape the groupthink, systems of indoctrination, and the mass psychosis that affects us in various ways.
Thus we need to do both: think more in terms of ‘we’ and at the same time think less in terms of doing what the group does.
Getting vaccinated, for example, is something we need to do in order to help all of us. We get vaccinated not just for ourselves, but for everyone. Not to get vaccinated is a selfish act. The whole idea of personal freedom is irrelevant here.
But at the same time our challenge is to use less social media, to care less about what others think of us, to consume less—in short, to find the many ways in which our society is driven by mass media and mass thinking, and to do the opposite.
Recently, to my regret, I joined Costco. The place is a madhouse of consumerism. If you’ve never been, don’t go. The shopping carts are the size of small SUVs, junk is piled to the ceiling of the warehouse I went to. Worst of all, you get a sense of mania when you enter: Suddenly I felt like I had to rush to buy everything just then! There I was, in competition with—what? People were actually helpful and noncompetitive; so much of everything abounded that there was no need to worry about getting the last item. I realized I was competing with an archetypal fear that there might not be enough; visions of enduring a zombie apocalypse pervaded me.
Discrimination would mean here: being less like everyone else but at the same time feeling our connection. Although we all are subject to that deep-rooted fear of not enough, in point of fact we are all in this together. I think I’ll rely on everyone to hoard, and not go back.