Politics is the Scourge, Not the Solution
Politics is a blight on a healthy society, and a healthy mind. Instead of rallying for this or that political candidate, we should be striving instead for an apolitical society.
I’m gonna throw a definition at you. Ready?
I submit, for your consideration, that “politics” is nothing more or less than the substitution of team identity for critical thinking.
Politics does not bring clarity. It does not bring understanding.
It’s actually the opposite of thinking. It’s meant to arrest thought, and reduce you to reptilian belonging.
Politics is the veil. It is a set of lenses, which, when donned, filter out half of existence, and thus serve to thoroughly confuse you and cause you to misunderstand the real nature of the world.
No understanding of real mechanisms of power can be obtained through the lens of politics. The entire point of politics is to obfuscate those mechanisms—to hide them behind the veil of celebrity saviors and celebrity villains, and nonsensical tribal identities such as “left” and “right”.
Politics is the shadow puppet show on the wall. Like any good show, you are meant to be swept up by it. You are meant to become mindlessly adoring or mindlessly enraged by this show… but always mindless.
Whilst the real power continues right on doing what it does, in the shadows.
I know I’m attacking the sacred cow of American life here. I have disagreed with many friends and several partners over this. They say it’s all about electing the right people. “Get out and Vote! You’re doing your Civic Duty and exercising your right as Free Citizens of a Democracy!”
Do you really still believe that?
Do you really believe that your elected representative, the guy or gal in front of the camera, is the one with all the power who really pulls the strings? What about the vast, lurking beast hiding off camera? You know, the one we’ve all been jumping up and down screaming about, to the point that our relatives think we’re crazy?
Have we not just gone through a three-year-long object lesson in Where the Power Really Lies 101, versus where we naively thought it lied?
Can you honestly look at our sitting President and claim, with any semblance of a straight face, that he is “the most powerful man in the world?”
How many times in your life have you thought: “Okay, this time, this is the candidate that will bring real change…”?
How many times do you have to sing along with “We Won’t Get Fooled Again!” before you realize who the “fool” is?
Take off the veil, and let’s think a minute.
Based on your own life, what do you know to be true?
I would put it to you that the important things in your life—your family and loved ones, your work, your creativity, your connection to spirit or Creator or whatever you call it, your connection to nature—these are apolitical. These are the things that transcend the blind, crustacean stupidity of politics and elevate us a species. They are what is threatened by the scourge of politics.
Maybe you’ve had this experience: you’re at a concert where everyone is focused on the pure joy of the moment, everyone is dancing, singing along, and you experience a moment of transcendence. You look around. You see people of all ages, all races, all swept up in a moment of shared human joy. You realize something beautiful and tragic at that moment. You realize that we are, in fact, one species capable of experiencing harmony and joy together—and that we do it easily, and naturally. But when we leave this place, we will exit into a world that’s trying its damndest to convince us that we are different species at war with one another, and that only our own particular tribe is worthy of the label “human” and all the rest are called Enemy. And that your highest duty as a citizen is supporting your representative at the grand gladiator match called Election so you can defeat Enemy and grab up power for you and your kind.
We know it’s not true. Most of human life is already apolitical. We are at our best, most cooperative and creative, when politics is the furthest thing from our minds. That is how we are meant to live. But then the news comes on and convinces us we are surrounded by Enemy, and we get swept right back into the puppet show.
Am I saying we should ignore politics and just sing Kumbaya together? Nope, far from it.
I’m saying we should turn our attention from where they want us looking to where they don’t want us looking. We should turn our attention from the shadow puppet show called Politics, to the puppeteers.
Looking back, I feel like that is the real project here, what we’ve actually been doing here together on Substack: we’ve been educating each other on the existence of the puppeteers and their masters. We’ve disagreed here and there, on who they are and what they’re really up to, but basically we are involved in a great project of unblinding. And we’ve started to make our way out of the Cave.
Now, surprise, surprise, some people want our attention turned back to the shadow puppet wall. “Hey guys, look at this spiffy new candidate! He will change everything! Don’t you guys maybe want to umm, come back and sit down and put these blinders on again?”
Thanks, but that’s a big Negative, Ghost Rider.
Too awake now, sorry.
Nothing against RFK. (Well, maybe one or two items of concern.) He says a lot of the right things. (Saying pleasing things not enough, though. See this devastating takedown, which shows how a little bit of critical thinking can take apart "heroes saying nice-sounding things” fairly quickly.)
But if you still think it’s all about electing the right person, you’ve bought into the basic premise that politics is an honorable, necessary institution, and the only point is to win at it.
Consider that politics, like so many of our institutions, is the disease. A contagion to be eliminated from a healthy society, and from a healthy mind.
Theoretically, we elect people to office for the same reason we hire security guards—to safeguard the system against evildoers. But does anyone really believe that works anymore? Haven’t we realized that the evildoers really don’t care who sits in the security guard’s chair? That they’re going to continue right on doing what they’re doing anyway? Have we not realized they, not we, are the ones doing the actual hiring?
There is a rooting out of power structures to be done. Politics, Us vs. Them, red vs. blue, “right vs. left”… it’s all a celebrity distraction from that project. It veils those structures.
You want change? Real change? Nothing changes, not really, unless people withdraw their consent from corrupt institutions.
For example, we are here, most of us, because we have withdrawn our consent from the obviously criminal cartel called Mainstream Media. And it’s working. Mainstream media is dying a slow, and rather pathetic, death.
We’re learning that we have do the same with Big Tech, Banking, the Pharmasick system, etc.
I have this recurring vision, like a scene from a movie: people are gathered together on a bridge. They hug, they cry as if coming out of a long nightmare. In unison, and with a great shout of resistance, they take their electronic devices and hurl them from the bridge. There is a moment of stunned astonishment at what they’ve done—how simple it all was!—and then they erupt in joy as they realize they are, and always have been, free.
I’m not going to go huck my phone off a bridge—it’s just a visual metaphor. But it really sums up what we have to do. Individually, in our lives, stop complying with madness, and stop giving our dollars, and our support, to corrupt institutions.
This, not some elected hero, is what will save us.
This battle is won or lost by what we assent to in our lives. It’s the dollar the we give to a multinational versus a local business. It’s a bank we support versus finding an alternate store of value. It’s a product we agree to inject into our bodies or not. It’s a mask we put on our face or not. It’s a child whose mind we allow to be corrupted by a sick education system or not. It’s a digital panopticon surveillance system we agree to live under versus standing up for privacy rights. It’s a lunatic ideology we give our mental assent to or reject utterly. It’s a voice raised in a loud NO, instead of silently going along.
Your savior is not to be found on an election ballot.
It is to be found staring at you in the mirror every morning.
Perhaps instead of praying “deliver us from evil”, we should be praying “give me the courage to defy evil.”
We perpetuate slavery by what we give our assent to. It ends when we refuse to comply.
There are no enemies, nobody is born into a role, nobody ‘belongs’ to a tribe; there is only right vs wrong, and every individual is responsible for his own moral choices.
Although I am in the UK I fully endorse everything in your article. We have the same issues here and having believed in the political system for many years albeit with some doubt, I am now so disillusioned with the whole system, I doubt anyone will ever get my vote again on any level, local or national. As the saying goes power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We trusted these people to take care of our country, people and our livelihood and have been terribly let down on every count. We call them weak and unable to make coherent decisions, when actually we are only seeing the outer cover, under the cover they are devious, hypocrites building castles for themselves and we will all be left on the other side of the moat.