An Essay on Individualism vs the Awareness, Accountability, and Collective Activism Needed to Create a Just and Peaceful World

This is so well said! Thank you, Alison Rose Levy!

The more layers that I come to recognize of my own racism, illusions, privilege, and biases that I’ve absorbed growing up white in America in a wealthy Detroit suburb, the more I’m coming to see and be accountable and empowered to be actively antiracist and accountable for fighting the many faces of violence and injustice that are so pervasive in our society. There are so many layers to my ignorance and indoctrination into disinformation, apathy and inaction, minimization and denial to shed!

I’m also just now working on a piece to share with the limitations of Eckhart Tolle and other New Agers whose focus on individualism and catapulting into enlightenment is a pervasive obstacle to actual and active collective participation in the universal struggle for racial, economic, social, and environmental justice.

The wisdom and truth-telling here is an illuminating gift. May we receive it and act. Molly

 

Yesterday, one of the supposedly "spiritual" people I knew from my former yoga world injected the familiar activism shaming into a thread about another topic-- "you have to be clear of all your problems before you can try to change society." "Anyone who has not overcome their own needs will just carry their problems into their activism." 

 

In becoming a social activist coming out of a community of "seekers" of my generation, I've endured decades of this kind of high-minded caution, invalidation, and assertion of the primacy of the individual self— over everything else in our collective. 

 

I've been told that people will "hear you better when you say it nicely." Making people feel uncomfortable about their own compliance with a status quo that hurts others -- won't feel nice. Privileging our friends, and pandering to their weaknesses to avoid hurting them— or to maintain a connection— hurts a whole lot of other unseen people. At first, we don't see these people, and eventually we CANNOT see them BECAUSE of the need to protect our sense of our own "niceness." 

 

The belief that it's all about perfecting the individual and that other social injustices can wait-- is inherently privileged and racist. And yet people who had these beliefs inculcated into them in youth and formed an identity around them refuse to examine and re-evaluate them. As we look at our world today, did these self projects help make a better society, save the earth, or raise awareness on a social level? Obviously not. And yet people who have identified themselves with such beliefs or made a profession of them continue to advance them. 

 

With the severe distortions of compassion and so-called spirituality we are seeing playing out through COVID, QAnon, and in other ways, I feel we are called to revise what it means to be authentically spiritual in a troubled world.

When I suggested to this friend that for the sake of other people experiencing systemic injustice, some social issues cannot wait until you or I are perfect, I used the example of what happened to Eric Garner. 

 

My friend did not recognize the case, when I described it. He may never have known of it. He began deliberating about the "truth" of the case, centering himself as the judge. In other words, he equivocated as if there were a question about what happened-- that he had to decide. This is an incident (one of many sad to say) where what happened was captured on video. There is no possibility of quibbling over the facts. 

 

The case as presented to him posed just one question: Is it okay in this country, is it okay within our community, and is it okay with me that a black man can be murdered by police for an exceedingly minor action which in any court of law in any developed country would NEVER incur a death sentence? 

 

Is it okay that this happens routinely in our society? Is it okay that any minor question about someone's behavior can instantly trigger the death sentence, be used to justify their murder, and allow the killers to go free?

Is this and other such incidents, social concerns that can wait to be addressed until I and other activists are without personal issues or needs?

My friend's visceral response was to back away and spread doubt over what happened as presented. In other words, he could not meet the circumstance even as a hypothetical, (though in fact unknown to him it was a documented reality) because privileged people have the right to become confused and doubt a police murder— but black people lack the right NOT to be murdered.

Second, is the root of the problem the many minor actions people might do? Or is the problem a system set up to allow and perpetrate this level of violence towards certain members of our society? While others look away and lie to themselves as to whether or not it is happening. 

 

If you or I shop lift, have a certain look on our face, belong to a race, gender, or dress in a way that triggers someone else— is it the universally applied law of this land that we can be killed for it? Or is the problem that people who are insulated by their race, gender, or dress code— lack the empathy to identify their own assumption of privilege that they would never be subject to such treatment? And to not care about those who are. 

 

My friend's visceral response to my account of the Garner case replicated his spiritual stance. "I can back away and not deal with this."

This is why people need not only individual self-awareness but a developed social conscience and a sense of solidarity with people who are just like us under the skin-- but different from us on the visible surface. Emphasizing the first while failing to fully develop the second produces a blighted moral character. 

 

Many years ago, for a TV show, I did an interview with a social scientist, who measured specific social values and their role in moving the needle towards or away from fascism. Since that time, I've seen our society devolve into authoritarianism not because of a few bad apples-- but because of the many people who hold corrupted social values without even questioning themselves.

— Alison Rose Levy