The Critical Shadow Work, Deep Search For Truth, Passionate Activism, and Fierce Love That Is Asked of Us In These Times

Thank you to my friend Robyn Shanti for this quote. Powerful truth. We cannot heal and transform that which we do not see. Given how massively uninformed we Americans are — which I've learned through the humbling journey into my own layers of ignorance, indoctrination, and illusions — this is why it has become so clear to me how vitally important it is for each of us to assume a deep and ongoing commitment to seeking and speaking the truth again and again and again. In this way, we support not only our own lifting of the veils of our illusions, but also the awakening of countless others through the ripples that we send and the intentions which we hold. We're all connected, all in this together. — Molly

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

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Please go here for the complete original article: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism