Don't Let The Empire Gaslight You Into Believing You Are Powerless

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Don’t let the empire gaslight you into believing you are powerless and helpless. There are always things you can do to fight the bastards, and there are always things you can do to improve your own life.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of believing there’s nothing we can do. Nothing we can do to fight the machine because it’s too large and entrenched, and nothing we can do to change our own personal circumstances because the deck is stacked so unfairly against ordinary people.

It’s a strong illusion because at a surface glance it appears to be true. Our political systems are locked down by the rich and powerful to ensure that our votes don’t inconvenience them in any way, and any new political movement which challenges establishment power structures will find itself facing sabotage from the outside and from within. Our voices are kept marginalized and our countrymen have been turned into mindless empire automatons by a lifetime of propaganda indoctrination.

And at first glance we appear to be just as powerless in our personal lives as well. Unless you’re lucky enough to have obtained some capital which you can use to extract labor from the working class or to possess some special aptitude that our system happens to value, you can spend your whole life struggling in poverty. The life of a worker is getting harder and harder, and it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing you can do about your own unhappiness and psychological dysfunction because you’re laboring under a system that’s so abusive and unfair.

So while it is true that there are many doors that are closed to a denizen of our dystopia, that doesn’t mean you are powerless to change things. Believing that you are powerless serves no one but the powerful.

We are never truly powerless because we always have the ability to help foment a revolutionary zeitgeist, and because we always have the ability to heal ourselves. As a collective we have the power to inform and educate the public to help them understand that they’ve been deceived their whole lives about our society, and that a better world is both needed and possible. As individuals we have the ability to do inner work to heal our trauma and liberate ourselves from the delusion of ego, which will have radically transformative effects on our quality of life in a whole host of ways.

There is nothing our rulers can do to take these abilities away from us. We will always have the ability to do something to help awaken the people to the need for revolution, and we will always have the ability to heal our inner wounds. Every single day there are concrete actions we can take toward both of these ends.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe there’s nothing we can do to change things. Too many socialists are content to just sit around smugly knowing better than everyone else and having all the correct opinions about things while expressing distain for everyone who tries to expand awareness or make the world a better place. Get active in your community. Produce dissident media. Make revolutionary art. Have conversations. Change minds. Open some eyes. Wake people up so that one day there will be enough of us to force real change.

It serves nobody but the powerful to believe you are doomed to a life of misery. Too many socialists are content to blame all their internal dysfunction on the abuses of capitalism and just spend their days masturbating their inner wounds in meetings and online without doing the rigorous inner work necessary to come to inner peace. Get curious about your internal processes. Research the many modalities for inner healing that are available online. Listen to the brilliant minds who’ve been sharing groundbreaking new insights about trauma and inner work lately. Investigate the possibility that spiritual enlightenment is a real phenomenon that is entirely achievable in this life. Take responsibility for your own inner wellbeing, and start doing something about it.

We don’t need to sit around paralyzed by power-serving learned helplessness. We don’t need to sit idly by waiting for some deus ex machina resolution to our plight. We don’t need to resign ourselves to a life of suffering and making the same mistakes over and over again because we’re being whipped about by unconscious forces within us that we’ve never taken the time to investigate.

There is always something we can do. We can never do everything, but we can always do something. There’s no good reason not to do that something we can do, every single day of our lives.

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