You Are Not Powerless, Because You Don't Stand Alone
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
You are not powerless to change things. You are MOSTLY powerless, but you are not powerless.
This might sound like a distinction without a difference, and if you were the only person who wanted things to change, it would be. If you were standing on your own against the evil empire and the psychopathic dystopia it has created, there would be no meaningful difference between your having zero power to change things and just having a tiny bit above zero power. Nothing would change regardless.
But you are not standing on your own. More and more people are waking up to the reality that the current order of things is unsustainable and urgently needs to be replaced with something drastically different. More and more people are becoming forcefully opposed to the murder, tyranny and abuse that the status quo is creating today, and to the ecological disaster and nuclear armageddon it is creating for tomorrow.
If it was just one person standing against this, being almost powerless would be functionally the same as being completely powerless. But because more and more people are coming to stand on your side of things, there is a greater and greater effective difference between being powerless and being mostly powerless.
We’ve all got a grain of sand’s worth of influence over our world. The historically unprecedented democratization of information and our ability to network and communicate like never before has given us all a grain of sand’s worth of power to open eyes and win hearts and minds over to a more revolutionary worldview.
Drop a grain of sand on your enemy’s head and it’s functionally the same as doing nothing. Drop a thousand tons of sand on your enemy, and it’s an entirely different story.
It might seem hopeless. The empire managers have our political systems locked down. They wield so much influence with their mass media propaganda and other forms of indoctrination. They seem to have an inexhaustible ability to undermine or corrupt any force of good that manages to punch its way through their network of control.
But it isn’t hopeless. It would only be hopeless if we were standing alone.
It can take a bit of insight to recognize this as a message of hope in an environment of western individualism. Hollywood has trained us to believe that you beat the bad guy and save the world solely through your own heroic actions as an individual. That victory looks like an egoically gratifying moment where you spin-kick the supervillain into molten lava after saying something pithy and masculine.
That isn’t the sort of thing that’s called for here. We’ll all have to work hard as individuals to win, but it will only be so that we can throw our own tiny grain of sand onto the head of our powerful foe. Our power lies in our vastly superior numbers, not in our own might as individuals.
That’s all you need to remember when you are feeling powerless: that feeling of powerlessness only makes sense from the standpoint of the individual hero’s journey. But the human adventure is not about an individual hero’s journey, it’s about billions of people waking up to reality together and becoming a conscious species.
Together, a bunch of mostly powerless people can create a very, very powerful force. If a healthy world is to be born, it that is the force by which it will come into being.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
A really good example of this is tiktok. They banned it figuring that they'd buy it or everyone would go back to Meta. Neither happened because everyone flooded the Redbook app and went full on Chinese. They were met with delighted cordiality and more swarmed over... End result? US is desperately trying to back out of the tiktok ban and Trump says if they don't reverse the ban he'll issue a decree reinstating it as soon as he's sworn in. No power huh?
The hardest thing to realize for many people is that we can not change the world by ourselves, but we can change it together. No man is an island sort of thing. We can't do eveverything, but we can do something. Each of us can, and it adds up, like rain during a storm. We live in a world where we are taught that we have to possess a lot to make a difference. This is what the empire wants us to think. You mentioned you lost a hero last year, a gentleman involved in dealings during water gate I believe. It was an article talking about the loss of a giant in our fight. You mentioned how you felt...I remember making a comment stating you are to us as he was to you. It might not be about power, but how we work together towards a common goal. We don't have the power to stop the flow of a river individually, together however, we could build a damn. Perspective. We can never dismantle the empire in one strike, it is decentralized, we can however make solutions that serve as morale boosts, we can work together in areas together to help where we can. We can't be heroes, perhaps, but we can make a difference, you do.