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- If you ever feel heavy
If you ever feel heavy
because you care deeply about injustice
In case the image does not show, here is what it says:
“If you ever feel heavy because you care deeply about injustice, suffering, and ecological destruction, remember that a trillion dollar propaganda machine was built to make you numb and it didn’t work on you.”
-Author unknown
But just because you feel heavy did it really not work?
Yes, the propaganda machine wants us numb.
But it also wants us isolated, heavy and confused.
It wants you to feel that heaviness all by yourself. So your grief becomes a private burden. Not a shared fire.
The feeling of heaviness can remain an individualistic response to grief, which hinders collective action to address systemic issues.
Don’t get me wrong:
It is vital to be with the emotions that arise in relation to today’s meta crisis.
That is key to show up fully in these times.
Or, as Joanna Macy puts it:
“Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.”
But just “not being numb” can still result in inaction.
We can feel a deep sense of wrongness, yet still be kept from contributing to collective action.
Because, the propaganda machine is also designed to keep us unorganized, separated, powerless, confused, distracted and unaccountable.
This isolation and inaction is reproduced through countless denials, myths, and traps.
The four denials of modernity/coloniality
I am currently reading Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira.
It’s a transformative experience.
What stuck with me were the four myths that modernity/coloniality perpetuates.
The 4 denials:
1. The denial of systemic, historical, and ongoing violence and of complicity in harm
The fact that comforts, securities, and enjoyments (of a few) are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation elsewhere.
2. The denial of the limits of the planet and of the unsustainability of modernity/coloniality
The fact that the finite earth-metabolism cannot sustain exponential growth, consumption, extraction, exploitation, and expropriation indefinitively.
3. The denial of entanglement
The insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land, rather then entangled within a wider living metabolism that is bio-intelligence.
4. The denial of the magnitude and complexity of the problems we need to face together
The tendency to look for simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good and that may address symptoms, but not the root causes, of our collective complex predicament.
What comes up for you as you read these?
For me, it makes me slow down and really sit with how to compost these denials.
This is the hard, necessary work of what it means to truly not be numb.
Moving beyond “not being numb”
Facing these denials requires a practice of confronting our own complicity and moving from a place of individual grief to a multi-layered process of unlearning.
This is where we begin to see what is possible beyond the myths that have held us captive.
Here are a few practices I act on:
Actively taking accountability for systemic privilege. And shifting the ways in which that privilege leads to harm.
Taking responsibility for action in collectives by contributing skills, time and energy to shifting systems of oppression.
Prioritizing relationships over speed and scale to avoid simplistic solutions to complex, chaotic problems.
Yes.
It’s already a big win is if coloniality didn't make you completely numb, but if you stay in that feeling of heaviness alone, it still wins.
The work of hospicing modernity is a difficult and lifelong journey, and no one has all the answers.
That’s why, I won’t end this newsletter with any conclusions.
The unsolved questions in your heart
Rushing to clarity can also prevent the emergence of deeper critiques.
So instead, I offer this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
So, what are the questions that remain unresolved in your heart?
May we sit in the cauldron of what is unsolved together.
And, then act for the more beautiful worlds our hearts know are possible.
In community,
Adrian
PS: Thanks for reading! ❤️ If you have questions or suggestions, I am just one email away!
P.P.S: If this has resonated with you, you might be interested in what's coming next. I'm currently developing The Impact Network Operating System. It is an integrated system of key tools I use for organizing collective action, learning & connection in online groups.
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