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.
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