You Have No Obligation To Conform To A Wildly Sick Society

Caitlin Johnstone
5 min readDec 14, 2020

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Image via Pixabay

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Russian propagandist for criticizing the most powerful and destructive institutions on earth.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a Chinese propagandist for advocating peace and detente instead of loyalty to the continual unipolar domination of a sociopathic global empire at all cost.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a dictator apologist any time you oppose murderous interventionism and the lies which are universally used to manufacture support for it.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a crazy conspiracy theorist for believing the plutocratic media distorts the truth to protect the interests of the plutocratic class.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a deranged extremist for saying the system which has marched our species to the brink of extinction is not working.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which brands you a freak and an outcast for saying everyone should be given what they need in a world of plenty instead of letting people die while elite predators hoard far more than they need.

You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a dangerous radical for saying that Black and Indigenous lives matter and that police funding should be re-routed to programs which actually work.

You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a misandrist bitch for saying rape culture is a problem and more consciousness needs to be brought to the power dynamics of gender.

You have no obligation to conform to a society where you are branded a loser for choosing to heal your psychological wounds and bring consciousness to your inner processes instead of spreading your mental demons around the world in search of conquest and domination.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which turns its back on gentleness, on kindness, on understanding, on deep listening, and stands with greed, violence, oppression, exploitation, and a rat race wherein you must step on your neighbor’s head to keep your own above water.

You have no obligation to conform to a society which rejects collaboration and harmony in favor of competition and obedience at the expense of the very ecosystem we depend on for survival.

The madness of our society gives you permission to turn away from its doctrines and expectations. When everyone’s dropping dead after drinking from the punch bowl, you are allowed to take a pass on the Kool-Aid. When the people standing in line for the ride are coming out the other end as ground mince meat, you have permission to jump the fence and go elsewhere.

You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your society.

You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your culture.

You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations of your family.

You have permission to reject the doctrines and expectations you yourself have held dear all your life up until the very moment you read this sentence.

You are not what they told you you are. You do not have to be what they told you you must be. You do not have to become what they told you you must become.

Life is so very, very much more than the thin layer of mental chatter which makes up our whole society could ever begin to perceive. You are so very, very much more than the doctrines and expectations of our pervasively sick culture could ever even guess at.

Set down the catechism of culture and make your home in the ineffable. Come and swim in the living waters. Come and sing with the hammerhead whales.

Your every breath contains more adventure than all the garbage summer blockbusters that Hollywood has ever made. The energy crackling in your cells this very moment contains more truth than every religious scripture ever written.

You are innately worthwhile. You were innately worthwhile the moment you arrived here, before you attained a single attainment, before you earned a single dollar, before you received your first nod of approval from someone with more power than you.

You have permission to simply be that, and to see where that adventure takes you.

Everything our species has tried has led us to a dying world and a society that is stark raving mad, so nobody is in any position to tell you that you are wrong.

Find that still, guiding voice within you which existed before they began caging you with their word-spells, and just see where it leads you.

Wherever it leads, it’s better than following the proverbial lemmings off the cliff.

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