But there is a way to live.
We live as humans with an autonomy of mind.
We step back in order to see the semantic system as puppeteer. And from that vantage point of critical distance, we reapply our disbelief to ALL constructed worlds of declared reality, no matter how appealing to our internal dialogs, no matter how much satisfaction of mind is promised to us.
We celebrate the primacy of lived experience with our family, friends and neighbors. Not just the lived experience of joy and celebration, but the lived experience of pain and loss, too. We share it all and we check in with each other more than we scroll.
We stop arguing truth statements from within any constructed world, no matter how wrong-headed we think it is. We especially stop arguing truth statements with the people we care about the most. Instead, we encourage them to see the system for what it is, and we trust them to reclaim their autonomy of mind on their own, because that’s the only way it can happen.
Our autonomy of mind is our birthright. It is not ladled out to us from some central pot, and it cannot be taken away from us. But we can give it away, sometimes in pieces and sometimes all at once, and that’s what the semantic system encourages us to do.
We see you, system!
And today we begin to reclaim our minds.
I’m quite discouraged about how things are progressing with the state of things in the country. It’s like all of the threads are being pulled at once.
Thankfully, our life day to day with our family and in our time is very counter-cultural to what seems to be happening everywhere else.
I know I sound vague, perhaps a bit dramatic, and a bit doom-y, so perhaps I should just try and reflect coherently about where things are, or at least how I’m thinking about where things are.