Charles Eisenstein

Share this post

“Handfuls” Intermission – Self-pity and self-righteousness

charleseisenstein.substack.com

“Handfuls” Intermission – Self-pity and self-righteousness

Charles Eisenstein
Dec 18, 2022
273
92
Share this post

“Handfuls” Intermission – Self-pity and self-righteousness

charleseisenstein.substack.com

I interrupt the serialized essay “Handfuls of /dust and Splinters of Bone” for this special bulletin. Quite a few people have written me in response to it. One genre of response I especially appreciate is diagnosis of my moral, psychological, and spiritual illnesses. These diagnoses save me a lot of money on therapists, so a big thank you to these brilliant amateur psychiatrists who are able so easily to plumb the depths of my soul and offer me correction, free of charge.

I want to address two criticisms in particular that came up especially in response to the most recent installment: self-righteousness and self-pity, as they provide a useful illustration of the theme of the essay.

The self-righteousness criticism says that I am setting up a good-versus-evil narrative in which “the system” is evil and I (and my readers) are the good guys, the valiant rebels. In fact the entire essay is a critique of exactly that mindset. I’m not sure how I could have made that any clearer, so why do people still read it that way? I think it shows just how pervasive that mindset is, that we are predisposed to expect, “Here is a new way to distinguish the good people from the bad people.” The idea I’m exploring is “The rebellion against the Party is itself an organ of the Party, yet there is also a different kind of revolution in which we may all participate.” The arc of the essay will arrive at a description of it. I hope this isn’t a spoiler. I wonder if maybe I should have posted the whole essay at once.

Some people also took issue with statements like the following:

Oh, we are not (usually) subjected to physical imprisonment and torture. We are only deprived of freedom and the means to survive. We are subject to spiritual abuse, a relentless interrogation designed to crumble our structures of resistance. Our gifts are rejected, our dreams ridiculed, our work seen as valueless and foolish, our lives as a series of naive, vain blunders. The world deems us incompetent, insane, or irresponsible for our refusal to go along with a program we know intuitively is wrong.”

It reads, to some, like a complaint from someone mired in victim mentality, blaming all his failures on something outside himself. Certainly, there is a moment to say, Stop blaming the world, the system, your trauma, racism, sexism, your parents, and everyone else for your situation. Take responsibility for your life. However, when that advice ignores real conditions, then no one can fully “take responsibility.” One must accurately acknowledge the situation one is in. The situation includes both the conditions of trauma and oppression, as well as the tremendous capacity of life to create and to heal.

Conservatives tend to ignore the first; liberals tend to diminish the second. Ignore the conditions, and exhortations to others to step out of victimhood become heartless, and possibly hypocritical (like holding someone down in the muck while exhorting them to get out of the muck). Diminish the capacity of life to heal, and help for the victim takes a patronizing, condescending tone, and a corresponding culture of dependency. These two toxic stories (“You are to blame for your condition,” and “You are the helpless victim of your conditions,”) mirror each other. Each seeks to establish who’s good and who’s bad.

I would like to confess that my accusers are correct about one thing—there is a note of self-pity, or at least of frustration, in the essay. I wrote the above-quoted paragraph in 2009. At that time, I was just emerging from two years of pretty intense poverty. I’d put everything into my book, The Ascent of Humanity, years and years of research and writing, and monthly sales were often in the single digits. For some periods I was living in kind people’s living rooms and guest bedrooms with my three children. By 2009 things were steadily improving as my work became known, but I was still pretty raw from that experience.

I suppose I could have edited those traces of victim mentality out of Handfuls of Dust, but I chose to retain them in a kind of solidarity. Victim mentality is one of the results of the Party’s assault. And here is a crucial point: the exit from victim mentality (It’s all someone else’s fault) is NOT “It’s all my own fault.” It is not to replace blaming others with blaming oneself. It is to step out of blame entirely. It is to stop searching for fault. It is to learn to see the world through different eyes.

That is precisely the Revolution the essay describes. The Revolution does not merely exchange one bad guy for another. It does not require us to believe that no one is at fault, or that no one is to blame, or that there is no evil or corruption. It simply steps out of that way of looking at things. Us-versus-them is not invalid; it is just limited and limiting. As I said in my introduction to this series, we cannot attain a more beautiful world by victory. There may be victories along the way, but they cannot defeat the us-versus-them, good-versus-evil, self-versus-other patterning itself. Same for exiting victim mentality. Liberation from the enemy cannot be achieved by making oneself the enemy.

The Revolution I speak of extends to every sphere of the human experience, from the political to the personal. It is happening right now. Finally, it is happening.

Share

Free and paid subscribers receive the same content. If you’d like to offer a little extra support and encouragement, consider choosing paid if you can comfortably do so.

92
Share this post

“Handfuls” Intermission – Self-pity and self-righteousness

charleseisenstein.substack.com
92 Comments
ELIZABETH LOVIUS
Dec 18, 2022

You are one of the most thoughtful, brilliant minds and your voice must be heard. Keep

Going. You are speaking the Truth that can set us free. ♥️🧨

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
1 reply
Louise Gorenflo
Dec 18, 2022

Vaclev Havel comes up with the answer in his essay, Power of the Powerless. It is the Big Lie. In Western Civilization, it goes back to the Christianizing of the Roman Empire. In its mission to spread the word of Christ it had to replace the traditional European religions, the Church essentially declared war on all those who believed the Earth and all life upon it are sacred, people the Church labeled as pagans. The Church transformed the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire, and thus had access to the "legitimate" use of violence. The lies it promoted are (1) the Earth and life are not sacred (and the manifestation of Satan), (2) that men (not women) have dominion of the Earth and all life and women and (3) men can pretty use Earth and life anyway they want for their profit by the grace of God. The mission of the Church and good Christians is to convert the heathen, whether they want conversion or not, at the point of the sword if necessary. See the Doctrine of Christian Discovery to see how these lies were used to justify the theft of labor from Africans and theft of land from Native People from the continents white people called the Americas. Fast forward as the star of science secularized civilization somewhat and corporations replaced the vision of Christendom with globalization. The same three lies operate today.

Living the Truth would dissolve the lies. The Truth is that Earth and life are sacred, and that we are part of the sacred whole of interbeing, that white Christians are not exceptional in anybody's eyes but their own and certainly not by the spirit and other life forms, and that our responsibility is to care for the Earth, all life, and other people as good interbeing citizens. When we stop our complicity in living the lie and start living the truth, we will be free of the lie. We start this on the level of an existential realization and then start living the truth within relationships, and onward.

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
12 replies
90 more comments…
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Charles Eisenstein
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing