On Political Bypassing

The clinical psychologist John Weiwood defined spiritual bypassing as "the tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” The bypasser spiritualizes social, relational, and political issues in an attempt to avoid their messiness and drama, and steers conversations onto spiritual ideas, where he or she enjoys a social advantage or psychological comfort.

It isn’t only spiritual ideas that lend themselves to this kind of avoidance. Accordingly, we might define a new term, “political bypassing,” as follows: It is

The tendency to use political narratives and framing in order avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks, or to assert social dominance. Political bypass politicizes emotional, relational, and spiritual issues, viewing them all through a political lens. Often the bypasser will steer conversation into a political arena in which he or she enjoys a social advantage and/or psychological comfort.

To identify the phenomenon of political bypassing does not mean to renounce politics altogether, just as John Weiwood did not discount the importance of spiritual ideas and practices. (He was, in fact, a practicing Buddhist.) Both concepts ask us to consider, however, what gets lost when we habitually spiritualize or politicize things. What do we not see?

Ironically, spiritual bypassing sidesteps not just emotional and relational issues, it also bypasses authentic spiritual understanding. Political bypassing similarly forestalls a deeper understanding of politics. That’s because in each case, the conception of politics or spirituality is artificially narrow. Spirituality should include all the things that the bypassing avoids; it is supposed to infuse the sacred into life, not relegate it to a realm separate from life.

Neither does political bypassing serve the political change it purports to be about. It shunts the energies of justice and social change into prescribed concepts and discourses that people agree are “political.” Thus, not only does it distract from personal or interpersonal issues, it also distracts from political issues—or at least, from what should be political issues.

Take for example the issue of Latin American immigration. If we, fluent and comfortable with such arguments, diagnose the anti-immigrant sentiment as the product of racist and xenophobic hatred of brown-skinned foreigners, we will miss out on a whole other complex of causes that may be more fundamental. The liberal media frames the issue as racism versus compassion, but says little about causes of immigration such as neoliberal economic policies and the global debt system that make life in many Global South countries so unliveable that people will risk everything to uproot themselves and move to a foreign country. Nor is there much mention of US support for the paramilitaries, death squads, and despotic regimes that are necessary to subjugate a population to an extractive economic order. Nor is there any understanding that immigrants are a kind of “final export” – once a nation has been stripped of its minerals, oil, timber, etc., all that is left to export is its young people. Nor, finally, is there much discussion of how the migration-generating global economic and imperialist order hollows out the North American working and middle classes as well, pitting them in artificial competition with immigrants and creating the social divisions that allow the elite classes to maintain their rule. Am I saying racial hatred is not a problem? No, I am not saying that. However, it is much less challenging to the status quo for us to denounce xenophobia than it is to expose the foundations of a global system that, necessarily, generates endless misery, poverty, oppression—and xenophobia. Racial narratives have traditionally been used to justify that system, but they can just as readily be used to prop it up.

Political bypassing also operates on a more subtle level. It validates an implicit theory of power, an ordering of the world into a hierarchy of importance that subtly reinforces the deep assumptions and guiding mythologies of the current world order. What is being “bypassed” when we locate power in presidents and prime ministers, billionaires and bankers, CEOs and managing directors, and the organizations they ostensibly run? It is not that they have no power. But the systems that contain them tightly circumscribe their range of motion, for better and for worse. Even the most enterprising among the “powerful” usually become captive to the organizations they have created—all the more so when that organization predates their leadership. Moreover, the implements of their power prove again and again to be of little use in achieving long-term goals, impressive though they might be in the short term. Take, for example, missiles and bombs. They can flatten neighborhoods and extinguish the lives of those a country names “enemy,” yet somehow they fail to bring security. They may win the battle. They may even win the war. But what is on the other side of that victory—five, twenty, fifty years in the future—is not a good thing. It is a society ridden with the mirror image of what it has sown.

Aside from violence, the other main implements of conventional power, the kind that politics recognizes, are information control and money. Each of these three abets the others, yet somehow, together they are impotent to avert the disasters fast overtaking modern civilization, or to redeem the age-old promise of liberating humanity from suffering and want, or even to stabilize the position of the ruling elites.

Where else, then, does power reside? What do we bypass by acceding to the conventional political view of it? Here are a few loci of power that escape the notice of the typical political observer:

1. Indigenous ceremonialists and shamans who communicate with other-than-human beings to protect land and water and keep the earth in balance. A few months ago I spoke with a shaman from Ecuador who described how an oil prospecting company was set to move into his tribe’s territory. The bulldozers and everything were ready to go. So he communicated with the spirit of the petroleum and asked it to intercede. “OK, give me three days,” it said. Three days later the contract was canceled and the machines were removed. The company had run into sudden unexpected legal issues.

We could also thank the environmental lawyers who raised those legal issues. But so often their efforts are in vain. This time everything went their way. Why?

I heard a similar story a few years ago from some native people in northern British Columbia, or perhaps the Yukon, can’t quite remember, who used prayer and ceremony to stop a pipeline.

If these people are so powerful, you may ask, then why is the Amazon burning right now? Why haven’t they put a stop to all this? It is because there aren’t enough of them to perform the ceremonies necessary to keep earth in balance. It is because modern education, money, and ways of life have eroded the world-story from which those ceremonies can operate. It is because the whole corpus of political-financial power is itself a system of magic, that lays waste to the world through the power of symbol. (Money, law, government, corporations… all are agreements mediated by symbols. The chief magicians, for example central bankers, utter some magic words or type some digits into a computer, and the world changes.)

Underneath the symbolic magic we call money, government, and law lies the mythology from which it draws power—the foundation of the modern worldview, the metaphysics of objectivity and force, the religion of science and its elaboration we call technology. Other loci of power draw on different mythologies, new and ancient. The process of accelerating change we witness today is a drama of clashing and superseding mythologies. It is also not that.

I’ve changed my mind—I won’t elaborate on other power centers right now. Some, like the last, are beyond the vision of politics; others are merely beneath it. I’ll just name a few of each, leaving out many: the hidden yogis, invisible acts of kindness and generosity, the shepherds of the dead, the musicians who add new threads into the weave of consciousness, the storytellers, and all those who endure hardship and still hold on to the will to live. I could write many pages on each, but this is already getting too long, and I want to tie together the two ends of the string: politics and spirituality.

If I were to advocate ignoring politics and placing our attention and trust in the power of indigenous rites or the other causal networks I didn’t elaborate on, this article would indeed be a kind of spiritual bypass, or at least a separating of two aspects of what is actually an unbroken reality. The message, rather, is to question the totalizing discourse that politics so easily becomes. For some of us, our gifts and instincts guide us toward politics, whether for a lifetime or for a season. Others are repelled by it, but that does not disqualify them from contributing to global change, because there are other modes of change that politics does not see. Yet neither are they separate from politics, as the example of the environmental lawyers illustrates. They change the environment in which politics operates.

We who recognize the futility, after so many centuries, of conventional politics to effect fundamental betterment of the human condition, are opening to means of change that have been invisible. Our desperation calls them to us. Many new ones are coming on line. I will do my best to describe some of them over the next year.