Personal update: on leaving politics and what's next

I am very happy to be out of politics. In the beginning it seemed that the Kennedy campaign was wide open to the perspectives, ideals, and approaches I aspired to bring—the unwinding of American empire and neoliberal economics; radical peace consciousness; deep ecology; paradigm shift in medicine; healing the political divide through the practice of the transcendent center;¹ and a political campaign based on authenticity, kindness, and civility. These ideas found deep resonance in early campaign meetings, colored the policy platform, and found their way into some of the speeches I wrote for the candidate early on.

Over time, my influence in the campaign steadily diminished. It wasn’t because of office politics or anyone working against me. It was that the campaign—and more importantly, the surrounding political culture—could accommodate only a very diluted version of what I hoped to bring. Toward the end I was doing very little, but despite speaking out publicly against the candidate’s positions on Israel and Palestine, everyone on the leadership team still wanted to keep me around. I kept trying to quit, but every time I consulted an astrologer, a mentor, or the I Ching, I got unequivocal advice to stay. The reason Bobby and the leadership team and the I Ching wanted me to stay wasn’t that they were afraid I’d make them look bad by leaving. It wasn’t that I was performing any indispensable task. It was, I think, that the ideals I came in with were still alive (however dormant, frustrated, or stifled) in the others on the team, and my presence was a kind of lifeline. I reminded them of the unfulfilled possibility of a different kind of politics. But as the campaign became more and more conventional, I sometimes wondered whether I’d become a token, a decorative philosopher on an organization that embodied ever-fainter echoes of my philosophy.

The other thing that kept me around was love. I haven’t been on a team really since the track team in college, and there was a lot of love among us. I think of that in those moments (and there are many) when I chide myself for staying past the term of my usefulness.

I am very happy to be free of politics! I feel like singing twenty times a day. In fact, I feel so free that I have commenced a one-week “news fast.” You see, I was immersed in the political world for a long time, and its way of seeing has tinged my vision. So I’m going to take a break from it in order to cleanse the lens of perception.

There is a lot moving in the world that is invisible through the political lens. The political lens magnifies some things and invisible-izes others. I need to decondition from it to recover the full use of my sight. Earlier this week I spent some time with a dear friend who is a high initiate in African mystery lineages. Let me tell you, the world looks very different from that perspective. One can see world-moving forces that the Western mind, let alone the political mind, does not know to exist. Having completed my political curriculum for now, I now plan to focus more of my attention on other streams of cause and effect, other logics of change that I’ve been neglecting for some time.

I realize as I write this that, by stepping away from politics and political writing, I am courting further accusations of “spiritual bypassing.” However, I’m much more worried about “political bypassing,” which I will explore in an upcoming essay. What gets bypassed when we reflexively see the world through the lens of politics? What do we avoid feeling and thinking? The classic dynamics of spiritual bypassing are at play here too.

I haven’t spent much time engaging the criticism of me online, which I hear has been rather passionate. I haven’t even been reading Substack comments. I apologize to those who have issued sincere public criticism and not gotten a response. It was just a bit too much too handle. Problem is, my tendency is to take every comment in good faith. For example, Stella read out loud to me a comment from one of the online feeding frenzies to the effect of, “Eisenstein’s earlier work was OK, but last time I heard him speak I was appalled by his incredible arrogance.” Well, I was up for hours that night, reviewing my speeches and interactions, entering that woman’s reality. I hesitate to dismiss such accusations out of hand, because her experience of me is subjectively valid—it was a real experience that comes from somewhere. It isn’t out of nothing. And my words sowed that experience in the world, which is a painful thing to know. So that was a night spent grappling with just one comment. You can see how it might be too much for me to read all the comments and engage all the criticism, some of which may not be in good faith.

Some people have asked why I don’t defend myself against various public accusations. It is because I really don’t want to make the issue about me—not due to any moral principle, but because it is boring. There are a lot more interesting and important things to discuss than whether Charles Eisenstein is a right-winger, a Trump apologist, a white supremacist, a spiritual bypasser, a New Ager, an anti-Semite, a sellout, arrogant, or deranged. But again, I apologize to those who put those criticisms out there hoping for their concerns to be met, and received no response. I apologize as well to those who left kind and supportive comments on this blog and received no response to those either.

I’m laughing at myself right now. This whole post is about me! And it is indeed kind of arrogant to talk to 80,000 people, most of whom one doesn’t know, about oneself. Dang. Well, even so, l will continue to offer occasional personal updates among my normal posts.

I’m entering a time of recalibration and renewal after the conclusion of this political chapter of my life. I will keep publishing here on Substack though, because I have a lot of pent-up things to share that I couldn’t adequately attend to while involved in politics. I also plan on doing a lot of research, reading, and exploration of the aforementioned logics of change and world-moving forces that are invisible from the place I’ve visited for the last year and a half. I look forward to sharing what I receive in those explorations. A lot is opening up already. I’m very grateful to all my subscribers. Thank you.

1. The transcendent center reconciles polarized issues by unearthing the unconscious assumptions both sides share and the questions neither side asks. It is not a mid-point between the two poles, but unifies them in a greater synthesis.