A Case for Doing the Inner Work (from a Leftist’s Perspective)
Material or Immaterial reform, which is more legit?
We often hear in leftist political discourse, the very valid criticisms about certain powers at large, i.e. the rich, can enact increasing exploitative demands on the poor while fooling the rest of us (in the 99.9%) into thinking we can hack more “freedom” by propping up the personal responsibility myth.
For those who aren’t familiar, this is one of my favorite articles which explains it well. After almost 20 years, it still holds up. In fact it has aged like wine. In it, Rob Horning explains how the very powerful and rich love to tout ‘personal responsibility’ while all too conveniently leaving out the necessary Material Reforms for structural change. In a mic-dropping paragraph, the author ends the article with this:
A lifestyle is what’s left when individual choices are seen as divorced from social reality, or are made in opposition to it, as a reaction to it rather than a part of it.[…] When capitalism fails to dignify our lives, and consumption proves an endless acquisitve treadmill with more desperation and fatigue than pleasure, we’ll not blame the system […] but will instead wonder what is wrong with our lifestyle”
I want to affirm the spirit of the author’s point. But maybe to my political friends who might disagree, I’m going to make the other side of the argument for Doing the Inner Work. I will try to do this while not polarizing against Material Reforms argument above, as if these were binary ideas, but two peas in a pod.
Wait! I changed my mind!
I KNOW I know, I know, for those who followed me for years, I’ve taken many swipes at popular self-development circles, gurus, culture and discourse on this very matter.
However, I have since changed my mind. Yes, you read that correctly. Not because I think revolution is useless but because I now understand revolution as a universal cosmic archetype, rather than a super-imposed material reality. I now see revolution as the inevitable result of a rising collective consciousness made up of each of our individuation processes working together.
We live in a holographic, fractal universe after all.
Retracted—
I said in an earlier Instagram post from 2023, which I’ve since deleted, I’d expressed:
“the self is NOT the final frontier.”
However, I now see that the self is the only frontier because what else is there? How can we see the Other if not through the lens of the Self? How can we see the Whole if we don’t know ourselves, wholly?
In my winding spiritual path, come back again and again to a non-dual understanding: I have found (or been revealed) the loving Oneness that transcends all. This is the truth of Love that can cure polarization which leads to all violence—the false distinction between “Me” from the “We”, a potent medicinal elixir to see through The Both And…
Thought Experiment
I’ve been toying with this hypothetical that helped me understand why collective liberation is likely impossible without individual liberation. Or rather, why they’re inseperable.
Here’s the hypothetical: if there was a cloned utopian earth that has people living in perfect love, world peace, perfect resource distribution, perfect environmental practices, perfect city and land use, perfect equality, perfectly fair systems, then let’s introduce an imperfect human from our earth to be placed in that utopia.
Ok, so you’re thinking, wouldn’t our friend from imperfect earth just end up infecting perfect earth? Wouldn’t he fudge the whole thing up? Either he would have to heal and stomach a big ego death OR he might find himself in a world so jarring, so out-of-place unable to truly integrate, he ends up in exile or on the fringes of that society. This renders uptopia null, as it’s no longer ‘perfect’ or ‘whole’ because separation would be re-introduced, coming back to my earlier point. I’m sure there’s an educated philosophical approach to this tension between exile and utopia.. But for me, this demonstrates an extreme of how outside-in /top-down reform alone, cannot be sustained.
In Conclusion
Even if perfect utopia DID exist (and i’m not really arguing it does or doesn’t as it’s irrelevant), the sad and sobering reality is for most of us is that our egos would NOT choose it.
This is because baked into our ego’s job to keep us safe by marching to the same tune, staying ‘secure’ within our status quo bubbles.
Our ego’s conditioning keep us from taking any real leaps of faith into the unknown even if the unknown is an utopian wonderland. It’d have to dissolve before standing in union with perfection.
Some uncomfortable truths:
Our woundedness opposes healedness.
Separation hates the whole.
The part resists The Self/The Whole.
This is why I believe “material reform” is not sustainable or at all authentic. At least not without the mirror image of the immaterial reform of the inner world transforming in tandem.
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Best,
Christina