The Role of Self-Help in Revolutionary Times
The online left often oversimplifies self-help as part of the capitalist agenda, portraying it as a red herring that is part of the problem rather than an effective way to subvert it.
Admittedly, it has certainly been used as a scapegoat instead of focusing on systemic changes.
HOWEVER! I have come to see things differently and view self-help as perhaps a necessary first step for real external change. This is a topic I chew on and go back on forth about all the time in my mind. Who knows maybe I’ll change my mind again by the end of writing this. But for now, I have a different perspective about the role of self help—here’s what i’ve come to conclude:
Earlier this year I watched Severance on Apple TV for the first time. It quickly became one of my new favorite shows and the show perfectly captures trauma and alienation under late(r) stage capitalism as the dystopia that it truly is.
It features a brilliant cast and storytelling that is perplexing, haunting, intriguing, creative, nonlinear and just..*chef kiss*
(🎞️ Watch the trailer here. Then go binge-watch the whole series!!)
A quick synopsis of Severance:
“Mark who leads a team of office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work inside Lumen and their personal lives; when a mysterious colleague appears outside of work, it begins a journey to discover the truth about [Lumen].”
-Rotton Tomatoes
In the show, the employees at Lumen are only allowed access to large compliance manuals written in a biblical style. In contrast, "The You You Are Are" (book) becomes contraband that slips into the severed world, “infecting'“ the minds of the workers.
It’s a silly self-help book filled with clichés, yet it deeply activates and resonates with the characters living with deeply trapped imaginations. It offers a radical contrast from the sanitized reality dictated by the compliance manuals. This book represents “forbidden knowledge” within Lumen, a vast and oppressive tech corporation where the workers are watched like prisoners.
“It’s funny because we’re seeing this silly self-help book go up against this gross corporate document…It just becomes: Which ideology is going to win out?”
-Vanity Fair Article
This is the book that ultimately gives rise to the severed worker’s revolt agains their technocratic cage, driving much of the forward motion of the show’s plot.
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Stay with me here as I try to bridge yoga movement and political movement work… it might be a stretch (no pun intended 😂)
In the practice of vinyasa yoga, there are several poses that require intermediate emphasis on certain parts or aspects of a movement. For example, before a seated forward fold (pose), instructors cue the students to extend and stretch upwards before allowing gravity to fold the body down towards the feet. Since I see everything through the lens of my yoga practice, I wonder if self-help, in this metaphor, is the emphasis of the stretch upwards.
While the point isn’t to maintain this stretch up, it is a necessary stop-gap for protecting the integrity of the spine in transition to the next phase of the practice.
Yoga teaches us that life is a constant flow, an ever-evolving journey where each step contributes to an unfolding dialogue. It reminds us that the path itself is the destination—a perspective echoed by Hegel, a philosopher whose concept of dialectical thinking frames history as a dynamic process of continual transformation. A Thesis, then Antithesis, and finally the Synthesis.
And in yoga, without the emphasis of the stretch upwards it’s potentially injurious to the body—perhaps so it is with the body politic.
Before we can express fully as a sovereign collective, we must know the fullness of our own sovereignty as individuals. Because how can know or seek communal expressions of healing, if we aren’t first seeking to understand healing through the vessel of the Self? And isn’t it through claiming our own personal power, the way in which we can wield it collectively?
Perhaps the real radical change is the key change of consciousness inside of all of us.When we reclaim the knowledge of the True Self , which is also the No Self, we come into union with the All That Is.
I don’t know the answers and I don’t pretend to know.
But I start seeing the plot holes in certain branches of leftist thought which sounds more and more like that John Mayor song: Waiting on the World To Change. But what if it’s not about outside-in change, but the opposite? Because we might be waiting forever for that change. And we only have today.
I will conclude with the often cherrypicked Be the change.. quote from Gandhi leaving out the most delicious core of his actual message.
Here’s the rest of his quote:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.
This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do."