A 21st Century Awakening in the United States of America: From Boycott to Economic Will

Awakening: The “Golden Circle” Reveals the Path Toward Social Harmony

In our first liberation piece, I offered a critical interpretation about the potential outcomes which could arise from the Women’s Marches and the Peoples’ Saturday, January 21, 2017. In this piece, I wish to focus on three important observations from that day—namely, that: (a) the Women’s Marches successfully implemented—whether intentional or accidental—a near-perfect application of the Golden Circle framework, which has led to an awakening, (b) these marches, including those which have emerged following the Peoples’ Saturday, have set the stage for bringing about harmony throughout the 21st century world, primarily because they have acknowledged the existence, and consequences, of social conflict, and (c) the Golden Circle framework and social conflict theory offer both explanations for our social problems of living, as well as economy-related solutions for resolving conflicts which separate us from our “actualized” social selves.

In regard to the first observation, what is “awakening,” and what have The People “awoken” to exactly? To best answer this question, it is important to understand the principles underlying the Golden Circle framework. The framework holds that organizations, including social movements (I would strongly argue), succeed and thrive when they are able to articulate the reasons for action (i.e., the “why”), when these organizations allow “reasons” to drive the development of methods and strategies for goal-achievement, or “tactics” (i.e., the “how”), and when these organizations allow tactics to determine the structures, processes, and social factors (i.e., the “what”) needed to achieve their goals (i.e., the “outcome”). Unlike previous resistance movements, the Women’s Marches clearly outlined a set of coherent reasons for engaging in civil protest: to promote a progressive and highly-inclusive feminist agenda founded in peace, human dignity, self-determination, and unconditional love. As I have noted before, the march organizers articulated a set of shared values which were self-evident, defensible, and morally untouchable. However, and perhaps most important to note, the march organizers allowed the “how” and “what” to emerge organically from the “why” itself. In effect, the march organizers brought to the surface painful social, political, and economic injustices which affect us all, as well as a reason to act against such injustice. This is awakening in the experiential sense; in the only sense which truly matters if prosocial change is to occur! Said differently, awakening is the neurosensory recognition, psychological acknowledgement, moral acceptance, and genuine embodiment (both figuratively and literally) of social injustice, coupled with a related kinetic force (“behaviors”) designed to achieve justice for all human beings. Arguably, since the Peoples’ Saturday, and because of the already-awoken, what The People are awakening to is the perverse connection between conflict and justice. So, why should people “be woke” to real-world social conflicts, regardless of their degree of subjective and objective experience with injustice? This question brings me to a second observation regarding the Women’s Marches.

Social Conflict: Why We Must Acknowledge, Accept, and Learn from What We Already Sense to Be True

There are some things we, who inhabit Western culture especially, all sense to be true, despite any psychological coping mechanism or frame of consciousness we exploit to deny, mitigate, or suppress these painful realities. What are these little, painful realities, exactly? At a biological-level, we all “sense” that human relations are reducible to mere reward-based exchanges. That is, because humans are neurologically wired to associate their social behavior with survival, we are prone to associate secondary rewards—money, material, status, power—with the satisfaction of basic primary needs such as hunger and thirst. Yet, we also “sense” that such exchanges provide short-term benefits for a few individuals (and their ilk) at the expense of the wishes of many others (yes, human and nonhuman alike). In other words, most people possess the requisite neurology to recognize—through sensation and perception—various forms of social conflict, and how such conflicts favor the few at the expense of the many. And this recognition elicits, at an unconscious level, a generalized sense of emotional aversion. In the present day, and in Western culture in particular, many people live emotionally aversive lives; what H. D. Thoreau described in Walden as lives of “quiet desperation.” That is, we, Westerners are so wanting of secondary rewards for the sake of personal survival that we are very quick to ignore our very social and nonmaterialist nature; we ignore the connection between community and survival, and we normatively carry the emotional baggage that comes with accepting social injustice as a by-product of the socioeconomic-political structures, processes, and actors which sustain and perpetuate capitalist/materialist social systems. Simply put, many Westerners have long “sensed” that something is wrong with our culture, its social systems, and its future.

Unfortunately, the recognition of social injustice, as experienced through our personal neurology alone, will never provide solutions by which to end injustice. The reason for this is simple: humans cannot deliberately access their neurology. Recognition, as a neurocognitive process, does not require the preexistence of critical functions such as language, intrapsychic conversation, morality, genuine embodiment (or “empathy”), and intentional kinetic force (or “action”). In fact, in the absence of these critical functions, the individual—a product of mere classical conditioning, operant learning, and approach-avoidance stimulus responses—is almost destined to exploit, and be exploited by, social injustice. The individual seems doomed to a life of eternal conflict, wherein the true self is never given a chance to grow personally and socially. In contrast to rote recognition, what is fully conscious—and, thus, relatively more difficult to cognitively and behaviorally reconcile—is the capacity to psychologically acknowledge and morally internalize injustice, to embody the lived experience of oppression, and to seek actionable solutions by which to achieve social justice for all. Why does this difficulty exist? To expand on this observation, I argue that this difficulty is a consequence of alienation.

Alienation: How We Become Divorced from Our Authentic Selves and Perpetuate Social Injustice

Once we psychologically acknowledge conflict, and accept its reality, we, The People, come closer to understanding how our culture perpetuates social injustice. In Western capitalist societies, injustice arises from a series of factors which act to reduce the value of a person to his or her ability to produce material things, monetary profits, and subjective contributions—to produce “secondary rewards”—that sustain the capitalist system to which we give our unquestioned, albeit undeserving, allegiance. In this perverse social system, if the individual cannot produce anything of capital value, then the individual is not valuable at all. Self-worth and self-motivation become intertwined with work (and never with the consequences of work, both good and bad), and work in capitalist societies is often repetitive, physically dangerous, cognitively boring, and socially estranging. As sociologist Alexander Liazos correctly observed from the works of Karl Marx, this type of social system imposes a heavy psychological toll on its citizenry, resulting in people who are alienated from their emotions and from many vital aspects of shared life.

So, how does alienation perpetuate social injustice? I believe the answer to this question is best articulated by Canadian physician Gabor Maté and his take on Marx and conflict, though Maté speaks more about issues involving health; his points, nevertheless, are applicable to issues involving social injustice in all forms. According to Maté, capitalist social systems alienate the individual in four distinct ways. First, individuals are alienated from their work. They are not allowed to experience the connection between their labor and what they produce. As such, what they produce is usually divorced from the consequences of production and the consequences of consumption (e.g., occupational dangers; poor physical/mental health; fossil fuel pollutants; weapons of war).

Second, individuals are alienated from nature and their environment. In the pursuit of production, money, and material accumulation, they become divorced from the impact of work on other living nonhuman begins and all ecosystems. Thus, they often act against the well-being of their own physical land, the essential elements of their communities, and the needs of the world at large (e.g., the concept of private property; eminent domain; climate change).

Third, individuals are alienated from other human beings. This third point is tragic, mainly because we are “social beings” by default. We cannot live without each other, plain and simple! Yet, the demands of production in capitalist societies do not provide time, space, and energy for community, deep friendships, and strong familial bonds. This is because family, friendship, and community, per se, do not have capital value; in fact, they often act against capitalism and capitalists! But, in the absence of meeting these central social needs, which are denied by capitalism and capitalists, individuals become divorced from others; everyone becomes a stranger and is suspect of something evil, of plotting something against my interests! Individuals become incapable of perceiving others beyond what they can produce for me, at this moment, for this price, under my terms. They expect violence from others; they become incapable of treating others as respectful, worthy, and inherently dignified human beings; and they accept the consequences of social conflict—anxiety, fear, self-induced paranoia, hate, inequality, self-conceit, profiteering, materialism, rape, murder, war—as normal, natural, inevitable, laudable, and therefore, acceptable aspect of so-called “human” life.

Lastly, individuals become alienated from their authentic selves. Under capitalism, social ties are synonymous with monetary exchanges, and nothing else. Because most people in capitalist societies rarely have their social needs met, they have limited opportunities to experience genuine social ties bound by mutual respect for each other’s true self. As many social psychologists have written for some time, human “social thinking” is grounded in impression management; individuals are—due to capitalist hegemony—inauthentic, self-centered, and self-focused on confirming their beliefs regardless of facts. They are all-to-ready to accept their private and paranoiac little worlds regardless of any experienced cognitive dissonance; they self-persuade themselves into accepting injustice even in the absence of external evidence to justify their beliefs, and despite the adverse kinetic consequences of those beliefs and paranoia. From another, though equally correct perspective, what individuals feel is based on how they interpret their bodily experiences, as well as their personal acts. But, if a perverse social system such as capitalism routinely suppresses The People’s free expression of their authentic feelings, suppresses the ability for everyone to control their own bodies, and suppresses the knowledge required to embody the consequences of personal acts, then the actualization of the authentic self is virtually impossible. This is the repugnant power which underlies capitalism; people self-sacrifice who they truly are—who they desperately want to be—in order to preserve a so-called “precious” stake in the hierarchy. A place in the hierarchy, illusory as it is, does little for the individual. Any place in the hierarchy, however, contributes much to the sustainment of destructive social systems which benefit a few, in the short-term, yet which simultaneously push the entirety of the human species, in the long-term, toward the Sixth Extinction. An empirically verifiable “suicidal xenocide,” create by, and directed toward the human species, is currently underway! This is the real perilous circumstance we find ourselves in, right here and right now.

So, what does this all mean, and why should we care about realizing our authentic selves? More importantly, how is self-actualization connected to social justice? This brings me to my third, and final, observation regarding the impact of the Women’s Marches and the Peoples’ Saturday.

Economic Will: What Is Required to Achieve Self-Actualization and Mete Out Justice for All

It is often said that a person must be able to love oneself genuinely in order to love others and the world with as much authenticity. At the very least, this statement is true because we can see the personal and societal damage caused when the authentic self is suppressed and when human beings are reduced to mere capital value. If we, The People, never had the opportunity to connect with our authentic selves to begin with, having chosen instead to pursue an inauthentic life of quiet desperation where we live only to accumulate secondary rewards for the sake of preserving a “precious” place in the hierarchy, then it is no wonder why we (myself included) have been complicit in directing our culture toward alienation. Complicity, however, does not imply malice intent. Quite the contrary, in fact!

People act pragmatically and in the interest of themselves and those they find to hold value. This reality does not negate the concept of “love,” per se, but capitalism does add context to it and, as such, explains why we choose to love some and not others; or choose never to love at all. Noting this point is significant because it demonstrates that humanity, at this moment in our species’ existence, is very much capable of internalizing morals, embodying injustice, and behaving in ways which mete out justice for others—under the right social conditions. Thus, the question we should be asking ourselves, as a species, is this: why do we struggle to extend love to others? The answer to this question is not rote genetics; this answer cannot be reduced to basic biological factors such as genes, kinship, reproductive success, and inclusive fitness. The answer to this question is a bit more complex. The answer is personal, social, and cultural in nature. Put differently, the answer lies within each of us and our lived realities—within the biopsychosocial self.

French social philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted that people are situational beings, for it is social context (and conflict, I would add) which sets the stage for who we are and constrains who we can possibly be. The body, mind, and environment are inseparable, and it is this inextricable connection which explains the self (authentic or not), and which explains social conflict (natural or artificial). This is the biopsychosocial self, situated in a moment in time and space. The biopsychosocial self is who we are, and where and when we are at! So, if we are situational beings, and if we are capable of morality, empathy, and just acts, why is it so difficult to extend love to others? If we consider the Golden Circle framework, as well as social conflict theory, the answer to this question starts to become apparent. The latter makes it clear that humans compete for limited resources, real and imagined; that is, people live—by default—in a state of social conflict. The former offers one way to understand the current state of affairs; that is, the Golden Circle explains the unfortunate success of capitalism. Why does capitalism exist? Greed! How does it persist? Suppression of the authentic self! What are the tools of capitalist suppression? Sexism, racism, classism, nationalism, Christianism, misogyny, hyper-masculinity, historical revisionism, physical violence, collusion, murder, militarism, genocide, colonialism, banana republics, slavery, deception, obfuscation, inveiglement, fear, coercion, false hope, and much more besides! Yet, there is a certain irony, here. Just as these two perspectives explain our social problems of living, these perspectives also offer solutions for resolving conflicts which separate us from our actualized selves and each other.

In closing this liberation piece, let us focus on one final question: what is required to achieve self-actualization and mete out justice for all? I argue that to truly know what is required to achieve this outcome, we must first articulate why social justice matters in the first place. Ontologically, social justice matters because we are situational beings, first and foremost. Moreover, true peace cannot exist when justice is absent. Pragmatically, social justice matters because, without it, the human species is doomed to walk further down the path toward its own annihilation. In Western capitalist cultures, the distribution of resources, and the unjust divisions of labor which produce those resources, act against the development of the authentic biopsychosocial self. The suppression of the authentic self, in turn, perpetuates injustice in all forms. From this standpoint, what is required to achieve self-actualization and mete out justice for all emerges from why we choose to resist capitalism in the first place: to liberate ourselves from the shackles of economic dependency, and to create a just world for all. This is the essence of economic will. Make no mistakes! Economic will is not simply the act of boycotting. The act of boycotting is just that: an act. Boycotting is a form of behavioral resistance directed toward an immediate aim, or the “what” necessary to achieve an “outcome.” At best, boycotting yields short-term progressive goals; at worst, boycotting amounts to nothing but social-political theatre! In contrast, economic will is a way of living which gives purpose to the existence of the human species, and to the self. Economic will is the culmination of our neurocognitive recognition of conflict, our ability to formulate language and engage in intrapsychic conversation (what is called “conscious experience”), our capacity for morality, our potential to empathize with both oppressor and oppressed, and the resulting kinetic force (i.e., capitalist concession and the dismantling of capitalism itself).

Since the People’s Saturday, many have been “woke” to what has always existed—and oppressed—The People: social injustice, and its ties to capitalism. Following this monumental awakening, the next step is clear: exercising our economic will via coalition! This is not an impossible feat. This is our moment. The time to act, strategically and in concert, is now. ∞

#selfliberation #peoplessaturday #goldencircle #economicwill #strategicresistance