If I Can’t Dance to It, It’s Not My Revolution

It’s time I wrote more explicitly about politics

La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People) by Eugéne Delacroix, 1830

In the verdant pastures of my youth, I read the New York Times from cover to cover, with a keen predilection for the political section. I listened to the “Pod Save America” bros back when they were called “Keepin’ it 1600,” long before they devolved into the Fox News of the Left. I marched and volunteered when I could, and amidst the intoxicating fumes of my addled mind, I even toyed with the unrealistic notion of a career in political strategy. This is all to say, my mind brims with political musings, almost all of which have, so far, remained unvoiced here.

This is partly because, in my early recovery, I realized I was unequivocally addicted to news media. Meaning: 1) I compulsively binged it whenever I had downtime; and 2) I could not point to a single instance in which it materially improved my life or the lives of those around me. In fact, it just made me more of a nervous arrogant technocratic wreck. Thus, for the first two years of my spiritual awakening (lol, but really), I completely tuned out the news, signed off Twitter (a company I helped build) and Instagram.

I’ve written about how important it is to practice harm reduction in terms of the media you consume because news media and “disaster content” are their own species of drug. I still believe that. Reactive politics is especially addictive because it rides on black-and-white ways of thinking, which, like all addictions, results in a reciprocal narrowing that only makes people more extreme in their beliefs.

In recent years, I’ve never felt more distant from the progressive left, despite the work I do in the world and my consistent voting record. What’s worse is that I know I am not alone in my generation when I say that I feel politically homeless, and it doesn’t take Noam Chomsky to know that this is a bad development for a Western dude who generally cares about people. In some corners of the internet, there’s even a notion that you should stay on your beat and ignore politics because politics has deteriorated into nothing more than the culture war. 

In the New Age spiritual communities I frequent, there’s a similar rising disengagement with the political arena; instead, they misguidedly double down on the worship of Self. This produces a different type of reciprocal narrowing of focus, a self-protective approach that limits one’s ability to see the bigger picture. In its own way, it’s just as dangerous as being so outwardly focused on political alignment that personal awareness flies out the window. I only know this because I have been that guy before, taking house calls in the never-ending cul-de-sac of personal growth workshops without exploring the rest of town, secretly hoping a political revolution would arrive at my doorstep.

Yet, it’s not just the fear-based sidestepping that has me wary of reactionary thinking and progressive politics. Even more than that is the feeling that it leaves me with at the end of the day, which is a sense of depression. Of shame-based defeat. And why is that?

Perhaps because progressive politics is becoming a congenial home for people who are miserable, according to Matt Yglesias. He’s a writer I don’t often read but am glad I did, as he partially inspired today’s essay.

Yglesias argues many progressives valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment while forgetting that depression is, in fact, “bad.” (I prefer to characterize depression as an important message from the mind-body-spiritual psyche, but his point is still well-taken.) Interestingly, the data suggest young conservatives are substantially happier than their progressive counterparts. Core to a progressive rationalization of these data points is that liberal teens are only depressed because they correctly perceive all the injustice in the world—rather than imply that they are part of a negative feedback loop that uses shame to inspire actions that feel impossible to realize, which only leads to more disappointment, sadness, anger, and shame.

“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” I’ve seen this plenty of times, friends have reported seeing it on Hinge profiles—it’s a much-bandied phrase, and even more bandied sentiment, even if sadness is the predominant emotion driving the anger. There’s a reason people refer to Woke Warriors. But one often hears liberals bemoan the state of liberalism in America—I rarely hear conservatives questioning their peers or their orthodoxy. They agree.

Internecine fighting on the left is only growing more rampant. The truth is, it has always been thus: leftists have always had more trouble uniting than rightists and I have a theory as to why this is so. The fundamental distinction in vantage point between a conservative and a liberal (I’m borrowing from Frank Herbert’s Dune here) is that a conservative would wish to live in almost any past rather than the present, whereas liberals are definitionally forward-thinking. (Notably, Herbert completes his analysis by suggesting all liberals are really just “closet aristocrats,” but that’s a different essay.)  

It is far easier for a group of like-minded people to point at a concrete Past and say, Let’s get that back than it is for a group of like-minded people to point toward a nebulous future and say That’s exactly how it should be. Building a future is a categorically more ambitious project than recreating a past that once was—the hopes are higher, the disappointment of failure is therefore understandably all the more painful. Liberals suffer from broken hearts. Turns out, it’s hard to Make America What It Could Be.

I often write about how we all participate in shared realities, something Robert Anton Wilson dubbed “reality tunnels.” I also often wax about how we all must suffer the cognitive dissonance that accompanies late-stage capitalism and the failed promises of Western liberalism. For millennials and Gen Z’s especially, the American Dream is an American Farce. Living in our parents’ houses, still on the family data plan, we scroll through tweets displaying the Amazon rainforest on fire next to culture war #hottakes, while we wait for our ethically-sourced face cream + bestselling book on creativity to arrive via next-day delivery.

When you believe you inhabit an unjust, cruel, racist, dying planet—yet one where your “personal process” still reigns paramount—you’re bound to feel a tad depressed. On a personal scale, late-stage capitalism has made damned sure you know you’re not good enough (Maybe it’s Maybelline?); oh, and the world’s on fire.

But like all models of reality, this one is only partially true! Depression is a symptom, never the root cause of the problem behind it. In politics, it’s the sort of thinking that thrives on black-and-white notions of progress, recovery, or reformation. The sort of thinking that notes only negative data, ignoring any positive.  

As someone who has suffered disastrous consequences from adopting incomplete models of reality that no longer serve me, let me assure you: if your model is not materially supporting the lives of those around you (i.e. one that is only sending you down the same depressive spiral), it’s time to search for a new way of being.

According to Yglesias, part of the solution is to stop catastrophizing and begin a type of collective-level cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) where we reframe unhelpful beliefs. First and foremost, to stop leaning into the “language of harm,” because it creates and reinforces feelings of harm. And while judgment-based thinking and forms of language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces that feed off binary thinking, it’s generally quite bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, manage inevitable adversity, and navigate an increasingly complicated world. Even here in Substack-land, countless writers earn good money for their households by pimping on language tropes that center around the perpetrator/victim duality, a narrative of a society chockful of pathologized victims.

This is not to undermine or under-appreciate the fact that we are, finally, giving voice to the centuries of voiceless victims out there, on a societal scale. Yet it is equally crucial we don’t instill, on a societal scale, the notion that we are victims. Especially without questioning the source of thinking behind the language tropes that paradoxically exploit rather than elevate our cultural identity. For good reason, recovery spaces seek to move outside these toxic media binaries to use a term like Survivor over Victim. Victims are powerless and often beyond recourse. Survivors conquer. One word is based on inaction, another is rooted in active resiliency. But just as an abused partner begins to believe she’s stupid if her abusive partner tells her she is often enough—so a society will believe it is a victim if its intelligent commentators keep cramming the notion down our throats. It is true that all humans inevitably encounter sorrows and traumas—each of us is assuredly a walking testimony to survival. Not all of us are victims. What I mean is we get to choose whether to be survivors or victims in our collective story, if we can find a way of being that emboldens us to do so.

La Danse (Dance) by Henri Matisse, 1910

Which brings me to the second piece of thought-provoking content that inspired this essay: a 90-minute spoken word podcast “The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized” by The Emerald’s Joshua Michael Schrei. Overall, The Emerald is a superb and innovative podcast that challenges conventional narratives by reclaiming mythic, timeless wisdom.

This episode speaks to how the language of psychology—such as the rise of “therapy speak”—has infiltrated every aspect of modern Western living, resulting in an inability to see the world as an animate, living being that wants you to move your body, dance, connect, rejoice, and grieve. Moreover, today activist movements have abandoned the spiritual vocabulary of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama in favor of the language of “personal processing theatrics.” Suddenly, progressive politics is no longer about walking hand-in-hand to the Promised Land, and much more about outing narcissists and claiming collective trauma. Caring people used to cry for; now they only cry at.

Here we see several cultural trends converging. First, the binary thinking in progressive politics depresses young liberals into a victim identity, which is always a myopic way to make meaning of life. Without a destination for universal liberation, the spiritually curious feel pushed away or still blissfully unengaged, potentially even driven towards conservatism. Many friends who’ve been lifelong, and proud, “liberals” no longer know where to plant their feet or hang their cap. They are still as horrified by the Right as they ever were; but now a similar horror has taken grip inside them for the blind and blinding vitriol they hear spewing from the Left. Inevitably, then, when the Left moved left-er, my friends now found themselves bewilderingly right-er. It is a phenomenon so common today it has earned its descriptor: these friends have been “right-coded.”

And the endless psychology-speak leaves little room to inspire progressives, like me, who still believe in the undeniable resiliency that defines the human tradition. And, most specifically, the leftist tradition. In the history of Western liberalism, the left has the great honor of claiming to be the defenders against tyranny. Despite distinctions of fundamental worldview (rationalist versus mystic), note the similarities between Yglesias and the podcast’s Schrei.

Here’s Schrei:

“Progressive organizations can’t get anything done anymore because they are constantly engaged in an internal war of psychologically-driven discourse that centers around words like trauma and harm… we have possibly reached the natural limit to the amount of individual processing that any planet can take, in which we are losing traditional perspectives in favor of self-help modalities, a particular vernacular that is turning public discourse into a massive struggle session.”

According to Schrei, it’s time to ditch the psychology-speak and reclaim the animate, ritualistic, and poetic; thereby, rescuing the Soul of the World.

This brings me back to Yglesias’s rallying call for collective CBT therapy. While reframing our untrue beliefs is certainly valuable, even this prescription is stuck in the reductionist, psychologized thinking Schrei so aptly warns against. While “effective,” CBT is a top-down, highly rationalistic version of therapy that denies the body, the Soul, the Spiritus Mundi—the Breath of Life. It’s not an approach that inspires me to move my body and take to the streets.

Remember 1968? When hella heady hippies marched en masse to englobe and “levitate” the Pentagon in protest of President Jonson and the Vietnam War? Remember how many different-looking faces and sub-ideologies combined? Remember how Norman Mailer chronicled it in The Armies of the Night? Well, I obviously wasn’t there, but you get my point: they were as filled with rage at Johnson and Vietnam as we are with Trump and/or Biden today. But they were also filled with love. That’s the difference.

Is it crazy for me to wish to be part of a progressive social movement that makes people feel inspired, and not depressed? As Emma Goldman, the Russian-born political activist, once declared:

If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.