Stifling Your Individual Self/Soul

(Check out Joshua Stylman’s Substack — Great information and background on a lot of current concerns)

The Coward’s Bargain

How We Taught a Generation to Live in Fear

Everyone’s Afraid to Speak

Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.

My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason and facts though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not.

This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.

But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “that can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.

But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes.

I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.

After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.

Another person told me they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during COVID sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.

But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity.

This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established.

And this is the world we’re handing to our children.

We Built the Surveillance State for Them

I remember twenty years ago, my best friend’s wife (who’s also a dear friend) was about to hire someone when she decided to check the candidate’s Facebook first. The woman had posted: “Meeting the whores at [company name]”—referring to my friend and her coworkers. My friend immediately withdrew the offer. I remember thinking this was absolutely terrible judgment on the candidate’s part, however it was dangerous territory we were entering: the notion of living completely in public, where every casual comment becomes permanent evidence.

Now that danger has metastasized into something unrecognizable. We’ve created a world where every stupid thing a fifteen-year-old says gets archived forever. Not just on their own phones, but screenshot and saved by peers who don’t understand they’re building permanent files on each other—even on platforms like Snapchat that promise everything disappears. We’ve eliminated the possibility of a private adolescence—and adolescence is supposed to be private, messy, experimental. It’s the laboratory where you figure out who you are by trying on terrible ideas and throwing them away.

But laboratories require the freedom to fail safely. What we’ve built instead is a system where every failed experiment becomes evidence in some future trial.

Think about the dumbest thing you believed at sixteen. The most embarrassing thing you said at thirteen. Now imagine that moment preserved in high definition, timestamped, and searchable. Imagine it surfacing when you’re thirty-five and running for school board, or just trying to move past who you used to be.

If there was a record of everything I did when I was sixteen, I would have been unemployable. Come to think of it, I’m way older than that now and I’m unemployable anyway—but the truth still stands. My generation might have been the last to fully enjoy an analog existence as children. We got to be stupid privately, to experiment with ideas without permanent consequences, to grow up without every mistake being archived for future use against us.

I remember teachers threatening us with our “permanent record.” We laughed—some mysterious file that would follow us forever? Turns out they were just early. Now we’ve built those records and handed the recording devices to children. Companies like Palantir have turned this surveillance into a sophisticated business model.

We’re asking children to have adult judgment about consequences they can’t possibly understand. A thirteen-year-old posting something stupid isn’t thinking about college applications or future careers. They’re thinking about right now, today, this moment—which is exactly how thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think. But we’ve built systems that treat childhood immaturity as a prosecutable offense.

The psychological toll is staggering. Imagine being fourteen and knowing that anything you say might be used against you by people you haven’t met yet, for reasons you can’t anticipate, at some unknown point in the future. That’s not adolescence—that’s a police state built out of smartphones and social media.

The result is a generation that’s either paralyzed by self-consciousness or completely reckless because they figure they’re already screwed. Some retreat into careful blandness, crafting personas so sanitized they might as well be corporate spokespeople for their own lives. Others go scorched earth—if everything’s recorded anyway, why hold back? As my friend Mark likes to say, there’s Andrew Tate and then there’s a bunch of incels—meaning the young men either become performatively brash and ridiculous, or they retreat entirely. The young women seem to either drift toward fearful conformity or embrace monetized exposure on platforms like OnlyFans. We’ve managed to channel an entire generation’s rebellion into the very systems designed to exploit them.

The COVID Conformity Test

This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. ……

TO read the rest go to:  https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-cowards-bargain?publication_id=24667&post_id=166277693&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Stand Up For Your Truth

HOW TO LEVERAGE YOUR OWN CONSCIENCE AS PURE LAW

Gary Z McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

If we heed these wise words by Lao Tzu, then it stands to reason that we focus more on developing highly evolved people capable of honoring universal laws, rather than waste our energy bludgeoning people with invalid laws that violate the golden rule, the nonaggression principle, and the universal laws that dictate health.

But what constitutes a highly evolved person? What might a highly evolved person’s character look like? How do we define such a broad concept? In Five Counterintuitive Traits of Highly Evolved Humans, I broke down the emotional disposition of highly evolved people. In this article we’ll break down the political disposition of highly evolved people.

Choose a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle:

Does your government have a taste for blood and a thirst for power? A highly evolved person, with their own conscience as pure law, would choose smart rebuking over fearful obsequiousness.

Don’t allow such a government to have its way. Question its authority. Practice strategic civil disobedience. Count coup on overreaching power constructs. Challenge outdated, immoral, and unjust laws. Be the personification of checks and balances. Dare to be a courageous David facing down the Goliath of the state.

We don’t need more people who blindly obey in deadly fear. That’s already the vast majority of people. We need more people who are highly evolved enough to smartly rebuke any and all governments that use violence to “solve” problems.

Choosing a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle is choosing to no longer be a victim. It’s choosing, instead, to become a hero. It’s choosing courage over fear, self-sacrifice over comfort and security, adventure over banality, fierceness over obsequiousness, and ruthless skepticism over blind faith.

Understand that the vast majority of people are still willing to live fear-based lifestyles. Sympathize with them for having not woken up yet, but do not pity them. It’s not their fault they were brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated into living fear-based lifestyles, but it is their responsibility to educate themselves and to break themselves of their conditioning.

You can lead people to knowledge, but you can’t make them think. You can, however, remain ruthless with your courage-based lifestyle. Become a beacon of courageous hope. Especially for those who are still living fear-based lifestyles. Call it tough love. As Derrick Jensen said, “Love does not imply pacifism.”

Choose heart-centeredness over political divisiveness:

Bipartisan politics is old hat. It’s high time you toss that hat in the fire. Highly evolved people have already done so. They have gone Meta with politics. They’ve gone beyond the outdated, codependent divisiveness of bipartisanism and graduated into an updated, interdependent metamorality.

Metamorality, coined by Joshua Greene, is based on a common ground that all humans can agree upon while proposing a utilitarian deep pragmatism that empathically broadens the mind and compassionately opens the heart to the plight of us all as interdependent beings on an interconnected planet. Highly evolved humans use this strategy, along with the Astronaut Overview Effect, to go big-pictur

Going big-picture helps us change our minds. Or, at least be more flexible and open in our thinking. It puts things into proper perspective. It helps us feel more empathic and less psychopathic toward each other. We’re better able to see the world as one, without borders.

We’re better able to narrow our highfalutin politics down to a single concept we can all agree on: freedom. We’re better able to see through all the red herring cognitive biases of the climate debate and realize that our problem is a single problem we can all agree on: pollution. We’re better able to cut straight through the divisiveness of religion and narrow it down to a single concept that we can all agree on: love. Especially love for our children, and creating a healthy environment for them to grow up in. And suddenly there are not so many differences between us.

Choosing heart-centeredness over political divisiveness puts a compassionate spin on our conscience. Indeed, it puts the “conscience” in having our own conscience as pure law. For pure law is universal law, based upon the healthy interconnectedness of all things.

Choose self-improvement over self-preservation and create a better world:

When it comes down to it, becoming a highly evolved human is about spitting out the unhealthy blue pill of comfort, safety, and security based on outdated laws, and having the courage to swallow the healthy red pill of curiosity, questioning, and skepticism that questions bad laws in order to create healthy laws that align with universal laws.

It’s about becoming the personification of checks and balances. It’s about putting in the hard and difficult work of becoming a highly evolved person who has the wherewithal to “use their own conscience as pure law.” And to teach others how to do the same.

The answer is not creating more bad laws to shove down people’s throats. The answer is creating people smart enough to question the authority that seeks to shove bad laws down people’s throats. Indeed. The answer is teaching people how to become bigger than the law, how to gain the capacity to have their own conscience as pure law, and how to become a more valuable human. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

If, as Plato famously said, “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws,” then it stands to reason that we should focus more on teaching people how to act responsibly and less on creating laws. Especially since humans are so terrible at making good laws. And especially-especially since humans are even more terrible about abusing their power regarding those ill-conceived laws.

As Edward Abbey wisely suggested, “Since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” The few seeking to rule others do so through the enforcement of bad laws.

So, it is incumbent upon anyone with their own conscience as pure law to ruthlessly interrogate such bad laws and then mercilessly check and balance any authority seeking to enforce such bad laws. We do ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren a disservice when we decide not to.

There is no greater cause than becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in. Will you defend outdated unethical laws and merely turn a blind eye to those who unjustly enforce them? Or will you defend the people’s right to ruthlessly challenge unethical laws and those who unjustly enforce them? The choice is yours. As William James said, “We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

from:   https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/01/21/how-to-leverage-your-own-conscience-as-pure-law/

20 Seconds to Change Your Life

20 Seconds of Insane Courage – Sometimes That’s What it Takes

26th September 2012

By Chris Bourne

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

When you look back on your life, the trials the tribulations, the challenges and opportunities, you’ll probably notice the really big occasions hung finely balanced on the feather edge of uncertainty. On one side is the abyss of some indescribable failure, and the other, some seemingly monumental achievement. These moments invite something deeper of ourselves, something more complete, something more authentic. If we can face them with total acceptance and commitment, then we’ll connect with the full flow of the soul and it will carry us through like an unstoppable wave. When I look back at these times in my life, I see that this level of surrender, this level of commitment, required something special: “20 seconds of insane courage”

Facing the darkness

I saw this moment of uncertainty we all face from time to time so eloquently encapsulated in a recent Matt Damon film “We bought a Zoo”:

“You know, sometimes all you need is 20 seconds of insane courage, just literally 20 seconds of embarrassing bravery, and I promise you, something great will come of it.”
~ Benjamin Mee

I can recall facing the darkness many times in my life, long before I realised I was simply creating it myself. Only later, I understood it was exactly these moments where I needed depth of soul more than anything. Yet an inner tightness and struggle – the need for an outcome – contracted my inner space so much, it strangled the very soul out of me. Although I worked hard to control myself, I was a quivering wreck!

If only

How many times have you said to yourself “If only”? “If only I’d done it this way, then that would have happened. If only I’d done that, then it would all have turned out alright.”

If I’d learned long ago to relax my grip on life and simply let the sweet spot of the soul sing through me, then all would have been different. But then of course, you have to know what you are not, to truly feel the sweetness of what you are.

So a point arrived in my life where I simply decided to let go. The struggle was not worth it any more. Even if it meant jumping off that cliff edge, not knowing if I could fly, I’d simply rather jump. Have you faced times in your life like that yet? A relationship that really needs to end, a crucial change of location or leaving a job that doesn’t serve? Such occasions eventually come knocking on our door.

Following the soul is just like this. It can begin softly yes. But certainly in my experience, true realignment is going to require us staring into the abyss of such uncertainty. Why? Because no matter how society conditions us to control life, nothing is ever certain to the soul.

It is uncertainty that makes the soul what it is. 

The Sweet Spot

In these moments, that’s when we need to look for the courage. But courage to do what? To effort and struggle for some kind of talent, some kind of gift, some kind or reward, target or outcome? Not at all. These are exactly the things we need to let go of.

We need to soften into these and just let go. You’ll know when those 20 seconds are inviting you. You’ll feel it. You’ll feel the tightening in your throat which makes your voice squeaky or hoarse, the stiffness in your muscles that makes your body awkward and ungainly or the tightness of your chest that makes your breathing shallow and rapid. These are the tell tale signs that you’ve stepped into the 20 seconds.

And in these moments, that’s when we have to soften, to soften into these symptoms. When the outer world is screaming for some kind of external reaction from you, what we really need to find is an authentic internal response:

  • to let go of the need for an outcome
  • to soften into the body, move and let it relax
  • to expand the chest and deepen the breathing with calmness
  • to open into the void of presence
  • to let the sweet shot of authentic beingness simply swing through us

The return to light

When all the pressure is on, soften, simply open and then the 20 seconds expands into an eternity. Look for the authentic feeling that wants to bubble up, the authentic expression of beingness. Let it wash through and over you. Let the swing carry you so that you may hit the sweet spot of who you are…

In this moment, anything can happen.
In this moment, you can truly change reality
to something more aligned,
in harmony with the universe
and the essence of who you are

To me, it is the return to light…

Chris

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2012/09/26/20-seconds-of-insane-courage-sometimes-thats-what-it-takes/

10 Year Old Takes on Pipe Line with A Song

What a 10-Year-Old Did for the Tar Sands

Why a First Nations student from British Columbia is taking on a controversial trans-Canadian pipeline project—through song.

posted Aug 15, 2011

 

Ta'Kaiya photo by Carol Carson

Photo by Carol Carson.

Ta’Kaiya Blaney’s song, “Shallow Waters,” co-written with her music teacher, was among B.C.’s top five finalists for the David Suzuki 2010 Songwriting Contest.

Ten-year-old Ta’Kaiya Blaney stood outside Enbridge Northern Gateway’s office on July 6, waiting for officials to grant her access to the building. She thought she could hand deliver an envelope containing an important message about the company’s pipeline construction. But the doors remained locked.

“I don’t know what they find so scary about me,” she said, as she was ushered off the property by security guards. “I just want them to hear what I have to say.”

The Sliammon First Nation youth put in a great effort learning about environmental issues and the pipeline in particular, and hoped to share her knowledge and carefully crafted words. Enbridge officials said they were unable to provide Ta’Kaiya space or time and failed to comment because the Vancouver office is staffed by a limited number of technical personnel. Their headquarters are located in Calgary.

So Ta’Kaiya stood outside, accompanied by three members of Greenpeace, her mother, and a number of reporters and sang her song “Shallow Waters.” The song’s video has hit YouTube and been viewed more than 53,000 times

to read more and see Ta’Kaiya Blaney sing her song, go to:   http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/what-a-10-year-old-did-for-the-tar-sands