So I had this dream that I was hanging out chatting with Gordon White from Rune Soup. OK, I actually was hanging out chatting with Gordon (and a whole bunch of other amazing people too) at As Above this past weekend. But between the Premium Members Drinks and the night itself, I also had a dream that I was talking with him.
In the dream he was talking about how Austin (Coppock, the other As Above luminary) told him about two groups of warring astrologers that had differing opinions on some highly technical thing that I didn’t even understand in the dream. And I turned to him and said:
An organization that defines itself by its enemies sows the seeds of its own destruction.
So obviously, the Gordon / Austin thing is my brain processing recent and upcoming events. It’s not weird at all that I’d dream about meeting cool people after, you know, just having met said cool people.
But this particular statement struck me so forcefully that it woke me up and I found myself scribbling it down before falling back to sleep. Because I didn’t want to lose it. It’s the key to understanding what’s going on in the world as well as how to get your own household through the coming years in the best way possible. Clearly my sleeping brain (or whatever was sending me a message in my dream) knows what it’s on about.
Right now everything is aligned against. It’s all about who and how and what you don’t want. Everybody seems to be running a “the other guy sucks” playbook. Candidates, parties, movements, academics. Wherever people group up (in science, philosophy, activism — everywhere in the social sphere) we’ve drawn battle lines and are pushing against the other.
We’re staring, mesmerized, at everything we don’t want. We’re looking only where we don’t want to go. We’re defining ourselves by our enemies. And the end result can only be destruction — literal, as well as mental / emotional / spiritual / intellectual. No wonder the movie Bird Box was such a cultural thing. It spoke to something deep inside that’s warning us that we’re looking into the abyss and getting sucked right in.
Instead, we need to (everyone say it with me) look where we want to go. We have to define ourselves by what we stand for, not what we stand against. We must be part of groups that define themselves by what they want to believe, do, and achieve.
I realize that it’s kind of a linguistic trick. After all, is there really a difference between being, for example, against intolerance and for tolerance? Actually yes, there’s a huge difference, because what you focus on is what you get more of. What you look at is what you end up steering toward.
There’s this local guy who I’ve seen on YouTube. I don’t know him, but his shtick is that he’s got a dashcam and he makes compilation videos of people driving badly. And we watched some of them (because it’s amusing seeing places we know and speculating if one of the bad drivers will be us) and it suddenly occurred to us that we had never seen that many terrible drivers in a decade of living here. Sure, it’s a city, with city traffic and city drivers… and some of them are crap. But mostly we just drive and other people drive and it’s fine. Yet this guy seemingly can’t back out of his own driveway without three or four people doing something dangerously stupid in line of his camera.
Cause guess what. He’s making a point — in fact a whole side hobby — of looking at bad drivers. And therefore he gets lots and lots of them.
Now, before someone goes off thinking that I’m all Pollyanna and love and light and never think bad thoughts (does anyone actually think this about me?) that’s not what I’m saying at all. I think we can aggressively support and defend what we want. I think that being clear and brave about what we are for means understanding that we know there are all these other options and some of them are pretty horrible. We don’t ignore them. We don’t condone them. We just also don’t make everything about being against them. Because in attempting to destroy them, we destroy ourselves as well.
