Hold onto your hats; I am back with a vengeance.
This may get sadder and darker before we emerge into the light.
Sadness, grief, and depression are symptoms of the system. I do not believe they are inherently human conditions. They are the natural endpoints of neglecting ourselves and binding our story to a larger narrative that wants to use our toil and submission to reach higher heights of avarice.
It's easy to see we are in an era where coagulated power is once again directed towards negation. Towards the act of destruction of life and higher forms of selfless love.
The systems cannot accept a story in which you or I are free. If we take this position and exist outside predefined limits of the cookie-cutter choices we're handed, then the systems will perceive us as expendable.
What can we do? How do we confront atrocity? Do we throw our bodies into the cogs of the machine?
I don't believe that's possible; this only oils the wheels of despair. And the machine currently runs on our despair.
The dominant school of thought in psychiatry locates the origins of such ‘beliefs’ in malfunctioning brain chemistry, which are to be corrected by pharmaceuticals; psychoanalysis and forms of therapy influenced by it famously look for the roots of mental distress in family background, while Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is less interested in locating the source of negative beliefs than it is in simply replacing them with a set of positive stories. It is not that these models are entirely false, it is that they miss – and must miss – the most likely cause of such feelings of inferiority: social power. The form of social power that had most effect on me was class power, although of course gender, race and other forms of oppression work by producing the same sense of ontological inferiority, which is best expressed in exactly the thought I articulated above: that one is not the kind of person who can fulfill roles which are earmarked for the dominant group.
The pursuit of freedom in your life has to be the quintessential aim of existence. In all we do, we must be ravenous. Like an animal starved of sustenance, we must seek out the scent of freedom and follow it wherever we can. We must suck the marrow from the bones of our choices. We need to stand as guardians at the gates of self-actualization, ready to cut down anything that attempts to place our spirits in chains.