How to Break Free from the Magnificent Swindle

We have become increasingly aware of the interwovenness of Soul and Soil, the interwovenness of Human and Earth, the interwovenness of Psyche and Cosmos—the interwovenness of all things.?

What does that interwovenness mean when it comes to leadership, learning, and evolution? What does that interwovenness mean about how we arrive at true happiness and peace? And what does that interwovenness mean about how we arrive at insight, and how we arrive at better ways of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world we share??

If we want a better world, we must become better knowers. We must arrive at better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. That’s a profound shift, but one that comes with exciting and exceptional potentials for us all.?

And the world depends on it. We don’t see how our habitual mind, the mind we use to do everything we do, actually doesn’t function very well. Our habitual mind doesn’t think the way Nature works, and we very much need to think the way Nature works if we want to thrive, if we want to create a peaceful, joyful, and just world.?

But it’s not easy to make this switch. The change itself is joyful. It is a path of love and a path of joy. It’s a path in line with our own highest values. It’s the path the soul wants us to walk.?

But powerful forces keep us off this path of wisdom, love, and beauty, because this path presents a danger to the pattern of insanity and the structures of power and domination that keep that pattern of insanity going.?

We’re kept away from truly dangerous wisdom because it threatens the pattern of insanity. But how are we kept away from dangerous wisdom??

Force only works in a certain kind of society. And it’s not as effective as other forms of coercion.?

We should make no mistake that the dominant culture does employ force and the threat of force. But the greatest levels of force tend to occur outside the borders of nations like the United States.?

Within such nations, the best possible coercion is one that convinces people they are relatively free and happy in the midst of their own suffering. That’s what we have.?

One way we can think of it is as a kind of bribe or swindle.?

Over the past couple hundred years in particular, a kind of informal but incredibly binding material bribe has emerged: We willingly distract ourselves away from the soul, and we willingly go along with the pattern of insanity, in exchange for material consumption. This is an old issue, which the wisdom traditions have long warned us about, but it has taken on an exceptionally powerful and dangerous form with unprecedented consequences.?

This distraction includes putting up with increasing inequality and various forms of injustice and insanity, including ecological degradation that threatens the very conditions of life we depend on. We put our lives at risk for this swindle—and not just our own lives, but the whole community of life as we know it.?

The material consumption is not just offered to us in some neutral or benign fashion. Rather, by means of powerful seductions and clever manipulations, we get it ceaselessly infused into our psyche—as a substitute for what our spiritual hunger drives us to seek. And we get it infused in countless forms, empowered by our own self-deceptions as well as cultural indoctrinations we can scarcely notice at a conscious level. We treat all of this as reality, not as fabrication.?

This process gets facilitated by the kind of duality many intellectuals of the dominant culture have encouraged. Some of these folks we still refer to as philosophers, even though they count only as professors of philosophy, whether they worked in a university system or not.?

As I said, we can think of this as a material bribe. Lewis Mumford captures this bribe rather well:?

The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.?

“Magnificent bribe” is a perfect phrase, and also an imperfect phrase. It’s a magnificent swindle and a magnificent coup—and more than anything else, a magnificent domination of the soul. But the soul cannot really be dominated or controlled—its essence is wildness, wisdom, and wonder; love, beauty, great peace and joy.?

There are always consequences for going against our own soul and going against life (by which I mean spiritual and ecological realities in their nonduality). We now face some of the more severe of those consequences, and we must do all we can to minimize the appearance of further, still more intense consequences, which become inevitable if we keep going as we now do.?

We need LoveWisdom more than ever just to be able to navigate the consequences we already have coming and cannot escape. We need LoveWisdom even more than that to avoid something worse.?

Mumford says “we are being asked to ratify” this bribe because we have to constantly ratify it. And we have to constantly ratify it because only we have that power.?

The Scottish thinker David Hume famously acknowledged in his work what we all know in our soul: that the real power in a culture is on the side of the governed, not on the side of those who attempt to do the governing—in our time, manipulation and control on a vast scale, amounting to a manufacture of consent (a consent now pathetic, sickly, and increasingly unstable). We vastly outnumber those in power—those who benefit from our labor and life energy—and we must continually assent to their manipulation, control, and extraction, in a kind of “inverted totalitarianism,” to use Sheldon Wolin’s term.?

Of necessity, we ratify this swindle by forfeiting our freedom. Freedom’s a tricky term. Whatever we mean by it, it has to involve something beyond our ordinary sense of being an “autonomous individual” or a “sovereign individual”. Instead, it has to mean something along the lines of what most of the great spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions have promised us regarding our potential.?

The liberation into which these traditions invite us differs from the ideas of “liberty” and “freedom” we find most widespread in the dominant culture. That means kind of liberation the wisdom traditions intend for us stands in tension with the ideas of “liberty” and “freedom” that have infected so many of us (even unconsciously), in the sense that this spiritual liberation has no dependence on property and possession, and it comes with an abiding peace and joy.?

In our materialistic, desacralized world, we tend to chase comfort and what we refer to as “happiness” in place of peace, love, joy, and true liberation—in part because liberation in the sense intended by these traditions seems so daunting at first glance. It’s daunting to the ego, we could say, and so we get hooked by the swindle Mumford tries to get us to acknowledge and reject.?

Many thinkers have reflected on this swindle in various ways. Walter Kaufmann wrote about it in his delightful book, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy. Here’s a passage from that book:?

Cloudless contentment is not open to [human beings], and if [they trade their] freedom and integrity for it, the time will come when [they feel] cheated. This does not mean that [they] will openly regret the bargain. Most people have failed to cultivate their critical perception of their own present position and of the alternatives they might have chosen; precisely this is the trade they made; this is what they gave up for comfort and contentment. Now they feel cheated without knowing how and when and why. What they feel is a diffuse and free-floating resentment in search of an object. Having given up autonomy for happiness, they have missed out on both. (213)?

The “happiness” here differs from the genuine happiness and wellbeing promised to us by the wisdom traditions of the world. Those varied traditions share a common ground, inviting us to renounce all our subtle and overt efforts to comfort, coddle, and pleasure ourselves. Even traditions that embrace sensuality and encourage a profound appreciation and enjoyment of life nevertheless differentiate this from our habitual notions of “happiness”.?

In the ancient Greek tradition we find this discernment in the contrasting notions of hedonia and eudaimonia, with the former signifying conventional happiness and pleasure, and the latter signifying something deeper and far more meaningful, for which the ego may have to put up with a great deal of discomfort, pain, fear, uncertainty, and renunciation in order for us to bring that fuller happiness to realization.?

Sadly, many people know this sort of discomfort and renunciation only in limited contexts like starting a business or playing a sport at a very high level. We don’t see many people working with these dynamics in the ways the wisdom traditions invite. That’s part of the swindle too—a far more subtle part that goes altogether with keeping the swindle going be keeping us all away from these and other sacred teachings and invitations from the wisdom traditions.?

The very philosophical writer Kurt Vonnegut framed the swindle much more humorously than Kaufmann did, in a graduation speech that everyone in the dominant culture should read in full—with the small caveat that being a millionaire has in our time become small potatoes:

I look back on all the taboos that I was taught, that everybody was taught, and I see now that they were parts of a great swindle. Their purpose was to make Americans afraid to get close to one another—to organize.?

It was even taboo to discuss the American economic system and its bizarre methods of distributing wealth. I learned that at my mother’s knee, God rest her soul. God rest her knee. She taught me never to say anything impolite about the neighborhood millionaire. She didn’t even want me to wonder out loud how the hell he ever got to control that much wealth.?

Vonnegut, who was perhaps as affected by Nietzsche as Walter Kaufmann was, does one better than the venerable professor: He intimates that the swindle must compromise intimacy, thus pointing the same way as those beautiful traditions of liberation, which always seem to invite us to verify the interwovenness of liberation and intimacy.?

Ultimately, the assent to this swindle happens by means of a drugging or even a poisoning of the soul. Cutting ourselves off from intimacy and interwovenness is the poisoning of the soul, and since we must include Nature in this intimacy and interwovenness, we must see all philosophies as toxic which endorse a duality between human and Nature, and see the poisoning and degradation of ecologies as the poisoning and degradation of the soul.?

In one way or another the soul must be controlled by structures of power, or else it will overthrow them. We may consider in this regard a painful description of how elephants are controlled by humans who have lost touch with their own soul:?

Circus elephants—walking in single file down a street. Why don’t they run away? It’s simple. It’s because they’re dead. They are dead souls in circuses and zoos. The only way to get elephants who are so powerful to do what a human wants with just a flick of their hand, is to beat the soul out of them. I saw it in Peach, when I beat her, I saw her soul leave. And they come to zoos as just kids, less than five years old, less than chest height, then we starve or beat them or a combination of both to make them dependent on us. Not the way to treat animals—and no need to. Eles are tactile and nurturing. Sometimes, I would sleep right with the elephants. One time, I had fallen asleep and woke up with Peach standing straddled over me to make sure the younger eles wouldn’t step on me. (Bradshaw 2009: 213)?

Those are the words of Ray Ryan, a former zookeeper. The keepers of our human zoo cannot use too much force (at least not within their borders) if they want to appear “civilized”. So our souls are degraded and our assent is manufactured in other ways (and we must keep in mind that the loss of genuine intimacy means a loss of our true power). The threat of violence exists, and sometimes it gets acted out in horrific ways. But for the most part, only the threat matters, and the rest of the soul poisoning happens in other ways. Mumford’s analysis misses some key details of that.?

For instance, contrary to what Mumford suggests, we don’t have “every material advantage.” Some of us have far more material advantage than others—a fact that (according to research we can save for another time) we may not really see, or may not want to see. Even basic things like clean air and clean water are becoming luxuries—again, we may not see this, or may not want to see it.?

The wisdom traditions see us like elephants tied to the thinnest of ropes. Our culture certainly helps fashion that rope and keep us thinking we can’t break free of it. It does this best by getting us to conceive of ourselves as functionally untethered—that we live in a democracy, that we can experience the rags-to-riches miracle, that we can dare to dream. All the while, we remain tethered.?

The wisdom traditions often emphasize the self-deception that goes into this magnificent swindle. It can’t happen without our cooperation, even if that cooperation happens in nuanced and fully unconscious ways.?

These traditions of spiritual genius (our rightful inheritance) provide tools to help us break free from the bondage imposed by our self-deception altogether with our cultural indoctrinations. The way out involves education—a balance of teachings and practice. Without the teachings, the practice would remain blind; without the practice, the teachings would remain unrealized.?

The great sages gave the whole of themselves to help us reject the bad bargain we ratify every day. All we have to do is learn from them, in our own utterly unique way.