How The System Keeps Us Trapped In ‘Never Enough’

Hello!

In case you missed it, please do read PART ONE of this post.

Now let’s continue to explore how our obsession with ‘self help’ actually stops us from seeing WHY we are in pain as individuals, and it stops us from being effective changemakers in our culture that very much needs to be shifted.

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We’ve all been indoctrinated on some level  into the idea that our lives are happening 100% because of our personal choices - that those who are successful are successful because they ‘did the right things’ and those who aren’t - those who don’t have enough, who aren’t ‘healthy’, those who don’t have the right jobs, those who don’t have the right consumer goods - those people are in those positions purely because they are ‘bad eggs’, are weak, aren’t trying hard enough or otherwise just aren’t acting right. That those who have all the right things and are in positions of power deserve to be there because they did all the right things and everyone else should be ‘pulling themselves up by their bootstraps’ to get to a better life experience.

We have been conditioned to see our pain as being caused by our internal, personal failings. We have been trained to feel like we are constantly being rejected, and that the solution to the fear that this generates in us is more consumption and production.

We have been trained to see the ONLY two solutions to any problem being more production or more consumption - and this again is tapping into some deep childhood psychology.

How We Get Manipulated

On the one hand, there IS very REAL insecurity that is created by the system.

In order for there to be SO much profit accumulating at the top of the pyramid - in order for those who own the means of production to be in a situation where they are purchasing their 3rd yachts and 4th multi-million dollar homes, they HAVE to be exploiting their workforce, the environment and those who consume their product.

We have to realize that the WAY the rich get and stay rich is via manipulation - they must first artificially inflate the value of their product in order that we as consumers will continue to make purchases that we don’t need to make, at a rate we don’t need to be making them. Second, they have to create a situation where it costs them LESS to create the product than they will make in exchange for the product. This is often done via sacrificing the wages and quality of life of their workforce. They must keep cost of production down, which almost always looks like not paying their workers in alignment with the actual value that their workers produce. This also means that they need to cut corners in terms of environmental impacts and consequences because it costs more money to be responsible than it does to utilize practices that harm our natural world.

All of this is done in a way that is marketed to us as being ‘normal.’ A lot of the time we don’t even SEE that these patterns are happening because the indoctrination that we need to simply put our heads down and work harder if we want any kind of ‘better life’ for ourselves that we aren’t able to take a step back and ask WHY our systems are how they are or to ask why they are how they are for others.

We’re not looking at why so many have to work so hard just to survive in a world where we have enough technology, resource and EXCESS for people to have the extreme luxury that they have. This is a big part of the problem. We are being told that WE are the issue, when in fact it’s the structure that’s the issue.

From there, there’s unequal distribution of resources, access and opportunities. In order to ‘get ahead’ in this system, you pretty much have to START halfway up the mountain. If you want to be truly successful in terms of having excess income that affords you more than your basic needs, you need to be born into a situation where this is possible. You need to be born into a situation where you have adequate safety, adequate provision, adequate access to education, where you’re not constantly worrying where your next meal is coming from or if you’re going to be placed in jail for a minor infraction. You need to have the time and space to study and learn. You need to have the time and space to master a skill that our culture deems ‘valuable’ and you have to avoid getting stuck in ‘low value jobs’ that are designed to exploit people. 

You see, we have been indoctrinated again into seeing things like factory work, customer service jobs, janitorial services and even things like teaching as ‘low skill’ labor, and we have been indoctrinated into the idea that paying those who do this work LESS than what it takes to live a comfortable life, that asking these people to work MORE than full time hours, that asking these people to go without social safety-nets like healthcare is REASONABLE - because we have been told that those who work these jobs are simply ‘not working as hard’ as ‘everyone else’. When the reality again is usually that the opportunities to make a different life for themselves simply wasn’t available or was a MUCH harder battle to fight for these people.

Again, in order to generate the wealth we do for those at the top of the system AND for those in the MIDDLE of the system, we REQUIRE these conditions to be what they are at the bottom of the system. In order that those in the middle can have their $2 coffee and $10 T-Shirts that they replace every season, in order for those in the middle to make more than the bare minimum at their ‘higher level’ jobs, in order for those at the top to be in continual profit growth - those at the bottom have to be sacrificed. 

It can be no other way.

We Don’t See It Because We’re Being Conditioned To See It As Normal

Most of us don’t even SEE that this is happening. We don’t see it because we are living in a perpetual state of stress and fear that causes us to be blind to the broader system and its effects, and because we have been lied to about what’s really happening in terms of how what we consume is produced.

We have been trained to see it as fair that people in ‘low level’ jobs don’t have a quality of life, because we have been told that they COULD have something better if they wanted it.

We have been trained to look the other way when the cost of our goods is so low that there couldn’t possibly be a fair exchange for labor happening.

We have been trained to see those with massive wealth, power and influence as heroes, good guys, virtuous and deserving - rather than seeing them as the manipulators that they are. 

We have been trained to be as hyper-individualistic as possible - to see everyone and everything as something we must be in some sort of battle with so that we can ‘get what’s ours’ no matter the cost.

Meaning those at the bottom truly ARE insecure, and they are constantly being blamed for their insecurity instead of it being recognized that they are being exploited. 

Then those in the middle, those who technically speaking DO have enough, are able to be relatively safe and secure in terms of actual reality, those who are not in a state of constantly worrying about getting their physical needs met and avoiding antagonism are caught in loops of fear that again come from a deep childhood program that again convinces us to keep participating in and perpetuating the systems we have - often without us seeing that we are doing it.

The childhood program that tells us that to fit in is to be safe, and to be rejected is to die.

You see, SO much of the way we are marketed these days has NOTHING to do with the actual quality of the product or service we’re being sold. So much of how we are convinced to trade our hard earned dollars for goods and services is based on either being told explicitly or covertly that having ‘x’ thing MEANS something about us.

We are sold on the idea that what we have, what we wear, the kinds of vacations we take, the brands of food we buy - that all of this serves to form our IDENTITY and informs others about where we sit on the ‘pecking order’ of our social hierarchy. 

We have been trained to so deeply associate wealth with value - that we have started seeing one another as worthy/not worthy of respect, kindness and safety based on how much money we can APPEAR to be making.

We are sold that we MUST keep up with trends in order to be seen as good enough. That we must be continually looking to what our neighbor is doing, what they have, what they are achieving and ‘measuring up’. 

This triggers us. Deeply. This constant feeling that we aren’t good enough (because in reality you can NEVER have enough to be ‘good enough’ in our system because the moment you do, what’s ‘good enough’ shifts) makes us feel like we are CONSTANTLY unsafe - no matter how much material safety we have. This is because in the temporary reality of our childhoods, being safe came from being accepted and approved of. When we were young, we had no way of understanding or meeting our own needs, getting rid of our own pain or creating our own pleasure. All of that was outsourced to our caregivers. The ONE thing WE had seeming ‘control’ over (which wasn’t always true but it APPEARED true to us at the time) was our ability to ‘please’ them so that they would empathize with and care for us.

We all still have this nervous system program in our bodies. 

The feeling that if we are rejected we can’t be safe, the feeling that if we don’t fit in something horrible is going to happen, and the feeling that if we aren’t loved and approved of that this means that there is something TERRIBLY wrong.

Which leads us to that toxic self-obsession rooted in trying to FIX ourselves to become culturally acceptable which drives us deeper into the system that NEEDS us to feel this way about ourselves in order to function.

This also means that when we are in pain in any way, we are prone to look to ourselves to try to find the ‘flaw’ in us. We are prone to looking to where we aren’t fitting in, where we aren’t measuring up, where we may be being rejected - rather than looking for the ACTUAL source of our pain, our actual desires, our actual fears and so on. Many of us have never slowed down enough to assess what we are actually feeling/experiencing/wanting/needing/not wanting/not needing when we feel anxious, lonely, depressed, angry, frustrated or any other kind of discomfort or pain, because the pain triggers us into that childhood coping mechanism that tells us that if we just become more pleasing, someone outside of us will understand us and then THEY will fix our problem for us.

And in our culture, we are constantly told that the thing that’s ‘wrong’ with us, is that we don’t fit in. We don’t have enough. We don’t look right.

We have been trained to see ALL problems as things that can be CONSUMED away - that any time we are hurting there ‘should’ be something we can purchase - some luxury, a self help program, a spiritual guidance session - that will ‘fix us’ and make the pain go away.

We have real pain, but that pain is usually being driven BY the system - and then we are being sold MORE of the system back as the apparent ‘solution.’

The system needs us feeling constantly insecure so that we will be good consumers and producers - self love helps us to find our ‘enough’ so that we can finally see where our true pain is coming from, and what the actual solutions to that pain are - which are never to ‘fix’ ourselves.

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Alright, let’s take another pause here, and come back next week for more!

<3

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