System Change as Initiatory Opportunity

Wealth and Spirituality/Consciousness, Part One

I admit I am kind of a naive, primitive person in many ways. I never finished college. I have never owned a car. I don’t own stocks or real estate. I have a tiny family and live on the financial margins. For whatever reasons, I keep my life as simple, as unbureaucratic, as possible. I don’t share the pressures and complexities that people with a lot of wealth, investments, properties, etcetera, have to contend with all of the time. While I feel I have some sense of it, I can’t fully understand how this shapes wealthy people’s attitudes and psychology. 

My wealthy friends have good hearts, can be generous, and care deeply about their communities as well as humanity’s future. In many cases, they seek to do what they think is best for the world. I have seen quite a few of them support psychedelics, for example. Once they discovered the value of psychedelics for healing and insight in their own lives, they felt a deep desire to share these substances with the world. Wealthy philanthropists helped unleash the current wave of psychedelic research and legalization — and now therapeutic initiatives and new entrepreneurial start-ups. The psychedelic movement has tremendous momentum at this point (which creates new problems, but better ones). 

However, beyond the psychedelic movement, beyond any reforms to the current system — such as renewables, green-building, or plant-based meats — we need a much deeper level of system change. We need system change to save our human family from catastrophic failure on a species level. Some sector of society needs to fund it.

This includes research and development, building the infrastructure for it, and marketing, promoting, and “selling” it to the world. The only people who could rise to this occasion, I believe, are progressive wealth holders.

As a marginal figure — in some sense, the ideal of what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls an “idiot” — I try to look at the world like a detached consciousness visiting, passing through, from some other star system or dimension. Throughout my life, I have felt our world is horribly cruel and unjust. We have created a system that traps — crushes — most people’s souls, making it impossible for them to reach even a fraction of their potential.

At the same time, a small group of people receive vast financial rewards for doing things that should never be done, like manipulating currencies, selling subprime mortgages, building new skyscrapers, or evading environmental regulations. Some people inherit wealth, and have to do nothing for a life of liberty. Other people are financially crippled because they are drawn to helping professions as caregivers or teachers. They work long hours. They never get to go on luxury ski vacations or buy land for themselves. 

The Story of Progress

The financial winners created a bunch of myths and stories about this situation to make it seem normal and okay. One of these myths is the myth of progress. The myth of progress is a bit tattered and worn out, but it still has legs. Believers in progress note that average lifespans have increased greatly since the late 19th Century. Many more people live today at a much higher standard of living than ever before. The reasons for this, the boosters say, are science, Capitalism, industrialization, and the free market. Therefore, these are all unquestionably good; you would be stupid to question them

It takes effort to unpack this. Of course, there is some truth to it. I don’t consider myself a Luddite or an anti-Capitalist. I look at social systems, much like ecosystems, as evolutionary processes.

I think Capitalism was necessary and inevitable. In a few centuries, the power of markets, driven by human desire, meshed the world together into one giant whole. However, the dynamism of Capitalism is based on debt and instability. This has unleashed an existential crisis that the system cannot address internally. Therefore, we need to build the next system, just as Capitalism replaced feudalism, which was even more unjust. 

Let’s admit the obvious: Modern civilization created immense wealth for the elite few by institutionalizing domination and servitude/enslavement over the many. We know that human societies can be organized without such extremes of hierarchy, privilege, and inequality. There are many examples still functioning today, like Australian Aboriginals, Amazonian indigenous communities, or some Indo-Tibetan societies. I am not saying these societies are perfect or seeking to romanticize them, and I realize they are smaller in scale. 

Initiation and System Change 

Most of the wealthy people I know have turned to the pursuit of mysticism, spirituality, and “higher” consciousness. A new industry has developed around this postmodern quest, which we might call “the consciousness industry”. Many of the leading neo-spiritual gurus of the consciousness industry not only valorize personal enrichment and seek it for themselves; they have also defined a kind of entrepreneurial ideal of esoteric mysticism. This new neo-spirituality is a purely personal matter, divorced from any social or class analysis.

The consciousness industry gurus rarely explore the ecological emergency or social responsibility. They focus on the personal quest for success or “abundance.” If most people fail to succeed it is not because the system is rigged against them, but because they have bad karma or don’t master the “spiritual laws of success” or techniques of “manifestation.” Much of the consciousness industry delivers a service for the privileged. It therefore avoids speaking truth.

The rupture of the biosphere’s integrity is the essential reason we need system change in an accelerated time-frame. We need to radically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses going into the atmosphere and interrupt the Sixth Great Extinction while we transition to a lower-energy lifestyle on a global scale. I believe the only way to achieve this is through a Universal Basic Income or subsidization. This would allow people to leave “bullshit jobs” that harm the Earth to meaningful work in the ecological and social sphere. 

To confront the ecological emergency, I also think we must develop a new kind of participatory, direct democracy that scales from the local to the bioregional to the planetary level. The people must believe they have a voice, that they are responsible for their own fate. For such a direct, participatory democracy to work, we need media and social networks that are not corrupted. All of these things can be engineered – but not under this form of Capitalism. We need to build a new system. 

Those among the privileged who seek spiritual realization or gnosis have, by now, understood the value of initiation. The basic idea of initiation is that one has to go through a series of ordeals to become a spiritual adept, to gain self-knowledge. For example, you sit up all night, deal with nausea and vomiting, as part of an ayahuasca or peyote ceremony. Or you go to Burning Man, get covered in dust and suffer searing heat. Or you join a vision quest or Sun Dance. A subset of the privileged have realized the personal benefits gained from these intentionally chosen ordeals. The visionary Gurdjieff called this kind of initiation, “conscious labor” and “intentional suffering.” 

But over time, such shared, initiatory ordeals become a new, sophisticated form of entertainment. Past a certain point, they don’t produce fresh insights. For some, these rituals start to fulfill a function similar to that provided by a country club in the past. They are community bonding rituals, which is nice but insufficient.

A new culture has formed around these experiences. Culture, as Terence McKenna noted, is our enemy: Culture is the husk left over when spontaneous inspiration becomes assimilated into society’s normative practices.

Authentic initiation is not inherently safe or easy; the candidate risks everything — life and sanity — in the quest for transformative knowledge. That hard-won knowledge then changes the community in its essence.

The Unified Field

The path toward “higher” consciousness or spiritual gnosis inevitably leads to the realization that, on some level, “we are one.” The traditional Mayan greeting in lak’ech, means, “I am another yourself.”

When you are in the ecstatic throes of a LSD trip or in deep meditation, you realize there is only consciousness: We are individuated expressions of a unified field of consciousness. Ancient Indian texts say: “I am That” — and “That” is all there is. Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup provides a logical argument for “idealism,” the revelation that the universe is mental in nature, the projection of an instinctive consciousness. Idealism is far more convincing than materialism.

Doesn’t it make sense that we need to redesign our social systems, as much as possible, around this basic insight into the underlying nature of reality? Our current political and economic system is designed to maintain separation, individual self-interest, and class war, rather than strengthen community, cooperation and connection. Once again, this is a systems-level problem. 

I realize that other cultures and traditional civilizations possessed deep mystical insights yet didn’t get rid of inequalities. India maintains a rigid caste system held in place by an understanding of reincarnation and cyclical time. Indian society was oddly static and stagnant for many centuries. But as Anglo-Europeans, we don’t share that background. The practices of ancient civilizations don’t absolve us of our responsibilities to address what we know to be wrong. 

It is not only that we have — deep down, we know we have — an innate moral imperative to reduce human suffering and raise up our human family as much as possible. Another issue is that the colonialist, market-driven, industrial system that has created so much wealth for the few is directly responsible for the planetary ecocide that threatens human civilization with imminent collapse while it drives most other forms of life to extinction. Today, the wealthy 1% are responsible for something like 30% of global emissions. Bill Gates flying his private jet to Davos to warn about climate change is only one extreme example of the contradictions in our broken system. 

We all know this system is unsustainable. This means it will break down and collapse at some point. In fact, this may happen quite soon. What are we doing to prepare for this? What are we waiting for?

Unless we build a new social model for a post-Capitalist world, we will experience global chaos as the legacy systems are overwhelmed. There will be hundreds of millions of refugees, leading to resource wars that may end with nuclear weapons. More dictators will take power. The Democratic experiment, as flawed as it is, will end. I hear projections of two to three billion deaths over the next several decades as drought, heatwaves, famine, and flooding become endemic. 

My point is this: If it is initiation that we seek, then using our intellectual and financial resources to bring about system change — to prevent or at least limit civilizational collapse: This is our opportunity for genuine initiation in our time. This is the work that will transform us, in our essence. It will force us to relinquish our ego, our false comforts, our belief in our superiority over others, our sense of separation. 

As a task, the initiatory path of system change is extremely difficult and uncomfortable — this makes it a true path of initiation. To accomplish it, we have to fight against society’s tremendous inertia, mobilizing our cunning. And for wealth holders, success in instituting system change — establishing a more equitable world — will mean a significant loss of privilege and capital.

In other words, system change offers a true initiatory ordeal, a quest. Like all initiations, it has an uncertain but potentially fantastic reward at the end of it: If we succeed, we help humanity across the abyss. We might survive as a species. 

One question you may ask: Why is it up to progressive wealth-holders to support system change? 

The fact is that they are the only ones currently in the position to do so. Those with limited resources struggle to survive in a system that is organized against them. To build a mechanism for systemic change needs capital – a great deal of capital. It also needs other resources such as time, reflection, and intellect.

To understand what needs to be done, I recommend the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer, which shows how the Koch brothers orchestrated a takeover of America from the Far Right Libertarian side. This was deliberately planned and strategic, cost them billions, and took fifty years. But now they are rolling back abortion rights, removing books from schools in Florida, gerrymandering, and prepping for authoritarian rule. If the Kochs and their cronies accomplished this, then another group can manage it from the opposite direction.

These are things I think about all of the time. But I could be totally wrong. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.