My goal is not to change anyone’s mind: what you believe and how you act probably won’t vary much just by reading an article. Rather, this is an exercise of hope and trust — in two different ways, which might even be called “individual” and “systemic” (like the article talks about): In the individual realm, I am hoping that personal conversations and exchange of ideas are important and transforming. And systemically, I am looking beyond our country’s current state of cultural warfare with the trust that justice and harmony are inevitable, while doing my best to speak the truths which that future is invoking right now.
To get from here to that future, there are a myriad of roads; the pathway which personally excites me most is the path of education.
I live my life based on what I know at the moment, and that becomes my politics. I clearly see that as my thoughts change, over years and decades, my actions change accordingly. I trust this is true for others as well: all our small daily actions — what we watch and read and write, where we shop and what we buy, who we talk to and whether we agree or disagree, what we give our attention to, even how we worship, pray, donate — everything we do is political action; and how we act changes as we learn and become more aware. Each person’s life is a continuous sequence of “activist moments”, based on their current understanding. And the path to better understanding is education.
I realize many readers already know much of what is said here: please forgive the redundancy. During my 20+ years teaching and tutoring, I’ve seen that most people have odd little gaps in their knowledge or experience, even within their areas of expertise and genius — so accept this paper, if you will, as an attempt to poke around in your world view with a small flashlight, looking for dark corners…
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A Bigger Picture: Finding Systemic in Individual
“Seeking / Seeing Systemic”
© John Nelson 2021
v 0.0.7 (Preliminary Draft)
Patterns of injustice, such as racism, sexism and other “isms”, have both “individual” and “systemic” dimensions. When we think and speak about injustice we tend to focus on the individual and ignore the systemic: the result is usually increased misunderstanding and further injustice.
If we want to fight injustice by examining its systemic dimensions, here are three ideas: (1) listen for the bigger systemic patterns behind individual stories; (2) give up our ideas of being “normal”; (3) be our larger selves.
Introduction: Systemic vs Individual
Patterns of injustice are all around us. Some are very familiar, some less so. Some of the most widespread patterns of injustice have names ending in “ism”: racism, sexism, classism, provincialism, speciesism, heterosexism, binarism, ageism, ableism… (and many others, both named and unnamed).
Typically the injustice of an “ism” is begun and perpetuated — and eventually recognized, revealed, fought, and corrected — in two realms: individual and systemic.
Of the two realms, the systemic injustice is harder to see and understand; the systemic is more persistent and insidious; and fighting the systemic is more powerful.
Although the essence of an “ism” is the same in both the individual and the systemic realms, its manifestations in those two realms can be very different:
First, the behaviors can be very different. An example of individual racism might be someone making a racist joke; an act of systemic racism might be a bank methodically and persistently under-appraising houses owned by black families.
Next, the results can be very different. For instance, individual speciesism can cause the cruel death of an animal, whereas systemic speciesism causes extinction of entire species. (One hint that we’re focusing on individual results and ignoring systemic results is hearing the phrase “unintended side effects”: that’s proof of individual thinking, because in a whole system there are no “side effects”.)
Finally, the ways of recognizing and protesting an injustice can be very different. A rape can be reported in one newspaper as simply a rape (individual), and in another as an indicator of rampant sexism in an entire industry (systemic).
And even though the two realms of systemic and individual are merely two views of the same problem, and resolving injustice clearly requires hard work in both realms, still the two kinds of work are not equal: fighting systemic inequities seems to carry more weight of justice than protesting individual acts. For instance, organizing to get curb ramps installed in an entire city has more clear benefit than calling out one person for using the term “handicapped”.
In extreme cases, even the definition of the ism itself can be different in the two realms. One example is especially striking right now: if the truly systemic nature of racism is intentionally ignored or denied, then the definition of “racism” can be twisted to mean any individual action that includes race as a consideration — and by that artificial definition, even saying “Black Lives Matter” is racist (it’s anti-white). The more rational and truthful understanding of racism defines it as the entire pattern of long-term system-wide injustices, not simply any individual act. In this wholistic definition of racism, “Black Lives Matter” reminds us that within majority white-run centuries-long whole-world culture, those Black lives have indeed not mattered; and so BLM is a clear acknowledgment of this ongoing evil, as well as a statement of intent to do whatever is necessary to correct that evil. (And with this understanding that racism is systemic racism, there can be no such thing as anti-white or reverse racism: in our culture, the only all-encompassing system is the one that embodies white superiority.)
Understanding the systemic side of an ism’s injustice means realizing how that injustice is perpetuated at a structural level in our entire culture, and how it is deeply embedded in the culture’s story and enforced by its most powerful institutions. That understanding then gives credibility and influence to victims and protesters, counteracts misunderstanding and deflection in detractors, and brings depth, breadth and ferocity to the fight for justice.
How the Systemic Is Ignored
For several reasons, though, it’s the individual-realm actions that usually capture our attention; the systemic realm is often unnoticed and unproclaimed. This is true for victims hurt by an ism as well as perpetrators causing it, and for protesters of an injustice as well as those later implementing a correction.
To the target of an ism, the recurrent individual intimate personal injustices often preclude thoughtful analysis. A typical day for a woman can consist of countless sexist insults, small violences that are impossible to ignore; but the deep and intricate social, political, and religious rules at their root may be less constantly in her awareness. So when the violences become too much to bear, her screamed protest is more often about the individual acts, not about the abstract systemic causes.
To the perpetrator, small individual acts are easier to brush aside and harder to prove, so any injustice is likely to be claimed as an individual event — trivial, justified, or merely misunderstood. “It was just a joke, don’t get so worked up about it!” “The spider was hanging right above the bed, what did you expect me to do, kiss it…!?” “So ok I put my hand on your back, is there some law against that? I was just trying to be nice; and I’m not sexist, I love women!” Their acts are always one-off, coincidental, meaningless; admission (or even awareness) of participation in a bigger pattern of wrongs isn’t usually forthcoming.
To those intentionally protesting an injustice, the prime criteria for framing their protest is often spin: what makes news? And nothing makes news better than provocative personal actions. So it’s the reports of very personal individual acts that become headlines, slogans, rallying cries, flash points, demonstration chants. The deeper, longer, bigger story of the system behind the slogans just doesn’t make for good sound bites. As a harsh example: everyone heard immediately what was done to George Floyd (the individual racist act), but we heard less quickly and clearly about the causative roles of qualified immunity, police unions, private funding and foundations, internal culture, and police militarization (components of root systemic racism).
Even when legal or regulatory progress is finally made to correct an injustice, it may be hard to see the gains as anything but individual patches that can seem arbitrary, inconsequential, and even annoying. When considered individually, many small environmental regulations (as an example of anti-speciesism) are easy to dismiss as bothersome meddling: you may not put that plant in your garden; you may kill this pest but not that one; you may saw this tree limb but not the other; you may not block the light for the spawning salmon (even though we all know they have never spawned here). Regulations are often used to address individual problems, but the root evil — systemic speciesism, for example — often remains unspoken and invisible, and so its guiding principle is lost.
In all these ways, the results of concentrating on the individual components of an ism to the exclusion of the systemic are predictable. Whenever the face of an injustice is demoted from systemic to individual, those invested in the injustice win. Victims become mere whiners, perpetrators become victims, protestors are cast as either misguided or dangerous, and corrections are twisted to look like injustices themselves.
Correcting this mis-focus must involve looking, listening, and thinking differently — and even, perhaps, learning to be an entirely different person.
(1) Listen for the Systemic
Communication about any ism is typically about either the individual realm or the systemic realm. Both are necessary: personal stories of individual experiences keep the work for justice grounded and relevant; but ideally, every message about an injustice also includes information about the systemic reality of that ism. Stories about individual acts ideally show how those acts fit into the bigger picture.
That doesn’t always happen, and we can’t expect it to always happen. We can’t simply tell the people who are causing, enduring, protesting or correcting an injustice that they should always tell the whole systemic story.
Instead, it falls to us, the listeners, to interpret what we hear in a more systemic way. When we hear a story about a particular unjust act, it’s our job to find the context. When we see a protest about some specific event, we’re curious enough to discover the bigger picture. When we hear a complaint repeated again and again, our response is to look at the system behind the problem. When we hear an old grudge resurfacing, it’s a clue to pay attention to what’s behind it.
Exactly how to listen differently — listen for the bigger truth in the individual details — depends on the ism. Listening for systemic sexism is different from listening for systemic racism, is different from listening for systemic speciesism…
Let’s look at some specific examples.
Sexism
I, the author, a male, cannot feel sexism as a woman does.
Sometimes, though, I feel that sexism as it may be felt by a man, knowing in my gut that every man alike suffers the shared dehumanization of sexist violence against women. Sometimes I understand that the harm done by any man harms that man as well as his victim and, equally, all of humankind. The victim and the perpetrator share the same karmic journey in which the suffering inflicted eventually returns home. It is not good to cause pain, it is not smart to misuse privilege, and sometimes I feel that it is not lucky to be a male in a culture in which being a male is lucky. Sometimes, I acknowledge and share responsibility for the harm caused by all men. (Often, sadly, I do not.)
But this is a true and worthy systemic stance. Here, all share in the harm inflicted and endured. Here, justice is built not upon guilt or entitlement but on loving kindness. Here, healing is the quieting of a pendulum, not its wild swing from one extreme to another. Here, the cause-and-effect karma of sexism might be assuaged and resolved without further harm.
I don’t know exactly what this entails in our practical world. I don’t understand the whole of systemic sexism, and I can’t guess all that’s demanded by anti-systemic-sexism. But I do suspect that the first step is awareness by men of sexism’s systemic nature, and our acknowledgement of universal responsibility.
Responsibility is not the same as guilt: feeling guilty (for this or any other ism) is not part of justice. (At best, for some people, guilt may be a helpful temporary first step in the walk toward justice, but only a step, to be followed immediately by another different step.) Conscious responsibility — not guilt — gives the power to choose differently. Guilt is neither the desired goal (it accomplishes nothing good in itself), nor a movement toward the goal (it locks the guilt-ridden into repetition of the pattern). Guilt is a strong mechanism of karmic pendulum swings, in which victims and perpetrators eternally exchange positions, each doing to the other the evil that was done to them, and worse. Guilt is not an impetus toward justice: feeling guilty is more likely to abort the process than to encourage it. Guilt does not even accurately point the way. If justice is a walking together toward healing, then guilt points down the road in the opposite direction.
So does that mean “don’t talk to me about anything that might make me feel guilty”? No, of course not. No one can be “made” to feel guilty. Guilt isn’t a basic emotion, like sadness, fear, joy; it’s a story, an interpretation of a situation. And there are always better stories to be chosen.
For men to create a better story, based on responsible awareness of systemic sexism, we must start to listen to women differently.
Think about the constant day after day accumulation of large and small individual acts of injustice and violence that fuel #MeToo and similar protests: is it surprising then that most of the protests are of the same nature as the provocations, individual?
There is tremendous strength in the necessary telling of these personal, intimate, heartbreaking individual stories. But the stated goal of the #MeToo movement goes beyond the individual realm; the target is systemic: “disrupting all systems that allow sexual violence to flourish”. Listening only to the individual narrations of individual injustices — without understanding that the violence of these acts is actually systemic, and without hearing the individual protests as also protesting the whole system — often does nothing to reveal and then disrupt the causes of further violence. Effective understanding and fighting of sexism requires translating individual stories into the bigger story of the sexist culture itself.
Let me say that again, directly to men: if you’re really not sexist, you will hear and see systemic sexism in every woman’s every individual story, every dissatisfaction, every complaint. In response, instead of ignoring, denying, defending, deflecting, or feeling guilty, you do what men do: fix the damn problem!
And for both men and women, it’s crucial to remember that this particular damn problem is solved not at the level of the symptoms, but in a higher — more systemic — realm.
Racism
Much has been written explaining how racism IS systemic racism, and showing that effective anti-racism necessitates working to change systemic injustice. (Read those books now!)
For me personally, as a white man, systemic racism means I can’t “claim exemption” for some individual action because it’s justified by the situation. I’ll give an example: When I choose to eat at a white-owned restaurant instead of the black-owned one across the street, only because I think this one's cleaner, I can’t claim that my action is personal and factual and individual to the situation and therefore not racist. My choice is indeed individual, and my action appropriate, and my reason may be completely true — yup, the menus are cleaner, that’s all — but racism is there anyway, because the racism is systemic. I can’t claim that there’s no racism here because my decision wasn’t based on race. The entire setup of the situation hides racism, because that’s what our culture does. (For instance, the black restaurant’s menus might be more stained, because they’re replaced less often, because the owner can’t afford to spend that much, because it costs the restaurant more just to survive, because their mortgage rate is higher, because their credit score is lower, because the demographics indicate the owner is black and therefore higher risk. And on and on…)
My simple personal decision of where to eat exists within racism. The most consequential part of racism isn’t what I do, it’s what I live in. Racism is part of who I am because my culture is part of me. If I have a credit card, there’s racism in it. Where I live in a city is a determined to some extent by racism. Buried in the quality of road maintenance in my neighborhood is racism. Even the air I breathe and the water I drink isn’t exactly the same air and water available to everyone, and who gets what (and poisoned by what) is guaranteed to be in some way racist.
Let me go back to the idea of guilt for a moment. Acknowledging that systemic racism is present with me, even in the instances where my actions are very personal and completely justified, does NOT imply I’m wrong and guilty in everything I do. (Systemic racism does not say that white persons are are bad!) Rather, acknowledging my racism means to me that I have a responsibility — to my own honesty and integrity, first and foremost — to consider my individual thoughts and actions in the larger context of the culture I inhabit. In choosing honesty and integrity, I no longer have any reason to be defensive about my actions; but I have every reason to see myself as a larger and better person, and so to look for opportunities to work with others towards justice.
My willingness to begin to interpret my life as a racist life can be thought of as a kind of listening, though quite different from forms of listening required to discern and counteract systemic injustice for other isms.
Our culture is way past the stage where it’s appropriate for the sufferers of this ism to teach those who have profited from their suffering: it’s not the job of blacks to patiently teach whites about racism. They’ve done that for generations. Protests now no longer have the purpose of teaching: they are a demand. The message to listen for, when trying to understand current protests, is not about the nature and causes of racism, but about how bad things will get if justice is further denied.
So rather than listening right now to literal facts about racist acts and the protests they provoke, deeper anti-racism calls for listening to deeper voices. Denying systemic racism is refusing to listen at all; but once the systemic reality of racism is seen and acknowledged, the information we need is all around us. There’s the message of equal and just treatment for all people that’s the centerpiece of our proclaimed self-concept as a nation. There’s the message of fairness, kindness and justice in the creeds of all the religions we claim to follow. It’s the same message proclaimed by our ethics and values, exemplified in our loving relationships, taught to our children. It is the message of inner wisdom and higher self.
It is also the message of survival. Listen to that!
“Homelessness”?
When we hear the word “homelessness” we think of the problem of people having nowhere to live: homeless is what we call the people who have this problem, and getting them into houses is what we do when we try to fix the problem (when we try at all).
But that’s not exactly what I want to talk about here.
Instead, I want to talk about the unnamed “ism” of discrimination and injustice toward unhoused persons, before as well as after they become unhoused.
That’s a very different problem from “homelessness”, in a couple of important ways.
First, it makes this our problem, not theirs: we, the housed, are the ones with the discrimination problem, not them, the unhoused. (But then, our problem ends up making a big problem for them.)
More importantly, though, it completely changes the systemic side of the whole issue.
But let’s start out by discussing the individual (rather than the systemic) realm. At a personal and individual level, this ism condemns as disgusting, abhorrent, and often criminal, the manners and places in which homeless people sleep, cook and eat, wash and bathe, eliminate, commute, occupy their time, interact with others, express themselves, stay safe and protect their possessions, and obtain money for human necessities.
The real root causes of being unhoused are not seriously considered by this “ism”, only the problematic visual signs and manifestations: and its responses inevitably make those things worse. The typical response to unambiguous evidence of lack of public toilets, for example, is not to make more public toilets available, but rather to further restrict access to toilets that are already being used, such as in stores, public buildings and parks. Response to garbage-strewn campsites is rarely to bring in dumpsters; response to unwanted car residence is rarely to create a safe and secure car-camping lot; response to dirty clothes and smelly bodies is rarely to offer showers and laundry. The logical responses that would improve conditions for everyone involved, both the housed and the unhoused, are usually not implemented. Rather, the predictable reaction is to restrict resources and activities even further, which makes the whole problem worse.
These most common responses to homeless people seem to be built on some sort of myth of individuality: Unhoused people are treated as if becoming and remaining homeless were simply nothing more than an individual choice. As if a homeless person could merely change their mind and quit being homeless. As if all we need to do is to strictly discourage them from their current problem-causing behavior so they resume a normal kind of life. As if there are no actual external causes at all for living unhoused.
That’s the individual realm of this ism.
Systemically, the picture looks very different.
If this problem we’re talking about actually were simply “homelessness”, then the systemic side might grandly considering not just the individual homeless people we walk past each day, but the plight of all the homeless people in a whole city: Where do we build all their new cheap apartments? Where do we put the new shelters in the meantime? How do we get all those homeless from where they are now (places we don’t like seeing them) to where we want them to be (hidden somewhere behind walls)? What are the big picture concerns about getting so many people from tents into buildings? Whatever do we do with a city full of homeless people…!??
But this problem we’re talking about, this unnamed ism concerning unhoused people, is NOT simply “homelessness”, and it isn’t simply a problem of being unhoused. It’s a systemic problem with our culture that not only causes but requires homelessness — and viewing the problem this way questions the very legitimacy of our “economy” as opposed to our “society”.
In a truly systemic understanding of how our current culture works, we see that people must be homeless: it is a necessary — though denied — consequence of uncontrolled capitalism. We know that true uncontrolled free market capitalism maximizes profit by depending on supply and demand to set prices and wages. So prices of rent rise as high as anyone is willing to pay; and wages sink as low as any workers are willing to accept. That bottom-level wage is of course not nearly enough to ensure anything like financial security, so those workers are vulnerable to any unusual expense or income interruption — and loss of housing is one of the most predictable results.
Uncontrolled capitalism’s “free market” is actually an economic “survival of the fittest”: capitalism rewards its winners with success as surely as evolution rewards the fittest animals with survival. Likewise, our current economic system causes the most vulnerable to fail — with loss of housing being a common symptom — in the same way that evolution causes old and weak prey animals to be eliminated by predators. This economic necessity of devastating failure is an inherent component of uncontrolled capitalism. (The same mechanism makes unemployment checks and mandated livable minimum wage anathema to free-market true believers: a safety net is not allowed.)
As if to justify all this, we say that those who are unable to succeed should not succeed, which is as illuminating as saying weak animals should be eaten.
Of course they should. There’s nothing wrong with evolution’s way of weeding out weak and old animals in favor of the more capable and stronger: that’s how nature works. And there would be nothing wrong with giving our economic system free reign to weed out weaker and less capable human beings — except that’s not who we say we are, as moral people. Our ideas and claims of what constitutes common decency in a democratic society differ significantly from the evolutionary system — and the economic system — of pure survival of the fittest. Modern human culture has never been ruled merely by raw evolution. Humans are animals, but also more than animals, and our lives are not to be lived simply preying upon each other.
Let’s pause to review some significant truisms: Capitalism is an economic system, and democracy is a social system. Democracy and capitalism are not two words for the same thing. Capitalism is not democratic, and democracy is not capitalist. We live in a society, not an economy. The job of a corporation is maximizing of profit; the job of a democratic government is maximizing the common good. Uncontrolled capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system have proven to be a terrible match. Criticism of capitalism is not anti-democratic or anti-God. Criticism of capitalism is not a communist plot, socialism is not communism, and socialist economies are not satanic. Socialist countries do have flush toilets. And according to expats, healthcare in Canada is actually very good, much better than ours.
Next, let’s be very clear that capitalism and uncontrolled capitalism are very different. When a country’s capitalist economy and democratic government are both powerful, both allowed to exert pressures and balances on each other, then capitalism is serving the demands of democracy and the nation is healthy. But there are no balances inherent in capitalism alone: it depends on the external control of a democratic government to keep it from eating itself up — as it is doing to our country right now.
Right now, as uncontrolled capitalism is gaining power and democracy losing it, our moment in history is forcing the question: do we want to live in a democratic society of equal opportunity and respect, or an economy of predicator and prey?
This is the unavoidable question when “homelessness” is understood in a truly systemic way.
Very simply, if we can perceive the systemic as we walk the streets of our city: then, when we look at a tent in a park, a cardboard “anything helps” sign, a dirty drunk pissing in the alley — we see Walmart’s predatory pricing, Bayer’s lobbying, and Amazon’s union busting.
Speciesism
“Species-ism” is not a well known term or idea. As you might guess, it refers to human beings’ unjustified discrimination against other species of animals as well as other living beings, and the damage that results.
Some people might equate this with “animal cruelty”: it is not.
We are used to talking about animal cruelty, and we have the idea we should be “humane” (whatever that means) to (some) animals. But if the entirety of our relationship to animals can be thought of as an ism, which like other isms exists in both systemic and individual realms — then everything we typically say and do about animals, even about their welfare, must be understood to be completely in the realm of individual. True, we can talk about general concepts and large scale ideas about animals; but even at that, all our talk is still in the realm of individual, because it ignores the most basic reality of systemic speciesism: our human culture does not consider humans to be animals at all.
We are animals, unquestionably. We share most of our genome and even much of our brain structure with our animal relatives. And we yet consider our own species to be so completely different from all other species that we rarely even consider the ways other animals might be like us, having joys, desires, fears — and rights — similar in quality and value to our own. In fact, we freely acknowledge that we value no individual animal’s life, (even the most intelligent, lovable or useful), as highly as the life of any human being. We bring pain, suffering and death to animals for no higher reason than our own amusement. We routinely cause what can only be called torment to uncountable animals merely to maintain our own unhealthy eating habits. We ruin ancient ecosystems to build houses. We place less importance on the survival of entire species than we do on driving cars. Even the animals which we consider our allies and friends are often mistreated, neglected, badly fed, disrespected, and generally treated as … animals.
My point is not that we treat animals badly. We know we do. That’s old news, and it’s not changing soon.
Neither am I making an argument for radical “animal equality”: I don’t claim we should treat all animals exactly like we treat humans. There are good reasons for considering some animals as less important than some humans, reasons even for behaving toward some animals in ways that may seem cruel.
Rather, this is an argument for giving an honest name to what we do — speciesism — and honestly admitting its scope, its mechanism, and the harm it causes. The idea of speciesism (in its systemic sense) gives us a way of thinking and talking about our problematic relationship with other animals, as well as plants and in fact the entire natural world. Like the systemic realms of other isms, it focuses on the patterns, habits and beliefs behind individual events. Speciesism questions the deeply held assumption that humans are better and more important than other living beings, questions even the seemingly obvious ways we believe we are different from them. Starting with those basic questions, it then traces the results of our assumptions in the everyday world.
Speciesism examines the basis of our universal practice of owning and controlling other living beings, noting that when humans do that to each other, it’s called slavery and is universally condemned. Speciesism compares our eating habits with those of other omnivores, and observes that most of the food webs used by humans are failing. Speciesism observes that humans’ self-imposed isolation from the rest of the natural world causes us emotional damage. Speciesism speaks the obvious, that our abuse of our environment is killing us, along with many many others.
When we try for a simplistic individual type of animal welfare, we typically treat the animals as we think they are: not-people, with no true commonality with us, no shared part. We would have better luck if we treated them as more similar to us — that is, similar to the animal part of us. But since we don’t admit we’re animals at all, that’s the part of us we’re most likely to ignore and abuse, too. So to treat animals better, we first have to become — identify as — the animals we ourselves actually are. To address systemic speciesism, we have to listen to our animal selves.
Of course identifying as our animal selves does not mean ignoring the parts of ourselves that might be different from all other animals — our thinking selves, and also our spiritual selves. We don’t really know much about animals’ possible intellectual or spiritual lives; but we can know and trust that at least for us humans, our mental and spiritual selves can grow and blossom while still maintaining deep harmony with our physical animal body.
There’s a related “ism” we should introduce here: anthropocentrism, the unquestioned belief that humans are the most important thing in the world. Speciesism is a component of anthropocentrism, and they arise from the same way of thinking: we humans are separate, removed, different, and superior to every other being, including the whole of the natural world. So solving anthropocentrism naturally solves speciesism.
But there’s a way in which examining speciesism by itself is especially enlightening: it has an individual realm or component, as well as a systemic, and we can learn something by comparing the two. Anthropocentrism is by its nature and definition systemic, and there’s no way to talk about it that’s not systemic. Systemic thinking is exactly what we’re after, of course; but on the many-forked path to systemic, we can find value in discovering the dead-ends.
One sure sign of a dead-end is when the name of a problem automatically limits its scope, making the problem appear more individual, and the very name hides the systemic. We ran into that with the term “homelessness”, which forbids us from even noticing that the real problem (the injustice that causes the symptoms) afflicts exclusively people living in houses. We might recognize it in the tendency to reframe environmental micro-plastic poisoning as simply a “recycling” problem. Similarly, “animal cruelty” steers the mind away from realizing that the larger and more basic form of the problem is how we humans think about and treat ourselves. And so in this way, “anthropocentrism” is a better term than “speciesism”: it more firmly puts our entire human existence into a proper context.
As with other isms, we could quickly jump to the incorrect conclusion that this way of thinking deprecates “us” (humans, in this case — and it might be equally be us whites / men / securely-housed, etc.): in that fragile posture, any doubting of absolute superiority is deeply threatening because we either have to be the best, or else we have no worth at all.
But that’s falling into the trap we will examine next, comparing others to ourselves from the vantage of a favored position: in any such erroneous comparison there’s going to be a better and worse, and if we’re not better then we must be worse — and so if there’s going to be any comparison between humans and animals, then we humans are going to make sure we come out on top, and nature loses. Big time.
(2) Give Up Normal
An important mechanism of all isms is the tendency to put one’s self at the center or “normal” place on any scale of variance: then everyone else is different from me, having either more of less of some important characteristic. When I think about the whole range of people's heights, for instance, I tend to see everyone else as either taller than me or shorter than me. My height is what I compare theirs to.
This isn’t any surprise: my position is the position from which I see all others; it’s my perspective, and so it’s always the starting place for my observation and evaluation. My experience is what I know, and I compare my experience with that of others (as I imagine it). Then that comparison naturally affects my attitude and actions towards them.
That’s fine if the attribute I’m comparing is neutral to me: I probably don’t care much if someone’s ear lobes are bigger than mine, or smaller. The problem is that for some things, my comparison is not at all neutral: my “normal” position is also “normative”, the standard by which everything else is judged. Then every point on the scale different from mine also comes with a value judgement. Their “different” place is either better or worse — usually worse — than my place. So even if I start with a neutral thought like “Huh, look at that, they have a different xyz than me”, I usually add the judgement “and that’s just not quite right, is it…!?”
Then the next thought, quick after “their xyz isn’t right”, is some variation of “so naturally they should be treated differently”. And right there, that’s the ism: negative discrimination in thought or action, when I compare another person or group to myself, based on some certain attribute which in itself isn’t appropriate or relevant.
I’m amazed how strong this tendency is sometimes: when I’m driving on a highway, everyone passing me is going too fast, and the cars I pass — or wish to pass — are going too slow. It doesn’t matter how fast I’m actually going, I’m at the right speed and they’re not, and so they should get ticketed.
So when I want to fight that tendency to judge and discriminate based on an irrelevant attribute — when I want to quit doing the ism — I have a problem: I find that it’s nearly impossible for me to just quit doing the good/bad evaluation, the judgement. I evaluate what I see constantly, whether I want to or not. No; it’s easier and more powerful for me to remove my whole “normal” position. So then the scale still has its entire range, but there’s no longer any center or normal: all positions, including mine, are just places on the scale, just points on a long line, all equal. That way there’s less temptation for me to call one place (mine) better than another.
Let’s go back to that example about driving speed:
I’m driving down the highway thinking to myself that I’m going the right speed, and noticing that others are driving different speeds compared to mine, usually “too fast” or “too slow”. I look at another car and I see only my speed and their speed, and mine’s right and theirs isn’t.
But instead of that, I could just as well start thinking of all the other possible speeds people can drive — barely creeping, or rush-hour slow, or going the speed limit, or maybe the truck limit or the night limit or the faster limit 10 miles down the road, or half way in between, or fast like in Germany or Montana, or way fast like the salt flats…. And all those speeds are just places on a scale, a long line listing them all, from slow at one end to fast at the other. There’s no “right” place on that line, every speed is just a speed. My speed right now, as I’m driving down the road, is spot somewhere on that line, too, but only that, a position on a scale — not the “right” spot, not any better or worse than any other spot, just a position on a line, just a speed, like all the rest.
With this way of thinking, that fast guy is just occupying a spot on the long long line of all possible speeds, and that slow clunker in front of me, just a different spot on the line, and my speed, another spot, no different. No “normal” or “normative” position, and so no right or wrong, no better or worse. I can still keep driving, passing people and being passed, doing what’s necessary to drive the speed I want to — but there’s no negative value judgement or wish for some inappropriate discriminatory action based on an attribute that isn’t really relevant. No ism.
This technique is especially important in fighting binarism (discriminatory belief in a strictly binary nature of gender presentation as male or female with no degrees of freedom) and heterosexism (discrimination against non-hetero non-mono sexuality). The characteristics and attributes being compared against “normal” in these isms — this is sex we’re talking about, right? — are very triggering to the “I’m normal, you’re not, so you’re bad” kind of thinking, and it’s hard for people to drop their judgements as long as they’re still holding on to old ideas of themselves as normal. It becomes tremendously freeing to drop the “I’m at the normal spot”, and see all the amazing variations of sex and gender — including one’s own, at the moment — as all equally good and interesting and valid.
Now here’s the real reason “giving up my own normal” is so powerful: it’s switching from an individual to a systemic understanding. “I’m normal” is always individual; “there is no normal” is usually closer to wholistic systemic reality.
Isms can’t stand that.
(3) Be a Bigger Self
I believe the role of “higher self” is crucial to establishment of justice, and so it must be included in this discussion. First, though, it might be helpful to introduce and clarify what I understand to be higher self.
Each of us is composed of multiple selves, multiple beings. I find it useful to think of three different selves — three forms of consciousness:
Each person is a thinking self, comprising their mental and emotional personality, expressing the unique identity they have created within the bounds of culture’s shared abstract ideas, structures and norms. My thinking-self is the form of myself I am most familiar with, the part I usually identify with. It’s what I commonly call “me”. This consciousness reasons, perceives, and emotes using the “newest” part of the human brain, the frontal cortex.
Each person is also an animal body, with non-rational animal needs and desires, simple animal pleasures and joys, fear and rage, and a predictable and very individual short-time-span animal instinct for survival.
This consciousness, residing in the “old” reptilian brain lower down in the skull, “has a mind of its own” — an identity very different from how I usually see myself.
And each person is also a “higher self” or spirit, a being that transcends both their animal body self and their mental emotional personality self. The higher self is a non-material essence, commonly known by words such as intuition, inspiration, compassion, ecstasy, flow, bliss, unity, unconditional love, eternal now, heart connection — an actual being defined by its ability to sense and understand oneness with a higher and larger reality than that available to the body or personality. This third form of consciousness is not so tightly tied to a physical brain — in fact, it can sometimes be located completely outside the body, as is common during extreme medical emergencies when a person might look down on their body from the ceiling. Like my body self, my higher consciousness spirit self has an identity different from what I consider my normal day-to-day “me” self.
There are of course nearly as many concepts of higher self as there are people pondering it. But we might agree on some common elements: Higher self perceives larger truths which transcend personal day-to-day concerns. Higher self places more value on the long-term well being of others and of a whole community, and less value on ephemeral personal comfort or status. Higher self feels a deep connection and unity with other people, other beings, and often with the universe itself. And higher self receives information that isn’t available or isn’t understood by other levels of self.
This “extra information” perceived by higher self isn’t necessarily weird or unusual. Traditional religions typically have whole huge books of guidance and information directed toward a believer’s higher self, much of which doesn’t make much sense in any other context. In addition, these religions often urge believers to listen and follow their own divinely inspired “still small voice” (or sometimes “conscience”) — communication which is understood to be of a spiritual non-physical nature and source.
Compared to traditional religions, more-contemporary religions and non-religious spiritual paths place an even stronger emphasis on direct reception by the higher self of non-physical information, and often have a more fully developed idea of what a higher self might be and do. Even some non-spiritual paths of wisdom end up cultivating the very same higher self (notwithstanding its embarrassingly “spiritual” non-material, non-causal and non-local qualities).
(Of course, there are branches of any religion or path which are ignorant of the unconditional love and unity part of non-material higher reality — or ignorant of higher reality itself — and thus preach instead some less-inspired, divisive, cerebral or dogmatic set of beliefs, and so lose all meaningful connection with higher self and its gifts.)
The existence of a spiritual higher self is thus widely acknowledged by religions, with the understanding that the truths and ideals and even the desires and needs of that higher self differ from those of body or mind. But higher self is by no means the exclusive minion of religion. Rather, religion is usually a dim and distorted reflection of the world of the higher self; and it is not the only, or even the best, route to knowledge of that world. Religion is but one (more or less flawed) response to — not the source of — spiritual reality.
Spirit, mind, and body: each person is always all three of their selves, but at any moment identifies most strongly as only one of the three. In our country’s overwhelmingly cerebral Western culture, most people most of the time identify as their mental emotional self. It’s rare for someone to ever fully “be” their body, primitive and non-verbal, except fleetingly and with severe judgements. It’s also rare to fully become one’s blissful spirit self with the accompanying sense of well being and transcendent unity (the event that’s sometimes called a religious or mystical experience). In fact, it may be that most people have never directly and completely experienced their body or spirit selves, and so do not have a clear experiential knowledge of their existence. Those that do are rewarded, especially those that make all three identities part of everyday life. Achieving balanced appreciative cooperation of all three is a worthwhile goal: the three complement and inform each other, and wisdom arises with all three in harmony.
Unfortunately, the three selves are often thought of as antagonistic to each other; after all, the different selves’ abilities, needs, understandings, and urges differ greatly, and many teachings in our culture denigrate one or another. However, denial or devaluation any of the three can cause great harm. The ignorance and neglect of the body self is a probable cause of much individual personal illness. Life without the help of a spirit self, on the other hand, is likely to correlate more to systemic dis-ease.
Wholeness is the realm of spirit, and a person’s spirit self is the best equipped to understand and work for the health of a whole system. In a system that incorporates a particular pattern of injustice, an “ism”, it is the spirit self that is most suited to perceive and acknowledge that pattern’s existence, most likely to have a healing vision of justice, and most willing and able to make the needed changes. Spirit self can transcend a body’s instinct for self-preservation and a mind’s inclination for self-centered defensiveness — without making them wrong or guilty! — by using an awareness that is more wholistic and systemic, and less individual.
A person with a well functioning spirit self is more likely to recognize that their own good is inseparable from good for an entire community; is less likely to cause others’ suffering for their own short-term benefit; and is more able to feel the benefit when someone else fairly advances.
In other words: in order to effectively fight an ism at the systemic level — or even to fully grok the whole problem, how the system is causing it, and how to fix it — try being your higher self.
Addendum: Systemic vs. Individual Determinants of Personal Behavior
As I write this, the U.S. is slowly trying to “return to normal” from our deeply modified existence during the Covid pandemic. As at other stages of the pandemic, we are now making decisions about our behavior that will have a crucial impact on our future, personally and collectively. One particular personal behavior decision — whether or not to be vaccinated — seems especially to be affected by the same systemic vs individual viewpoint as we’ve been discussing. (Other pandemic related questions, such as whether to wear a mask, whether to go out in public, whether to maintain personal distance, have had a similar dimension.)
The individual perspective on the question of vaccination can for some people be described as this:
I have reason to believe that I am safe, or that I can create my own safety, without being vaccinated (I have faith in God, or I have a strong immune system, or I am young or fit and have no complicating factors, or my friends are all careful, etc.) I do not see and experience evidence of extreme danger from Covid (no one I know has died or been close to death, the people around me are acting the same as they always have, there is no drastic change in my personal day to day world, etc.) Perhaps some people I trust have told me there is no great risk to me (and if their information is perhaps not factually accurate, that’s not known to me, or I don’t consider it important).
This individual perspective on the matter of Covid vaccination naturally includes personal experience, individual stories, isolated samples, and small-scope facts (such as hospitalizations or deaths within a short distance or a small group).
A systemic perspective might be more like this: Statistically, Covid is a certain percentage more likely to cause death than other similar virus infections, and measurably more likely to be transmitted from one infected person to the next. For a given rate of infection and size of group, the number of deaths can be predicted. Other serious adverse effects of infection are similarly statistically more likely than with other similar diseases, and these effects can be quantized and predicted. Vaccination is statistically known to decrease the death rate, serious health problem rate, and transmission rate in specific predictable ways. In addition, it can be predicted approximately how likely virus mutations will occur in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. From these facts, it can be seen how a population that is mostly vaccinated is better off than a population that is not.
None of the facts in this systemic view can be perceived personally: I can’t see vaccination decreasing death rate nationally, with my own eyes. On the contrary, some of the facts I can personally see and experience — several of my friends were sick from their vaccinations, for example, and one later caught full Covid and had to be hospitalized — can feel very significant and important to me, but have no effect at all on the systemic story.
So the question becomes, do I base my behavior on personal experience and facts that are observed and known to me (“individual”), or on trust and belief in a bigger story which I cannot ever directly experience or verify (“systemic”)?
In the case of Covid vaccination, the result of each of these styles of decision making is becoming increasingly clear: currently, Covid is a “disease of the non-vaccinated”. The fact is well documented statistically — and is becoming more and more available to personal individual experience, as individual people die — that non-vaccinated areas are suffering the effects of Covid more than vaccinated areas.
We can think of numerous other situations in which our lives are impacted by the divergence between an individual perspective, based on personal direct experience, and a systemic perspective, based more on trust or belief in facts that cannot be verified by most people.
There are cases in which the systemic view has been intentionally and “systematically” discredited: the tobacco industry carefully hid for decades the fact that statistically speaking, smoking causes death. Plastic manufacturers are doing the same right now: plastic waste is a known problem, and the plastics industry spends enormous amounts of money to make that an individual personal problem (claiming that the very personal act of recycling is the answer), even though it is known and acknowledged by corporations internally that recycling is not economically viable and that very little plastic is or ever will be recycled. The world’s large oil companies have also been doing for decades what tobacco companies did, sowing doubt publicly that their products and actions are causing a catastrophe, while acknowledging it internally.
In all these cases, direct personal experience can be at odds with systemic knowledge: I might enjoy smoking, and it hasn’t caused me visible harm yet. I put my plastic into the recycling bin, and by the next week it’s gone, I assume to a good place. And until fairly recently, I might not have noticed that the climate is trying to kill us for what we’ve done to it.
In many situations related to important large-scale societal questions — vaccination, smoking, chemical risks, climate, as well as the “isms” we’ve previously discussed, and many more — people seem to act in accordance with either their individual-level or their system-level understanding of the issues. And to them, within their current understanding, those actions are completely and unquestionably correct, just as to them the actions of others, based on a different perspective and understanding, are unquestionably wrong.
Within what I know, I’m doing what I believe to be right. So is everyone else. All trying to do the right thing.
Just understanding this one fact — that everyone is doing their best — may expand our thinking.
Even this way of talking about our society’s problems — shared and common problems, after all, regardless of any one person’s or group’s temporary individual role in the karmic dance — might be thought of as systemic, and so might convey some benefits of big-picture awareness. The most important benefit may be simply the willingness to continue talking and working in spite of discouragement, expanding our awareness, extending our vision, bit by bit, toward what we know is inevitable: justice and harmony.
Seek it.
See it.
Believe it.
—now let's act that way.
