The Frustrating Passiveness of Headspace
It's all about taxes, stupid. Don't let others make you think that you're too stupid for more democracy.
I’ve been meditating using the “Headspace” app almost every morning in the past few weeks. But I’ve been noticing a pattern which really frustrates me.
For example the current episode of “Today’s Meditation” is titled “Transforming the Mind”. Its main script, before the regular meditation starts, is as follows:
Meditation does not eradicate the difficulties and challenges of human life. But it does allow us to have more clarity around these events. To feel less overwhelmed, to learn something valuable. So we may begin practicing meditation with an idea that somehow it’s just going to clear the way, that difficult things are going to stop happening in life. But very quickly we realize that those things will continue regardless. And besides, meditation is not about changing these things. It’s how we relate to them when they arise. Very often, the more away of that we become, it’s almost life starts giving us these difficult opportunities to learn from. To start to see where we could do with a little more practice. What is it that shapes our stability of awareness and compassion? So as much as possible not seeing these things as obstacles to acquire a caring mind, but actually as a way of transforming the mind. Bringing these difficult experiences onto the path as a way of learning and transforming the mind.
To me, this feels almost abusive.
Why are people taught that they must just endure the world?
That the world is a static, unchangeable beast, where I am always the problem and as long as I’m not feeling well, I constantly have to change myself? Isn’t that just supporting abusive people and abusive systems, by willfully tricking ourselves into passiveness, into lethargy?
To me, the script above is just triggering. For me, being overwhelmed is a clear sign of my mind and body that not I need to change, but that my environment needs to change (i.e. that I need to change my environment). Otherwise I will just continue to be thrown back and forth by other people who take control and who don’t care about my well-being at all.
I don’t mean mindless activism or pointless demonstrations that do nothing but to satisfy someone’s urge to scream and shout. I mean supporting each other in changing the world in ways that’s simply better for self-efficacy and expressing creativity.
Take the typical “democratic” Western political system as an example. For decades, people have been taught that they are too stupid to make political decisions, and that instead they have to vote for arrogant gurus (i.e. “political representatives”) that do nothing but fight with each other in parliaments and waste tax money. And then, on the other end, people very much feel that their work is making them depressed, they feel isolated and lonely, the climate is going to hell etc.
Is it because the people are too stupid and want climate change to happen? No! It’s just because the next step in the development of democracy is knocking on the door.
Specifically participatory budgeting: There’s a global digital portal, everyone can add projects for the common good on this portal and every project has a clear description and budget plan. Then, at least once a year, every person in a nation gets the same share of the total tax income (e.g. in 2024 for Germany, this would be €476,807,656,000 / 83,600,000 inhabitants = €5,703.44 per person) and can distribute that to these project buckets. The method is there.
But the main argument I’ve heard against this model so far is: People are too stupid to do this, and that’s why we shouldn’t do it (or only with many guardrails, effectively keeping the power for the aristocracy).
Is that really how we want to approach democracy? This would be like saying in the 19th century that women shouldn’t vote, because they are all just housewives and thus too stupid to have a proper political opinion. So then women should just be excluded from all democratic participation?! That’s ridiculous.
The intention of every person genuinely for democracy should be to continuously make the political system more democratic. Since the introduction of universal suffrage, which was definitely an important step in human history, democracies have been stagnating. But considering that politicians are obviously completely aimless in solving the challenges of the world, it just makes so much more sense to give even more power to the people. Of course politicians should absolutely make suggestions for the spending of tax money, but the people always need to have the final word.
Asking anyone to decide over how to spend millions or billions of tax money is destined to fail, not even necessarily because of bad intentions by politicians, but simply because no one can sensibly make decisions over so much money, when that money is supposed to be spent for the benefit of the people anyway. But people are currently stuck in pushing down themselves and saying “ahh no, maybe I’d be responsible enough for more democratic participation, but everyone else won’t”. Duh, then more education is necessary, until we can rely on each other in this way! Continuing to rely on politicians will give us nothing but confusion, hate and populism.
To conclude: One of the main insights I’ve had in the past few months is that the world can be shaped. We don’t have to mindlessly suffer in the existing systems until all eternity. All systems we live in have been made by people and they can be changed by people. And I will not rest until the budgetary responsibility, at least in Germany, has been fully transferred to the people.