I’m sitting outside at the coffeeshop, chatting with my old friend, Jack, when an old acquaintance comes barreling up to us on her bike. She stops in front of our table, legs spread wide as a sumo wrestler. Apropos of nothing whatsoever she announces, with Spanish Inquisition zeal, that she has been “working ceaselessly to shake white people out of their complacency around race issues.” Her exact words. Naturally, she herself couldn’t possibly be any whiter, with her freckly Peppermint Patty face, not if she were listening to Lawrence Welk, the Carpenters, and Vampire Weekend all at the same time. 

My friend Jack is African American. He doesn’t say a word in response to her proclamation. Buries his nose in his book, The Lotus Sutra, a classic Mahayana Buddhist text. The poor man is exhausted by guilt-racked white liberals craving some sort of ill-defined forgiveness and absolution from him, like he’s some sort of grand representative for all African Americans. I, too, say nothing, which makes everything suddenly feel awkward. Plainly, from the point of view of this old acquaintance, poised pugilistically astride her bike, the onus is on us to respond in some very specific way, to show that we are sufficiently down with the cause, and awed by her heroic activism. 

This aggressively white woman has, since the murder of George Floyd, gone batshit crazy with wild-eyed, mouth-frothing, hyper-wokeness on steroids, and, though I myself am a Chomsky-devouring Lefty, I find it unbearable. 

The very next pronouncement out of her mouth, without so much as a sporting nod toward a segue, goes as follows: “We have to recruit men to help dismantle the patriarchy.” I shit you not. She looks at me and Jack, her eyeballs almost vibrating with expectation and, again, some mysterious but menacing demand. 

Addressing race inequalities and dismantling the many toxic elements of the patriarchy are obviously worthy and urgent causes. But there is something terrifying about this kind of certainty of rightness, no matter how good the cause for which it is ostensibly deployed. This level of self-righteousness never ends well. I have the inescapable sense that this acquaintance of mine, given the power, would round up those people she decreed to be non-woke infidels and, without batting an eye, have them (us) burned at the stake.

I also feel certain that, as she’s bombing around the city on her crusade, she is unwittingly converting scores of normal, everyday liberals into full-blown Trumpers. 

Freshman psych texts, and plain old common sense, tell us that glassy-eyed certainty of one’s own moral virtue always masks buried inner-demons. When these inner-demons are unfaced and unintegrated they must be projected “out there” onto the world, onto “bad others.” Our intolerable shame becomes a “hot potato,” that we are always compulsively trying to “throw off” onto others. Some primal part of our brain thinks that if “they” are bad enough, that’ll finally make me feel okay. 

I believe that activism only becomes right action – action that contributes to deep change, action that is enduring and resonant with people, action that changes hearts and minds, action that keeps spreading out in ripples of woo woo, hippie goodness – when it, the activism that is, comes from profound humility, from knee-wobbling knowledge of our own homely, if not to say mortifying humanity…just like those “bad others” who are “out there.” 

Here are a few passages of Adi Da Samraj I am reminded of.

“The only way to solve the current world-situation is for everyone to ‘lose face’ – instead of everyone demanding to ‘saveface’…

“…only by everyone ‘losing face’ together will the collective of human beings be able to regenerate the moral strength and authority that is necessary if human beings everywhere are to require cooperation and tolerance of each other – and only when there is first such a regeneration of universally equalized moral strength and authority will there be a universal agreement to create and maintain a truly cooperative and tolerant global human community.”

“People talk about a ‘new paradigm’ – but, all the while, they are actually being the old paradigm. In that case, any ‘new paradigm’ tends to be just some sort of ‘costume’.

As long as people persist in the old paradigm, they are persisting in ‘tribalized’ ego- culture…There is no new paradigm until the old paradigm is dead – ‘Ground Zero’…A whole and new global culture of humankind must be born from this ‘Ground Zero’. 

“Taking the frightening facts of the world into account, one must deal with them in an entirely different manner than by egoic reaction. One must undermine – rather than directly confront – negative forces. The only security is in harmlessness. Harmlessness obliges one to open one’s face – and, indeed, to lose face! …One must always thoroughly understand and transcend the egoic role of being an opponent, and (on that basis) always actively and responsively undermine the oppositional pattern-energy that is in the opponent…”

“All have suffered. All are equally full of nonsense.”

Have you always felt unassailably certain and right that you should not subscribe to a blog such as this one? What if you’re not? Think about it.