Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel.
Our society isn’t what it pretends to be.
Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world.
Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet.
In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda.
We have no integrity.
To have integrity as an individual is to be the same sort of person you are at home as when you’re in public. To treat everyone with the same amount of kindness and respect regardless of whether they’re your boss, your child, your subordinate, or your friend. When all your thoughts align fully with all your words, and all your words fully align with all your actions, whether nobody’s watching or everyone’s watching. When the values you claim to hold are the same as the values people see you embodying in the life you actually live.
To cultivate integrity as an individual is to bring all of these factors into alignment, and eliminate all conflicts and contradictions between them in the way you live your life. To cultivate integrity as a society is no different.
And as denizens of the western empire we’ve got a long, hard journey ahead of us if we are to eliminate all the conflicts and contradictions between the type of society we claim to be and the type of society we actually have. In practice we’re about as incongruent with our theoretical values as any civilization could possibly be. We are an empire of frauds.
The fight for a healthy world is largely a fight to move us from fraudulence to integrity. To create a society in which our most noble aspirations and most deeply cherished values are reflected in the way our civilization is actually organized. That is the cause toward which we all strive, when all is said and done.
Gaining integrity as an individual means getting uncompromisingly real with yourself about what you’re actually like as a person. Gaining integrity as a society means opening as many western eyes as possible to the reality that everything we’ve been told about our civilization and about our world is a complete sham. Only then can we begin striking at the true roots of our problems and move into health and harmony.
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Caitlin Johnstone 