"I Still Believe Humanity Is Headed for A Mass Awakening"
by Caitlin Johnstone
"I still believe humanity is headed toward a mass awakening, as unfashionable as that is to admit here in the late 2020s. The fashionable thing to say these days is that everything’s f*cked and we are headed to our doom, and that if anything changes it will be because the insanity of our capitalist system causes our material conditions to deteriorate so drastically that we are forced into revolution to survive. That things are bad because we’re a rotten people with selfish hearts who haven’t forced the revolutionary changes the world needs because, deep down, we actually like things the way they are.
People who want to look cool and smart in revolutionary political circles tend to say that if a mass-scale transformation of human consciousness were going to happen, it would have happened by now. That everyone’s already basically aware that we live in an abusive, propaganda-saturated dystopia ruled by tyrants, therefore our continued compliance with status quo politics is a conscious and deliberate choice made by the overwhelming majority of the western world.
But here’s the thing: anyone who has taken a deep dive down the rabbit hole of human consciousness and come out the other side knows it doesn’t actually work that way. Not on a personal level, anyhow.
Anyone who has had an authentic transformational awakening after a prolonged period of spiritual seeking will have experienced a sloppy, awkward, tumble of a journey into eventual freedom from egoic delusion. It’s not pretty. It doesn’t happen the way the mind imagines it happening. It doesn’t unfold in linear fashion, and, while it might have significant climactic moments after which nothing is ever the same, it doesn’t unpack all at once. It’s a clumsy, two-steps-forward-one-step-back ordeal whose most prominent characteristic is an absence of control.
But it does eventually happen. After a chaotic, unpredictable, frequently uncomfortable internal adventure, there’s a freedom, clarity, gracefulness and joy the likes of which you never could have imagined before the avalanche began.
I see no reason to believe our collective awakening should be any different. It’s not going to be a neat and tidy affair. It’s not going to look like the hippies imagined back in the sixties, with a prevalence of psychedelic drugs leading to a swift societal movement away from egocentric psychology and dominator politics. But we’ll get there. We are in the process of getting there already.
We are already a much more conscious species than we were at the turn of this century. Our ability to network and share information has exploded in ways that have turned us into a fundamentally different sort of animal. Young people care about a genocide which poses no direct threat to them as passionately as their grandparents cared about a war in Vietnam which they were being personally drafted to fight in. Concepts like “trauma” and “inner healing” are now household terms that our parents and grandparents were only ever dimly aware of. Any skillful spiritual teacher who’s been helping people reach enlightenment for a few decades will tell you that humans are popping out of their egos far more readily and frequently than they used to be. I myself am seeing the people around me in my personal life awaken and heal in ways I’d never dared hope for a few years ago.
I’ve seen too much to believe we cannot become a conscious species. I am more convinced than ever that we are headed there already. It’s going to be a shambling, shuffling mess of a journey, but we’ll get there. The human potential for spiritual enlightenment has long been an unaddressed elephant in the room in our estimations of what we can achieve as a species, but that elephant has been loudly clearing its throat as of late. We can’t run from our true nature forever."
"I Still Believe Humanity Is Headed for A Mass Awakening"
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A Reader Comment by Jackabond: "There is no coherent argument from nature that suggests humans can transcend our natural selfishness. That is, in fact, an argument from super nature. The belief in an evolutionary, collective mass awakening that cures all that ails humanity is a comforting but childish absurdity.
Life is a complex struggle to find truth and meaning from an astonishing variety of contradictory and competing interests. Expecting billions of unique individuals to achieve collective enlightenment is pure fantasy. As Caitlin describes, progress is a slow, messy, and agonizingly incremental grind that takes us backwards as often as forwards. There’s no doubt that the world is better in many ways than ever before but can anyone truly argue that time has made the world any ‘gooder’? The penultimate ugliness of the current moment is sufficient to put that idea to rest.
Waiting for a mystical shift to make everything “all right” while remaining true to our nature is ultimately just a form of lazy optimism that keeps us from doing both the spiritual work and the hard practical work to to deal with our broken reality. That’s not being a naysayer Caitlin, it’s being realistic. Spell out your ‘naturalistic’ action plan and let’s put it to the test.
There are certainly natural processes that support a trend toward greater cooperation, but no coherent naturalistic argument reaches the strong claim of a collective awakening that eliminates our fundamental natural selfishness. That final step requires a non-natural cause."
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