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Video Description
So often we are told that we cannot change what happens, only how we respond. This video from the Conscious Radical channel says that is only half the truth, and that the missing half is where all the lost power went.
The episode begins with a book about the soul and ends inside a statute, weaving personal reflection with a larger invitation. It is a reminder that powerlessness is often a taught feeling, and that another way opens when the feeling is questioned rather than obeyed.
Full Video Transcript
There is another way. We’re just told or conditioned to think that there isn’t and we’ve
been told that for centuries. So this piece is a bit of a journey with an unlikely start but I
wanted to share it with you. I started listening to a book called The Soul’s Code by James Hillman.
I’m not sure if any of you have read it but Hillman believed that each of us arrives with
an image of something inside us. So for example inside every tiny acorn is a giant oak.
and therefore inside each of us there is a potential for something. Now Hillman took aim
at what he called the parental fallacy, which is the idea that we’re the sum of what was done to us
plus whatever we inherited from our families, from our parents. He thought that story was bleak and
that it was wrong, because if that’s all we are, what is there left for us to actually create
ourselves. The book is about our sole purpose or calling and as I listened to it I really did feel
a sense of underlying anger from Hillman. Hillman also wrote another book with Michael Ventura called
We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse and that book in a nutshell
says that therapy has taken the rage that we feel about the world, the system and the environment
that we live in as citizens and we’ve internalised it instead of directing it outwards. Our grief at
the injustices of the world and inadequate politicians have become a private symptom,
something that we need to work on rather than holding external accountability. Instead of our
soul being a force to be reckoned with, it’s become something we need to manage. Now I recognise this
as something that has been said to me and I’ve also said to others and I wonder whether you have
too. You can’t change what happens, you can only choose how you respond to it. Yes, I can choose
how I respond to something but it still doesn’t make the thing I’m responding to right. As an
example of this, I can control how I respond to an increased water bill despite the fact that my
water bill went up because somebody or some organization decided to pay
dividends to shareholders rather than maintain the infrastructure but instead
of getting angry I need to choose how I respond but again that just doesn’t make
the injustice right so that got me thinking now I recently published a
video about the eons in Gnostic cosmology and I talked about the human
and the assembly. The concept is that they are one and the same on the spectrum. That the human
and the assembly, which is Anthropos and Ecclesia, are a syzygy. They are yoked together. So hold
that idea. Almost none of us have external power on our own. It’s in numbers that we can make a
difference. If it’s just me versus the world, I can absolutely feel powerless. Epictetus was a
stoic philosopher and he talked about what we are responsible for and what we’re not. One of his most
famous quotes is men are disturbed not by things but by the view which they take of them which is
very similar to the you can’t change the event but you can choose your response line. Now Epictetus
was born a slave in a wealthy household and his owner gave him permission to pursue liberal
studies. He gained his freedom shortly after Emperor Nero’s death and taught philosophy in
Rome for nearly 25 years. His quote from Enchiridion states, some things are up to us
and some are not up to us. That is, some things are in our control and others are not. Okay, fair.
From his perspective, what is in our control are our opinions, our values and our desires.
These are all free and they’re our responsibility. What is outside of our control is our bodies,
our health and physical traits, not sure I completely agree, external goods such as
possessions, wealth and status, other people’s opinions, reputations and actions. So he used a
working example of a prominent Roman senator, Halvidius Priscus, who was ordered by the emperor
to stay away from the senate but kept turning up, kept speaking and was finally executed. Okay so
maybe not the best ending but the principle survives. Vespasian said go in then but say
nothing. Halvidius said well don’t ask my opinion and I’ll be silent but I must ask your opinion
and I must say what I think is right but if you do I shall put you to death. When did I tell you
that I’m immortal. You will do your part and I will do mine. It is your part to kill, it is mine
to die but not in fear. This was shared to demonstrate psychological freedom and how someone
could not be bought or frightened. They did this by completely separating internal character from
external conditions. They priced in the loss of everything outside of their control. Therefore it
was your duty to have opinions and use your voice in civic duty but somewhere along the line we’ve
lost that and I wanted to understand why. While Epictetus and Helvidius believed individuals must
master their inner character regardless of external tyranny, Robert Owen argued the opposite.
He believed that human character was entirely formed by the environment and by radically
changing people’s external living and working conditions, society could eliminate crime,
poverty and misery. In 1817 Robert Owen coined the famous slogan, eight hours labour, eight hours
recreation, eight hours rest. Under Owen’s philosophy the eight hours of recreation was
explicitly designed to be citizen time. He believed that a factory worker that spent 14 to 16 hours a
day performing exhausting labour was effectively stripped of their humanity and their civic
capacity. But if you built in recreation time that could be used for education, for civic engagement
or even moral development. That block of time was fought for to make it physically possible for
people who worked to still engage in civic duty. But unfortunately those eight hours have since
been eaten up by commutes to and from work, second jobs, in caring for a child or a relative,
or dare I say extended working hours. We just don’t have the time for civic duty and then we’re
told that’s apathy. It isn’t, it’s exhaustion. I wonder if I describe this person whether you’ll
recognise them. They work full-time to cover the bills that rise faster than their wage. They come
home exhausted and now have people to care for. Understandably they would like some time for
themselves. Do you recognise them? Is it you or is it someone who’s close to you? Now expect that
person to volunteer, to do their civic duty and that person will feel a pull in their guts. They
know they should, perhaps they would love to give back or perhaps they think yes but haven’t I paid
my taxes? Haven’t I voted? Aren’t other people paid to do this? Wasn’t that the deal? The professional
politicians are paid to fulfil a role. They’re supposed to mind the system while I mind my life
and now you’re asking me to give up my very limited free time. I feel like I’m being charged
twice for the service that I’ve already paid for. Now that isn’t what many would call apathy, it’s
far from it. It’s a sense of injustice, internalised as guilt for not putting in the extra
unpaid hours. I expect most of you have heard of Andrew Carnegie, the American industrialist who
wrote the Gospel of Wealth in 1889. Now he argued that concentrating wealth in the hands of a few
self-made men was necessary for human progress, but it did come with a strict moral duty. The rich
should administer their surplus for the public good and that’s instead of paying high taxes so
for him volunteering was the counter offer to redistribution of wealth now philanthropy was
very on trend back then not only did it give back to the communities that made these men rich
but they also got to leave a legacy in the form of community buildings and structures but somehow
this philanthropy and volunteerism has lost its way and trickled down to the very ordinary citizens
of the world in 2010 the uk government launched the big society now i was working in the third
sector at the time and was part of the initiative to encourage more people to volunteer in their
communities one of the main initiatives of this program was to ask locals to run our libraries in
their spare time this was at the same time that the government was withdrawing funding of them
there was also a large oxford study of workplace well-being the study covered around 90 individual
level mental health interventions ranging from mindfulness and well-being apps to financial
well-being programs and volunteering the study identified volunteering and charity work as the
single positive intervention that provided a statistically reliable boost to employee
well-being but this measures how workers feel it doesn’t look at what made them feel that way
in the first place so who is accountable when workplace arrangements impact the workers
now of course at this point my trail led me towards the law i remember clearly the sinking
of the ferry the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987. 193 passengers and crew died as a result
of the bow doors being left open. Then there was the Clapham rail crash and the Piper Alpha oil rig
explosion in 1988, the Hillsborough disaster and the Marchinus riverboat disaster in 1989
and more rail disasters in the late 1990s. This devastating string of high-profile mass fatality
disasters exposed a critical flaw in English common law. Under the old identification principle
a large company could only be convicted of manslaughter if prosecutors proved that a single
senior individual, that is the company’s controlling mind, was personally guilty of
gross negligence. Now in complex multi-layered corporations, safety failures were usually
distributed across departments, allowing larger organisations to escape criminal accountability,
whereas smaller single director firms were easily prosecuted. There was public outrage over the
legal failures following these tragedies and it directly forced the 1996 Law Commission proposals
that eventually became the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act of 2007. It came into
force in 2008. The law was meant to end corporate impunity for death. Section 18 of the Act states
no individual liability meaning the organisation is convicted rather than the individual and that
typically means a fine. While the Act was specifically designed to stop large companies
from escaping accountability the vast majority of successful convictions continue to be
against small single director firms where the line of blame is simple. Now if you live in the UK
you will have heard about the post office scandal where more than 900 sub-postmasters were
personally prosecuted on the say-so of a computer system. It’s known as the Horizon IT scandal
in which between 1999 and 2015 the post office wrongfully prosecuted and convicted more than 900
sub-postmasters for theft, fraud and false accounting. The financial shortfalls were
actually caused by glitches and bugs in the accounting system designed by tech company
Fujitsu. For decades the post office corporate elite and Fujitsu executives actively covered up
the software’s defects and thankfully as a result of a former sub-postmaster Alan Bates
who led a high court battle between 2017 and 2019, it was definitively ruled in December 2019
that the Horizon system was riddled with bugs and that the post office knew it was unreliable.
Convictions were finally overturned and sub-postmasters were exonerated from 2021 onwards.
In December 2012, HSBC was ordered to pay a record-breaking $1.92 billion settlement
to the United States Department of Justice.
And this was after a federal investigation revealed the bank had laundered
hundreds of millions of dollars for brutal Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
yet not a single executive senior manager or employee at the HSBC was criminally charged
prosecuted or jailed for the laundering of drug cartel cash or the sanction violations
prosecutors chose to prosecute the corporate entity rather than individuals because they
feared criminally indicting high-level executives could trigger a systemic collapse of the bank
They worried this collapse could destabilise the entire global financial system.
In the UK, I’m coming back to the water companies,
they have also failed systemically to manage raw sewage.
This mirrors the corporate governance patterns seen in the post office and the HSBC scandals.
For decades, the water industry has treated financial penalties
simply as an acceptable cost of doing business,
while senior management remained entirely insulated from personal accountability.
They were issued massive corporate fines but this hasn’t stopped the systemic environmental breaches.
The fines were levied against the corporate balance sheet rather than individuals
and so the costs have been passed on to consumers through their bills. At this point I did hit a wall
and I think it’s one that we all hit at some point. It’s always been this way. I’m one person.
How can I possibly change anything? The Gnostics saw the same system and explained it through
cosmology. It’s a system that’s been running for centuries. It can’t possibly change. Now I am not
a defeatist and you may have noticed I have some rebellious undertones. I don’t like falling into
despair and I’m happy to say that my initial thought of what’s the point was wrong. Slavery
was a universal institution once. It was defended as natural and economically necessary that without
it the whole world would collapse and yet within one century it went from the norm to illegal.
In Haiti an entire population forced into total physical subjugation managed to maintain their
inner will to rise up and shatter their chains. Because death was an everyday certainty the threat
of death lost its psychological leverage. The enslaved population internalized the reality
that their physical bodies were not up to us, but their desire for freedom was entirely up to us.
In London in 1787, 12 men gathered in a printing shop to form the Society for Affecting the
Abolition of the Slave Trade. Through publications, this group reshaped the information environment
around slavery. They published posters showing the layout of the slave ships. They created a
ceramic cameo which was worn on clothing and they organised a massive consumer boycott with an
estimated 300,000 citizens refusing to buy slave-grown sugar which hit the plantation owners
where it hurt, directly in their profits. There is a sting in the tail though of this uprising.
Haiti’s freedom was fined in order to pay this massive extorted fine Haiti was forced to take
out a predatory loan from French banks locking the nation into a cycle of structural debt that took
122 years to pay off and permanently crippling the country’s economy the slave owners were
compensated £20 million. This was an unfathomable amount in 1833 and equated to around 40% of the
UK’s total annual budget. Now the British government didn’t have £20 million sitting
in the treasury so it had to take out a loan and it took out a loan through the elite international
banking firm NM Rothschilds & Sons in partnership with the prominent financier and stockbroker
Moses Montefiore. The loan was finally paid off on the 1st of February 2015. It took the British
government and generations of taxpayers 182 years to completely clear the debt that was incurred
to compensate the 46,000 slave owners. At this point I want to bring in George Fitzhugh.
He was a Virginia slaveholder who wrote Cannibals All in 1857. He argued that at least under his care
where slaves were treated as property there was an incentive to feed them, to house them and care
for them and instead it was industrial capitalism that was cruel with factory owners using workers
during their healthy years paying them starvation wages and abandoning them to freeze or starve when
they became sick or old. He believed slavery was the ideal structural environment for all working
class people regardless of race. He stated that white factory workers in New York and Great Britain
would be far happier, more secure and better governed if they were legally placed into
lifelong domestic bondage under paternalistic masters. To me this shows that the financial
architecture of the modern world values, protects and compensates property and capital
over human life while at the same time forcing the most vulnerable to pay for their own subjugation
so who is running this system this architecture I remember a comment on one of my videos saying
so you’re saying the system is alive and can make its own decisions not quite what I’m actually
saying is that it does feel designed a system in itself doesn’t need a purpose it doesn’t need a
brain a soul or a master architect to function it only needs incentives rules and a self-correcting
feedback loop once those inputs are locked into place this system will reliably reproduce the
exact same outcomes over centuries that’s entirely independent of the personal morality
the desires or good intentions of the individuals who sit inside it it was designed over years
by centuries of legal precedents, property laws and financial instruments specifically
engineered to do one job, to protect wealth from the messy, unpredictable demands of human beings.
The Gnostics also assumed that for a system to act with such cold, ruthless consistency,
there must be a literal cabal of ruling powers orchestrating it. In the Gnostic case, it was the
archons. But headless does not mean handless. The system self-organised and at some point
those that were benefiting from the structure decided to cultivate it. So let’s take a look
at the Montpelierian Society founded in 1947 with a specific aim to rescue free market capitalism
from the post-World War II rise of the welfare state of planning and collective management.
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek organized the conference and members of
the conference understood that you can’t successfully control a society by
simply capturing a government or installing a single dictator because
governments change and dictators die instead the Mont Pelerin society aimed
for structural hegemony they wanted to change the very air that academics
politicians and central bankers breathed. They spent decades funding an
international web of corporate backed think tanks. Think of the Institute of
Economic Affairs in the UK and the Heritage Foundation in the US. These
institutions drafted free market policies just waiting for a major
economic crisis to strike and it did. When the global economy entered a
massive crisis in the 1970s the MPS were on hand to advise and as a result of
which we have neoliberalism, the operating system that governs our modern
world. What about the Powell Memorandum of 1971? So if the 1947 Mont Pelerin
Society provided the macro level economic theory for neoliberalism the
The Powell Memo was the corporate battle plan designed to build the mechanical hands that would enforce it.
It’s proof that while the modern capitalist architecture is headless, its hands were meticulously crafted.
Powell believed that to protect free enterprise, business needed to create a highly organised group of corporate lawyers
whose sole job was to monitor upcoming litigation across the country and intervene to protect corporate interests.
interests. And we still see it today. Cases being lodged arguing that regulating a business or
filing a company will damage the wider economy. Does that remind you of the HSBC fine? Doubt is
our product since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of
the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. This comes from the
1969 brown and williamson tobacco memo manufacturing uncertainty to paralyze action so the system may
be headless but many hands do make light work hundreds and thousands of middle managers ensure
we are compliant even though they don’t hold any of the equity the risk assessors the compliance
officers the jobs worth do they know what they’re really protecting and for whom okay i know
I’ve shared a lot of what’s wrong and I’ve provided no joy and no solution. I have perhaps
solidified the argument that the point is, well, nothing will change. The system has definitely
learned how to protect itself and we police it ourselves by repeating the argument. This is just
the way it is. Or there would be chaos without the system, would there? How would we possibly know?
We’ve been repeating the same thing over and over again. One empire collapses and we remake it
in its image. What I did find is that every objection I raised in my mind actually became
a future direction. I found as I do quite a lot clarity through contrast. It’s easy to say what
we don’t want but we don’t often turn that on its head to tell us what we do want. The problems of
we are too tired to take action we’re afraid to take a gamble or lose our livelihood how can you
change a system that has no direct architect or author to persuade we have no leverage people are
already paid to do this job why do I have to pay again we can’t all just pack up our bags and live
off grid and we’ve tried the cooperatives and the credit unions and we’ve seen many of them
dismantled or sold off but we can move our mortgages or pensions which reroutes capital
this action is just very ordinary consumer behavior trade unions which reached their peak
in the 70s which is when they wielded immense macroeconomic leverage there’s still something
that you can consider obviously various factors have led to their decline some of which i’ve
mentioned, but also strategic litigators exist whose sole purpose is to hunt for the precise
test cases that can pierce that corporate veil and dismantle systemic corruption. So instead of
fighting isolated battles, these organisations weaponise the law to reshape the structural
environment. And now I do appreciate that paying a subscription to them isn’t necessarily the most
romantic political act that you want to make, but it is a start. Another less romantic way is
naming it. Words and vocabulary form part of the infrastructure and are incredibly powerful.
Think of the term gaslighting. Everybody seems to be using it, but are you aware of where it came
from? Well, just to give you a hint, it’s been on a bit of a journey since 1938. I’m not sure we have
a household word for liability shield or engineered exhaustion or for when consumers who were harmed
end up paying the fine but please do tell me if there are any and give me suggestions if there
aren’t and I’m suggesting this because when we have a lived in term we can acknowledge that
something exists and that it’s actually happening. Now I have been ruminating and a little bit angry
or weak. Anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does wane and fade. That’s why it needs to be
focused into something purposeful, into positive action and not internalised. Mark Fisher’s
capitalist realism confirmed that our sense of no alternative is manufactured. It’s cheaper than
repression, especially when a population is convinced that nothing can change because we
end up doing the policing ourselves to each other in comments like what’s the point that’s just the
way it is or there’d be chaos without it the root of this piece is the point and to my amazement
or slight dismay the news provided me with two illustrations as evidence both received through
my push notifications the first was how water companies that were privatized with all their
debts written off which have paid out 78 billion pounds in dividends while running up 64 billion
pounds in debt have not completed any new major reservoir since 1992 are now exploring surge
pricing for households in drought. So their failure to implement proper infrastructure
while continuing to line their pockets has now been rebranded as a demand problem aimed at us
as customers who have no freedom to switch. And the second one was how the poorest people in the
country are having their bank accounts placed under automatic surveillance to catch fraud worth
a fraction of the tax that is unpaid but there is no automatic surveillance there. Hmm interesting
but I will come back to hope and it is structural though it begins in an unlikely place, our
quiescence. Quiescence is our stillness, our quiet and the system pays to keep it. It only ever gives
ground when it fears that we would do something different. In that sense every concession they make
is a confession. When a system suddenly gives ground by making a corporate apology, by updating
a policy, by offering financial redress, it’s rarely because of genuine moral enlightenment.
Under the rules of global capitalism, a strategic concession is a mathematical admission of guilt.
It’s the system’s final defence to prevent the public from looking up and realising how the
entire architecture is wired. We are managed because we are feared and nobody wastes fear
on the powerless. So speak to a financial advisor to move your pension. Set up a direct debit to a
for profit that helps hold corporations accountable. Join a union. Find a word to describe what is
happening. Each of these seem really small but they are cumulative. Remember the 12 men in a
printing shop bringing slavery down. Something that people at the time thought was impossible.
Then think about the Gnostics who described the system in the only way they could make sense of
it. They named the archons but they also introduced the eons, the fullness that comes in pairs and
particularly Anthropos and Ecclesia, the human and the assembly, the citizens assembly deliberating
common life. The Gnostics gave us the defence against the archons as pairs. Even Sophia who
his wisdom fell into chaos was restored with the help of others. So I think Hillman was right
in that the rage we feel was rerouted inside of us and I think the cure for this is actually
directing it back out with purpose but not on our own. The system has an incentive to keep us
separate. It has already calculated the cost of what would happen if the separation ended.
Thank you.
Source: The Conscious Radical