Opening to Despair
Stratification is a word used by sociologists to describe the inequality of inequality itself. There are many layers to inequity. And unfortunately, the experience of these layers are unequally distributed. Hence, we have a word for it: stratification.
Despair is one of those layers that you would just have to assume is unequally distributed. That should be intuitively obvious but nevertheless, there’s this very American impulse to pretend as though ours is a more equitable society than it really is.
To acknowledge the absurd depth of our national inequality, to peel back its layers and layers of unfreedom, would be to delegitimize the founding presupposition of our democracy. It would be admitting that not all men (ha) are seen as equal and that not everyone is so equally endowed with rights to life, liberty, and human dignity.
Acknowledging the truth of our inequity would shatter the illusion of equanimity that the Constitution represents. We’d have to start all over again.
Dang.
When you think about it, the rich love maintaining this delusion. This is why elite schools offer scholarships and financial aid in the first place. If poor but talented teenagers couldn’t attend Ivy Leagues, no one would believe that the rich kids sitting in most of the seats had any merit. So scholarships are offered to the studious poor so that everyone can go on laboring under the absurd delusion that everyone who graduates from these schools is equally meritorious.
This unconscious impulse to assume false equivalency is, in my mind, the complete opposite of solidarity. In fact, when you really think about it, it has the perversely ironic effect of erasing the class hierarchy. It trivializes adversity and diminishes the accomplishment of survival.
This is why the insistence that “we were all in this together” throughout this pandemic makes me cringe every single time I’ve heard it. No, obviously we’re not all in this together. The poor have been left to work themselves to death while the most privileged of us bunkered down to work remotely from home and bake fancy white bread.
We all saw it happen.
There’s no point in denying how unequally dystopic this entire dark episode in American history has played out. Those with the weakest grasp on the bottom-most rung of the class ladder fell off into the abyss. The rich took off for an early summer season to Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons. The President kept playing golf. Congress went on vacation.
But we’re all in this together, they posted. Hang in there.
It seems so long ago now when this all started that maybe we forget when journalists were reporting on the “pandemic caste system” created in response to the crisis.
That I expected. What I didn’t expect was the glib solidarity.
(And then weeks again, still more glibness when the George Floyd protests woke up a lot of corporations to the actuality of systemic brutality, so much that they issued what they literally called “solidarity statements.” Where are they now, you might ask?)
The glibness. I hate it.
For me, solidarity has always been a synonym for compassion. ‘Compassion’ means, literally, “suffer with.”
To suffer with someone else does not necessarily mean that you suffer exactly what they experience, but that you do make space in your heart to resonate with their struggle. It’s more like two guitars in a room: when one is played, the other will vibrate. Compassion is like that, that ability to tap into the truth of the moment and let it move you. To me, that’s what solidarity is about.
But the insistence that we are somehow all in the same thing together is the opposite of that. It’s what Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa would call “idiot compassion.” The reason that such false equivalency is not truly compassionate is that it denies the actual truth of the situation for the benefit of self. It’s not letting the real sorrow and pain of inequality vibrate at all. It’s a kind of performative erasure, alleviating the guilt of the privileged while at the same time trivializing the reality and severity of the situation for the poor and the marginalized.
It seems like compassion. It sounds like compassion. But its falseness is what vibrates the loudest, isn’t it?
In other words, it’s what I would not just call glib solidarity but idiot solidarity.
Another place where idiot solidarity happens quite a bit is in how we talk about the economy. Poverty is a crime against humanity that politicians allow to happen because they succeed in convincing so many of us that we are responsible for the economy. The GDP is treated like a national scorecard of how well we are doing as a country.
The rhetoric of politicians succeeds when it makes us feel somehow responsible for the wellbeing of the economy because only then would we accept the sacrifice of our wellbeing to it. That, to me, is idiot solidarity.
But that’s how we get morally brainless op-eds and shit tank whitepapers about how we can’t increase the minimum wage, nationalize daycare, or reintroduce domestic welfare policies because it would be immoral, unethical, and silly for us to do anything that might jeopardize the metastasizing growth trajectory of the GDP.
Politicians get away with such an enormous amount of violence by convincing us that we all somehow share responsibility for making the economy go vroom. This is why they got up and said quite literally that some of us had to die of the coronavirus--for the sake of the economy. But the truth is that our economy doesn't work for us, it works for about seven white guys.
Idiot compassion and idiot solidarity are both antithetical to liberation. Both throw up obstacles that interfere with actual compassion and real solidarity. And some of the work of undoing the horrors of history requires that we underline these subtle but pervasive hypocrisies.
This is one of the most critical reasons for developing a spiritual practice. Meditation is about cultivating peace and stillness, yes, but it’s just as much about making a disciplined space to confront and engage with genuine suffering and true horror.
Privilege does a lot. Privileged people insulate themselves from unpleasantness, almost to a pathological degree. They often give themselves anxiety trying to get away from pain. This is what the suburbs are about. That’s why Trump and his supporters talk so baldly about minorities and poor people "ruining” the suburban dream with their suffering because to them, part of the dream is to be insulated from others’ pain.
The opposite of insulated privilege is solidarity. Tonglen practice, for example, is a form of meditation wherein the practitioner visualizes themselves actually breathing in the pain and suffering of others. Obviously, it’s just a visualization exercise and can’t actually harm you but many of the people I’ve shared this practice with freeze up at the idea of even imagining the suffering of another person. When this happens, I don’t force them to practice or shame them about it but I do make clear that this is an invitation to sit with that response and think through what it signifies.
Another form of meditation like this is called Metta, or loving-kindness. Where Tonglen is about breathing in pain, Metta is about breathing out its opposite, towards yourself, towards your loved ones, and eventually towards everyone, for the benefit of all beings. You start small but practice sending healing and waves of kindness outwards until you vibrate with love for the whole planet. While few of us have hearts so pure and golden as rinpoches that we can do that, equanimity is nevertheless the goal and the practice. The heart is a muscle and that exercise is like CrossFit.
But few of us with privilege fight to make any space at all for dismal topics like inequality to be discussed. The privileged status quo in most situations is not to discuss unpleasant topics, not to bring up conflict, and never to talk about the enormous elephant ripping apart the room. Those with the power to control the situation and its framing would prefer that we stick to abstractions and generalizations, numbers and expert (read: sanitized) analysis.
Making space for the messiness of pain, sorrrow, and grief is bad for the economy.
Chin up, peasant, we’re all in this together. Stop pooping the party with your utter desperation.
So the opposite of that is making space for the darkness. This shit is not fun. It’s not something you’re going to write a lot of Facebook statuses about. It’s impossible to post on Instagram. It’s lonely, most people hate doing it, and goes against the diet of compulsive distraction that most of us have come to accept as our consolation in life.
But that’s where the work starts.
That’s how you break yourself open.