I do not know how or why it arrived. Obviously everything is terrible. But I have a hypotheses about what happened.
What it was like
Faced with what is plainly–and I will not soften my words–a destruction of our foundational democratic institutions and mores by fascist movements that have used methods historically judged as pure evil, I struggled, as I have seen many struggle. I lost hope, I felt despair, I mourned the loss. But mostly I was afraid–afraid that if I took Christ’s words seriously, I would now be faced with actually acting on that impulse—to love my neighbor as I love myself, and to lay down my life for them. My mind immediately takes those commands to their logical conclusion–standing between the barrel of a rifle and a person about to be carried away in a black van–but if I’m honest it was the other ways I might be asked to “lay down my life” that presented a more present danger. To live differently today, and every day. To stand up for my values, regardless of the threat from authoritarianism. To do so peacefully. To love my enemies.
I felt powerless over these dark forces bulldozing the social and cultural constructs that made me feel safe. And admitting one’s powerless is the first step of all 12-step programs, something I have some experience with.
Just as happened with my alcoholism, I was stuck in a futile cycle of trying to manage something I couldn’t seem to manage, succumbing to the hopeless despair and confusion (what AA literature calls “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization”), then steeling myself and trying again, again to fail.
I did not try to “work the steps” as it related to this current moment. It just happened.
What happened
Step 1
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
💀 Things got so bad that I accidentally practiced a futurorum malorum præmeditatio, the Stoic practice of imagining the worst that could happen. I hit bottom, in 12-step parlance. I came to believe I was powerless over…the amorphous mob of hate and vile, and the powers that ascended from them.
There were a lot of scenarios that ran through my head, but they all resulted in, “…and then we’ll deal with that,” or, “…and then we’ll all find out what life is like after that.” I realized that when it came to the crumbling of our society, government, and economy, that the worse it got, the more we’d all be in it together.
This had additional unexpected side-effects. I compared myself less to other people more well off than me, or more talented, or more put together. Small frustrations or inconveniences stopped being antagonistic vexations of an angry universe determined to thwart me. I was more grateful for little things; one day while I cleaned my kitchen countertop I actually thought to myself, “I like this house so much, I should really enjoy it now, it is so much better than a tent.” (Usually, thinking about our house simply results in a recitation of an unpleasant todo list.) I realized that some sad middle-of-the-road outcome from all this nonsense might feel less satisfying: no real change, just nagging awfulness and bile and bad feelings, still in our trances. If things got bad enough, maybe, just maybe, we’d change things.
Step 2
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
🕳️ This might be a superset of the above, but I decided I was an optimistic nihilist. I realized I didn’t just invent that idea, and after searching for and finding tons of videos and articles, I’m starting to think I am practicing a particular edge or nuanced version. I do believe in a Great Other, something mysterious and elusive that is embodied in all living things and maybe even in every molecule and atom, connecting everything, whispering, prompting, urging. I do not believe that in the end will be absolutely nothing. I’d watched this video a few times, and realized that it was very much in line with his 3rd concept, A place between everything & nothing…
I don’t know if I agree with his final conclusion, that optimism is a choice. Becoming an alcoholic is the combination of thousands of choices, and eventually getting sober stops being a choice.
Step 3
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
🎈 I decided that while I do not believe in a “God of coincidences”, I like to look for opportunities to practice divine nonchalance. I first learned of this idea the first time I watched The Institute many years ago. Based on my recent searches, it has been adopted mostly by new-age types or mentioned in press about Dispatches from Elsewhere, the fictional adaptation of the events described in The Institute. “Divine nonchalance refers to a state of relaxed confidence and trust in the universe, allowing one to let go of worries and embrace life with a childlike wonder. It encourages living in the moment and accepting outcomes without excessive attachment or anxiety,” says an AI summary in my search results. That works. Accepting outcomes. I once heard someone in an AA meeting say, “I got out of the outcomes business,” and I thought I was on board, but I didn’t really feel any different. Something about hitting bottom, realizing I was powerless, and the sense that the end of the world as we know it was coming and I felt fine…my faith feels both more sure-footed and embodied.
Step 4
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
😱 We’re taught a system in AA that involves analyzing our symptom and then considering our part in the circumstances of that symptomatic consequence. These are framed within the things that “drove us to drink”. In this case, I was afraid of losing comfort, security, and safety; but I had stood by and watched as, “even a shared illusion that [shared moral values] matter, if even as a collective fiction, seems to [have] gone…[and] the types of people and institutions who have historically encouraged their constituents towards some historical or inspired ethical framework are the very same ones dismantling, sowing confusion, deceiving…” #
My transition from hopelessness to hopeful didn’t occur in a single day like my transition from a drunk to a sober person did. This inventory hasn’t resulted in a series of todos (I wish they did), it is concerned with creating the mental environment that might result in knowing what the right thing to do is when the moment to do it presents itself. Action isn’t to assuage the symptom, it is the result of solving the root cause. Removing the disease allows the plant to flourish.
What it’s like now
Some changes happened, again, not as actions I took to solve my problem, but as a result of having worked on my problem.
🗯️ I stopped checking social media so often. I didn’t decide to, it just happened. I’d get to the end of a day and realize I’d barely opened Mastodon. And I still wouldn’t have much drive to open it then. Things just got to be too much. Too much hand-ringing, too much crazy stuff all at once, too much OMFG can you believe they’re doing *that*. Not enough good stuff in-between. Not enough art, not enough action. The lack of desire to foment on Mastodon is a byproduct of the hope, and it is self-reinforcing.
🎨 I started finding more meaningful art.
🧑🎤 I started finding like-minded folks actually taking action.
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Red State Revival
The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics
The Deluge: On Literature, Science & The Art of Hope
⛲ I’ve focused on local communities. Our online communities and media are lost to technocrats. I’ve been so online and just busy for so long that my local connections have suffered even beyond the ways all of ours have suffered as a result of rampant capitalist forces.
There is much left unsaid in this post. I’m privileged. I grew up on Fight Club and Donnie Darko, knowing something’s wrong but ultimately unable to embody any understanding that that privilege was what is wrong. That dissonance results in disfunction, alienation, disease. We in AA get sober together despite our differences, and possibly because of them. We’re asked to give of our experience, strength, hope, time, and resources when asked, and almost always find that we are not asked of too much.