Truth

Truth.

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“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid”

~ Hardeep Matharu (from Double Down news article) .

Truth has been missing for a long time. It has gone into hiding.

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bell hooks speaks of the greatest part of love. And she means the practice of love, of love being the verb, love being in the doing. The greatest part of love is being truthful. Truth and honesty are the nuts and bolts that build the connections that show love in action. Love without action is nothing but a performance.

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Lies have taken over and infected so much of our modern lives. In the early histories of the 20th century American Dream, the cult of persona took over person-hood as part of a community. Born into this cult of persona both personally, politically and globally, we have all constructed a Wizard of Oz style mechanical glamour. One that we exhaustively push and pull buttons behind the scenes while trying to maintain this façade.

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What is it serving?

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Short term ego based self esteem. It eases the difficulty of painful conversations. It saves us from bruising to the ego’s extreme fragility. Rather than deal, experience and understand the hurt, connect, then heal; we obscure the truth. Bury it deep inside. Instead go back to pressing buttons and maintaining the façade. Conceal and spritz up the painful truths with white lies here and there. (Isn’t it a fascinating fact of English that the term “WHITE lie” is perceived as a “harmless lie”?) anyway I digress.

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Each lie we tell ourselves, tell others, and perpetuate, creates a debt to real love, real progress, real revolution. The quote above has been with me in my heart all week. As I look around at the mountain of debt we are accruing, it scares me. Terrifies me. I see nothing but debt that will need to be paid off at a severe cost.

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Personally I’ve been facing a few of my own in the last few weeks. Lockdown is asking us to face ourselves. And trust me, if you are offered the grace of space to do this right now, I would encourage you to use this time (if you are able) to do so.

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The hubris of those lies I tell myself comes from a deep seated inadequacy. An unshakeable sense that no matter what I do I am not good enough. I am facing the points in my life where I feel I haven’t lived up to what I had hoped for myself or where I have been educated to believe I should be. In each situation, the deep frustration, guilt, shame and anger, turn out to be where I haven’t been honest with myself. Then I look towards things I want to do with this deep seated inadequacy and I am immobilised with sheer panic that I’m not good enough to fulfil them and achieve them. Because I have begun to believe the lies told about me and that I have turned into believing myself without any outside influence or manipulation.

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White Supremacy creates a hierarchy. We have almost ALL lived with this since birth. It has infected almost all of us to a greater or lesser degree. It harms those most obviously and violently at the bottom of this created hierarchy. However those closer to the bottom are closer to the truth. Closer to reality. Closer to being outside this matrix of lies. I see no love at the top of the WS hierarchy, only lies and shame all cloaked behind a false ideal of success.

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Those further up/deeper within the hierarchy have been taught that any sense of inadequacy and raising the sense of self up “through the ranks” of WS is possible. Consciously or unconsciously through the stepping on or denigrating those “below”. Those lies have to be told to ourselves over and over again to mask the inadequacy with false superiority. The sense of self is built on lie after lie about ourselves and about others. Those lies, told over and over again throughout a lifetime drag us further away from reality. The definition of Psychosis is the loss of connection with reality. bell hooks speaks of real love and connection only through the telling of truths. If there is no truth telling. No honesty. There is no real love. Only a psychosis of lies told over and over again till all connection with love and humanity is lost.

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Those of us within the WS structure have greater truth telling work to do. And I mean with ourselves. I’m not wholly about people telling others about themselves. No until we have invested all the time teaching ourselves about ourselves. Most times, it’s being in that which teaches other people best. A truthful telling of ourselves looks like being honest about where the lies we tell or believe about ourselves have harm and cause violence, disparity, and disconnection with others. As a person of mixed heritage that includes Whiteness, I have seen and I live both sides. I have spent years (and will spend many more to come) dissecting the ways in which I am not part of the system, but also a part of that system. Lies I have taken into my heart to create some version of myself that attempts and desires to rank and rate me higher in the WS system than the reality, truth and love of who I really am. Lies that disconnect me from both the truth and love.

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Loving yourself. The practice of loving yourself. Is telling yourself the truth. Being honest with yourself.

(This is why I am not here for “self-care”. Self care speaks to caring about the self only in the way that you can then go and serve your capitalist function. Self care does not speak of revolution. Love and Truth are the only languages of revolutionary) 

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So take this time as an opportunity, to make the decision to take an honest truthful look at yourself.

I ask this, because right now I see a lot of hiding from our guilt and shame. Action and zero reflection on who we really are. If we really want to dismantle White Supremacy, we need so much more reflection than I am seeing right now. Reflection & understanding MUST come before action.  We MUST going and look within before we storm without. I started this type of therapy in 2016. I made a conscious and wilful decision to step into therapy that specifically looked at finding meaning (Logo-therapy). I still feel like I have only just started (and I have only just started). So a Black Square on one Tuesday or a week’s worth of hashtags, is just not even gonna cut the starting ribbon on this marathon that we are on.

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Real time needs to be taken to dismantle the parts within ourselves that fear the difficult and painful road of truth and love.

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For more reading:

The cult of persona “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking” – by Susan Cain 

“All about Love” bell hooks 

“The Art of Loving” Erich Fromm 

“Man’s Search for Meaning” Viktor E. Frankl