Hi y’all. It’s good to be here with something fresh. I tried audio for the first time! I feel awkward! But mostly excited! It’s 2022 and here we are, recording right from my backyard, on my iPhone. Humble beginnings. Practice. Experimenting and evolving.
I hope this enhances accessibility and digestibility. I would love to hear from you in the comments, on the piece or otherwise. I’m beaming my heart out your way. Big times call for big love.
“As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.” – Muriel Rukeyser
Like mosquitoes on a summer night, lies zip through the air, fighting through layers of resistance and clouds of repellants in their thirst for blood. Lies are opportunistic, intelligent, and adaptive predators. Some lies carry benign messages: an irritating itch, an uncomfortable harassment, nagging until they fade away, ultimately leaving no trace. But other lies carry fatal ideas: toxic mind-altering manipulations wage war against our best defenses of rationality and critical thinking, leading to points of no return.
As complicated conspiracy theories swarm humanity, piercing through our vulnerabilities to spread their transmissions, they are amplified by disinformation factories pumping propaganda through unregulated digital dystopias. The biggest lies have dangerous, destructive implications, and we're seeing this play out at vast scales. We watch wars explode for dirty delusions of grandeur and greed: like Putin claiming to "denazify" Ukraine, like the US claiming WMD's or "counterterrorism" to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and countless other nations (as my friend Julia wrote about). Lies are told when one wants something they don't have, or more of what they already do.
The lies against humanity are abundant, and none of us are immune. Even if spun at a global scale, they trickle down to inflict profoundly personal pain. An army of infected neighbors, community members, internet warriors feel empowered to disempower, galvanized by the lies sanctioned at the top. Trump became an avatar for this. He said everything we've all heard before – the locker room talk, the racial slurs – but had yet to see so obviously, so explicitly from the presidential podium, at least not so revoltingly. Lies like this are designed to degrade, demean, deny dignity, destroy lives.
I'm currently tracking two trends:
Keen minds get churned in the spin cycle trying to track everything unfolding precisely because it's a terrifying tangle of lies... yet we know there are truths desperate to be exposed so we may try to pull apart the threads, reach for links, tie things together to find the buried ledes;
Technology is accelerating our access to information, increasing transparency and visibility – of everything, of too much, of things we don't need to know and not enough of what we do – yet no matter how overwhelming it gets, it is powerful to learn quickly what could have taken months, if not years, if not decades to understand about the issues of our era.
These two factors combine to create and compound crisis because we're seeing much more, faster than ever. Before the internet, smart phones, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram... it was harder to alert, analyze, and assess, let alone respond like we can now, nearly instantaneously. Very little happens these days without almost immediately getting exposed. There were always lies, always corruptions, in fact Hitler and Stalin and Andrew Jackson and Christopher Columbus (shall I go on?) got away with what they did in part because it was easier to invisibilize. (One day I'll wax poetic here about how much I love the famed Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville and the seminal text he published in 1835, for this reason. Spoiler alert: he was having none of America's colonial bs and tried to warn the good people.)
Though they’re not new, conspiracy theories are exploding at a rapid rate1. And people who have resisted the pull of propaganda for so long, are suddenly succumbing to their grip. As described above, the compounding crises sparked by extreme levels of corruption are exceedingly painful to hold. To hone in on just one injury: so many of us entrust our lives and livelihoods to leadership and governance at all scales. We approach elections with deep heart and sincerity, knowing many of our kin can't even access elections safely, freely, and democratically, in our home countries or abroad. It's devastating and soul-crushing to think we could be duped so profoundly that now we could be pushed to the brink of our survival because a few dudes sucked Earth dry, turned it all into trillions of dollars, just to end up leaving this place for outer space or to hide away on private yachts. It's too much. So I do have compassion for those who grab onto toxic, cheap substitutes for truth, for real reality and all of its sharp edges. It is indeed much easier to say "this is the ______'s fault" and scapegoat and incarcerate and wage wars... than it is to slow down and get real with the cold, hard truths of our times.
But the bigger Truth is: there are more of us here who've been burned than those who've done the burning. We don't have to hold this pain alone if we all help transmute it, together. Also, these lies are unoriginal. We've seen them before. We know that their primary aim is to deny us our innate potency, our inalienable sovereignties. How do we become impenetrable to these betrayals, distortions, manipulations? How do we liberate ourselves from lies and take our power back?
How do we navigate the abundant level of corruption, increasingly being exposed, without succumbing to conspiracy theories?
How do we navigate chaos, without succumbing to crisis?
A global lie that triggered me this week was the conspiracy theory that Zelensky is a neonazi (despite being Jewish). This is textbook antisemitism, but as discussed throughout this piece, millions of people are looking for an answer, so maybe it's that Zelensky is himself pulling the strings? This is such painfully regurgitated, unoriginal antisemitic mythology that my stomach twists as I write it. I'm not going to link to anything here, but if you Google it, you'll see the gist of it is that Russian propagandists are trying to convince people that Zelensky is sporting neonazi insignia on his clothing. It's infuriating. It sent me to familiar yet terrifying territory in my psyche. My heart thundered in my chest as I struggled for breath. Thoughts thrashed against each other in my mind: what if this lie penetrates? What if it mutates? What if they believe it? How could they? This could spin out of control. It could go viral, get violent, even deadly.
To maintain the status quo, of course public opinion of Zelensky must be undermined: 1) Zelensky is Jewish which is threatening to a lot of people; 2) Zelensky is challenging power structures, which is threatening to a lot of people, because he wants peace therefore he's exposing hypocrisies, inconsistencies, manipulations...like the futility of sanctions as this war pushes prolific profit for oil and gas, for corporations like Nestle, for weapons trade, etc etc; like the unwillingness to protect democracy and instead prioritize subversive multinational allegiances; like persecuting millions of innocent people as collateral damage once again. Zelensky is leading with ethics, values, integrity, love for place, love for people, love for peace, and he's a Jewish hero. Very threatening. So... he must be a neonazi???? It is strategic to destroy public opinion of a global leader from a marginalized group promoting peace. That is the exact conspiracy that has trailed humanity for centuries as we fight to bend this moral arc toward justice (i.e. a well-known example is COINTELPRO — the FBI conspiracy to destroy the civil rights movement, including feminist organizations, anti–Vietnam War organizers, and the Black Power movement…) This tactic trickles down to the personal: on a daily basis, people wage violence against each other to undermine public image, making up arbitrary conjectures to deny people the right to sovereignty, the right to exist, the right to love, the right to peace...
There is no doubt things are extraordinarily, unbelievably toxic in our world today. This can propel us on missions to try to expose all of the lies, all of the distortions and manipulations... but it can also make us susceptible to jumping to conclusions that are patently untrue... in fact, this is what propagandists want us to do. Corruption is the force that creates convoluted connections to hide behind a million layers (who's in bed with who, who's hiding money where, who's doing deals instead of defending democracy to get precious metals or oil rights?)... but conspiracy plays on that complexity and sends us all on scattered scouting missions to try to find more evidence when the violent truth is right in front of us, earning a million dollars every minute we're fighting each other instead of it.
Ultimately, I do believe this chaos is healing us. If we think about it: the patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and all forms of oppression aim to squash down, to compact, to contract, to suppress life. Chaos is the opposite. It's the uncontainable. It's the boundless. It is arguably the source of life itself. Creation asks us to balance chaos and structure to ground formlessness into form. But we've been living under regimes of intense, pressurized form for centuries. We need the balance of formlessness for life to flow, to persist. When I think of autocracy, dictatorship, oligarchy, my body gets rigid. When I think about collectivism, cooperation, collaboration, my body melts, breathes, dreams...
I want to be honest that this piece was surprisingly hard to write. As I looked upon lies like I never have before, I confronted my own very intimate grief. I saw my traumas in a new light. I realized that most, if not all, of the traumas I'm actively healing root back to the same source: lies. Lies that are centuries-old and generations-deep. A lie people told about me that smashed my heart to pieces and stole from me a truly great love. All the lies harbored internally that I tell myself over and over and over: suppressing, self-sabotaging, compounding my suffering. I write about lies here often because to me they are the root of so much pain. Like one of the deepest lies: that we don't all, every single one of us, belong to our mother, to source, to our shared Earth home, equally and completely and abundantly.
I imagine every one of us has a story about a lie that fundamentally altered our lives or could have. Equally important, I imagine all of us have at least one lie we believe about ourselves that shapes us constantly. At the root of most lies is wounding. Is this why lies are getting so loud? Calling us to get comfortable with what's true? That we're in pain. That we need care cultures that prioritize interbeing, interdependence. What else could get us to look at all the ways we're trapped in false fights with each other, instead of banding together despite our differences to commit to the truest, holiest battles for clean water and air, nourishing food, universal healthcare, fundamental rights, a thriving planet?
Lies get intimate for us young, and carry us through our lifetimes. They forge us in the fires of accountability. They challenge us to constantly carve the contours between concepts like truth, opinion, feeling, belief, and cold, hard fact. And because of the inheritance of lies that define our human world, they initiate us into being human. Maybe we won’t evolve beyond lies entirely. Could they at least be more benign? More misunderstanding or miscommunication than manipulation? I try to remember that most lies play on fears and insecurities of insufficient/inadequate love and resources. I try to remember that lies, no matter how big, are rooted in simple ideas: that there isn't enough. That we aren't enough. When I remember I am enough, I become impenetrable to lies that defy my wholeness. When I work toward a world where everyone has enough as my north star, I become impenetrable to lies that deny collective dignity. I’m healing so that I can build a sanctuary within myself of groundedness, emotional maturity, inner peace, trust, and comfort with uncertainty where lies can’t enter… at least not for long.
Last week I wrote about practice and process. I think "truth" is the inevitable outcome of healthy process and practice: we are enough, we can have enough together. When we practice this every day, we empower these truths to persevere. Lies are the predators inflicting death and destruction. Liberating them is a ritual of devotion, a labor of love, a prayer for life itself. We will never have a perfect world, but it is not naive nor romantic to work toward a better, more possible, more life-giving one. A collective release into Earth's abundance through the truth of enoughness might just make lies irrelevant.
Thanks for being here with me y’all. I’m eternally, endlessly grateful and honored to walk these trailways with you. And as always, I would love to hear from you.
Big love,
Rach
P.S. I said I wouldn’t link to anything above but I can’t help myself. Further reading on Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories Abound Around Russian Assault on Ukraine.
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A great read to dig in further: “This cultural phenomenon goes back to 1967. At that time, in response to questions about the Warren Commission Report (which President Ford helped create), the CIA issued a memorandum calling for mainstream media sources to begin countering ‘conspiracy theorists.’ In the 45 years before the CIA memo came out, the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or about once per week. Before the CIA memo came out, the Washington Post and New York Times had never used the phrase ‘conspiracy theorist.’”
The fragile power of lies