“Indoctrinated Into Our Own Disappearance”

I watched a powerful clip on Instagram in which author, speaker, poet, Alok Menon so eloquently explains:

“Are you interested in living in a world that has so thoroughly indoctrinated you into your disappearance.... What we are fighting for is what is right, what is just, what I beautiful, what is honest, what IS... Human complexity IS. People cannot see what IS when they are living a fantasy of what they thought they should be!”

Menon was speaking of gender and sexual diversity, but I think their statement applies more broadly to each one of us.  In some ways we have all been indoctrinated into our own disappearance.  Each time we move away from our truth to “fit in” with culture and society, we are silencing a part of ourselves. 

“Culture” is “any set of social standards that shapes the way people think and act.” (Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity).  Any time you have a group of humans, even two people in a room, a culture is created; there will be implicit and explicit rules as well as expectations for how to behave, feel, and think.  We have cultural prescriptions about roles, hierarchies, values, etiquette, what’s cool, what’s not, “shoulds” and should nots.

Each of us live in, and are influenced by, multiple cultural systems including our family, our social groups, work culture, as well as socialization within broader religious, ethnic, generational, and societal cultures. 

I am not saying cultures – whichever ones we live in - are all bad, or that all the values, goals and “shoulds” they espouse are all wrong; the problem begins when culture requires us to abandon our own truth as a condition for membership.

In broad strokes, culture today tells us our value is tied to achievement, and achievement is measured by money, status, power, and position.  The cultures that surrounded me when I was younger told us women were incomplete without children, then told moms they should feel guilty if they put work before their kids, and simultaneously devalued moms who decide to stay at home to raise children because they didn’t “work”. When we do “work”, culture has often told women they are worth less doing the same job as men.  And for a long time, we all accepted it. Imagine if our cultures decided women should be paid for domestic labor; imagine the shift in power and status then. 

I believe the buzz of culture today intoxicates us into thinking we need to be busy, that who we are and what we have is never enough, that power and belonging comes from our number of likes, and most insidious, that our worth is decided by others. This kind of cultural noise, I believe, keeps us from hearing ourselves, accessing our true emotions, and hearing our deeper longings: our longing for peace, for simplicity, for less, for self-acceptance and true connection. 

Ultimately, culture requires a level of conformity; fitting in, thinking, dressing, behaving, believing the same, and pursuing the same goals. If we look around us, we might see differences and diversity, but imagine what an alien viewing us from space would see?  Ants following each other. 

While differences exist, most of us in this period of human history live within nuclear as opposed to extended families, marriage is expected to be monogamous and forever, we send our kids out of the home to be educated, we send out elderly to nursing homes, we shop in supermarkets rather than grow our own food, parents have far more responsibility toward their kids than kids have to their parents, we work until we drop, skirts are supposed to be for girls, and beautiful people (although what’s considered beautiful is also decided by culture and changes over time) are celebrated.  We think this is the way things are meant to be, but some group somewhere decided it, and we follow. 

We follow to the point that what’s most unusual or unique about us often gets pushed out so we can fit in.  Our edges are dulled, the parts that make us pointy and unique are sanded down, smoothed out, to make us act and feel more like one another.  We disappear into sameness. 

What I find most disturbing however, is we often don’t even recognize that we are being molded, manipulated, or otherwise influenced by culture.  We are being directed further away from our truth and what might really make us happy, but we believe this redirection is who we are and what we want.

Consider this: over the pandemic, when we were disconnected from our external “groups”, many stopped wearing heels, opted for loose comfortable clothes, and decided to let their hair go grey.  People talked about enjoying a calmer life with fewer social obligations, and a lot of people decided not to return to their previous jobs or reevaluated the way they lived.  Of course, not all was rosy over the pandemic, all the loss, uncertainty, increased isolation, and anxiety was devastating for many, but what the pandemic inadvertently revealed to us was when away from external influence, we would perhaps make different choices for our lives. 

If you wanted to create a prison, perhaps the most ingenious method to prevent escape would be to convince the prisoners they weren’t prisoners; to make them believe they were choosing to be there.  Kind of like the plot of the film The Matrix. That’s what culture does.

Culture uses the most powerful tool against us - our need for connection and belonging.  In her book The Way of Integrity, Beck writes,

“Cultures need our cooperation to survive, so they’re designed to control our behavior.  All cultures do this by threatening or inflicting what psychiatrist Mario Martinez calls the three archetypal wounds: abandonment, betrayal, and shame.” 

Our fear of losing connection through abandonment, betrayal or shame is harder to face than lying to ourselves into our own oblivion.  What we truly love, want, need as individuals is silenced, even from ourselves, as we decide to follow our groups into the next cultural trend. 

How do we break free?

The tool used to entrap us must be the way we break free; if we fear abandonment, we much become so complete in our own relationship to ourselves that we no longer feel alone, if we fear betrayal, we must be loyal to who we are, if we fear shame, we must love ourselves enough to stand up for our truth. 

Before any of this can happen, we need to recognize our own imprisonment and acknowledge there are parts of ourselves we may have hidden away.  We must learn to hear our own yearning.  Beck suggests asking yourself, “What do you want?”  Make that list.  Then when you are alone and quiet, ask yourself, “What do you yearn for?”  According to Beck most people are remarkably consistent in what they yearn for; these include peace, freedom, love, comfort, belonging.  Keep that list and throw the first one away.

Your body always knows, if something does not feel like peace or freedom to you, you will feel it in your gut.  Your body will rebel with exhaustion, anxiety, aches, and pains.  Learn to listen and you will regrow your stunning, beautiful, unique edges.