Why I'm Writing

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag camps for eight years. About 10% of prisoners died each year from disease, starvation, or overwork. But Solzhenitsyn observed that some of the worst cruelty within the Gulags — the creation of hierarchies that allowed for robbing, beating, and raping — was done not so much by the guards as by the prisoners themselves, perhaps in the hope of distracting themselves from the horror of their own fate.

We are all creating and perpetuating Gulags in our own way. No one is forcing us to be cruel, evil, or irresponsible, and yet we continue to do it. One such Gulag is our destruction of this planet. We buy into stories about needing to have this or that in order to be enough. We cannot resist the ego security that our technology or gasoline or vacations provide. If you really think this is not you, what happens if you imagine forgoing the plane flights it would take to get your carbon emissions under control? What happens if you imagine no longer buying cellphones with blood mine components?

Another type of Gulag can be found if you observe the mechanisms you use to secretly hit back at your intimate relations. We make ourselves superior (or maybe inferior) and scan for how things aren’t right. We create cycles of emotional drama, we punish each other, we close our hearts, and we call this “relating.”

It may seem sometimes that there’s no other choice. To give up plane flights and cellphones and secret resentments with our family and partners is too wild of an idea. There’s no way.

The insanity of the Gulag can only end when prisoners start to feel the pain of what it is they’re doing to each other, when they realize the depth of the evil they turn to in their quest for security. If the prisoners could stop numbing themselves and begin feeling with humanity, then the guards would have to step in, and if the guards could stop numbing themselves and begin feeling with humanity, then…

I will be writing about the collective insanities we’re taught to perpetuate in Modern Culture, as well as about the Next Culture that’s available for us to start living. Next Culture is where we feel (and are trained to feel) and where we put aside our survival strategies that serve purposes like looking good, accumulating more, isolating, and dominating. Have you ever wondered what could happen if you redirected your energy away from serving these kinds of purposes? What kind of authenticity would you access if you no longer cared about looking good or having the most?

This is a newsletter of exploration. It’s hard to imagine breaking free of these structures. I will be documenting what I find along the way about how to do so, how to use the pain that will come from separating from these old ways of doing things, and what there is to find in Next Culture. Please write to me about what you discover yourself. Please write to me about the pain you feel in this world.

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