The Way The World Works Doesn't Work

I recently saw a documentary about a beach in Ghana where a huge percentage of the world’s clothing washes up each year. In the film, a Western reporter asked a Ghanaian activist, “Are you angry at wealthy nations for doing this to your beautiful ocean?” “What do you mean ‘my’ ocean?” the activist replied. “Are you not aware that tomorrow this will happen on your shores too?”

The way we live isn’t sustainable. Neither is the way we think. The above story is a good example of a trend in today’s thought toward replacing universal human morality with tribal narrative: If I can tell a story about how my people are right and your people are wrong, then what I do doesn’t have consequences. It’s just something that happens on other shores. This delusion is, quite literally, killing us.

The modern spirituality-industry has been complicit in this by stripping traditional religion of its values and repackaging it as a set of techniques accessible to only a privileged few. Commandments about not killing, stealing, or doing injustice are out. Happiness-hacks are in. There’s even a famous “expert” on mindfulness who divides his time between teaching meditation and advocating for war and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East.

But meditation has its morals, and without the value of harmlessness, it won’t make you “ten-percent happier,” or any-percent happier. The Buddha said clearly: if your happiness comes from taking things from others, denying their humanity, or oppressing them, it won’t last. The job of spirituality is not to be quiet about these issues or stay in a lane. The job of spirituality is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

People will say, “That’s just how the world works.” But consider that the way the world “works” doesn’t actually work. This is the premise of every meditation worth its salt: to shift from merely tolerating the world to challenging it, to see the futility of looking for fulfillment in money, status, and consumption, and to find a happiness that doesn’t make trash for others.

Judy Baca, “Non-Violent Resistance”