Written by Charles Eisenstein, 2005
The Great Robbery
The sullen, resentful, rebellious teenager is a
figure so universal in our culture as to have become a cliché. Whether it takes
the form of a brooding, barely-controlled rage, or explodes outward as
violence, or turns inward as depression, anger is a near-universal
characteristic of modern youth. What we hesitate to acknowledge, though, is
that this anger is well-founded. It is not some passing immaturity. Young
people are angry about something, something
real, and if we pay that anger heed, and trace it to its source, we will find
there a clue to what has gone wrong with our world. Better yet, we will also
discover a path toward the world’s healing.
On one level, the anger of youth stems from that
cardinal characteristic of adolescence, idealism. Idealism is the belief that a
more beautiful world is possible, and not only possible, but attainable. It is
the conviction that we need not settle for the lesser world in which we find
ourselves.
Allied to idealism is its interior reflection: a
sense of our own individual magnificence. This is the feeling, “I am in this
world to do amazing things.” It is the knowledge that we are divine beings here
for a divine purpose—nothing less than to participate in the creating of that
more beautiful world of our idealistic intuitions.
When these beliefs are denied or betrayed, outrage
is the inevitable result. Essentially, we are told No! A more beautiful world
is not possible. Things are just as they should be. It is foolish to dream of
more. This is the way it is done. This is the way of the world. Get used to it.
That’s what my fourth-grade math teacher told me when I complained of boredom
doing pages of long division, “You’re going to be bored a lot in life, so you’d
better get used to it.” From this perspective, schooling that is a dull
routine, beholden to petty authority, motivated by trivial external rewards,
defined by fixed schedules, and filled with meaningless assignments is actually
good—salutary practice for the “real world".
The teenager’s rage builds up over years. The
fourth grader, gazing out the window, looking at the clock, waiting for that
half-hour of freedom at recess, sneaking some social time into the margins of
the schoolday. The 12-year-old, looking out on a vast world into which he is
never allowed unsupervised or unscheduled, too busy to play. The high school
student, scrambling under the pressure to excel, disciplining herself to stick
with the grind. The first-grader, sulking on the “time-out bench",
humiliated but still defiant. Children made to feel ashamed of themselves by
parents, principles, churches and teachers. Made to shrink into something less.
Made to shy away from the wide wide world. Be small. Be practical. Lower your
expectations.
Yet after 15 or so years of spirit-breaking,
something in the teenager still resists. Unable to articulate what is wrong,
the teenager rebels in whatever way he can. Anticipating this, the
spirit-wrecking Machine turns this rebellion toward its own purposes. Set off a
smoke bomb in the bathroom, get caught, and learn the lesson, “You can change
nothing. Resistance is futile.” Or the rebellion is diverted toward harmless
avenues of expression that pose no threat to the system—listening to loud
music, using profane language, getting tattoos and piercings.
The anger of the teenager is the indignation of
the dispossessed. The Great Robbery is first and foremost the pillage of their
childhood. Childhood is supposed to be a realm of exploration in which we
discover our passions, our selves, our life purpose. What we get instead is
enslavement to schedules and obligations. Childhood is supposed to be a time of
play. And what is play? Play is something far different from what we, in a
degenerate age, call fun—the consumption of entertainment. Play is supposed to
be nothing less than practice in creating the world. Its highest expression is
“deep play", the kind which unfolds over days and weeks. In deep play,
children create entire worlds of the imagination, in which toys are but props.
In so doing, they prepare themselves for an adulthood empowered in the divine
function of world-creation.
One way we rob children of play is by taking away
the time and space for creating worlds of the imagination, and filling their
lives instead with preprogrammed activities, prefabricated worlds through which
they proceed as instructed, step by step. Video games are a prime example.
Here, a world is already created by software programmers. The children merely
walk through it. The same goes for television—no imagination is necessary on
the child’s part, because it has already been done in the TV studio. The same
as well for organized, supervised sports. This kind of childhood is preparation
for a very different adulthood than that of the empowered world-creator. It is
an adulthood bound to live a preprogrammed life, a life handed one, a life not one’s
own. This is how we are robbed of our potential for magnificence.
An equally grave loss is the loss of our passion
and purpose. Bereft of the chance to explore our inner world, we grow up not
truly knowing what we love or what we want to make of our lives. In the absence
of a passion, we easily accept the range of available substitutes. I might as
well be an engineer. Maybe I’ll major in finance. That might be okay. I’ll get
a good job at least. Ask someone thus dispossessed what they really love, what
makes their heart sing, and they won’t even know.
If you accept that the purpose of life is indeed
merely to get by, to survive, to get a secure job with benefits, get married,
have kids, retire securely, grow old and die, then perhaps this result isn’t so
tragic. But if the adolescent intuition is true, that we are indeed here on
earth for a magnificent purpose, then the cutoff from our passion is a terrible
crime. Before you read any further, decide which alternative you believe. What
does your heart tell you?
I think the spirit of youth never actually dies,
but lies dormant in even the most hardened, controlled, uptight adult. That
spirit will never be satisfied with a life handed on down by the impersonal
forces the drive our society. Its dissatisfaction manifests as an omnipresent
discontent, a feeling of emptiness that the rewards of
doing-as-you-are-told—status, material possessions, etc.—can never fill.
If you are in the place of disconnection from your
true self, true passion, true reason for being on this earth, don’t despair.
Well, actually, do despair. Despair, or more precisely depression, is often the
first step toward discovering true life. In order to discover the right life,
it is first necessary to withdraw from the wrong life. This necessity drives
many of the supposed character flaws common to teenagers. Laziness,
procrastination, apathy are all different permutations of the urge to withdraw.
They are a covert way of saying NO! when more overt rebellion is impossible, or
demands too great a leap of courage. In the American South the slaves, unable
to rebel outright, instead pretended to be lazy and stupid, in many cases
coming to believe in their own pretense. Teenagers often do the same thing.
Stupidity is a kind of protection. But—and I don’t care who you are—you are not
stupid. Never believe that.
Oftentimes, laziness and apathy are insufficient
to withstand the pressure to perform. Applying willpower and self-discipline,
threatening ourselves with the inner voice of shame and guilt, enticing
ourselves with external rewards like grades, status, and approval, we overcome
the urge to blow it all off. We think of ways to make ourselves live the lives
expected of us. In this case the rebellion of the soul manifests even more
deeply, for example as clinical depression, anxiety disorder, disease, or
suicide.
The defining feature of depression is a kind of
paralysis, which is precisely the withdrawal from the wrong life I have been
talking about. It could be the wrong job, wrong relationship, or something
else, but essentially it represents the soul’s rebellion against circumstances
that the conscious mind believes cannot be changed. “No!” says the soul. “I’d
rather not get out of bed!” Psychiatric medications can quiet this voice for a
while, but even if successful they only end up transforming it into another
form of refusal.
That deepest, truest part of ourselves, that I
refer to as the soul, or the spirit of youth, will always think of a way to
eventually bring us into the space of emptiness that is necessary for the
discovery of our true self and life purpose. Disease is one avenue. Cancer in
particular represents the somatization of a kind of self-betrayal, in which
cells forget their proper function and usurp the body’s resources for their own
unlimited growth. Psychologically, the counterpart of these renegade cells is
the security-obsessed ego, consuming all our gifts for the dead-end goals of
security in all its guises: wealth, status, power, and so on. And if death is
the result, so be it. Better to die than to live the wrong life. So goes the
logic of the soul.
This is also the logic that propels the tremendous
rise in the youth suicide rate. When every other avenue of refusal has been cut
off, the teenager is trapped. Self-destruction is seen as the only option. The
escalating regime of control imposed by parents and schools, with the aid of
surveillance technology, psychological manipulation, and psychiatric drugs,
makes suicide all the more likely. And the antidote is to empower young
people—and the spirit of youth in all of us—to discover another way out. To
say, “Life is just fine, it is you who has the problem” is incredibly
disempowering. But that is the implicit message in the regime of medication and
control.
Here is the right message—and it applies equally
to the suicidal teenager as well as to the commonly resentful. The message is
that what you have always secretly suspected is true. The world is not supposed
to be like this. Your intuitions of something more beautiful are valid. You are
meant for an amazing, divine purpose. You are brilliant, possessed of unique
gifts just waiting to be discovered. And—very important—anyone who tells you
otherwise is lying. Worse than lying, they are stealing from you. Much has been
stolen already, but there is one thing no one can ever steal (though you might
put it aside, temporarily) and that is your soul knowledge of the message I
have just related. What’s more, it is possible to recover all that has been
lost. It might take time, but no one is a helpless victim. All we need is to
reconnect with the power we already have. It is the power, first and foremost,
to say no. You have been exercising that power all along, in fact, but when you
begin to see the source of the betrayal, when you begin to see through the lies
that construct the lesser life and lesser world that most of us have grudgingly
accepted, then that power is multiplied a thousandfold. You have the power to
withdraw, not through the unconscious mechanisms of laziness, depression or
suicide, but consciously, mindfully. And then, in the empty space that you
create for yourself, begin to play. Begin to do what you enjoy, without having
to justify it to anyone. From this starting point you will discover meaning,
passion, and life, and you will become indominable.