Complicity

“The environment being destroyed, refugees dying, workers being exploited, neocolonialism etc. is all the work of a small group of super rich people.”

Absolutely true.

But they are only able to do so through our passive collaboration. Every job we do, every moment in which we do not revolt, makes this system possible.

And it is true that resistance is dangerous and our choices are based on an estimate of the risks to our physical safety. Even those that do actively resist the system make that estimate and don’t fight every battle. If we were the kind of heroes we really want to be, standing up against everything we can not accept, we’d probably be dead.

But that doesn’t mean our complicity isn’t real. It is. Our complicity is as real as the complicity of those who lived under past fascism, colonialism, slavery.

In Holocaust history we learn that genocide can be imagined by a small group but can only be carried out if the majority decides to not actively resist it. That is no less true about all the other horrible things that happen in this world.

History also teaches us that there is no level of powerlessness where resistance is impossible. Concentration camp inmates revolted. Slaves revolted. Our own sense of powerlessness or the danger involved can be very real but it doesn’t absolve us of our agency and complicity.

I believe we can hold the weight of our complicity AND the knowledge of where the real problem is. I believe guilt doesn’t help us, but an honest understanding of our place in this system does. I believe we can practice self care and self love AND understand our complicity.

I believe that once we really come to terms with this it might actually make us more compassionate towards ourselves and towards our comrades, because our love for each other isn’t based on the fragile illusion of innocence.