The Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burn Out, and Loneliness

The Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burn Out, and Loneliness

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends.

And koinos Hermes.

Today we’re going to talk about our dirty little secret—and not just any old secret, but the Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burn Out, and Loneliness.

billion in: 2023

t included in that figure. In: 2022

And we haven’t even touched all the coaching, consulting, and training in the business world that effectively amounts to self-help.

trillion in: 2023

The self-help-industrial complex knows we suffer, and while in some ways it tries to help, in other ways, as an industry, it tries to suck us in, tries to get us to resolve our suffering by means of its peculiar methods—which may seem varied, but far too often boil down to more and more and more of the same, cleverly disguised as the next big thing. The latest twist on the next big thing is of course the claims of evidence-based and scientifically-grounded self-help programs.

Self-help naturally brings to mind books and programs for dealing with stress, trauma, depression, anxiety, and so on. However, under the rubric of “self-help” we must also include much of what gets sold and promoted on platforms all over the internet and social media, under the guise of “business”—including people working in positions from sales to C-suite, along with a wide variety of schemes for those who want to be self-employed or start a business.

Countless “thought leaders” of the business realm essentially amount to self-help gurus, with varieties of self-help geared to executives, entrepreneurs, corporations, and organizations. It’s all part of the self-help catastrophe, no matter how “no-nonsense,” “evidence-based,” and “bottom-line business sense” it sounds—or, how “vulnerable,” “brave,” and “spiritual” it sounds.

In so many of its forms, the self-help catastrophe says the following—sometimes in language that masks this deeper message)—but nevertheless, it says: “You suffer as you do because you want to win this game. Follow these tips and tricks, and you will finally succeed! And then you will feel happy! We can take you from zero to dangerous, from broke to bad-ass, from quiet desperation to financial independence, from burned out to reinvigorated, from full-on sloth to 10x productive, from self-doubt to the self-confidence of your inner sage who braves the wilderness and dares to lead. You can have it all, and we have the secret you long for.”

But our real secret—the soul’s dark secret—is that we don’t want to play this game. Our inner dignity and wisdom rejects the whole game, the whole swindle, because the better angels of our nature know it won’t ever make us truly happy, truly at one with our fullest potentials and with the sacred mystery itself.

That’s really what it comes down to: The game is unhealthy; it’s wearing out the world we long to love, and wearing us out too; and when we experience it wearing out our world, wearing out our own heart, mind, and body, wearing out the bodies, minds, and hearts of our fellow beings, our soul hungers for truly wise people to come forward and say,

“There are major problems with this game we’ve all been playing. It doesn’t accord with wisdom, love, and beauty. It doesn’t accord with sacredness and with reverence for life, and it keeps us out of attunement with spiritual and ecological realities. Let’s talk about how to stop the insanity. Let’s talk about how to heal ourselves and the world at the same time. Because we can do all we want to adapt to our suffering, but we can’t truly heal until we transform the causes of our suffering.”

We long to hear this, because the soul has begun to groan and even to get feisty in reaction to the bit and bridle of the deranged rider who tries to gallop us into oblivion. We want to free ourselves from the burdens of ignorance and walk a noble path of wisdom and wildness. We want to sleep again, dream again, dream bigger and better—not merely to dream for ourselves, but to dream the whole world onward, tapping into sacred powers and inconceivable causes that have no real place in our contemporary context.

We want to return ourselves to Nature’s rhythms, which operate at a radically different frequency than the noisy pace of “progress”. We want time for real connection—not the substitute “connections” of social media, but time in true togetherness, time for laughing together, creating together, appreciating together, thinking together (not the false thinking of abstractions and commercializations, but the thinking of life). We want unstructured time—in Nature and in nurture.

We want meaningful work—truly meaningful work that we don’t have to rationalize. We’re done with having to act like a “team player” in a meaningless sport that degrades the conditions of life as it degrades the human spirit. We’re weary from work that breaks down our bodies and minds as it breaks down the wider ecologies we depend on.

And the work our souls call us to—the real work of our life at a simultaneously Cosmic and community scale—that work only gets constrained by the pattern of insanity that covers over what we are, covers over the mystery and magic of life. The terrors and wonders of the holism of the universe get pushed away by busyness and the constant barrage of fear and craving that constitute our political and economic shackles.

Instead of telling us what we need to hear, what our souls long to hear, the purveyors of self-help chant to us: “Hey there! Look over here! We belong to the [fill in your favorite neurobabble or marketing catchphrase] Research Institute. We research Theory F, and F is for flow and for financial freedom,” or, “We teach Process X—and the X is for an extraordinary method for arriving at disruptive insight and moving you and your business forward. Watch our TED talk, and then schedule a free strategy session!”

This can unfold in variously nuanced ways. For instance, if someone experiences imposter syndrome, the self-help catastrophe will tell them, “Don’t worry. It’s because you need to learn to trust yourself. It’s also because you come from a group that has been silenced and made to feel inadequate. But we can fix that. We will help you get rid of that imposter syndrome.”

But, if Socrates were alive today, and one of us went to him and said, “Socrates, I feel like an imposter. I think I have imposter syndrome,” Socrates would reply, “That’s very good news! Something in you realizes you lack true wisdom, and it wants you to slow down. Anyone who acts like they know what they’re doing in this incredibly complex and sacred world of ours is full of themselves. It’s not because you were marginalized that you now feel imposter syndrome, but rather that you were marginalized because of your sensitivity to all the impostors out there forcing their agendas on the world. Slow down, and trust that feeling of humility. Let it come through. Let’s find out what we can learn from it, and how we can heal self and world together. Let’s walk the path of wisdom, love, and beauty together, and enter the heart of wonder.”

If we said, “Socrates, I feel burned out, anxious, and depressed,” Socrates would say, “That’s very good news! Something in you doesn’t want to play this game. Slow down. Take care of your soul, and attend to the sacredness of this world. Let the teachings of wisdom, love, and beauty help you to turn away from all this craziness. The great mystery awaits us, and we shouldn’t waste a single moment of our lives.”

But, here too, the purveyors of self-help do basically the opposite. Instead of helping us end the game, they try to convince us that we only need to get better at playing the game. They tell us we have internal hang-ups, rather than inquiring into the systemic problems that go completely together with all our psychophysical and utterly philosophical symptoms.

This isn’t a personal attack on anyone. A lot of people playing this game have good intentions, at times delightful ones. On the other hand, we may need to challenge certain ideas and open up a debate when somebody puts their work into the public sphere. And these people’s work is definitely out in public. It’s hard to avoid.

So is our secret. Paradoxically, our secret is impossible to avoid, and yet, for some of us, nearly impossible to see—hence its darkness. This secret only seems dark and dirty because we’ve pushed it into the shadow, into the unconscious. We’re not allowed to say we don’t like the system, and we take it as a sign of intelligence when someone endorses the system we have, or tells us it’s the worst possible system—except for all the others.

And this makes no real sense. We cannot heal if we don’t stop doing the things that cause suffering, and we cannot experience the most profound and transformative insight if we don’t stop manufacturing ignorance. The dominant narratives make it challenging to see the causes of our suffering and the nature of our ignorance, and in some cases those narratives actually obscure our suffering and ignorance.

For instance, we don’t clearly see our anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout, and so on as having causal roots in the larger system. This happens in many ways, but even our science tells us that a materialistic culture and the pursuit of material wealth makes us less happy and goes together with all manner of problems.

The same goes for many diseases. We don’t often enough see our cancer, heart disease, alcoholism, device addiction, and so on as having causal roots in the larger system. It’s always, “I have cancer,” or “I’m an alcoholic,” and never, “This system we all perpetuate has gotten really good at creating cancer, anxiety, addiction, depression, trauma, burnout, and aggression.”

The system will actively seek profit everywhere, even in places a sense of sacredness or a semblance of wisdom would keep us from sticking our narrow agendas. Thus the system constantly invents interventions and extractions that become money.

And this means, for instance, we don’t eat what Nature provides. Rather, we eat what capitalism provides, even if we shouldn’t call it food. If degrading ecologies, creating disease-inducing junk food, or intervening in the genetics of plants and animals means profit, then we will do it.

Similarly, it means we often don’t get exposure to wisdom, love, and beauty, but instead get exposure to the fragmented and degraded forms of these the marketplace will allow. At times, the situation appears tragic in its irony. We pave over some wonderful, wild place, then the people living there go to airports (also formerly wild, wonderful places) in order to fly somewhere far away, to look at “nature” or to take a psychedelic or yoga retreat.

We should emphasize here that what we refer to as science goes fully together with our reflections. Science, technology, politics, and economics all go together with the degradation of our ecologies and the limitation of our potentials.

And they create a context in which we don’t fully sense and understand the suffering that comes from our disconnection from spiritual and ecological realities, which includes the loss of species, the degradation of landscapes and breakdown of the ecologies we depend on. When we get out of balance, that being-out-of-balance becomes the framework for all our thinking, which means all our thinking has a certain lack of attunement with reality. It’s part of a most fundamental philosophical error, which we could call the error of context.

The context of the dominant culture—a context of disconnection from wisdom, love, and beauty, including disconnection from Nature—that context presents us with a story that we have two and only two options: We either accept the political, economic, scientific, and technological system we have, or we must consign ourselves to insanity (usually likened to Stalin, Mao, or some kind of chaos). This makes it impossible for us to criticize the insanity of the system we have, and to think wisely, compassionately, and creatively together so that we can arrive at far more vitalizing alternatives.

We take this in en masse. It becomes part of our psychological and philosophical milieu, the water we swim in, the soil we grow in. And thus it becomes off-limits to critique the pattern of insanity, and to confront the scary questions we need to confront about what we must renounce in order to help the whole world heal, ourselves included. Doing so feels, to many of us, like speaking the name Voldemort, recognizing his evil presence in the world, and contemplating all we might have to endure to rid ourselves of that evil.

Many of the most new-agey self-help gurus, who otherwise say all sorts of warm and fuzzy things, fail to question and may even actively embrace the system we have. They may tell us that they, too, once had their doubts about capitalism and money. But, after riffling through the akashic records and consulting with their spirit guides from the Pleiades (or even consulting with the divine), they now understand that they secretly hated rich people, and secretly believed they didn’t deserve money. Now they adore rich people, they have abundant self-love, and they understand that money is just “energy,” and to master it we only need to “raise” our “vibrational frequency”.

The more frightening truth: Rejecting the pattern of insanity somehow seems like a greater sin than many other things we might find in our shadow. The only thing bigger than science in our culture is capitalism, and so the only sin bigger than being woo-woo is being a rebel against the economic system. And many of the people who like things our science considers woo-woo also like things capitalism sees as wonderful—like flying thousands of miles to conduct or to attend self-help programs, and in general spending and trying to make as much money as possible.

Rejecting the dominant culture’s central game amounts to an incredible taboo, one that (we imagine) comes with a scarlet letter of ignorance, since only fools would suggest we have an ethical obligation to come up with something better than the pattern of insanity that has us all in its grips.

And so our deepest, darkest secret stays way down in the shadow, with an aura of the forbidden. We suffer. The world hangs by a thread.

To understand how the deepest, darkest secret of our anxiety, depression, stress, strain, trauma, and so on gets manipulated by purveyors of self-help both inside and outside of the business world, we can look with a little care at the self-help catastrophe in general, so as to arrive at some insight into its nature.

A lot of the self-help industrial complex has essentially applied the logic of capitalism—which is the dominant form of conquest consciousness—it has applied the logic of capitalism to the wisdom traditions and the discoveries of those traditions.

This process echoes the division of labor lauded by Adam Smith, but it arises as a division of wisdom. The self-help-industrial complex breaks up holistic wisdom into fragments that purveyors of self-help in all its forms can master, package, and sell to us as tools, tactics, and trainings for our eager consumption—fragments they can brand as new, innovative, visionary, disruptive, and so on.

Because they offer fragments of wisdom, something in the fragments makes sense, even seems right, and has efficacy in our lives. But, as fragments, they will inevitably perpetuate and even deepen our problems—at personal and planetary scales.

Conquest consciousness breaks everything into pieces. In the division of labor, we take a task that would require extensive skill, and break it into parts that require little to no skill at all, in practical terms.

In the manufacture of a car, for instance, we may find no one involved in the entire process who could actually build a car from scratch. No one possesses the holistic knowledge and skill needed to make a car—from extraction of raw materials, through the creation of all components, to the final assembly of a working vehicle. But rather, each person has only some fragment or fragments of that knowledge and skill.

In the self-help catastrophe, the wisdom traditions get fractured into pieces, such that no one selling self-help in its typical forms has the holistic wisdom we need to live well together, in a manner that furthers the conditions of life. Rather, the purveyors of self-help find fragments of wisdom with powerful relative effects.

Wisdom is what works. But fragments of wisdom only work in fragmented ways, which means they create unintended negative side-effects that we may or may not easily notice.

This doesn’t happen in a malicious way in most cases. Often it happens with the kind of best intentions that pave the way to perdition.

In this process, the purveyors of self-help extract the fragments—usually from the collective psyche, rather than from direct, intensive study and practice in a holistic tradition—and they use the extracted material to produce self-help products. Extraction from the collective psyche often functionally feels like a “discovery” on the part of the self-help guru. But these “discoveries,” in their more holistic form, have been around for centuries, in some cases millennia.

The division of wisdom then gets packaged as things that sound new, insightful, and exciting: the subtle art of not caring too much, how to start with why, overcoming our inner saboteur, following the five-second rule, the art of doing nothing, the master key to achieving flow states, mindset magic, vagus nerve manipulation, the value of vulnerability, and other “tools” from the bottomless “toolkit” of capitalistic patterns of thought.

We should note how many of these claim to be “evidence-based”. This shows us again the ways science and technology go together with our current insanity. I’m not calling for a rejection of science and technology altogether, but we do need to see the ways what we now refer to as science empowers, perpetuates, and keeps us trapped in a pattern of insanity. Economics presents itself as a science, and it shares with physics the same kinds of metaphysical speculations presented as fact.

Science gets used to keep the pattern of insanity going, and science also gets used to develop self-help programs that keep us all entangled in that pattern of insanity. This does not mean science is all bad, but that we need to try and see clearly. And the ways we now use science for self-help will not reliably provide what we need and what the world needs.

The practices and the metaphysical assumptions of science limit us, and give us the semblance of power rather than liberating our true power. Taken together, our science, technology, politics, and economics lead us to create programs of self-help because of the very problems they create for us in the first place. That’s quite a con job.

Whether they derive directly from science or not, the various programs of self-help contain fragments of wisdom. Again, by self-help programs, we mean something very broad, which would include leadership programs, sales training, fancy consulting work, and more.

These programs only function because they contain fragments of wisdom. Those fragments allow self-help programs to achieve what seem like good results. But the results exclude the holistic perspective that would reveal their incoherence (and their redundance).

The classical, capitalistic division of labor depends on breaking up wisdom and breaking up Nature. The self-help catastrophe (which is just another vehicle of capitalism) applies that logic to the human soul and the soul of the world. In a deep sense, the basic gesture in self-help is the same as in capitalism: The fragmentation of life (which includes extraction from life), often for the sake of increasing profits.

Our considerations here have nothing to do with promoting a “socialist” agenda. Rather, we cannot avoid raising the central incoherencies of capitalism, because capitalism itself has never promised us wisdom. Playing the money game means ignoring that fact, and/or ignoring the ridiculousness of trying to pursue genuine happiness and wellbeing for self and world without a foundation of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In other words, the soul itself naturally rejects capitalism. It does so not because our souls are “communist,” but because capitalism keeps us out of attunement with spiritual and ecological realities. The soul wants wiser alternatives, and it knows we have the creativity and intelligence to develop them.

The self-help catastrophe, on the other hand, shrugs its shoulders and tries as slickly as it can to get us to double down on the ignorance we know, rather than leap toward unknown wisdom, love, and beauty.

We can scarcely fool the soul with notions like a “triple bottom line”. Spiritual and ecological realities don’t deal in bottom lines, but in circles, cycles, curves, fractals, discontinuities, and total interwovenness. Our own souls and the soul of the world know that capitalism must have “profit,” above all else, and thus “conscious capitalism” in all its forms amounts to oxymorons and rationalizations.

In capitalism, conquest consciousness pursues its extractions from beings and ecologies quite exclusively for the sake of profits. Because we now live in an artificial ecology of money, many self-help approaches do quite a lot of rationalizing so that they, too, can focus on making money by claiming to help us make money.

The self-help-industrial complex, as a vehicle of capitalism, is itself a capitalistic endeavor. Its aim, as an industry, thus has nothing to do with furthering the conditions of life and bringing genuine liberation to the human soul. Rather, it has the same single aim as other patterns of capitalist thought: Profit. As with any capitalist enterprise, this activity alienates us from ourselves, from each other, and from the world we share.

The way this works seems so often the same at a base level that one can become nauseated by the mindless repetition. But, on the surface, we find a seemingly endless display of little novelties vying for our attention as breakthroughs or secret formulas.

Again and again we see people trying to give us the hacks which they claim will help us overcome our anxiety, our depression, our boredom, our loneliness, our self-doubt, our lack of “productivity”. They offer us “atomic habits” to overcome the friction, tension, and heaviness in our lives, and techniques to address our experience of stress, strain, trauma, weariness, busyness, and a lack of deeper meaning and purpose.

Most importantly, of course—they will make us rich. Again, this isn’t the only goal of the self-help catastrophe, but it’s a common one (even if implicitly), and it’s integral to our cultural context—integral to our suffering too. The more a culture gets hooked by money, the more one needs money—not because it makes us happy in any meaningful sense, but because, in such a culture, the lack of money can bring us a great deal of misery.

We find here one of the clearest indications of the unhealthy nature of the dominant culture: A lack of money contributes significantly to stress, strain, and day to day suffering. Put another way, a culture that has made the world such that money can solve a lot of problems, a culture in which money can make life easier and more enjoyable for some, and more miserable for others—such a culture has lost its way, and cannot long endure.

When we see a culture like that, we see a vast ecology of suffering. That suffering may not always look like suffering. The wealthy may seem happy. But only because the culture has arranged the lives of its citizens in such a way that money can purchase a buffer that protects the wealthy from a significant level of struggle and strife, while providing entertainment, excitement, and prestige.

That doesn’t change the fact that those same privileged people lack the fuller happiness and liberation promised by the wisdom traditions of the world, and it doesn’t change the fact that the overall ecology produces suffering rather than nourishing the conditions of life.

The self-help-industrial complex then bursts into the midst of our various forms of suffering, and its gurus entice us with all manner of solutions for this suffering, many of which they claim are based in science, or are used to train Navy SEALs, or are featured in famous business platforms. It sounds convincing—and feels alluring.

If we look at these solutions with an eye of discernment, we find at least two regular tendencies. We’ve touched on them already, and we can now lay them out clearly.

First, none of them address the fact that the system itself has created much of our misery, and has put the conditions of life as we know it at existential risk. The self-help solutions always put the onus on us to accept the system, give in to its demands, and “take responsibility” for our lives in the most limited sense—a sense of responsibility that lacks wisdom, compassion, and grace.

We find limited tolerance of any critical thinking about the ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and so on of the larger system, or any serious inquiry into the role it plays in producing suffering in the world. Accordingly, the purveyors of self-help tell us we have no one to blame for our lack of “success” but ourselves—even if accepting that story means we must participate in a system that has proven itself exceptionally good at causing large-scale problems.

Secondly, every single one of the proposed solutions from the purveyors of self-help has a clear, direct, and far more holistic expression in the wisdom traditions. Every last one. We find nothing truly new—and, if we find anything even seemingly new, we also find it far more anemic and fragmented than the version of it we could receive from the wisdom traditions themselves.

Despite these facts, many of our “thought leaders” act like we modern people have discovered all these things ourselves. Many purveyors of self-help will claim to have put in years of effort “researching,” “studying human behavior,” attending “workshops,” spending time in nature, and other unreliable gestures of legitimacy.

Even if the research in question happened in a university setting, this still would leave us with the fragmentation so characteristic of science in the dominant culture. Our scientists are analysts, not sages; they seek knowledge, not wisdom, compassion, and grace.

Few if any purveyors of self-help acknowledge the wisdom traditions in any compelling way. Fewer still actually study them with sufficient sensitivity to their wholeness, or with any evidence of comprehensive understanding.

When we apply some discernment, we don’t usually sense much wisdom from these figures—but they do ooze confidence. They seem convinced that they have the answers we need, and, again, often with seemingly positive intentions that are likely sincere in many cases.

But it all serves to conveniently cut us off from the wisdom traditions. The convenience here goes not to us, but to the pattern of insanity that gives us all our symptoms. And the convenience also goes to the purveyors of self-help, who can more easily teach hacks, techniques, and “tools” than real wisdom, love, and beauty.

We thus take powerful practices, powerful medicine that belongs to the human soul and to the great mystery itself, and we set it loose to do whatever the system desires—whatever the pattern of insanity we’re embedded in needs in order to perpetuate itself.

Many purveyors of self-help act as if they understand a great deal, as if they know our darkest secrets, even though they ignore the deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret so many of us keep pushed down in the shadows of the soul.

As part of compassionate discernment, we have to separate the purveyors of self-help as human beings from their function in the pattern of insanity. We are all lived by powers we pretend to understand. As human beings, the purveyors of self-help may feel a sense of genuine concern for us and for the world. They may sincerely want to help us become the best versions of ourselves, and they may have some genuine sensitivity for our suffering and our struggles.

But they are also lived by the massive currents of the dominant culture. They have not just an identity as human beings, but also as participants in the culture, participants in the patterning of that culture.

The self-help-industrial complex moves through them, even if its movements might go against their better judgment as human beings—if they could discern those movements. It drives us all onward in the self-help catastrophe.

Consider your favorite purveyor of self-help, or any famous “thought leader,” whether in business or some other domain. Look carefully and you will see that they follow this basic playbook.

We’re not talking about the Dalai Lama or any legitimate spiritual teacher. We’re talking about the figures, great and small, who tell us how to solve our problems and “succeed”. Some of them have worked at universities and have advanced degrees, others never went to college. Some of them do focus on what they refer to as “spirituality,” but in ways that present little to no challenge to the pattern of insanity.

Many of them seem like nice people, and it’s important to emphasize that. Many of these people seem intelligent, creative, and caring. How wonderful it would be if all those fine qualities and all that passion and creativity went to work healing the community of life as a whole.

Because of their sincerity and confidence (which often come from real struggles in their lives), and also because they may have some knowledge and experience, we want to believe them. And, to say it again, they may have very nice intentions—

it’s not easy to fully process the fact that not everybody who feeds the pattern of insanity does so with mal intent. Indeed, often the opposite. That’s sometimes the hardest part to metabolize.

So our favorite gurus might have an intention to positively change the world, and they may have fragments of wisdom that carry a certain degree of efficacy. But because they don’t turn toward the deepest, darkest secret of our soul—the fact that our soul just doesn’t want to play this game anymore—then they don’t challenge the game itself in its most fundamental structure, which is incoherent.

This incoherence means the pattern of insanity goes against spiritual and ecological reality. It stands in fundamental contradiction to our own highest values, and it therefore keeps us all incoherent. The very presence of the game makes us less happy, less at peace with ourselves and each other, less attuned to spiritual and ecological reality.

The insanity and incoherence in turn mean that what the self-help catastrophe unleashes on us amounts to a real danger—that’s the catastrophic aspect.

Ironically enough, perhaps tragically enough, there really is a program out there called Zero to Dangerous, and that name captures the problem with unintended precision. And it falls right into the wheelhouse of a philosopher, which is why this podcast is called Dangerous Wisdom—we’re rejecting the whole framework of the self-help catastrophe that tells us we can and should go from zero to dangerous.

When we look at the marketing materials of this self-help program, we find the same basic moves of the self-help-industrial complex. And we don’t find any wisdom.

Imagine if I said I could take you from zero to Buddha or zero to Socrates or zero to Jesus in just a few weeks. It sounds silly. And that means any program offering to take us from zero to wise enough to assert our agenda on the world is most definitely a program that takes us from zero to dangerous—but, again, literally dangerous . . . dangerous to the conditions of life.

We need to understand why that sort of marketing works on us. It’s interesting to consider: If we can do something we feel competent at, we will feel on one level much better in our lives than if we try to pursue what we truly value but don’t think we can accomplish.

I may secretly value something, may secretly long to pursue something that just feels right to me, in the depths of my soul. But if I also doubt my capacity to succeed, then I will feel much worse, and will get caught up in delays, procrastination, laziness, failure, stress, anxiety, depression, and more.

And so I would much rather do something that feels accessible to me. It might not be what I long to do, but it’s what I feel competent at.

Think of what that does to us. Think of what this means if deep in our soul we long for a better world, we long to be of real help and service to others, we long for an end to injustice, we long for more quality time in Nature, we long for more quality time with friends and loved ones, we long for an end to ecological degradation, we long to help heal the land and protect the community of life, we long to trust and collaborate with each other, we long for meaning and purpose and true peace, happiness, and freedom.

And everything in the culture tells us we can’t attain those things. We get message after message telling us in countless subtle and overt ways that all of this amounts to idealistic nonsense, communism, Stalinism, the death of democracy, and utopian, pie-in-the-sky daydreams.

And we see how much power and aggression stands in the way of the soul’s longing. We feel helpless and incapable of pursuing the soul’s longing. And we just feel so much better if we give in and play along—if we do the jobs that we know we can do with competence and success, even if they feel meaningless at some level.

Understanding all of this puts our egocentric culture in a very different light—especially when we look from the clear perspectives offered by the wisdom traditions of the world.

In the dominant culture, we only really allow—and we in fact celebrate—the person who says, “I know,” the person who says, “I know what I’m doing.” And we don’t know how to properly recognize the limits of our ignorance.

Sadly, we’ve started to paste various limited labels over that issue. Instead of just calling it ignorance, we might call it patriarchy or white supremacy.

This in fact shows us how the system co-ops what seems like a nice intention. So we have this feeling that ignorance can express itself as what we call patriarchy, and we have the clear sense that certain people get marginalized in the dominant culture.

And what does the system do in response to this?

We think we’re being clever or spiritual, but the system itself wants us to say: “You have all the answers within you.” The self-help catastrophe and the coaching industry in particular, focus a lot on this notion that we each have all the answers withing us.

But all that does in practice is place the answers in yet another ego. It doesn’t create a genuine spiritual or philosophical revolution.

Socrates and Buddha did not mean the same thing that the self-help catastrophe means when it says, “you have all the answers within you.” And that gets us to part of the challenge: Someone takes a fragment of wisdom, and turns it into ignorance.

Yes, Buddha said everything you truly need to know is within you. Socrates said the same. But they meant it with a spiritual and philosophical depth and breadth that completely transcends the way that message comes across in the self-help-industrial complex and in the dominant culture in general.

The purveyors of self-help might say to us, “Well, I mean that your higher self has the answers, not your ego. I’m talking about your higher self.” But that makes no sense because if we look at the self-help catastrophe, we find it totally bound up with the marketplace—and not merely bound up with the marketplace, but swimming at full strength in the same direction of the currents of that marketplace.

And yet we all know that our higher self has no interest in this game. It may find the game amusing from a cosmic perspective, the way the gods might find human folly amusing. But the soul has no real interest in self-branding, creating a customer avatar, posting to social media, or working on search engine optimization.

Can you imagine Buddha sitting around saying, “You know, we’ve really got to get in touch with our customer avatar here”? Can you imagine Socrates or Jesus saying, “What we have here is a branding issue”?

Picture Socrates telling Plato, “I think I just needed better PR. That’s why they want to kill me. They’re executing me because of PR—not because I questioned everything they claimed to know, not because I challenged their egos, not because I challenged them precisely because they acted like they knew what they were doing when they didn’t, not because I challenged them to face their own ignorance. No. I just had a PR problem, and that’s what you need to pay attention to, Plato. Take it from me.

“And really think about search engine optimization, Plato. Oh, they don’t even have that yet, do they? Oh, well, don’t worry. That means you won’t be enlightened, Plato. But give it a few thousand years, maybe, I don’t know, two, three thousand years, something like that, and then people can get an incomplete education, and turn their desire to help the world into social media posts, self-published books, and a job as a life coach or a digital nomad who has no deep roots with the land and no deep connection with the wellsprings of wisdom.”

That may sound harsh, but we’re actually trying to honor our own souls, and the longing we feel to help the world, to attend to the sacred, to realize our fullest potential and purpose, and to enter into the wonder, mystery, magic, and inherent meaningfulness of our life, our world, and the cosmos itself.

We could call this the realization of our true self. Our true self has nothing to do with the pattern of insanity that has covered over our life and our world.

But we get sucked into the pattern of insanity for a variety of reasons. One we just touched on: That we feel powerless to dispel the pattern of insanity, and thus we feel we cannot act in the fullest alignment with our soul and our sacred values.

Moreover, as we mentioned, the pattern of insanity convinces us all that only fools or evil communists want to challenge it, and so we just feel awful when we ask hard questions. People can treat us like the enemy.

As we also tried to acknowledge, we also feel better when we go along with the pattern of insanity because our particular kind of insanity has created a situation the wisdom traditions see as horrifying: In our culture, poverty buys us misery. Money still can’t buy us happiness in the truest sense of the word, but poverty buys us so much misery, and money buffers us from so many headaches, that having money makes us feel comparatively wonderful.

As for a more meaningful life, the self-help catastrophe promises that, even if it can’t deliver the kind of meaning the soul hungers for. Worse yet, we have all gotten so deeply entangled and invested in the pattern of insanity that we can’t even guess what the meaning of life would be like without it.

We don’t know what it would mean to change, and we face a situation very much like physical dependence on a drug. It’s one thing to quit alcohol if you just drink and don’t have physical dependence, but if you have a physical dependence on the drug and you try to quit cold turkey, it can kill you. You have to get weaned off.

And William Burroughs put it very well, with poetic license, when he said that the difference between a junkie and an ordinary person is that a junkie metabolizes junk. They don’t metabolize food. If you take junk long enough, and you start to take enough of it, then eventually it changes your entire metabolism.

We need to think of that broadly. It’s not only that we become less interested in an apple than we are in getting more heroin. That’s true enough. But we also need to think of how it changes the way we metabolize our whole experience.

Then we can begin to understand the kind of shift that Burrows is talking about—and the kind of spiritual revolution that all the sages are talking about, because the sages tell us we are physically dependent on our suffering.

We behave like someone physically dependent on our suffering, and that that suffering mindset, that conquest consciousness, has changed the way we metabolize our whole experience.

That’s what the sages want to tell us, and when we look at the present situation, we can recognize, we can register that somehow or other we depend on the system we have to get from one day to the next. We depend on it.

But that dependence does not mean the system is good. Our dependence doesn’t indicate a moral or ethical endorsement of the system. It just has to do with the fact that we have become physically dependent on something fundamentally toxic.

That’s not a good thing. We don’t want to try to excuse that situation. We don’t want to perpetuate our profound addiction to alcohol because quitting it could kill us. That’s not the reason to keep taking alcohol.

Nor is it good enough if someone were to say, “Well, it won’t kill you to quit, but it might be really, really hard. You’re gonna go through a hell of a time.” Well, that’s not enough reason to keep taking the poison. The fact that it’s going be uncomfortable to quit doesn’t make it wise, loving, or beautiful to stay with the addiction.

And we seem to face that situation today. Something in us realizes we have become dependent, addicted to the pattern of insanity. And we sense that it might feel pretty uncomfortable to quit. Maybe not. Maybe it will feel far easier than we imagine.

Our dread for potential discomfort so often fails to match actual experience. We put off the simplest things because we think they will suck. We put off our taxes because we think it’s going to be such a hassle, we put off conversations because we think they will feel so uncomfortable or will create so much hostility, we stay in relationship because of how awful we think the breakup will be.

And we find out again and again that the things we want to avoid aren’t as bad as we imagines, and that putting them off created far more suffering than confronting them would.

In any case, we can all understand why an addict should quit, even if the process will indeed feel like a kind of torture. We know they will come out the other side better able to truly know themselves, better able to realize their fuller potentials, and better able to live in accord with spiritual and ecological realities. There’s nothing more valuable, and so the short-term suffering to get there pales in comparison.

There’s a surprisingly simple solution to all of this: We can get together and start talking about how to walk away from all these games. We can start to listen to our own souls and to the soul of the world. We can start to take back our time and our sanity, and let ourselves be nourished by the most incredible natural resource we have: Our interwovenness with each other, our capacity for true friendship and love, and the wisdom traditions that teach us how to realize our fullest potentials, beyond all the insanity.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share . . . send them in through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.