Karl Marx | Anne of Blue Bus Books

It’s Not All Good!

by Calliope Braintree

The Conscientious Contrarian

I’m extremely spiritual and metaphysical. I revel in the woo-woo. But enough is enouph. The saying “It’s all good” bothers me. It’s not. There’s a whole lot that’s bad…that’s very very bad. Colonialism, military spending, genital mutilation, both here and abroad, deforestation, rampant consumerism, rape, murder, ethnic cleansing, Monsanto…the coming Extinction Event. The list goes on and on and on, ad nauseum. And while it’s true that good can and does emerge out of the struggle with bad, the way order emerges out of chaos, it goes the other way, too. Horrible situations do not always get resolved. Sometimes they get worse.

If we’re here to learn lessons that improve the quality of our souls, we have to stop being so arrogant, simplistic and naive. We have to actually learn the lessons we’re here to learn, not pretend we already have, like we’re above it all, smiling benignly at the supposedly less evolved. “It’s all good,” we say with a patronizing pat on the head. Ugh! The nerve! The arrogance! Because whatever we think we’ve learned? Is a drop in the bucket. We can choose our response to things, and we should. It does make an enormous difference. But it is most definitely not all good.

The economist Karl Marx described religion as the opiate of the masses. It helps oppressors oppress. When people believe they’ll be “rewarded” in the after life for the suffering they’ve endured in this, plantation and sweat-shop owners smile. Metaphysics is no different. If it’s all Maya, all an illusion, then the horrors can continue unimpeded. What’s the difference?

Meta means beyond. As in better than? Or just in addition to? Either way, it’s meaningless without the physics. The concept’s impossible without first being alive, in a physical body. So why ignore physical reality in favor of what’s beyond it? Opiate. It’s like the thing with the cup. Is it half empty or half full? Positivists say “it’s half full” while negativists insist, “no, it’s half empty.” This either/or reasoning is not doing anybody any good. It’s a lie. Because actually? Most things are both. Positive and negative are not mutually exclusive. They are one and the same. Look at the cup in your mind’s eye. The bottom half is full and the top half is empty.

There is immense power in positive thinking, but what about the power of lying to yourself?