The Comfortable Radical

The world is transforming. As we move into the spiritual singularity, the old ways of doing things are breaking down: how we work, how we govern, how we relate to technology and to each other. You can feel it everywhere.

And for a lot of us, it feels like we’re on a runaway train. We can see where the tracks lead, and changing direction seems hopeless. So what does it mean to be a radical right now? And can you still be one if you’re comfortable?

Controlled opposition brainwashing

Part of what makes it feel hopeless is that counterculture movements have always carried at least some level of controlled opposition brainwashing. Sometimes it was literal. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program infiltrated and disrupted civil rights, anti-war, and leftist groups. During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom, bankrolling magazines, conferences, and art to shape what counted as cool and progressive.

More often, it’s softer. Advertisers embraced 1960s counterculture style almost immediately and turned rebellion into a product category. Gen X rebellion became a look you could buy: slouch, wear dirty clothes, be sad and mad. In the 2000s, a whole generation of eco-minded kids was taught that saving the planet was our personal responsibility. That idea was helped along by BP, whose 2004 campaign with the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather popularized the personal “carbon footprint” and the calculator to measure it. An oil company convinced us the pollution was our fault.

I’d add the Xanax SoundCloud era to that list. Here’s my rule of thumb: if your counterculture runs on drugs that make you less counterculture, you’re probably being psyoped.

In too deep

So it’s easy to feel disenfranchised. We’ve marched, we’ve protested, we’ve boycotted, and it hasn’t seemed to help. Occupy Wall Street was real opposition, and it got shut down fast. It feels like we’re in too deep.

I think of the elephant tied to a stake as a baby. It grows up strong enough to pull the stake out of the ground, but it never tries, because it still believes it’s tied up.

We are in a class war. And in a class war, it’s easy to assume that wealth is the opposite of a radical ideology. That if you have money, you’ve sold out.

Wealth isn’t the opposite of radical

There’s some truth to the fear. Political scientist Ben Ansell found that when homeowners’ house prices go up, they become less supportive of redistribution and social safety nets. When your own cushion grows, you stop wanting a shared one. Money can absolutely pacify you.

But look at what the wealthy actually do with their resources. In their 1995 book Voice and Equality, Sidney Verba, Kay Schlozman, and Henry Brady found that time, money, and civic skills are what predict political participation. And in a 2014 study of nearly 1,800 policy issues, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page found that U.S. policy tracks the preferences of affluent Americans far more closely than those of average citizens.

Comfort doesn’t make the rich passive. It makes them effective at standing up for, and defending, what they have. Imagine if radicals had that same capacity.

So long as you don’t let wealth pacify you or make you less interested in changing the world, riches can support your ability to manifest a higher-vibrational future, one with an equitable experience for everyone.

The tax of struggle

I know struggle from the inside. After college, I was eating out of dumpsters. Later, I worked three jobs and around 60 hours a week, commuting constantly, just to end the month with $50 left over. I still made art and posted videos with broken thrift-store keyboards, and I didn’t let poverty stop me. But I was angry, frustrated, and exhausted all the time.

There’s science behind that feeling. In 2013, Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao published a study in Science showing that poverty itself drains mental capacity. In one experiment, they asked shoppers at a New Jersey mall to think about an expensive car repair. Lower-income participants then performed worse on cognitive tests, a drop the researchers compared to roughly 13 IQ points or a full night’s lost sleep. In another, sugarcane farmers in India did better on the same kinds of tests after harvest, when they had money, than before it.

When your car is constantly broken and making loud noises, there’s a tax on you. Scarcity eats the bandwidth you’d need to organize, create, and dream. It can make you angrier and less able to act at the same time.

When you’re not struggling, you can more easily focus on what is good.

We are not meant to suffer

Here’s what I believe: we are not meant to suffer or struggle long term. Struggle is here to remind us to have empathy for others. I was born into a disenfranchised experience so I could understand it, so I could carry that compassion and that fire with me. The lesson isn’t to stay there.

Your feeling state is the most important thing for manifesting. If you’re stuck in scarcity, resentment, and exhaustion, that’s the frequency you’re broadcasting into the future you’re building.

So do your shadow work. Express your anger instead of swallowing it. Direct your frustration into radical change. And build a life where your spirit is truly fulfilled and happy, because a fulfilled radical is a powerful one.

Raise the vibration

Money doesn’t always mean fulfillment. But when you’re not worried about car repairs, you can focus on the relationships, art, and experiences that raise the vibration of earth. For me, that looks like infinite art supplies. That’s my yacht. I don’t want a yacht.

The question isn’t comfort versus chaos. It’s what you do with your surplus. You can use security to tune out, or you can use it as a launch pad to take the risks that people in survival mode can’t afford to take.

Be a comfortable radical. Keep the fire. Use what you have to build what everyone deserves.

Thank you for raising the vibration of earth. If this speaks to you, join UNICULT.

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