Rage against the system

There are moments in the last couple of years that are recurring more frequently.

Are moments of rage.

Image picture of PRIVATE Photo Review cover of #42 on Social Issues
Photo by John Lambrichts

I’m trying to write this down so that I can understand it better.

The more I learn about injustices, the more is getting difficult to cope with their reality.

We live in a extremely unjust system: capitalism, global poverty, consumerism, climate change, concentration of wealth and power, unequal distribution of basic social services healthcare and education, global surveillance, intolerance against minorities, gender injustice, racial prejudices, wars propagating across decades, and more, and more… a long list of interconnected social issues.

Most of us, privileged, keep following the rules of this system.
Most of us, privileged, are embedded in the matrix, keep hiding to ourselves the unjust truth.
By lying to ourselves we keep acting as an ingenuous source of unintentional consequences that propagates in this system causing on the other end suffering, despair, death, injustice.
And I feel like sometime it’s easy to identify the individual causes of injustice but most of the times I cannot blame anyone in particular, that the problem is just propagating in the complexities of our social system.

Sometimes there’s a part of despair in me due to the inability to react. Despair that doesn’t last more than few seconds: it becomes rage.
There are moments that my inner self wants to scream against all of this. There are moments that I actually scream in my little silent closet.

I believe in dialogue, compassion, reconciliation, non-concentration of power, anarchy, peaceful civil disobedience, suspension of judgement and all… all of this situation makes me angry. I’m angry that this feeling of rage becomes the only alternative and that this feeling is causing a contradiction to the above beliefs: rage does not lead to dialogue and reconciliation.

I still keep embedding myself in the system, I still lie to some of my beliefs and I find difficult to resist to its forces.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning accepting the daily wage slavery and going to collaborate within organizations that do not stand on the same side of my beliefs. By doing this I also know that I’m getting influenced, or better, infected again by traditional behaviour, moral codes and beliefs… and it’s difficult to stand against all of them.

I started keeping a little note in my pocket with me that says “I wake up”.
It’s an awakening process that took years and I fear one day I will begin to accept going back rather than wake up again.

Sometimes what keeps me going is the hope that at the end of the day I’m doing my best to ethically steal to the rich guys in the Global North to contribute back to the ones in need in the underdeveloped parts of the Global South. Another reaction that is in contradiction with my core beliefs: virtually stealing instead of dialogue.

I also think that standing in this situation is an excuse to keep lying to myself, that in reality alone I’m too weak to contrast this system, that I’m not brave enough to start more openly disobeying against it so I keep partially embedding myself into it.

These are my moments of rage against the system.

There are moments in which we might feel powerless, but we are not.
We need to come together, organise, explain and support each other against the threats in this social system.

We need to come together as a new system to defeat the system.