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Or maybe you include only the parts of you that end at your fingertips. Or maybe you include even less than that. Maybe not even your emotions. Maybe not even your dreams. Maybe nothing but your thoughts. And maybe not even those.

I just got a note from a friend who put it well, “People never leave or even look outside the bubbles they create to meet their own immediate gratification. This is how we’re taught to live: it’s the city model on a micro level. These hollow beings (be they cities or people) suck in everything from around them and create a wall of aggression to keep outsiders outside. The more hollow and empty they realize they’ve become on the inside, the more fiercely they attack, disable, and devour their surroundings. It occurs to me that in a very real sense, we cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”

She continued, “People see that the culture—and the same is true for many of our relationships—is broken in so many ways, and so unsustainable, but are terrified to probe too deep, because they think if it—civilization, their intimate relationship, whatever—crumbles, there might be nothing left. This is how we enter into these bubbles of perception—they form our earliest passage from a world of love to a world of fear and denial. It begins with wanting connection. And then we settle for something less, because we think the alternative is nothing at all. But our truth is still there—all of it is still there. We could wake up any time and reclaim the whole of our existence.”174

Precisely because those in power are so dependent (for their power, for their lives) on those they exploit, they must convince themselves and especially these others the opposite is true. Between open-mouthed kisses, fathers tell daughters no man could ever treat them so well. As carcinogens accumulate in our bodies (in our bones, organs, fat) movies, TV shows, magazines, and newspapers inculcate us to believe that without police (who count it among their jobs to protect the property and processes of polluters from the outrage and bombs of dying citizens) we would all be murdered in our sleep. As bombs (their bombs, never our bombs) fall on human beings around the globe (human beings who want to live and love and be loved and see their children grow to live and love and be loved) we are told by politicians that bombs (their bombs, never our bombs) are necessary to make the world safe for something they call democracy. As forests are felled, rivers poisoned, soil toxified, as we see beautiful wild places we love destroyed, as we watch our grandparents, cousins, brothers, sisters, lovers, children, ourselves wasting away from cancer, the whole culture tells us time and again the same message: you cannot survive without this culture, without civilization.

All of these messages are feasible only because of outrageous narrowing and blurring of our ability to perceive and to think clearly. Safety must be made to seem dangerous, and danger must be made to seem safe. Benevolence comes to be called violence, and violence comes to be called benevolence. Fear feels like love, and love feels like fear.

I have experienced this. My father trained me well. I hated him when I was young, for the rapes I endured, the beatings I witnessed. But when he left, when I was maybe ten, I also felt deeply betrayed, and I hated him all the more for this further betrayal. At the time we did not talk about it, but I later learned from my sister that my father also raped her, and that she felt something similar when he left. She ran away. Later he came back. I hated him even worse for that. Later he left again. Still I hated him. I hated him for what he did to me, and I hated him for leaving behind a hollowed-out shell of me when he left.

All of this was precisely the sort of preparation I would need for a life of giving myself away, preparation for a process of schooling in which I was to give myself away to teachers, in preparation for a life of wage slavery, when I was to give myself away to the highest (monetary)