I need you to know something.
I need you to know that it's okay to be a beginner.
In this whole political activism, local and global solidarity, and community thing. It's okay to be a beginner.
Because the truth is that many of us are brand new to this space. Many of us are not seasoned political organizers and we don't know the first thing about community building.
Many of us were living relatively comfortable lives and were blissfully unaware of the world's problems until one came knocking on our front door, repeatedly.
And while the ongoing Palestinian genocide is a big problem that knocked on a lot of our doors and radicalized us for the better, many of us had already encountered other large-scale, but maybe not so blatantly horrific problems, in our everyday lives that already had us questioning the world around us and trying to do better.
But the truth is, that even if you've been slowly disentangling yourself from capitalistic imperialism for a minute now, it's likely that you're still a beginner.
This is especially true if your radicalization started anytime after Donald Trump became the President.
So why am I talking about being a beginner?
Because things have gotten particularly unhinged on social media as of late. This is always to be expected when Mars is in Gemini, but it's deeper than that. It's a trend that I've noticed since the early days of Black Lives Matter, which is that the beginners in the room (especially the white ones) have this wild egoic tendency to hold themselves out as the experts on the matter of liberation.
In the "this is how we get free" conversation, beginners tend to make a lot of (extremely unnecessary) noise.
Beginners tend to shout that the only way to get free is to do this or do that. And they tend to shout it at people who have been working on getting free for actual decades.
Beginners love to shout about getting free from capitalism and burning down the system without any sort of risk calculation regarding short and long-term harm reduction and whether and how it matters.
Beginners tend to demand immediate solutions to problems that are more than a millennium in the making.
Speaking of milennia, beginners tend to think about our problems as beginning and ending with capitalism and have no understanding of the historical context of empire or the fact that capitalism is just another cycle of empire.
Beginners do not understand that the normalization of the violence we see in today's society pre-dates the Roman Empire.
Beginners tend to think (and shout) in binaries and have no capacity for complexity. I think this is because beginners are so overwhelmed. They are so overwhelmed by the injustices they are waking up to that they accidentally entangle their nervous system regulation with liberation.
That is to say that beginners unconsciously create co-dependent relationships between their nervous systems and liberation. One where they can only achieve nervous system regulation when we are free. That's why they shout for immediate solutions. Because they don't understand that part of their responsibility to the movement is being able to recognize when they are at capacity and tend to their nervous system so they can continue the fight.
Instead, beginners feel when their nervous system is at capacity, do nothing to tend to it, and shout their dirty pain at their organizing elders in the hopes that it will make them feel better.
Beginners are desperate to simplify complex problems. They long to make multi-dimensional problems one-dimensional. Beginners want "if this, then that" liberation logic puzzles to solve and get angry when none exist.
That's because most beginners (again, especially the white ones), are driven by ego.
Most people who one day find themselves ascribing to the benefits of whiteness and then the next day trying to renounce its benefits without actually releasing the specific benefits of whiteness that they've grown accustomed to are used to having a sort of societal authority.
After all, people are supposed to listen to whiteness and cede authority to whiteness. Therefore, it's only natural for beginners who are still tethered to their whiteness to walk into the liberation room and expect to be treated as the authority.
So let me tell you this matter of factly:
If you're a beginner, the best thing you can do for yourself and the movement is to allow yourself to move through an ego death.
Liberation will never be won with ego. And, the truth is that you don't know better and it will probably be over a decade before you do.
To me, learning is the most natural facilitator of an ego death.
So if you're a beginner or know someone who is a beginner, choose learning over shouting. Accept that you aren't an authority and shift into learning about and observing the work of liberation.
This automatically requires you to cede that whiteness authority you never earned. And I don't say this to just white people, for it also applies to nonwhite folks who have played the respectability politics game as a means of earning the privileges and authority of whiteness.
When you step back into the role of observing and learning, you automatically put your ego in check because you relinquish the false sense of authority over others that you thought you created for yourself by subscribing to whiteness.
Contrary to what some of you may believe, I'm a beginner too and my favorite resource for learning at the moment is The Empire Podcast. I know I've mentioned it before, but studying various empires throughout history helps you see that none of what we are experiencing about the Western Empire is new.
I'm currently listening to the Ottoman Empire series where the Turks were the center of everything and the empire of tolerance (compared to Europe), even though they were still firmly in the business of conquering. They were so powerful that England spent nearly two centuries trying to get their attention to ally with them before ever getting a real response. That is to say, England was so insignificant that it took 200 years for the Turks to respond to their repeated letters. Talk about desperate.
But that's what studying history does. It generally reminds us that what we're experiencing is cyclical and who's on top and who's on the bottom depends on which turn of the cycle we're in.
It also tells us that it will take a lot more than 1 month of shouting on the internet, or 6 months of protesting, or 1 year of divesting, or 5 years of education to break a cycle that is literal millennia old.
It tells us that the most important thing is to maintain the struggle and fortify the solidarity at every turn.
And it teaches us how to avoid repeating the same mistakes (the parallels between Steve Bannon's diagonal alliance between gym rats, conspiritual wellness, anti-Vaxxers, and Neo-Nazis and the alliance that the first Supreme Leader of Iran (Khomeini) formed with communist lefties to take down the last Shah is quite eery).
So if you're a beginner like me, then I encourage you to become a voracious reader, a documentary watcher, and a podcast listener to learn about the things that were intentionally omitted from your formal education.
It will humble you and it will turn you into a better ally and contributor to the movement.
May you choose love over fear and safety over comfort,
Brionna
