Capitalist ideology convinces us to confuse material wealth with happiness. Even a lot of us on the left get stuck in this idea. But we can really benefit from breaking apart the justice of meeting our material needs from the idea that material wealth leads to happiness.

Many people have explained this in interesting ways. For example: Oscar Wilde argued that we need to abolish private property so that instead of spending our lives trying to accumulate things, or the symbols for things, we can actually live our lives.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the importance of this when he called for us to get on the right side of the world revolution by having a radical revolution of values here at home, specifically a "shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society."

MLK points out values must change *before* we can change conditions:

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Angela Davis points out how often even radical activists ignore this issue:

"I think the lack of critical engagement with the food that we eat demonstrates the extent to which the commodity form has become the primary way in which we perceive the world." https://www.radioproject.org/2012/02/grace-lee-boggs-berkeley/

Using the example of food, Angela Davis notes how we rarely go further than what Marx called "the exchange value of the actual object."

She says "we don’t think about the relations that that object embodies."

Angela Davis argues that instead of uncritical participation these processes of capitalism, it would be truly revolutionary "to develop a habit of imagining the human relations and non human relations behind all of the objects that constitute our environment."

It isn't wealth, fame, or power that will make us happy, bring justice, and repair our world. It's changing our system of values and relations. Not only with each other but with all life on Earth, and with all environments on and beyond Earth.

Capitalist ideology has shaped our minds, so we will have to change our minds to change the world.

We have to see reality in a fundamentally different way than the way that everything in our society teaches us to see.

This is connected to the argument that @bellhooks has made that "the most important field of activism, particularly for Black people, is mental health."

When we think about systems of injustice it's not just what they have done to the material world, but to our minds as well.

bell hooks points out how vital it is to change our minds:

"When my students say they want to change the world, I espouse an inward to outward movement.

If you feel that you can’t do shit about your own reality, how can you really think you could change the world?"

When capitalism and racism and other violent ideologies shape our minds but we fight for justice without working to fix that harm first, what do we get?

bell hooks: "When you’re fucked-up and you lead the revolution, you are probably going to get a pretty fucked-up revolution."

Changing our minds can start with therapy. One reason we need universal healthcare.

It can continue with just stopping, practicing silence, doing deep looking and listening. This can help us find out who we are beyond what capitalism has told us we are. https://twitter.com/OmanReagan/status/1348494368424935425

A simple practice anyone can do is to just stop and breathe. Basic mindfulness.

People will wonder: How is that going to help when millions are suffering?

It helps because we need to learn how to exist, how to live, and how to think outside of capitalism, colonialism, etc.

If we can't learn to work on our trauma and suffering, to step outside of *all of this* and stop, breathe, and be ourselves we're not going to be able to think or act outside of the systems that created that trauma and suffering. https://twitter.com/OmanReagan/status/1349175433556676608

When we rush headfirst into trying to solve problems, we often get caught up in the same logic of the system that created the problems to begin with. Because for many people that system also produced us, taught us, raised us. https://twitter.com/OmanReagan/status/1348077804462620673

One benefit of learning to stop and just be is that we can see the situation more clearly. We take time to look deeply at the causes and conditions, see the interconnections, the history, everything that brought us to that moment.

This way our solutions don't cause more harm.

After September 2001, Thich Nhat Hanh spoke at Riverside Church about how to respond to anger and the desire for revenge. This thread shares highlights from that speech. https://twitter.com/OmanReagan/status/1348080263373340673

We can think of many other examples of how the impulse for revenge after injustice leads to suffering.

We've been taught to seek revenge for wrongs, to want lots of wealth and material possessions, to believe that things are scarce and capitalism is necessary.

We can unlearn.