It is Not Going to Get Better (But…)

"Guernica" by Pablo Picasso (1937)

That’s quite the apocalyptic headline for the first essay of the year. But it is less about pessimism and more about healthy non-attachment.

One of the terms I learned last year was “luxury beliefs”. This is a more accurate and less social justice-y way of saying “privilege”. The persistent idea that “things will get better” is too often a collective form of spiritual and intellectual bypassing practiced by people with resources, status, and general safety. It may be called “faith”, but it is most often about the assumption that what used to work will somehow work again; that a system that produced stability for said group will somehow stabilize.

That is not true, either spiritually or systemically.

This is partially why people without “luxury beliefs” often speak about the long game. A quote by Theodore Parker (and famously paraphrased by Martin Luther King, Jr):

“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

So there is no going back.

There is a future, but it is not some version of what used to be.

The Spiritual Reality

The luxury belief version of spirituality assumes consciousness wins because consciousness deserves to win. That awakening spreads naturally; that humanity evolves toward enlightenment on some predetermined schedule. This treats spiritual development like technological progress, as if awareness compounds automatically across generations.

It doesn’t work that way.

Every generation starts from scratch. Consciousness does not transfer through DNA or culture. Each human being must make the same fundamental journey from identification with ego to awareness of awareness. The work happens one person at a time, and most people never start. The ones who do start often quit. The ones who don’t quit often get captured by spiritual ego, which produces teachers and movements that look like progress but function as new forms of the same old unconsciousness.

The spiritual traditions based on Universal Wisdom all say the same thing in different languages: The default state is sleep. Waking up requires enormous sustained effort. Staying awake requires more. The forces that keep people asleep are not accidental. They are structural features of embodied consciousness. Fear, desire, identification, the need for certainty, the addiction to being right. These are not bugs in human psychology. They are how ego maintains itself.

Ego does not want to die. It will use anything to survive, including spiritual practice. This is why every tradition warns about spiritual materialism, about turning the path into another achievement, about mistaking insight for transformation. The number of people who have profound spiritual experiences vastly exceeds the number of people whose lives actually change as a result. Awakening is not rare. Integration is rare. Sustained awakening that alters behavior and produces wisdom is vanishingly rare.

Further, the myth that history shows a steady increase in human consciousness is simply not true. It shows cycles and periods of awakening followed by periods of forgetting. Wisdom traditions emerge, flourish, calcify, and collapse. The teachings get diluted, weaponized, or abandoned. What remains often serves power rather than liberation.

The idea that “things are getting better” spiritually confuses access to information with transformation. We have more spiritual books, more teachers, more retreats, more apps than ever before. That does not mean more people are awake. It means more people are consuming spirituality as content. The marketplace for enlightenment grows while the number of people doing the actual work remains roughly constant.

This is not pessimism. This is what the mystics have always said. The work is hard. Most people won’t do it. The ones who do will face everything they’ve been avoiding their entire lives. They will lose the identities they built. They will outgrow the communities that shaped them. They will become incomprehensible to the people who knew them before. The path does not lead to comfort. It leads to truth, and truth destroys more than it preserves.

So the spiritual war continues. Each generation fights the same battle. Consciousness does not win permanently. It wins in moments, in individuals, in small communities that hold the practice long enough to produce a few people who actually wake up. Those people become the seed for the next cycle. That is the long arc Reverend Parker was speaking about.

The Systemic Reality

Complexity science and systems thinking reveal something most people find unbearable: large-scale systems are shaped by feedback loops, incentive structures, and emergent properties that no single actor controls. When a system becomes sufficiently complex, it develops its own logic. That logic operates according to what allows the system to persist.

We are watching this play out in real time. ICE raids targeting communities that have lived here for decades. The wildly unconstitutional acts of asking masked men in uniform asking for IDs, pepper spraying observers, and going door-to-door. The killing of Rene Good by a Border Patrol agent who faced no immediate threat. These are the system working as designed. The cruelty is structural.

Under Trump (and really, Steven Miller), immigration enforcement operates as a system optimized for control. It stabilizes around the interests of the people who benefit from a permanent underclass of exploitable labor and a visible enemy to justify expanded state power. The raids, the family separations, the deaths are features, not bugs. They serve the system’s actual function, which is to maintain hierarchies of citizenship, to enforce obedience to the state, and to demonstrate state capacity for violence against populations with limited ability to resist.

The people horrified by these events believe the system has failed. The system has succeeded at its actual purpose. The failure lives in the belief that the system was ever designed to do something else.

This same pattern appears across every large-scale coordination mechanism humans have built. Economic systems optimize for profit extraction within legal and social constraints. When profit requires harm (exploitation of labor, destruction of ecosystems, over-extraction of resources) the system is producing harm in the most efficient way possible.

This is why reform fails more often than it succeeds. Reform assumes the system wants to be better. Systems perpetuate the conditions that allow them to persist. When those conditions include inequality, corruption, or structural violence, the system defends those features because removing them destabilizes the entire structure.

The murder of Rene Good will produce outrage, maybe some performative accountability theater, then business as usual. The system absorbs the shock and continues. This happens because the people running the system operate inside incentive structures that reward the behavior that produced the killing in the first place. Agents who demonstrate willingness to use force get promoted. Departments that show aggressive enforcement get funding. Politicians who promise to be tough on immigration get elected.

Real change requires destabilization. It requires breaking feedback loops that have been reinforcing themselves for decades or centuries. That happens through crisis, through external shock, or through the patient construction of alternative systems that eventually outcompete the old ones. None of these paths are fast. None of them are guaranteed. Most attempts fail.

The people who believe things will naturally get better also confuse technological progress with systems evolution. Technology changes rapidly. Social systems change slowly. The gap between what is technically possible and what is socially achievable grows wider every year. We have the capacity to create humane immigration systems, to distribute resources equitably, to hold state violence accountable. We just lack the social systems, political will, and economic incentives to deploy those capacities in ways that actually solve the problems.

Complexity science also teaches us about phase transitions. Systems appear stable for long periods, then shift rapidly into new configurations when certain thresholds are crossed. We cannot predict when those thresholds will be reached. We cannot control what configuration emerges on the other side. The new system will stabilize around whatever feedback loops assert themselves first in the chaos of transition.

What we are witnessing now may be the leading edge of phase transition. The ICE raids, the normalized state violence, the collapsing distinction between enforcement and persecution are signaling a system reorganizing around more authoritarian configurations. The people who expected liberal democracy to self-correct are discovering that democracy is just another system. It stabilizes around the incentives that shape it. When those incentives reward consolidation of power, suppression of dissent, and scapegoating of vulnerable populations, democracy produces fascism legally - and efficiently.

People who understand systems expect things to reorganize. Some people will find themselves in better positions in the new configuration. Most will do worse. The transition will be chaotic. The people most vulnerable in the current system—immigrants, the poor, communities of color, anyone without wealth or citizenship as protection—will be most vulnerable during the transition.

So the long game is building parallel structures, alternative networks, and resilient communities that can function outside the dominant system’s logic. It is preparing for phase transition by creating the seeds of what might stabilize afterward. It is accepting that you will see only a fragment of the outcome in your lifetime and doing the work anyway.

Because the arc bends and someone has to keep bending it.

You do this because the alternative is complicity with a system that kills people like Rene Good and calls it enforcement.

But there is a “but”... You can get better.

The system will reorganize around forces beyond your control. Your identity, your consciousness, your capacity all remain yours to develop. This has always been true for people living under oppressive systems.

Every community that survived systemic violence did so by refusing to let the system determine their internal condition. They developed practices that produced resilience, dignity, and power that existed independent of what the state granted or withheld. They knew the long game required people who could stay sane, stay connected, and stay capable of action across decades of uncertainty.

This is preparation for collective action that actually sustains itself. Movements fail when people burn out, fracture under pressure, or lose the capacity to think clearly in crisis. They succeed when people show up grounded, connected, and capable of making decisions that serve something larger than immediate relief.

You get better so you can be useful for longer. So you can hold steady when others panic. So you can offer something beyond your own survival. So you become the kind of person who can help build what comes next.

Five Ways to Get Better

1. Deepen Your Spiritual Practice

Spiritual practice is how oppressed peoples have maintained dignity, clarity, and moral authority through every cycle of violence and extraction. It is how they preserved their humanity when systems treated them as expendable.

This means daily contact with something larger than the immediate crisis. Meditation, prayer, contemplative reading, time in silence and/or in nature. The specific form matters less than the consistency. You are training your nervous system to remain present when everything in you wants to flee or fight. You are building the capacity to witness your fear, your rage, your grief and continue to act from clarity.

Real spiritual practice produces discernment. You learn to distinguish between what you can influence and what you face as given conditions. You direct energy toward actual leverage points. You develop the ability to act from groundedness rather than reactivity. Deeper spirituality teaches you how to fight with more intention and precision.

2. Create Something That Tells the Truth

Creativity is how people bear witness to the truth when the official record is all bullshit and lies. Art, writing, music, film are how marginalized communities documented their reality and transmitted their experience across generations.

A creative practice keeps you sane. It gives you somewhere to put the grief and rage. It transforms passive suffering into active meaning-making. You are translating experience into form. That act of translation is itself a form of power.

So… write what you witness. Paint what you feel. Record the voices of the people around you. Document the small moments of resistance and care that the official story will miss. This is how future generations will understand what actually happened. This is how they will know they are part of a longer story.

3. Build and Tend Community

Oppressed peoples survived because they built networks of mutual aid when the state abandoned them. They shared food, labor, childcare, and shelter. They created parallel institutions (churches, social clubs, underground schools) that provided what the system withheld.

Your task is to learn who has the skills and resources you need and what skills and resources you can offer. This means showing up in physical space with actual people. Attend the meet-ups, organize the potluck, check on your neighbors.

Community is also where you craft the future you want to see. If you want a world based on cooperation, you build that in microcosm now. You create structures where people make decisions together, where labor is valued regardless of market price, where care is understood as collective responsibility. These experiments teach as much through their failures as through their successes. You do them anyway because the learning compounds.

4. Reclaim Your Self-Worth from External Validation

The system gains power by convincing you that your value derives from what it grants you. Citizenship, employment, credentials, property, status become the measures of worth. When the system withdraws or threatens to withdraw these things, people collapse. They lose their sense of who they are because they built their identity on permissions the system can revoke.

Oppressed peoples have always known this trap. So they built cultures of affirmation that existed outside state recognition. They celebrated each other’s humanity when the law denied it. They created rituals of honor and belonging that required no official sanction. They taught their children that their worth was inherent, grounded in their existence and spirit.

You reclaim this by doing the internal work to locate your value in something the system has no access to. Your capacity for love, your moral clarity, your creativity, your courage to act with integrity when doing so costs you something. These are qualities you cultivate through practice and prove through action.

5. Study History and Learn the Patterns

You get better by learning how people navigated previous phase transitions. What did communities do during the last authoritarian turn? How did they protect vulnerable members? What infrastructure allowed them to survive when official support disappeared? Which forms of resistance were effective and which were performative?

This requires reading beyond the sanitized versions taught in schools or reduced to simplistic drivel on social media. It means seeking out firsthand accounts, oral histories, and analysis from the people who lived through what you are facing now. It means recognizing that the current moment has precedent and that precedent contains useful information.

Studying history also inoculates you against both despair and false hope. You see that the arc really does bend, but the bend happens across generations and requires enormous sustained effort. You see that ordinary people have faced worse and found ways to preserve what mattered. You see that action always matters. You learn to think in decades rather than news cycles. You develop patience grounded in pattern recognition.

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This is your time.

If you have resources, status, or safety that others lack, you face a different kind of work. The luxury belief that things naturally improve has insulated you from understanding how systems actually function. That insulation is ending.

The practices remain the same. Spiritual depth. Creative witness. Community building. Internal worth. Historical study. But your relationship to them differs. You are learning what others already knew. You are discovering that the stability you took as permanent was always conditional. You are recognizing that your citizenship, your credentials, your property granted you access, they did not make you safe from fascism.

The people who already understand this can teach you if you are willing to learn. They have been preparing for collapse your entire life. They built parallel structures while you trusted official ones. They located their worth outside state validation while you collected degrees and titles. They studied resistance while you studied management.

You get better by accepting that your previous advantages will matter less as the system reorganizes. By recognizing that survival increasingly depends on skills the market never valued: growing food, repairing things, resolving conflict, caring for the vulnerable, building trust across differences.

You get better by using whatever resources you still control in service of something larger than your own comfort. By showing up in ways that actually cost you something. By becoming the kind of person others can depend on when things get harder.

The arc bends because people with options choose to use them well. The transition needs you awake, capable, and committed to something beyond your own preservation.