The Body Politic

“Body Politic” by William Stoneham

What is the cost of giving a shit? The price for not joining the apathetic?

Those who have long fought against injustice in the world can already answer those questions. But if you are, like me, new to real activism and resistance, you may not be able to see that the cost is far deeper than financial or lost friendships. Righteous anger feels so damn good! An enemy to fight every day gives a sense of purpose; a long-sought desire for noble work.

No matter how righteous the emotion is, there is no free lunch. It always costs something and what is spent must be replenished.

The work of resistance doesn’t come with an instruction manual on what happens to your body and soul when there is sustained confrontation with systems designed to break you. The exhaustion accumulates in ways you don’t recognize as political until you’re already running on fumes. The rage builds in your chest and you tell yourself you’ll process it later. Even with the tools of consciousness and therapy, your nervous system starts operating from a threat baseline you’ve normalized as just how things are now.

Herein lies the lesson that all effective Systems Shakers have learned: without self-care, we become what we are fighting.

That’s because the body politic isn’t some abstract concept about how societies organize themselves into hierarchies and systems. It’s the actual aggregated state of every nervous system. Your internal experience doesn’t remain private or separate from collective outcomes.

Audre Lorde called self-care an act of political warfare because she understood that you can’t dismantle a system while your body runs on that system’s foundational logic. Threat response is authoritarian infrastructure. Demand for certainty is authoritarian infrastructure. Relating through domination or collapse is authoritarian infrastructure. You think you’re resisting, but you are subconsciously reproducing a similar system.

The separation most of us experience between our internal state and collective outcomes operates as a kind of perceptual gap rather than actual metaphysical fact. We feel isolated in our struggles. We experience our dysregulation as private failure. Meanwhile, dysregulated humans create dysregulated institutions with the same reliable consistency that water flows downhill.

The body politic can’t exceed the collective nervous system capacity of the bodies that comprise it, which means your individual work on yourself isn’t separate from political work. It is political work.

The Illusion of Separateness

Complexity science and mysticism agree on a most inconvenient truth: you’re not an isolated unit making choices that only impact you. You’re a node in a network where every pattern you normalize propagates outward and every unhealthy cycle you are in becomes part of the overall energy field.

Complexity science describes how individual parts interact to generate properties none of those parts possess on their own. Neurons fire and brains think. Citizens vote and populations generate culture. Nobody designed consciousness or political norms. The system just becomes what its accumulated patterns make it. Your dysregulation feeds the algorithm. Your refusal to rest teaches the culture that rest is weakness. Your apocalyptic thinking shows up as apocalyptic strategy.

“We are all connected. We are all part of the same unfolding story. The very laws of the universe guarantee that we will affect one another.”
- - Stuart Kauffman - theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher

Mystics call this the Law of Correspondence and frame it as metaphysics instead of mathematics, but they’re describing the same operational reality. Your internal state and external conditions aren’t separate domains that occasionally influence each other. They’re the same field expressing at different scales. Harm you normalize in your own thinking becomes harm the institution runs on. Fear you carry in your body generates fear-based structures in the collective. The universe doesn’t moralize about this. It just mirrors it back with perfect fidelity.

“That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.”
- - Jesus of Nazareth

I believe Jesus wasn’t providing some abstract rhetoric about Oneness. He was teaching about ontology; that the separation you experience between self and system is perceptual error, not metaphysical fact. When you actually grasp non-separation, the body politic stops being an organizational metaphor and starts being a description of what’s structurally true.

You are the system. The system is you. There’s no exemption clause.

We Become the Abyss

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
- - Friedrich Nietzsche

We all have our own abyss.

Mine comes from a threat-detection system where ambush is a baseline reality. Enneagram 8 intensity meets ADHD pattern-matching meets trauma architecture that taught me the world runs on a dark binary of domination or submission. Consciousness has taught me a different, more hopeful reality. But when depleted and I don’t rest and recalibrate, I escalate into worst-case scenario planning, pervasive doom loops, and a binary choice between attack mode or isolation mode. These happen to be the exact relational mechanics that authoritarianism runs on, which means my dysregulation doesn’t make me a better resister. It makes me a better recruit for the thing I’m trying to dismantle.

The dysregulation doesn’t stay private or internal. It shows up in my tone, my writing, my leadership, the energy I emit in every interaction. If I don’t interrupt it with actual practice, I become what I’m resisting: someone who allows intensity to be destructive instead of building with it. Then the very thing I hate the most, injustice, is running my nervous system and using my body as its vehicle.

Examining Your Body Politic

Four systems will run you if you don’t run them first:

Your nervous system operates as a pattern detection and response apparatus that learns from every encounter what kind of world you’re living in. Chronic threat activation teaches it that enemies are everywhere, certainty is survival, and nuance is a luxury you can’t afford. Safety states restore access to discernment, complexity, and the capacity to think instead of react. Dysregulation spreads through contact the same way a cold moves through a room.

Your mind filters reality through accumulated patterns and beliefs, with ego functioning as the primary defense mechanism against information that threatens your identity. When ego runs your thinking apparatus, you can’t learn anything that challenges who you believe yourself to be. You can only defend your position and attack dissent. Congratulations. You’ve built internal thought police while claiming to resist external authoritarianism.

Your body stores experience as sensation, tension, and autonomic memory that doesn’t require language or conscious awareness to influence everything you do. Unmetabolized rage, grief, fear, and shame don’t evaporate through being ignored. They run background processes that distort perception, interpretation, and response. Most often, your mind will hijack these sensations and tell you stories that you are not worthy of self-care; that real warriors don’t rest; that you aren’t cut out for the cause. Until you intervene at a body level, these stories will metastasize and become your reality.

Your soul is the part of you that knows what’s true before ego intervenes with its calculations about safety, status, and approval. Ego wants comfort and validation. Your soul wants clarity, nourishment, and expression.. When your soul gets subordinated to your ego’s demands for security and recognition, you’ll compromise anything to avoid discomfort. You become exactly as corrupt as the system you claim to be fighting.

Liberating Self & Soul

Liberation theology and libertarian philosophy shouldn’t converge. But they do. Both say the same thing: you can’t liberate others while you’re internally captive.

Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.”

The oppressed don’t automatically become liberators. Without internal healing, they become new oppressors using the same playbook. Oppression colonizes consciousness. It shapes how you think, value things, and relate to power. If you don’t dig that out, you carry the oppressor’s operating system into your revolution. Your revolution reproduces tyranny.

Liberation theology says spiritual practice isn’t separate from political struggle. It’s the foundation. You can’t free anyone while the oppressor’s logic runs your internal government.

Libertarians come from opposite terrain and arrive at the same conclusion. Freedom isn’t doing whatever impulse demands. It’s self-governance. When people can’t regulate themselves, someone else will. Authority rushes into vacuums created by abandoned personal responsibility.

Can’t regulate your nervous system? You’ll attract leaders who promise safety. Can’t think critically? You’ll outsource discernment to idols. Can’t connect to your own soul? You’ll chase external status to fill the void.

Classical libertarians understood freedom as positive capacity requiring cultivation. You’re not free when enslaved to impulse, addiction, groupthink, or your own unexamined patterns. You’re just unregulated.

Practice Makes Progress

Here are some practices that build capacity for sustained resistance

From liberation theology: For nervous system regulation after prolonged exposure to crowds, conflict, and carrying others’ needs, Jesus withdrew to wilderness regularly. He fasted to break ego’s grip. He practiced Sabbath as an active refusal of productivity culture. These weren’t religious rituals. They were self-care practices for someone in sustained confrontation with empire.

Your version: Regular strategic withdrawal from the fight. Create moments of intentional disengagement so your nervous system can complete stress cycles your activism generates. Maybe a weekly day refusing all political content, or a monthly overnight alone spent doing joyful things. At a minimum, practicing daily silence interrupts your ego’s compulsion to control.

Liberation theology doesn’t do solo spirituality. It does collective discernment. People name their internalized oppression out loud and let the group see what they can’t see alone. Find humans who will call you when you’re reproducing patterns you claim to resist. Give them actual authority to interrupt you.

From libertarian principles: Self-governance requires virtues that make external governance unnecessary. Prudence. Temperance. Courage. Practical wisdom. These are not abstract ideological ideas. They are capacities you build through deliberate practice.

Your version: Design personal protocols that don’t rely on willpower. You know depletion triggers your doom spirals. Interrupt them structurally before they cascade. Hard cutoffs on news consumption. Non-negotiable rest periods. Hard boundaries when you feel depleted.

Develop tolerance for not knowing. Expand your capacity for curiosity. The libertarian version of freedom requires living with uncertainty instead of collapsing into premature certainty. Practice sitting with ambiguity before you speak. Build capacity to hold multiple competing truths without needing immediate resolution.

Build the Body You Want to Inhabit

As my wise and fierce partner, Virginia Lacayo, says: “The work of justice doesn’t need more self-sacrifice.”

In other words, self-care is justice.

In addition, self-care is leadership modeling. Your regulation can also become collective capacity. Your discernment can become organizational wisdom. Your commitment to integrity can become the standard that holds up under crushing pressure.

This work doesn’t happen in isolation. You can’t see your own blind spots. Sometimes you can’t catch yourself reproducing patterns. You need other humans who love you enough to interrupt you when your ego hijacks your discernment; when your decisions come from depletion instead of clarity.

So find people who will practice this with you. Not people who will validate every choice or affirm every feeling, but people committed to the same discipline of staying different from the thing they’re fighting. People who understand that calling you on your bullshit is an act of care. People who will let you call them on theirs. This is the messy, ongoing work of building nervous system capacity together so the collective body can hold more complexity, more paradox, more truth.