Has your freedom become your prison?
It's this kind of question and your support that has made docu-mental a Substack indy writer grant recipient
vol. 2 issue 14
Greetings,
Thank you for being a subscriber to docu-mental. It’s because of you that I am able to say I have been chosen by Substack for an independent writer’s grant, one of only 44 out of nearly 600 to be chosen.
docu-mental’s highly unusual conversion rate from free to paid subscribers is one reason I am told it was chosen. I also am told I offer my subscribers consistently high quality content, the likes of which cannot be found elsewhere. To be given this validation of my efforts mapping and exploring the places where mental health, democracy, and freedom meet in this country is so deeply gratifying, all I can do is more.
When I started docu-mental, my intention was to “create herd immunity to anxiety and depression™” by investigating how we might apply public health strategies for curbing infectious diseases to the challenge of poor rates of public mental health. Together, we’re will still finding our way through that exploration, but so far, what has ended up the focus is how we got ourselves into such a state of anxiety or worse to begin with.
I began with looking at why erosions in five particular states of mind — identity, scarcity, hierarchy, autonomy, and trust — had come to drive our participation in democracy, and what tended to make us feel most threatened in these areas. What I discovered shocked me and changed not just my thinking, but my approach to democracy, too.
I went from believing myself a proponent of the American Dream, to seeing how in fact it has been rendered impossible, and that the lie of its existence underpins our nation’s upward trending epidemic rates of anxiety and depression.
That’s not what I expected would happen when I started docu-mental.
Yet, as I and my regular readers and podcast subscribers have discovered in the past year, our democracy has been eroded by the rising system of monopolies and surveillance capitalism. While this system is in place, no one is free.
It has rendered the Constitution utterly impotent because how can anyone be free when someone else owns them, and we are virtually all now owned by Big Data to one extent or another?
And if we are not free, then we are not ever in full possession of our potential to make our dreams come true, least of all the American Dream which requires a far more equitable distribution of resources than is possible in an economy now presided over by financiers who have taken control of not only our economies, but the lawmakers in charge of overseeing and promoting them for the good of all.
When I came to this conclusion, I was stunned, actually. But the further I went in, the more my investigations showed me that the American Dream has become a false lever. It helps fuel our identity-driven politics. It causes us to rightfully fear that our access to resources will be shut off. It pits us against one another so that we search for ways to feel superior to our fellow citizens. It robs us of agency, putting us in situations where we end up with more responsibility than the authority to carry that out. And it erodes our trust in ourselves, in our leaders, and in one another.
I have offered scads of evidence to this fact over the past year, and I hope if you are new to docu-mental, you will take a tour through the archives, but I can tell you that the most impactful moment of all for me was in preparing for my podcast interview with economist Grace Blakeley. In doing so, I came across the words of the late cultural critic Mark Fisher:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of Capitalism.”
That was indeed true for me. Just contemplating it gave me a shock.
That’s when I realized I had never actually fully questioned my assumptions about what is true about my values as an American. I just “received” them as true.
I might have experienced my share of life’s hardships, but I came to see I was still comfortable enough to let others define my freedom and my democracy for me using the American Dream as the carrot. The more I thought about it, the more dismayed I was to think of how much time in my life I had wasted in service to a lie.
That re-set is where I now start each issue and episode of docu-mental. I am curious about everything. Nothing is sacred. Rather than be an evangelist for or against any point of view, I am liberated to explore new manifestations of freedom.
If I have a manifesto it is this: whatever makes us free will one day become our prison unless we have the tools to dismantle and rebuild it to suit our evolving needs, our evolving selves.
During this pandemic time of isolation and quarantine, scary and desperate as it all may feel, there is also an opportunity to expand the kind of inquiry docu-mental excels at doing. As our normal lives and the structures that have until now held them in place crumble around us, we are free to ask why did we value those structures in the first place? Who did the structure truly serve? Did it meet our needs? If not, why not, and what would we rather see in its place?
Without a dream, there is no hope, no sense of the future. We need an American Dream. But it needs to be one we’ve actually dreamed, not been told is true by someone else who knows nothing about who we are, who we are becoming, and what we value. That requires we actually know the answers to those questions.
I hope docu-mental will help you find those answers for yourself.
If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. Either way, please do share docu-mental with others whom you think will be inspired to learn more about the connections between our mental health, our democracy, and our freedom. I have dropped the rates for the time being:
And as always, thank you!
Whitney