Systems exist because we agree to them. They wouldn’t exist without people, because they aren’t part of the natural rhythm of the Universe. Systems are how humans organize themselves around agreed-upon ideas. They facilitate resource distribution and create structure—all the things people need to feel comfortable and safe in their lives.
Somewhere along the way, people were taught to take on the identity of the systems they live within. They become their morals, values, political ideology, or religion. Instead of being opinions they hold, or ideas they’ve chosen to structure their lives around, these things become egoic identities—and reasons to label people who don’t agree as bad or wrong.
The problem isn’t that people have their own opinions and ideas about how things should be; it’s that they try to project those ideas onto the people around them. We live in a world where everybody tries to make everybody else live the way they do. We hold strong judgments about people who don’t live the way we want them to. This is what creates the tension and division we see in the world today.
The power behind those arguments comes from identification. When someone doesn’t agree with your view on abortion, for example, it’s interpreted as a personal judgment or attack on that belief, instead of simply what it is—a difference of opinion. Because these opinions have become identities, they’re defended the same way we defend our physical selves. That identification is what makes people react as if a disagreement were a personal attack.
The truth is, we no longer need shared beliefs in order to survive as a group. We are no longer in caves, fighting bears, and struggling to survive harsh winters. The system of resource distribution has created sufficient access to food, clothing, and shelter. It’s not equal access, but it’s reasonable access for the vast majority of people—we don’t have to hunt to eat; we go to the grocery store. We don’t live in caves; we have temperature-controlled homes. Agreeing on whether this access is equitable or not doesn’t affect its ability to provide the grocery store with food for you to buy. We don’t need shared agreement for this system to work.
The same is true of religion. We don’t all need to believe in God to survive as a society. Shared moral beliefs are also unnecessary. The systems of food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and education can run without our agreement. This remains true because those systems are currently running just fine with no agreement from anybody.
The democratic political system is subject to the same problem. It’s meant to allow for differences in opinion. We’re supposed to vote, and the winner is whatever the majority believes. But there are a couple of problems with democracy.
First, it’s not really a majority when less than 50% of eligible voters actually vote. It’s the majority of a minority of people, which means that whatever the true majority of voters agree on is not what ends up happening. That creates disenfranchisement and apathy.
Second, democracy doesn’t offer a place for outliers—it excludes them entirely. That means there’s always a segment of the population that never really gets their voices heard or acted upon. In truth, this problem isn’t just for outliers; it’s true for the conservative right in general.
If you think back in time, progress is—very broadly—a leftist ideology. The conservative platform as a whole tries to keep things the same: if it worked in 1900, it can work now. Why change it? To gain the progress we have over the last 125 years, politics has stayed generally left. That has largely excluded the political right from the conversation.
What happens when we stop acknowledging one or more groups of people? They get mad. They act out. They become disenfranchised. They disengage. If or when they gain power, they use it to the fullest extent possible to try to return things to a previous state.
Democracy is meant to offer a balanced system, but it can’t really do that without 100% of eligible voters participating in every election. Without an artificial balance through mandatory voting, democracy quickly fails due to the unintended exclusion of large segments of the population.
Contrary to popular belief, voting isn’t the solution, because voting offers limited choices. You either vote on the options available or dedicate your entire life to trying to make the options you want available to others. That’s a high price to pay just to be heard—and to have a choice.
So how do we fix the problems?
We first have to acknowledge that human identification with these systems is unnecessary and increasingly harmful—not only to individuals but to the systems themselves.
We play many roles in our lives—through our careers, families, friendships, and in our religious and political lives. The key is that they are roles. They are not who we are. They’re things we do because we enjoy them, or because they help us surround ourselves with people who think or feel the same way we do. They create a sense of community and acceptance.
When we can maintain separation between the role we play and who we are as individuals, our individuality becomes the natural priority. The role is then a secondary thing we do for ourselves. That is as it should be. The opposite—over-identification with a role—becomes all-consuming. We lose ourselves in the very thing that was meant to bring us joy.
Systemic release, for an individual, looks like letting go of the need for identification with a given belief or ideology—to return to a sovereign individual who has opinions and beliefs that help structure their life. Without identification, we can let people be—live as they choose, be who they are—with no need to change them simply because their way of being feels like an affront to ours. We don’t have to be offended by the lifestyle or beliefs of another person, regardless of how extreme those things might seem.
Politics and religion require our participation, but they don’t require our identification. We can remain active in those communities and still retain a sense of self that isn’t based on them. Systemic release frees the individual to be who they are, not who the system identified them as.
The system wants you to identify with it because that’s how it traps you in roles—through expectations. When you focus on meeting those expectations, you forget that you don’t have to agree to the system.
It doesn’t mean you have to rebel; it means you have to remember that you can choose how much of yourself you give to it.
Your participation in the system is largely a choice. When you free yourself from the need to participate in politics, religion, or even shared societal values, you give yourself permission to be true to yourself instead of the system.
That’s power the system doesn’t want you to remember you have—because if you remember, you’ll step away. And that’s dangerous to a system that’s just trying to survive.
Love to all.
Della
P.S. This article was also shared to my Substack subscribers who got in their email. You can join me at this link: https://underneathitall.thestillhouse.space
