Joe

The greatest misunderstanding when it comes to spirituality is that it is spiritual. Whether you spend your days checking off a task list of good deeds, chasing after a state of zen, building your daily routine around prayer and worship, or just trudging through life hoping for heaven, when our spirituality focuses on the spiritual, we miss the point. We have turned something that is a means to an end, into an end itself.

Demonstrated dignity is how we, as members of a society and formative voices within society, declare which lives matter. It is also how we participate in the divine creative act and undermine the hell of nothing. Demonstrated dignity brings heaven to earth.

Just like meritocracy, victimhood is a weapon of shame, a response by our psyches to counter perceived inadequacy while preventing us from healing. While meritocracy allows those who achieve cultural markers of success to celebrate themselves and look down on others, victimhood denies our culpability and points the fingers towards someone else. While meritocracy can only guard a few against shame, victimhood is a strategy everyone can use. This is why, when things go wrong, we all look for someone to blame.

The illusion of meritocracy, simplistically summarized in the line, “You get what you deserve,” is a dominant tool used to justify our societal devaluing of certain lives while propping up the value of others. As long as the idea, which both Barack Obama and Donald Trump made references to the ideal in their inaugural addresses, remains legitimized by public discourse, we will remain a society of inequality.