We live in a culture where we have given other people permission to engineer and impose upon us what they need our personal needs to be. When we submit to that contract, advertisers and influences own a big part of the quality of our lives. If violence is a threat to agency and efficacy, being unable to discern our own most essential physical and personal needs based on the direct experience kills efficacy and agency. The warning here is to be careful not to sub-contract your Sense of Good and need to the commercial transactional sector of this culture.

We are back to suffering now in this conversation. Too many of us live almost fully immersed in a massive trance of needs skillfully inserted as a screen between us and the voice of our souls and like the fish who don’t know they live in water, we don’t know we live in a pattern of need designed by other needy people.  This last election cycle was more a manipulation of needs and fears than a clean discussion of policy and the values that support them. We are suffering in part because we live in a non-conscious tyranny of need.  This tyranny may be more effective than any authoritarian  government on earth right now. 

The television, social media, and entertainment are the subtle enforcers of our own individual prisons of artificial need. This suffering country of ‘wealth-wasted’ is plagued by drug addiction, suicide, and explosive violent expression. Too many people desperately want their agency back but are convinced by those talented, entertaining commercial taskmasters that the only road to efficacy and joy is more wealth.  Thus politicians who pander to this ruse win elections, even though an eighth grader who does their homework knows their policy promises are hopeless.  Suffering from the effects of the tyranny of need goes a long way to explaining this last election.

Beauty is free to you in infinite ways or you can try to capture it in an luxury items.  Time is yours for free or you can spend thousands on other people’s engineered needs for you. Health can be had for the nurturance that we all can provide with a little sacrifice, and finally peace, joy, and efficacy can be found in faith once you have liberated yourself from this culture’s tyranny of need.  This liberation can be had without violence, but with cooperation in a supportive network of human communities dedicated to the essential values of their unfiltered real personal faiths and genuine essential needs.  After all I don’t think we can consume this planet back to its pristine state.