Have you ever thought about how none of this is real? How when you drive from one state to another, or fly from one country to another, there is a border but yet there isn’t. It doesn’t actually exist anywhere you can see; it’s just something made up by the humans. We’ve decided to create imaginary lines across planet Earth – our collective home – that fall exactly on the left side of this tree, in the middle of that river, on the other side of this hill, or right through that blade of grass.
We fight wars and we hate our neighbors because of invisible lines. Kind of crazy right?
And then sometimes I open my banking app and I look at my balance. As I’ve gotten older and as technology has changed our world, money feels increasingly illusory because I almost never actually hold any of it in my hands. Back in my teenage years, when I only had a seldom-used savings account, I took a paper check with some numbers on it to the bank and I came out with bills, which I could spend somewhere else and get something in return. And yet even then, all of that was so much make believe.
Who decided those little green bills had value? Why not rocks? Why not feathers? Why not pieces of cotton? No, the little green bills with pictures of men I’d never met on them had the power to feed me and clothe me and put a roof over my head. Oh and only the real ones, not the fraudulent ones that look just like them.
These days I pull out a plastic card that manipulates those numbers (no more little green bills), and the only reason the numbers exist or mean anything is because we’ve decided they do. We have even gone so far as to build an entire economic machine around numbers, which used to be backed by something physical (gold) but I don’t even know if they are anymore.
Who decided gold was valuable anyway? Why not brass? Why not ore? Why not aluminum?
Humans perpetuate every single make-believe structure we’ve devised, and the people who stand to gain the most from our fake systems are the ones who perpetuate the exploitative parts.
I think it’s normal to have a hierarchy of some sort when you look at all species on planet Earth. If you put up a bird feeder, you will quickly see the social order at play. But what isn’t normal is for one bird to hoard more seed than he can eat while all the other birds around him starve. What isn’t normal is for a squirrel to charge a fee for the other squirrels to share a habitat, or to live in any of the surrounding habitats. What isn’t normal is for an eagle to hit a dividing line where they are no longer allowed to fly, because they weren’t born on the other side and therefore can’t enter unless they pay a fee and don’t overstay their welcome.
This is all fake, you guys. All of it. The problem is we’ve devised both good fake things (laws) and bad fake things (paying to exist), and we currently have an excess of bad fake things while all of the good fake things are no longer being enforced by certain humans, because they profit off of them too much and are drunk on power.
I say this because I’m sitting here watching our laws, the good fake things we’ve collectively agreed to abide by as a specific version of human called “American,” suddenly cease to exist simply because a small group of those humans decided they could profit more if they got rid of them. It is a call to become more introspective about not only how none of this is real if we don’t decide it is, but also how some of this fakeness was devised to help us live more harmoniously with one another. Humans have a unique capacity for hatred and corruption.
I think it’s also a call to redesign some of these fake structures into something that is more aligned with who we are at our core (a mammal, one species, one group) and that respects the only home we have. There will always be a need to create some structures in order to contain the worst of humanity, and there are social orders in nature to do the same. But we need to make sure that our fake structures actually make sense as Earth citizens and as social mammals who depend on this planet (and on one another) for survival. We need to not allow a small group of humans to harm the rest of us, as seems to happen time and time again from corrupt political structures to repetitive wars to abusive corporations.
I don’t know why we seemingly always choose to build our fake structures based on fear, exclusion, hate, dominance, and power. Sometimes I get really distraught about it because it feels like insanity. And then other times I remind myself that none of this is actually real. I’m here to learn, to grow, to impact the planet where I can, and then to return to wherever I came from so I can proceed onward.
That’s what my grandmother told me anyway, the time she came to me in a dream more than a decade after she’d died. “I’m working to get to the next level,” she’d said, and somehow I understood what she’d meant.
I wish we could do the same here on Earth. We seem to just repeat ourselves over and over again, century to century, and never learn a damn thing.