Episode Summary

I think a little differently from what you might be used to, and you can too (if you so choose). You don’t have to like the system. I’m certainly not here to reinforce the system, in fact, my message is about changing the system. After a recent interaction on social media, I was inspired to share in a little more detail, the vast man-made paradigms that we boldly describe with words like ‘normal’ and ‘fact’ and explore just how adaptable our system can be by simply asking:

“But why does it have to be this way?”

Today we’re talking about:

• Dealing with disagreement on the internet as a small business owner.

• Could our paradigms (like economics) be understood AND disagreed with?

• How we (humans) have secured our own limitations and captivity.

• You don’t have to like the system

You have a choice for change.

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Listen to the full episode

Episode Transcript

Julian Crosson-Hill  0:15  

This is the answer your unique calling podcast. This podcast provides tips, tools and inspiring stories for creating clarity around your calling, opening your heart to infinite possibilities and enabling you to have the greatest impact on the world. I’m Julian Crosson-Hill, a certified spiritual life coach, meditation teacher, Human Design Specialist and founder of Priest of Inanna. And most recently, I’ve joined the faculty at star seed Academy coach training. It’s my mission to teach and guide others, in living a spiritually aligned life that answers their unique calling. Welcome, and thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m your host, Julian Crosson-Hill. So today, I want to talk about something that happened on social media and kind of talk about or clarify some thoughts that I have on the way systems and paradigms work.

And so, what happened was, I posted a reel on my Instagram about the idea of energy exchange, and the fact that money is energy. And when we put in our work, when we put out a certain amount of energy, that the law of equilibrium, there’s a similar amount of energy that comes back to us. And someone commented, and basically said that I needed to study economics, that that’s not how economics works or supply and demand and price discrimination. And, you know, I understand the basic economics, but I’m not going to go into it here. And I, you know, of course said, “Well, that’s fine that you that you feel that way, and we can agree to disagree, but obviously, my message isn’t for you”.

And there’s two things I want to talk about there. First of all, just really high level, I’m not bothered by this at all, I don’t even view this as bullying, someone disagreed. And that was fine. Because I know what my truth is. And I trust in my truth, and I have zero attachment to other people agreeing with me. So, for those of you that listen to this podcast, and it inspires you, and you find that what I’m talking about resonates with you, then that my message is for you. And if my message doesn’t resonate with you, or you don’t agree with it, then my message isn’t for you. And that’s okay. I’m totally fine with that I have no attachment with having complete strangers on the internet agree with me.

And I think that if you are a spiritual business owner, and you are marketing, your business on social media, that is something that you, someplace that you need to get to. A lot of us, especially when we’re new in spiritual business, we get out on the internet, we get out on social media and someone comes in is mean or cruel or just disagrees with us or whatever, on the internet. And it we really take it personally; we allow it to determine for us our worth and our value. And that’s not about you. It’s about the other person and their need to be right.

So, you know, in this case, I have no attachment to everyone agreeing with me and agree with my message, my message is for certain people, and it’s obviously not for them. But from their follow up comments, it was obvious that this person had a strong attachment to other people agreeing with them. So let go of that attachment. I will tell you that right now, because you will find social media far easier to follow, far more palatable, far easier to tolerate, if you let go of attachment to everyone agreeing with you.

But now let’s talk about the message that this person had. Because I think this is an interesting point. And I want to dig into this a little bit. So, their whole, their whole reason that they disagreed with what I was saying was based on economics and economics works a certain way. And you know, obviously anyone who doesn’t believe that doesn’t understand it. That’s an interesting point. Because here’s the thing about economics and about how things work. It’s a system. It’s a paradigm. We’ve created those ideas. We’ve created that science and I’m quoting that in air quotes here, that of economics, because we didn’t have price discrimination or supply and demand when we were hunter gatherers.  Economics as a science certainly isn’t infallible. Economics believes in infinite growth. How likely do you think it is that every company on the planet Earth is going to grow their sales every year, every quarter, for infinity. We would burn up every resource on the planet if that were true. So obviously, there are some myths that economics has adopted and based their theories upon, such as supply and demand and price discrimination. So, obviously, we can’t really say that that is any truer than the idea that money is energy, and that the law of equilibrium means that the energy you put in equals the energy you’ll get back.

But there’s also the aspect of the system. And I think this is the part that I really want to dig into some more. Economics is a system, it’s a system for understanding how markets work in the world, how we, people wanting things versus people having things to sell affects price, and how we arrive at the different values attached to different things. But it is a manmade system, this is not a natural system.

And a while back, I read a book that was very influential to me, it was called Ishmael. And it was by an author named Daniel Quinn. And the concept of this book was really interesting. A man sees a classified ad that says, “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have earnest desire to save the world”. And when he goes to answer this ad, what he finds is a talking gorilla. And the gorilla, who has been in circuses, and zoos and various places, says that he’s going to teach the man about the one thing that he has in common with mankind, but that mankind doesn’t realize they have in common with him. And that thing is captivity.

And then he talks about how the systems that we have aren’t working, and about how they’re creating limitation and captivity for us, that he talks about our use of natural resources in the planet. He likens it to; do you remember those old movies that you maybe saw as a kid when they would talk about the history of human flight, and they would show these movies of various inventors trying to fly? And there’s the one where they drive a contraption that is sort of a bike with flapping wings off of a short cliff, and it stays aloft for a short while and then starts to fall. And that’s what our current way of doing things and managing the resources on this planet can be compared to, because it’s keeping us aloft. Right now, we’re sort of flying. But eventually we’re going to crash. And of course, at the root of that is economics.

What I wanted to sort of get clear here is that you don’t have to agree with the systems that are in place right now. And you don’t have to believe that they are the ultimate truth. This idea of how we work, how we decide what goods and services are going to cost, even how we get our food. One of the ideas that the Ishmael book talks about is that the point at which humankind became captives was when they started locking up the food. And that’s really a provocative idea. Because if you think about it, why do you work? You probably work to keep a roof over your head and to buy food. If food were plentiful all around you, and you could just go pluck it off of the tree, pull it out of the ground, how motivated would you be to work?

And so, our system is built on these ideas that reinforce the system. And economics is one of those. Rhis idea of supply and demand is how we justify some people having and some people not having, and some people having to work more to have certain essentials versus other people. You don’t have to like the system. And I’m not here to reinforce the system. My message is about changing the system. My message is about changing the world. And often we have to work within the system.

I’m a small business owner. So, there’s certain aspects of the system that I have to work within. But I can also start to change how the system works. When I was in technology, I very much changed how the companies that I worked for were hiring people. I sought to hire more diverse people. I streamlined our interview process to make it more accessible. I did things to change the system. As a small business owner, I do things that also are contrary of the system. You can do the same thing. We don’t have to like the system. We may have to work within it. And we should, wherever we can find the edges that we can start to push the system in a different direction, we should take the opportunity to do so. We don’t have to blindly accept it. And that’s really the message that I’m here to do, that I’m here to deliver. that I’m here to get out, is that the system can change.

 It has changed multiple times in human history. Our system started out as simple hunting gathering, where we worked in small groups of people, and we gathered our food we hunted for our food. Then we moved to a modern agrarian model and built cities where we had kings and warriors and priests and workers. And we started to create hierarchies. And then we had the Industrial Revolution. And we created these other systems that are basically what economics is talking about supply and demand and using resources in the most efficient way. Which, you know, notice, I don’t know how efficiently we’re you really using them. We’re killing our planet in the process.

Our systems have changed. Our systems are always changing. As we grow, as a group of people, we create new systems to reflect our new understanding. So we have a firm choice here, we can realize that this system is just one of many that we’ve had in human history, and that it’s going to change, and that we can actually be part of that change. Or we can say, everyone who says the system should change is wrong, that their ideas are foolish, and that they need to study basic economics. They need to study the system and understand it and reinforce what we have. For me, I am a Change Catalyst. I’m here to bring change, I’m here to create change. And it is my choice to tell people that we can create that change. It is my choice to create that change in whatever small ways I can myself. It’s also your choice. You can fully buy into the system. You can fully accept your own captivity, or you can choose to be free. You can choose to change the system. You can choose to view it a different way. And so, if you’re someone who has seen the system, who has seen the current paradigm and says this doesn’t work for me, this doesn’t work for everyone, and I want it to be equitable, I want it to work for everyone that my message is for you. And I hope that my message inspires you because you do have that choice and I invite you to make that choice. Bright blessings.

This has been the answer your unique calling podcast with your host Julian Crosson-Hill, produced by Priest of Inanna LLC. You can find us on priestofinanna.com That’s Priest of Inanna, i-n-a-n-n-a.com On Instagram priestofinanna