Social movements will not fix what ails us.
Raising the level of spiritual intelligence of society's members will.
There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”3
Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics) (p. 7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Hoffer describes how we, as human beings, tend to blame external circumstances for our assessment of our success and failure. And yet, it is apparent that often we cannot control external circumstances while we can always control our response to them.
The ability to monitor and witness our functioning in response to external circumstances is one of the major components of spiritual intelligence. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. How many people do you know that live examined lives? It is in the living of an unexamined life that it becomes easy to blame others for one’s unhappiness. The failure to take responsibility for one’s choosing the responses to life’s circumstances that leads to increased unhappiness and suffering. We have the choice of whether we would live as victims or agents.
Joining a social movement is giving up responsibility for one’s own agency. We throw ourselves into the dependency of the group. We are no longer ourself but one of them.
The step to spiritual growth is the willingness to give up making other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness. The giving up of making other people and circumstances responsible is called “forgiveness.” We no longer are holding other people responsible but rather ourselves for our response. We choose to be an agent rather than a victim.
Most political problems can be reframed as spiritual problems and until they are dealt with as such, efforts to ameliorate them will continue to fail. In other words, the problems we face are not external to us but they are internal. It is in enhancing the spiritual intelligence of the members of a society that that society will grow and flourish. The cornerstone of spiritual intelligence is self understanding and self management. Our efforts to improve the world would be more effective if we focused on raising the level of spiritual intelligence of society’s members rather than changing the aspects of the unjust world that we hate.