Finding the Awe to [Yesterday’s] Outrage

Yesterday, I wrote this about Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire, and it’s full of words like ‘grotesque’, ‘ugly’ and ‘incomprehensible’. I think it shows how I’m finding this particular news hard to process - I’m outraged by it [although not quite so angry as Jonathan Pie!].

My outrage is valid. I think we should be outraged at this level of inequality … but something was niggling after I sent yesterday’s post - I was missing something.

I’ve had Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry sitting unread on my bookshelf for a year or more, and today I picked it up. The book is a short, profound essay centred on how we might move from an economy based on ownership and competition, towards one rooted in gifts and reciprocity.

i.e. the exact opposite of the current system where Musk is apparently ‘winning’.

At one point, Robin [that seems overly familiar, but she feels like a friend - referring to ‘Kimmerer’ just feels wrong!] writes of the ‘Honorable Harvest’ - a set of guidelines from her Indigenous heritage, designed to “constrain rampant consumption”:

[I don’t think Musk would be familiar with any of these.]

Robin goes on to talk about how in currently dominant ways of thinking, there is no “moral constraint” on consumption. She wonders how things might be different if instead we were “to harvest honorably, with restraint, respect, reverence, and reciprocity.” She also identifies how in natural systems, both “incremental change and creative disruption” are required for new environments to form, along with the necessity for “species that live in neither the new nor the old, but at the edges”…

For me, it was a thoughtful, uplifting read - exactly what I needed after the trillionaire story.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still fucking furious that I live in a world with so. much. inequality. And I think there’s a place for that outrage.

But it needs to be balanced by a sense of awe. I need both, or else I risk becoming poisoned and/or paralysed by the outrage.

The Serviceberry reminded me of that - and of the importance of connection and relationships as the antidotes to separation and individualism.