Carmen Speer
Aug 31, 2018 · 1 min read

I love this, Caitlin. I was just thinking about this while watching Derrick Jensen talking about the human capacity for self-delusion. He’s talking about the stories we tell ourselves to make something all right, the language we use, how the victors tell the story and the victims are either silenced or have that narrative thrust upon them until they come to believe it.

I was thinking about how we can know which stories are true. Someone asked me the other day what I thought empowerment really meant. I said it means taking a step back from the paradigm in which you exist but which you didn’t ask for or create, and taking a look at it while asking yourself the question, what do I need to unlearn, and what do I need to learn to do the unlearning? If you can answer that question and start on that journey, it’s empowering.

We need to need to rescue the hostage of our strangled truth from the people who hold her captive. Since life is stories and humans think in stories, we need to grassroots grab back the narrative. That is the most important thing. Teaching people that nothing has to be any certain way they’ve been told by society it does, and also teaching them objective facts about what is happening in the world, true stories which have been kept from them in the service of lies, is important.

If everything is a story, we need some better storytellers, and we need some writers to step up and be our teachers.

    Carmen Speer

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