“No One and Nothing Will Be Great Unless it Costs You Something” (Viola Davis)

Viola Davis spoke these words on January 20, 2018: “At the end of the day, we only move forward when it doesn’t cost us anything. But I’m here today to say No One and Nothing Will be Great Unless it Costs You Something.”

Davis’s words ring true for every human being. But what will it cost us women, specifically, to affect meaningful change regardless of our backgrounds?

My ideas for how to jump start imperative change would definitely cost us. It would cost us the discomfort and general messiness of discarding ideologies, values, and definitions we’ve inherited and accepted before the age of reason.

Most of us women were raised in a religion or spiritual practice. Many of us continue to identify with our childhood ideologies. Many of us found our childhood ideologies patriarchal or inadequate, so we found something or someone else to identify with.

All of us, regardless of birth culture, have inherited the limiting definitions and ideological trappings of psychology.

What if we women were to re-evaluate the need to hang our hats on an ideology, regardless of how ancient, western leaning, eastern leaning, psychologically wonderful sounding, alternative, or woke it seems to be?

What if the belief we need to be guided by the values and definitions of an ideology IS the root cause of inequality in the first place?

Think about it. We women are standing up for our sexual freedom, safety, and reproductive rights. We American women are NOT about to let a bunch of male senators dictate to us when, why, how, or with whom we can have sex or reproduce. But we seek out and welcome male authorities who will dictate to us how to understand, define, and appropriately express all of our non sexual human behaviors. We gladly allow religious, spiritual, psychological, and self help authorities to define every single aspect of our human behaviors and our human lives except for our sexuality. Why?

As long as we subscribe to ideological schools of thought, whether philosophical, psychological, religious, or spiritual, we give away our rights, our voices, our power, and our ability to achieve equal rights because these ideologies are all about controlling our behaviors, controlling our decisions, controlling our life purposes, and controlling how we define ourselves and others.

Even the most benign ideologies like yoga that ‘allow’ us the freedom to ‘be who we are’ are chock full of instructions for how to achieve our ‘best’ life. Yoga dresses itself up in lovely innocent enough sounding verbiage, but it is the most controlling ideology of all because it claims it can tell us how to feel and how not to feel to achieve our ‘best’ life. The word yoga literally translates to yoke and to yoke means to control. Yoga is the set of instructions for how to ‘control one’s self’ from the inside.

Do we really need some ancient set of instructions for how to control our emotions and behaviors?

What if rejecting the very idea we need an ideology to tell us how to behave and how to live is the imperative first step towards achieving equal rights for for all humans? Would we women be willing to accept the cost of letting go of the ideologies we’ve been led to believe are our security blankets?

What if being told how to behave, how to feel, how to live, or how to define ourselves and our lives by God, Allah, Jesus, Mohammad, Freud, Dr. Phil. Dr. Oz, Confucius, Buddha, or Swami Satchidananda is no different than being told how to behave by Donald Trump, Mike Pence, or Jeff Sessions?

Instead of looking for the best ideological dictators, what if we retired the role of ideological dictator all together?

What if we accept the subversive notion that a human being is born with all the ingredients she needs to make optimal decisions for herself throughout her life without the help of an ideological boss?

Losing our sense of security with these ideologies would be the easy part. Losing our ability to control others with our ideologies would be way harder because we all want other people to believe in what we believe, behave as we would want them to behave, and feel as we would want them to feel. Controlling how someone thinks, feels and behaves is the end goal of all ideologies.

Without the weight of ideologies, we would be relegated to influencing other people by making measly old logical arguments. And without the weight of ideological community members, we would be relegated to making logical arguments with our measly old selves. But when everyone’s voice is equal, everyone is speaking from just their measly own self.

To become a self who is equal to every other self, we must believe each one of us has the capacity to make optimal decisions for how to think, emote, and behave simply by having been born a human. We must reject we were born to prop up somebody else’s goals, purposes, and moral imperatives.

This seems odd because we girls and women have never been given the option to make sense of our lives according to how they make sense to us. We have only ever been given the option of following and promoting the instructions of something or someone “greater than” our measly old selves.

Baby talk for our vaginas is no longer OK for us and we have insisted on using anatomically correct language concerning our vaginas. Baby talk for our brains shouldn’t be OK either. We don’t need to substitute the word heart, soul, or spirit for our brain any more than we need to substitute the word pee pee for our vaginas.

We women are completely capable of making all the decisions we need to make with the capacities we are born with as human females. I reject the notion my vagina is a vesicle through which to honor some god of some self help author’s idea of a goddess. I also reject the notion my brain is a vesicle through which I can get in touch with my soul or spirit or some god or goddess. I have a brain and a vagina, period.

My hope is we women will take our individual vaginas and our individual brains and become a collection of equal individuals rather than a collection of insignificant individuals who are propping up someone more important’s ideological dictatorship.