Towards a Holistic Radicalism

The world is suffering and oppressed. This suffering and oppression seems so huge, so unmanageable, so saddening. Many people in our society turn away from the suffering and oppression of the world and put all their thought and effort into private security and comfort. For those who suffer, this is not an option. They resist where they can. It is their resistance that forms the hope for a better world. A better world does not come from governments, religions, or violence. It comes from the united efforts of the suffering and oppressed, and their allies, to change the world.

Much of the suffering and oppression in our world is systemic. There are structures, institutions, and ideologies that perpetuate suffering and frustrate liberation from suffering. As I have tried to understand the systemic nature of suffering, I have come to identify eight broad types of systemic suffering and struggle: economics, politics, gender, sexuality, ecology, race, violence, and religion. Economic suffering produces poverty and economic exploitation. Political tyranny, authoritarianism, and elitisms rob us of the power to make effective change. Gender repression prevents women's full participation in human life and traps men in destructive lives. Sexual repression traps us in shame, fear, and hopelessness. Racism degrades and exploits whole communities. Religious domination disempowers and alienates us from ourselves. Ecological exploitation threatens to wipe out our very existence. Underlying many of these systems of suffering and domination is the power of institutionalized violence, warfare, and death.

A unified vision of resistance and liberation will address all of these systems. While many successful struggles against systemic suffering and oppression have been waged throughout history, often only limited changes to the basic dynamics of oppression were ever won. While I am not proposing that I have found the exact perfect understanding of social struggle against suffering, nor that a holistic vision of radical progress is all that is needed, I do hope that this way of trying to look at social struggle comprehensively can contribute the future successs of the human struggle for peace, freedom, justice, and wholeness.

Each of these systemic arenas of suffering and struggle effect the others. Racism leads to economic exploitation, economic exploitation leads to ecological degradation, ecological degradation feeds the cycle of violence, violence leads to political domination, and so on. If we acheive a limited victory in one of these struggles, but fail to apply that success to other areas of struggle, the victory can be wiped out more easily. A comprehensive understanding of systemic interconnections could be a key to acheiving dramatic revolutionary change.