Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Why I am a socialist

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I’ve written often about capitalism’s flaws, and about how capitalism distorts how we think. But never about why I feel the way I do about capitalism — why I’m a socialist.

No one ever has asked me why — but even if they did, I’d fumble through an answer. How did I get here, nearing middle age as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America with a “Bread and Roses” tattoo on my arm?

Was it hearing my dad complain about delivering packages for FedEx? Was it watching the most handy and resourceful person I’ve ever known get treated like he was expendable?

Was it watching my mom struggle to unwind after work? Was it hearing the most hardworking person I’ve ever known fret about her boss ignoring her ideas because she’s a woman?

Was it hearing white neighbors when I was growing up use the N-word to describe lower class people moving to our town?

Was it because I couldn’t make it as a musician? Was it the bartender’s eyes when he could only pay me in free beer because the club needed to make rent?

Was it watching the Occupy movement take over McPherson Square a few blocks from my band’s rehearsal space?

Is it because my heart hurts when someone says people caged in prison or living on the streets “deserve” it? Is it because my heart hurts less when I read a line like this: “’Deserve’ is a word which the possessors use as a weapon against those they dispossess,” from the communist journalist Agnes Smedley?

Is it because I found in Karl Marx’s Capital — which I first read with people as fed up, tired, lonely, and heartbroken as I was — a way of understanding why I was fed up, tired, lonely, and heartbroken?

It’s all of those things, of course. We don’t pick what encourages us to grow. We meander like a vine growing in a forest, propelled by our own inner process but also contained and guided by what we’re growing into.

But if there is one thing that’s made me a socialist — made me disinherit capitalism and want to help build something better — it’s that I’ve never wanted to accept the “singular loneliness of American individualism,” as the writer Vivian Gornick calls it.

Capitalism didn’t invent loneliness — but it deepens it. Socialist feminists like Nancy Fraser have shown how it warps social relationships:

Production moved into factories and offices, where it was considered ‘economic’ and remunerated with cash wages. [The creation and maintenance of social bonds] was left behind, relegated to a new private domestic sphere, where it was sentimentalized and naturalized, performed for the sake of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ as opposed to money.

Historically, [the creation and maintenance of social bonds] has been gendered. The lion’s share of responsibility for it has been assigned to women, although men have always performed some of it too. The rise of capitalism intensified this gender division.

In other words, capitalism turned the creation and maintenance of social bonds — or building community — into “women’s work” and hid it away in our homes. Inside our homes we are family, and caring for each other is too often done out of duty. Outside our homes we are individuals, rarely part of something beyond ourselves unless it’s organized around making money. Even then, the power to be free, to fully be ourselves, is uneven — there are bosses and there are workers.

I’m a socialist because we are capable of relationships beyond business owner, worker; producer, consumer; husband, wife; family, not family. We are capable of so much more with each other, and capitalism holds us back.

Why even label myself anything, let alone a socialist? Why declare that I’m against the way this society is organized, against its very DNA? Good questions. The poet Audre Lorde wrote after a close scare with breast cancer, “I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Why we can’t imagine a world without police

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The prison and the police are in our heads and hearts, therefore this system is naturalized in a way that makes it almost impossible for folks to step back and think that it wasn’t always like this. I think we can’t underestimate the fact that we think these institutions keep us secure.

Those are the words of the prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, and they make my heart hurt. I do think police and prisons and bombs and guns keep me safe. Think being the key word.

The truth is, they don’t. Kaba and Angela Davis and Alex Vitale and the #DefundThePolice movement are teaching us that. Every video of another black person being killed by police, of a protestor being shoved to the ground by a militarized stormtrooper, of a mother wiping tears from her eyes, is a reminder that something is very wrong.

But my mind assumes things. It can’t handle the awkward space that opens up after the question: “Wait, do we really need police?” It anxiously fills the gap with questions: Who’s going to stop the murderers and rapists? What about serial killers? What if someone is breaking into my house?

In reality, cops spend most of their time responding to noncriminal issues like noise complaints and people living on the streets. They commit murder and sexual assault disturbingly often. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence don’t report it, presumably because they don’t trust the criminal justice system. Nearly 40 percent of murders go unsolved (yet violent crime rates are at all-time lows). And what about corporate crime, like wage theft, which robs workers of billions of dollars every year? Why aren’t the cops going after Jeff Bezos for Amazon dodging all of its federal taxes?

But these facts don’t stop my mind from worrying. And they for sure don’t make me feel safer.

Where do my worries come from? Why do I assume that society will turn into a dumpster fire without cops? Why do I assume our society isn’t already a dumpster fire for a lot of people? Who gave me this fear?

Zen Buddhist teacher angel Kyodo williams says thoughts fill our mind like it’s “that drawer that collects everything in your house.”

They’re moving at an incredible rate of speed. And, for the most part, we almost never get the opportunity to observe them and sort through them. You say, ‘Oh, but wait a minute, someone lived in this house before me. And some of that stuff is not mine. Actually, this is not mine. That’s my mom’s. This is not mine; that’s the inheritance of white supremacy.’ And we have no real way of being able to discern what is mine, what is yours, what we’re holding collectively, what I have inherited, what I have taken on as a measure of protection, of a way to cope at some point in my life.

No wonder I think someone is about to break into the house. Cop shows are among the most popular on television. Politicians have been going “tough on crime” for decades. I’ve been robbed at gunpoint, assaulted by strangers, and had my car stolen. I grew up watching “Cops” and shooting guns with my dad.

But when I slow down, take a few breaths, and “observe” and “sort through” my thoughts, something shifts. I can even imagine for a split second a world without cops — or at least far fewer. A world like the one imagined in a Facebook post I saw recently:

Can you imagine a world where social workers rather than cops help someone having a mental health crisis? Where we spend more money on public education and less on policing? Where everyone has a safe home, clean water, and enough to eat so that committing crime is unnecessary?

It’s really hard. The thoughts come rushing in. We can’t do that. How are we going to pass that through the Senate? How are we going to pay for it?

But thoughts are just what they are: thoughts. Not reality. Not necessarily true. And usually not even ours. If we don’t slow down enough to remember that, if we just react like a programmed robot, thoughts become a prison in our heads and — worse — our hearts.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.

Had any luck dating during the pandemic? Asking for a friend.

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I met somebody interesting a few weeks before the shutdown—before I holed up at my parents’ house on their rural farm. Hours of FaceTime and hundreds of text messages later, she’s an irresistible mystery I’m dying to figure out in person.

But what’s my crush based on? How much about her has my mind invented? How much have I projected on to her? Probably a ton. Probably so much that I’ll hardly recognize her in “real life.”

Once, at the end of a meditation retreat, the writer and Zen Buddhist teacher Natalie Goldberg told us students, “Watch out. You might think you know each other, but you’re projecting so many things.”

I’d spent that week crushing on one of the retreat center staff members. Everything about Molly added up to perfection. Her sunbaked skin and snow-white teeth. Her glances in the kitchen, which broke the retreat rule of not looking at each other. Her California accent when I broke another rule by striking up a conversation one morning. (There’s actually a name for this instant obsession, the “Meditation Crush,” which Portlandia nailed in this sketch.)

In my head, Molly and I ran off together to buy a cabin in the nearby Sante Fe mountains. But, as I walked away from the retreat center on the last day, Goldberg’s advice came in handy. I’d probably never see Molly again, which hurt—but I knew, in my gut, that I’d fallen for a projection.

Here’s how projection works: “Your brain fill[s] in the gaps in an otherwise incomplete story and the way it does that is through use of your own past history—positive or negative,” writes the psychiatrist Paul Dobransky.

Key words: your own past history. We know ourselves more than anyone else. So, when we meet someone new our brain fills in the gaps based on this self-knowledge. Molly was more than just an attractive face—she was the wild, earthy free spirit that I’d wished I could be.

See, when we’re young, we get messages from parents, teachers, family, and friends that certain things about us are unacceptable, wrong, unworthy. We internalize these messages as shame, which causes us to hide and lose access to parts of ourselves. When we lose access to, say, our joy, we’re bound to idealize others who are unabashedly joyful. When we feel shame about, say, our tendency to get really anxious, we’re easily irritated by other people who get really anxious too.

The other day, I was flipping through one of my favorite books, Pema Chödrön’s Start Where You Are, and saw a note I’d made: “Molly, Sante Fe, May 2016.” Here’s the text beside it:

“Our sense of being defeated means that something got in. Something touched our soft spot. This vulnerability that we’ve kept armored for ages—something touched it. Maybe all that touched it was a butterfly, but we have never been touched there before. It was so tender.”

And that’s the thing. Even if the Molly I fell for was a projection, there’s a reason she got in. There’s a reason I made up the story that I did. And there’s a reason it hurt to let her go.

In other words, whether my pandemic romance turns into something real or not, I’m learning about myself. I’m peering into a mirror who also happens to be using me as a mirror, and we’re both growing together, as long as we stay openhearted—which is the whole point of falling in love in the first place.

I’m a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. If you’d like to work with me on your meditation practice or being more mindful in your life, reach out.

Download my free ebook on starting and sticking with a meditation practice here.