Under capitalism it's legal for employers to steal from their employees. Doordash has reached a historic $131.5 million settlement to repay workers in New York City for wages the food delivery app stole from them over the last four years, which sounds like a big win for the little guy if you don’t think about it too hard. The Hill reports: “Under the settlement with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and city officials announced on Tuesday, DoorDash will pay $115 million to 260,000-plus workers it either did not pay at all or paid late. The food delivery company will also pay more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs.” So all Doordash has to do is return the money it stole and pay a microscopic fraction of its $13.7 billion yearly revenue in penalties, and that’s it. Nobody’s going to prison. Nobody was threatened with jail time. It wasn’t even a criminal case; it was an administrative enforcement action by New York City regulators. Doordash’s billionaire CEO Tony Xu is as free as a bird. A hundred and fifteen million dollars. What do you think would happen to you if you stole $115 million from your employer? Can you imagine that not being treated as a crime? Can you imagine going “Haha, ya got me! I’ll return the cash. Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and then paying a small fine and just going back to your life like it was no big deal? Of course you can’t. You know you’d be arrested, handcuffed, prosecuted for grand larceny, and then spend many years behind bars. Under capitalism it is strictly illegal for employees to steal from their employers, but if employers steal from their employees it’s not even a crime. It’s not even a petty misdemeanor. It’s perfectly legal. Which is so obnoxious, because stealing from workers is obviously much more abusive and destructive than stealing from billionaire corporations. The wealthy executives of a gig economy app would not have their lives affected in the slightest by an employee stealing from their company, but workers who are struggling to pay their bills can be devastated by even a few missing dollars in their paycheck. Employers stealing from employees is also plainly worse than the reverse because when an employer steals from an employee, they’re not just stealing their money. They’re stealing their labor. They’re stealing their time, which is the one thing you can’t make more of in this life. They’re stealing slices of your lifespan which you would otherwise be spending with loved ones and doing things that fulfill you. They’re actually stealing your life. And yet it’s only illegal for employees to steal from their employers. Employers stealing from employees? That’s just business. This glaring disparity between the rights of employers and employees exists because capitalism is all about using state power to protect the interests of capital. The most ardent proponents of our present system like to contrast capitalism with communism by claiming that communism can only be enforced through abusive excesses of state power, as though we don’t see state power dropping the hammer on the working class every minute of every day throughout our society. In practice the most significant difference between a socialist state and a capitalist one is whose interests state power is used to protect. We live in a tiered society where the people actually turning the wheels of civilization through their sweat and toil are legally inferior to the parasitic middle men who skim the profits from their labor. This is not justice, and this is not equality, as hard as the propagandists of the capitalist empire might try to indoctrinate us into believing the contrary.

Under capitalism if you steal from your employer you go to jail but if your employer steals from you then you need to win a class action lawsuit to get back what they stole, and they suffer zero consequences. Capitalism is all about using state power to protect capital by force.

Different people mean different things when they talk about having an awakening. Some use “awakening” to describe the movement into revolutionary politics as you gradually discover that everything you’ve been taught about your government, your nation and your world is a lie. Some use that word to refer to the process of awakening from the indoctrination imposed upon them by their family and their culture: religious beliefs, fundamental assumptions about sex and gender roles, what a healthy relationship looks like, abusive family dynamics they’d been trained to view as normal, etc. Others use it to describe the process of awakening from the psychological trance of the ego and dismantling our maladaptive cognitive and perceptual mechanisms which cause us to suffer and view ourselves as separate from the world. And a mature worldview understands that all of these groups are using the term correctly. In this strange human adventure we are called to awaken on all levels: individually, interpersonally, and globally. None of these levels are more valuable than any other. You can awaken to them in any order, or at the same time. To awaken globally means bringing consciousness to what’s really going on in the world. It means learning the truth about the abusive nature of your government and its allies, and unlearning all the lies you were taught about the “liberal democracies” of the western world. It means learning real history and reading real news, and expunging from your worldview all the fake history and the fake news you’ve been fed your whole life by the western empire. It means deeply reckoning with the suffering your rulers have inflicted upon your fellow human beings around the world, not just intellectually in your head but emotionally in your heart. To awaken interpersonally is to bring consciousness to what’s really going on in your relationships, your social circles, and your community. Opening your eyes to the fact that you’re in an abusive marriage, or that your family is wildly dysfunctional, or that your church has put a lot of debilitating nonsense in your head. Learning to spot the manipulators, users and abusers in your life, and working to minimize the damage they can do. Discovering the various ways you yourself have been hurting or hampering the people in your life, and working to right those wrongs. Bringing harmony to your inner and outer circles of association by working to cultivate the healthy and uproot the destructive with relentless self-honesty. Cutting other people’s bullshit out of your mind and out of your life while building bridges to other people’s loveliness. Helping joy and love to thrive in the small social areas over which you have personal influence. To awaken individually is to bring consciousness to what’s really going on inside you. By closely examining the nature of your own thoughts and senses, you can gain a profound experiential insight into the fact that there is no actual “me” inside your body having experiences of an outside world, and there never was. A deep, clear recognition of the fact that the “self” your thoughts refer to is a psychological work of fiction causes all energetic belief to fall away from the internal mental narrative, and life becomes much more peaceful and pleasant. This awakening can then be deeply educated into your operating system so that all your emotions, psychological tendencies, and fields of perception move fully into alignment with this insight. People can be awake on one level but fast asleep on another. There’ve been spiritually enlightened gurus who can speak brilliantly about nonduality but have the politics of a CNN liberal. There’ve been powerfully lucid revolutionary leaders who abused their spouses and beat their children. There are beloved pillars of the community who are entirely trapped in egoic delusion. Awakening on one level helps you to awaken on others. Awakening individually gives you the clarity to see which battles actually need to be fought and which are just candy for the ego. Awakening globally to the abuses and manipulations of the empire allows you to recognize the same abusive paterns and manipulations in yourself and in your interpersonal relationships. Awakening interpersonally helps you understand the way your specific family and culture has shaped your psychology in ways that inhibit your awakening as an individual. Our task is to try to awaken on all three levels. Let your curiosity and intuition guide you through the process of bringing consciousness to what’s really going on in yourself, in your relationships, and in your world, and then you can truthfully say you are doing your own small part to help humanity become a conscious species.

I understand what you’re saying, but that’s mostly just head noise that gets indoctrinated into us by the unhealthy society we live in. Life isn’t about racking up a bunch of accomplishments or hitting certain milestones, it’s about living. Literally physically being alive, and making sure you fully live it. When I say “fully live” your life, I don’t mean having a bunch of exciting experiences like going skydiving or running with the bulls, and I don’t mean ticking a bunch of boxes like getting married and having kids. I mean actually being present for it. Having your attention in what’s really going on instead of in a bunch of made-up thought fluff in your head. And that actually gets a lot easier to do once you let go of the notion that you’re doing life wrong and that your story isn’t unfolding correctly. According to the rules of our dysfunctional society, you are inadequate unless you’ve become a productive gear-turner for capitalism and obtained enough wealth to consume products at large volume. Ideally you’ll have also produced some children who can grow up to become good consumers and gear-turners themselves. Your life is nothing but a story of academic goals to career goals to relationship goals to family goals, purchasing larger and larger chunks of real estate along the way until you catch some disease and die. Your enjoyment of life? Worthless. Your relishing of your own sensory experiences from moment to moment upon this unfathomably beautiful planet? Entirely without value. Marveling about the miraculous nature of this strange and wonderful terrestrial experience? Irrelevant. All that matters in this civilization is what boxes you have ticked and what products you have purchased. This is an insane way to live. Only the human brain could come up with such spectacular hallucinations. Only humans are crazy enough to believe life is going wrong even when they’ve got a beating heart, a full belly, and no physical threats in the immediate vicinity. No frog is sitting there worrying about its worth as a frog. No eagle is flooding its body with stress hormones because it hasn’t accomplished enough in life. They get their food and they relax. That’s their whole day. How to live? The cells in your body already know how to live. Your mind has no idea, but your cells know. All your mind can do is make stuff up about what a life well-lived looks like, and meanwhile your living cells are already doing life without your mind’s supervision or understanding. They’re doing it in your sleep, that’s how irrelevant your mind is to the process of living. Your mind thinks it’s driving this life, but it’s actually just a loud and bratty passenger. When you stop listening to the mind barking instructions from the back seat and learn to simply sit in the wonder of sensory experience like the animals do, that’s when you really start living. When you stop listening to the babbling mental monologue and the labeling, dividing mind which thinks it knows what everything is, you start seeing everything for the first time. Each moment of this incarnation is fascinating and awe-inspiring when you learn to see it with fresh eyes, whether you’re climbing Mount Everest or sitting at home drinking coffee. THAT'S what living is really about. It’s about truly showing up for your one precious life. Not the story of your life. Not other people’s ideas about your life. Not your arguments with life or your assumptions about what it should look like. Your ACTUAL life, as it’s actually appearing, in the here and now, from moment to moment. Don’t let the madness of our dystopian society trick you into missing out on this. Don’t take your guidance on how to live your life from a profoundly sick civilization. Take your guidance instead from your own living cells. From your senses. From the felt experience of the living body. From the air in your lungs. From the colors and shades in your visual field. From the vibrations in your eardrums. From the wind on your skin and in your hair. That’s the only place life is actually happening. Start there. Start there over and over again. Every instant is a brand new beginning.