BEFORE WE TAKE SIDES

Let’s pause and widen our attention before we meet a divided world

I am seventy-two. My parents did not make it into their late eighties. Out of eight siblings, two are dead, one has had Alzheimer’s for fifteen years, and the rest of us are heading for our eighties with the usual mix of luck and attrition. Statistically, I probably have one or two reasonably functional decades left. People kindly say, “You don’t know that,” but in a rough order-of-magnitude way, I do.

I hold that personal timescale alongside the wider picture.

We have a major war in Europe that looks disturbingly like a rerun of the opening moves of the First World War. China is intent on dominating its region. India is drifting into a hard-edged majoritarian politics. There is a growing cluster of strongmen and brittle democracies. And above all that, a small global class of individuals and corporations whose wealth now runs into the hundreds of billions and, quite plausibly, soon trillions.

If you are a trillionaire, you can effectively allocate more than a hundred million dollars a day. My partner and I are moderately comfortable. But it sits in a different universe from the financial and political agency of those who can move markets and twist policy with a phone call.

Add to this a just-in-time global system that depends on social cohesion and stable logistics, at precisely the point when cohesion is fraying. Inequality widens, trust thins, politics polarises, and planetary boundaries are under strain.

Given all that, it is not surprising that many thoughtful, ethical people turn to activism as their primary orientation: climate movements, social justice campaigns, various forms of resistance and reform. Among my friends, including those with a Buddhist background like my own, there is a strong sense that one’s deepest responsibility is to fight, lobby, demonstrate and disrupt.

I don’t think that impulse is wrong. But I no longer think it can be primary. For me, the order has become: attention and state of mind first; conceptual thinking and social action afterwards.

This is an attempt to say why.

Agency and Its Limits

A helpful word here is agency: the capacity to shape what happens, both subjectively (“I feel I can do something”) and objectively (my actions actually change conditions).

Over the last decades, agency has become highly asymmetric:

A small set of actors – very wealthy individuals, large corporations, certain states – have enormous structural agency. They can move billions at the press of a button, shape narratives through media, and block or channel legislation.
Most ordinary people have shrinking effective agency. Precarious work, housing insecurity, under-resourced services and rising costs mean a lot of energy is spent on survival and firefighting.

This asymmetry is not just an ethical problem; it is structurally unstable. Large differentials in agency and wealth tend to generate resentment, loss of legitimacy, and volatile responses. Over time, they make the environment less safe for everyone, including the rich.

In principle, democratic politics could correct this. In practice, the time constants of policy – consultation, legislation, implementation, feedback – are slow, while the dynamics of finance, information and crisis are fast. The system has a great deal of momentum. Meaningful change tends to arrive late, and often only after some form of shock.

Looking honestly at this, I see several plausible branches for the coming decades, and one of them is a hard-right, authoritarian “solution” – a familiar historical pattern when inequality is high and mainstream politics seems unable to respond.

I do not think this outcome is inevitable. But it is structurally possible enough that it should enter our calculations.

Activism as Refuge

Against that backdrop, it is completely understandable that people seek refuge in activism.

There is a particular relief that comes from:

finding a group of like-minded people,
having a clear story about what is wrong (climate breakdown, capitalism, fascism),
and a clear set of actions (protests, blockades, campaigns, lobbying).

It restores a sense of agency: I am doing something. It also meets human needs for belonging and meaning.

But activism as a primary refuge has its own characteristic risks. I see them in myself as much as around me:

Projection and simplification
Complex, systemic problems get collapsed into simple villains and heroes. Opponents are not just wrong, but bad. Anxiety and grief are converted into anger that always points outward.
Burnout and bitterness
When the expected results do not come – emissions still rise, elections are lost, wars continue – the gap between effort and outcome can turn into cynicism and rage.
Smuggling in the same mind
Without much inner work, we bring the same patterns into our movements that we grew up with elsewhere: status competition, purity tests, scapegoating, inability to tolerate ambiguity. The outer cause changes; the inner habits do not.

None of this is unique to any particular campaign. It seems to be what human minds tend to do under stress when there hasn’t been sufficient practice or reflection.

Conceptual Thinking as Refuge

My own background is in Buddhist practice, so I tend to use that language, but I think the pattern is wider.

One of the things I notice – in myself, in friends, in public life – is a deep reliance on conceptual thinking as a refuge. When reality feels overwhelming – ecological, political, personal – we reach, almost automatically, for more analysis, more argument, more theory. The underlying move is: if I can get the right conceptual frame, I will feel safer.

Thinking, by itself, isn’t the problem. We need concepts to navigate the world. The problem is the habitual reliance: turning to concepts to avoid the rawness of reality as it is – unpredictable, uncontrollable, not arranged to our liking.

From a Buddhist angle, it’s striking how quickly this kind of ungrounded conceptual refuge slides into the old trio:

grasping – at the comfort of being right, having the correct line or the “real” analysis,
aversion – towards those who don’t share it; the need for an enemy; the pleasure in indignation,
confusion – mistaking our map for the territory; living inside commentary and losing contact with the unlabelled feel of experience.

In the immediate social context, this shows up as “them and us”:

our movement versus theirs,
the “awake” versus the “asleep”,
the intelligent versus the stupid,
the spiritually serious versus the compromised.

We retreat into stories – often very clever ones – to avoid the discomfort and vulnerability of direct contact: with our own fear, with other people’s suffering, with the complexity of the world. And in doing so, we quietly recreate more of the same patterns we say we oppose.

This is one of the reasons I have come to feel that practice has to precede concepts, not follow them.

Practice First, Concept Second

See ‘Change your Mind’ by Paramandana

For me, “practice” means training attention and heart over time. In my case that is shaped by the Buddha and the Metta Sutta, but I don’t think one has to be formally Buddhist to recognise the territory.

Importantly, I don’t really mean “try harder to notice what’s going on in your mind”. In my experience, trying harder produces tension and obscures what’s going on. For most of us, the ability to see what the mind is doing is the result of practice, not the starting point.

What practice has mostly meant for me is building a simple habit of bringing the mind back to some clear, direct experience – something uncomplicated and present. That might be the sensation of breathing, the feeling of sitting, sounds, the sense of space around me. If I keep returning to that, gently and often, there is a natural sense of clarity in the moment, and it doesn’t feel like a struggle. Out of that clarity, the patterns of the mind start to show themselves on their own. I don’t have to dig for them.

It is helpful to bring to mind positive states and kindly actions – my own or others’ – and to stay with the felt sense of that. Over time, this builds a very ordinary but quite visceral sense that other minds really exist: that there is someone there, with their own joys and fears and limitations. It begins with individuals, and then becomes more general. It starts to feel like another faculty, almost like a way of seeing, that arises out of the simple habit of giving self and others direct attention without presuming in advance what response will arise.

That is much closer, in my mind, to the spirit of the Buddha’s mindfulness and the Metta Sutta than to a kind of anxious self-monitoring. It’s not about endlessly analysing ourselves. It’s about repeatedly coming back to a clear, direct experience, and letting clarity and kindness grow out of that – and then letting our concepts and commitments come afterwards, rather than using them as a shield against reality.

The Dhammapada – a very early collection of short Buddhist verses about how the mind shapes experience – is clear that seeing the mind’s tendencies is only half the work. There is also a path: a steady, sometimes quite ordinary intention to let the mind turn another way. Nobody can do that turning for us. Movements can inspire us, teachers can point, but in the end it is my own choice, again and again, to give even a small consent to clarity and kindness – to want to want them. In my experience, it’s this wanting that matters most: once that much is there, the actual shifts of mind often come with surprisingly little strain. The real task is to keep renewing that wish and to look for, and bring about, the conditions that support it: sitting down at all, coming back to the breath or the body, recalling a kindly act instead of rehearsing a grievance. That kind of effort doesn’t mean forcing experience into a shape I like. It means gently but firmly refusing to feed the habits of craving, ill will and confusion, and giving other qualities a chance to grow.

There are things I cannot meaningfully change

I cannot re-engineer global finance.
I cannot prevent wars in distant capitals.
I cannot dictate how billionaires use their money.

I can, at best, make small contributions at the edges: how I vote, what I support, where I put my money and time. Those matter, but only up to a point. I’m also aware that even being able to talk in this way about practice and choice already means I have a degree of safety, time and support that many people simply don’t. That doesn’t make practice optional for the rest of us, but it does mean I don’t assume everyone can approach it in the same way or with the same freedom.

Where I have real leverage, every single day, is over:

whether I react from fear, resentment and the craving for simple answers,
or from a slightly more open, steady and interested state of mind.

Practice is a way of shifting that. It does not make me wise or good in any grand sense. But it can:

slow the spin,
make it a little easier to hold complexity and not immediately collapse into “them and us”,
and create a small gap between feeling and reaction.

And, just quietly, practice isn’t only preparation for difficulty; it is also one of the main ways life still feels rich and worth living, even in a frayed world.

Only after that – to the extent that I can establish it on a given day – do I want to let conceptual thinking really take off: What is happening? What seems likely? Where might a small, human-scale action help rather than harm?

In other words: I want my analysis to rest on some minimal clarity and kindness, not the other way round. If I don’t attend to that, my analysis itself easily becomes just another way of acting out the old habits, only now with more sophisticated vocabulary.

This Is Not an Argument for Doing Nothing

“Practice first” is not a recommendation to retire into a meditation hut and ignore the world. I don’t think “the world is illusory, so nothing matters” is a mature spiritual position. Nor do I think movements for justice, climate, peace and sanity are optional extras we can dispense with.

What I do think is that how we show up in them matters:

whether we bring more aggression or a bit less,
more rigidity or a bit more curiosity,
more “them and us” or a slightly wider sense of “we”.

A practice-first approach means:

recognising that my own mind is part of the field I’m trying to respond to,
accepting that unexamined reactivity will distort any cause I join,
and acknowledging the mismatch between my individual agency and the global systems I worry about.

From that stance, action often becomes:

more modest in ambition,
more local and relational,
less addicted to dramatic results,
and, I hope, a little less likely to add to the total confusion and ill will.

It might look like:

supporting a local project consistently rather than chasing every global outrage,
doing some slow, unglamorous work in community,
or using whatever skills I have to strengthen institutions that still have some integrity.

None of this “fixes the world”. But it is a way of living in alignment with one’s values without pretending to be in charge of history.

A Gentle Invitation

Among people I know – some Buddhists, many not – I notice a familiar pattern:

sharp, often accurate conceptual critiques,
strong identification with particular causes,
and relatively little attention to the state of mind from which those critiques and commitments arise.

I don’t have a programme to offer, and I have no desire to tell anyone where their energy “should” go.

All I really want to suggest is a small inversion of order:

What happens if we make getting the mind into some kind of shape the first move,
and let our concepts and commitments unfold from there,
instead of the other way round?

My own sense, as someone with perhaps a decade or two of active life ahead – if I am fortunate – is that this matters more and more as the century unfolds. The larger patterns may not be kind. Authoritarian tendencies may strengthen. Systems we assumed were secure may turn out to be fragile.

We cannot guarantee good outcomes. But we can choose what we lean on as all this unfolds.

For my part, it now makes more sense to trust first in cultivating a mind that can meet suffering, uncertainty and decline without completely losing its bearings, and only then in any particular political or conceptual project.

My hope isn’t to pull anyone out of their commitments, but simply to help widen the stance from which those commitments are held, rather than push anyone into a new trench. It is a plea for putting practice before theory – clarity, compassion and simple presence before the next layer of commentary – so that when we do think and act, we are at least a little less likely to feed the very forces we’re trying to resist.

This whole reflection really sits inside what Buddhism calls the Noble Eightfold Path – especially right view, right intention, right speech and right action. I haven’t used that language much in the main text, but if you know the Eightfold Path you may recognise the territory: how we see the world, how we lean in our hearts, and how that shapes the way we speak and act before we take sides.

Further reading / listening
– Change Your Mind by Paramananda – a short, experiential introduction to Buddhist practice, with a lot on how we can gently turn the mind towards more clarity and kindness.
– A simple overview of the Noble Eightfold Path – for example, Sangharakshita’s The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path (also published as Vision and Transformation) gives a very human, practice-based account of how right view, intention, speech and action work together in everyday life.