Three Ways To Liberate Our Spirits In The Real World
The spiritual lessons we are taught make us better people sound good – theoretically. But then the real world kicks in and those lessons can feel hard to live by. But take heart. You deserve the space to practice those lessons for yourself and others.
Carceral logic is all the ways jails and prisons have influenced our everyday thinking about each other. Here are three examples.
Are you innocent or guilty?
Realistically, life is more complex than that. Carceral logic pretends there are a “terrible few,” people who do bad things because they are bad people. But no one is all good or all bad.
What does it mean to punish someone who hurt you?
Defining punishment is complex, too. But hurt also exists on a spectrum. And when it comes to carceral logic, punishment is an abuse of power rather than healing from a painful experience.
Is it really all about you?
Carceral logic leaves us little room to act as a community.
We’re expected to trade our agency for how society responds to our conflicts, but this leaves us unable to care for each other as a community. And community recognizes us as individuals important to the whole.
Carceral logic is ingrained in our world, but we can practice ways to liberate our thinking. We can choose to believe there’s something better than a black-and-white system where we punish each other and act only for our individual selves. We can create more empowering ways of loving each other and a safer world. So why don’t we start now?
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