Man in the mirror
Like my man MJ, I’m starting with the man in the mirror and asking him to change his ways. Sha’mone!
I stepped away from the law over two years ago, mostly because I didn’t want to spend my life in constant conflict with difficult humans. But the call to justice has pulled me back.
Until recently, I had all but ruled out returning to lawyering and was focused on writing and bringing a Minnesota cannabis microbusiness license to market. Then, right before the State Fair, I rediscovered the sense of purpose I’d felt as a lawyer while investigating what I suspected was a fraudulent investment scheme targeting me and other independent licensees. Exposing the false credentials, shell entities, and sketchy history of a would-be fraudster reminded me why I wanted to be a lawyer in the first place: to protect others and seek justice.
I had allowed my law license to lapse. To get my L back, I had to pay nearly two racks in fees and fines and complete about fifty hours of continuing legal education. Forcing myself to sit through fifty hours of CLEs was challenging, but I banged them out, praise the Universe. The Hennepin County Law Library and the Minnesota AG’s office offer free on-demand CLEs, and between the two, I completed most of my hours without paying a dime.
Some of the CLEs were mind-numbingly dull—especially those on government data practices and administrative law—but most were surprisingly engaging. I especially enjoyed the ones on artificial intelligence and the law, tribal sovereignty, and the consolidation of power in politics, technology, and wealth.
A few of my old adversaries from the civil defense bar showed up as panelists. Listening to them talk shop reminded me of the corporations that buttered their bread.
For fifteen years, I represented some of Minnesota’s most disadvantaged and disenfranchised residents in human rights cases. Most of my adversaries were corporations that violated my clients’ civil rights in myriad ways, most often in the employment context.
To give my clients a fighting chance at justice, I had to learn how corporations think and operate. As Sun-Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “know thy enemy.”
I cared about doing my best for my clients, and I came to understand corporate values on a soul level. They’re always amoral and driven solely by profit maximization and self-interest. That’s it. Nothing about human values like love, compassion, empathy, or loyalty. Just money and margins.
That understanding helped me get good at suing corporations, and I won my last six trials. The irony, though, was that I invested much of the money I earned suing corporations back into the very corporate system that exploited my clients.
Like many working people, I had a retirement account that automatically invested part of my earnings in mutual funds—tiny ownership slices of many corporations, often the 500 most valuable in the U.S. I happened to buy in when prices were low and watched my account balance multiply through the magic of compound interest. I liked the idea of “passive income” and read a few books that reinforced the belief that investing in mutual funds was the smart path to wealth.
Many of us mistakenly believe we have to invest in corporations just to keep pace with inflation and survive. Our employers automatically enroll us in 401(k)s that funnel our wages straight into corporate coffers. Most of us do this unthinkingly, literally investing our life energy in corporate values. It’s low-vibrating, self-perpetuating—and it needs to stop.
We can break the cycle if we wake up, exercise our God-given right to free will, and choose human values over corporate values.
One day, it hit me that raising the quality of my consciousness—our only real obligation—was incompatible with raising the balance of my investment accounts through corporations that put profits over people and the planet.
Corporatism is the biggest scourge on Earth. It requires an infinite supply of fuel for an infinite growth economy. Corporatism feeds on human souls and natural resources harvested from Earth for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The relentless pursuit of profits has inflicted deep wounds on our planet and our species’ collective consciousness, wounds that deepen each day.
By owning corporate stock and profiting from it, I was complicit in corporatism. An enabler. No different, really, from those corporate defense attorneys on that CLE panel. I was also putting profits over people and the planet, only to a different degree.
That day, I took a long look at the man in the mirror. The next day, I divested from the stock market.
If everyone did the same, corporations would lose their lifeblood overnight, and the system would implode. We could dismantle corporatism with relative ease.
All the money in the world means nothing if we’re spiritually bankrupt. Jeffrey Epstein’s life tells us all we need to know about the spiritual decay that comes from valuing money and wealth over morals and wisdom.
The way we humans operate — driven mainly by corporate values — is unsustainable, and dysfunction is accelerating. If we don’t rapidly evolve the quality of our collective consciousness, our species will go extinct and take countless others with it. We can meet this existential challenge, in part, by waking up to our complicity in corporatism. If corporatism collapses, I’m optimistic we’ll adapt and build something wiser and more humane. But if it doesn’t—and soon—we’re definitely not going to make it.
Getting left behind on the money train gives me anxiety. But folding into a reality where corporate values eclipse human ones is hell on earth. The signs are already emerging, and everyone senses it on a soul level.
Each of us has a personal gravitational field that attracts what matches our vibrations. We fold into realities that reflect the quality of our consciousness. That’s why meaningful change always comes from the inside out, and never from the outside in.
Practice leading with the heart and being the change. We can start by choosing human values over corporate values.
As my childhood best friend Jesse likes to say, “Don’t talk about it, be about it.”
