What Being “Inward Looking” Really Means

It was after noon, and the gate at the upper end of Lower Park should have been open. As luck would have it, I initially thought, I followed a worker in as he opened the gate. But as my luck would have it, he only opened it enough to allow his vehicle through.

“I can’t let you in,” he said rather severely as he got out to shut the gate again. “Why not, is there a tree down?” I replied. “No,” he said in a more friendly tone that belied the ominousness of his words, “We’re clearing out the homeless people.”

A wit once quipped, “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.” Well, America is a hell inhabited by people who think they’re in paradise. After electing, for the second time, one of the devil’s own, that truth has become much harder to deny. And the malevolence has yet to assume power.

California is often seen as paradise, but I live twenty minutes from Paradise, and it burned down in a hellish, climate change induced wildfire six years ago, the worst wildfire in the state’s history. It added to the area’s homelessness, but the Golden State recently began sweeps after a draconian US Supreme Court ruling that re-criminalizes homelessness.

A ruling by the right-wing majority court in June “means that cities no longer are prohibited from punishing people for camping if they have nowhere else to go.”

Even Oakland, a progressive city east of San Francisco with a high minority population, has begun sweeps across the city under a plan that states, “In no case, will emergency or urgent closures be delayed for shelter unavailability.” Of course “urgent closures” are whatever city officials arbitrarily say they are.

Given its Mediterranean climate, California has more homeless people than any other state, more than a third of America’s homeless population, over 200,000 men, women and children. An increasingly right leaning Gov. Gavin Newsom, kowtowing to the cruel national zeitgeist, welcomed his new power to sweep encampments.

As homeless advocates declare, the ruling “criminalizes poor people with no other options, for simply existing.” Thus an issue that is a matter of economics, housing policy, and health has been relegated once again to an ineffective law enforcement approach.

Homelessness became endemic in America after President Reagan’s mass closures of the nation’s mental health institutions over 40 years ago. But the roots of the problem lie in America’s zero-sum culture, in which you are a winner or a “loser,” and one’s worth is measured solely by your bank account, the house you own, and the car you drive.

It’s a culture of utter inner emptiness and alienation, which even progressives “buy into” when they persist in seeing the underlying misery in the USA in economic terms. Conflating America’s pathological externalizing with looking within, it has become a cliché to say, “Americans have become inward looking.” That’s laughable.

There are two meanings to the phrase, “inward looking,” a predominant false and a rare true meaning. The dominant meaning implies “navel staring” in the individual, and turning away from the world in xenophobia in the people generally. “Inward looking,” we’re told, is how the “indispensable nation” has suddenly become irrelevant to the human prospect.

However there’s another meaning to “inward looking,” which the United States and the West must now understand to rebuild after the Trump Administration does its worst. In the true sense, “inward looking” means being self-knowing, which is the foundation of right action and civic responsibility.

Much superficial analysis, at home and abroad, has centered around the specious issue of the economy, as if the cost of eggs or the price of gas is what moved people to vote for a malignant narcissist again. But for a people wholly lacking an inner life, the economy stands in for emptiness, ennui and enervation. Unfortunately, neither the people nor the pundits have any other language for the widespread spiritual and emotional reality except in economic terms.

That allows Trump to name and blame others for America’s inner hellishness – illegal aliens and the liberal elites – “the enemy within.” Trump and his millions of followers really believe that when the people onto whom they have projected their hate and misery are deported and driven out, America will be great again.

So what does it mean to be truly inward looking? It doesn’t mean, as so many meditation teachers and retreat centers maintain, that the self is the only thing we can know and deal with. That’s produced widespread solipsism in the West, which has greatly contributed to the indifference to the injustices and suffering in the world. What will happen when Trump’s policies inevitably promote much more misery and immiseration?

Being inward looking doesn’t mean denying cruel and overwhelming economic and political structures; it means seeing that the sources of egregious economic disparity, racism and war are not external, but internal.

As the saying goes, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” Evil forces exist within, not without, so they must first be faced and met inwardly before the rotten structures of society can be remedied outwardly.

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