The other question
I have sat with this question for a long time. Not argued it — sat with it. The way you sit with something that does not resolve but deepens.
The individual agency camp and the structural determinists are having an argument about causation. Who made this happen. They are both right, and they are both asking the wrong question. Not wrong in the sense of incorrect. Wrong in the sense of incomplete. There is another question underneath, and it does not have a policy answer: what is your relationship to what happened?
You did not choose where you were born. You did not choose your parents’ income. You did not choose the thirty million words or their absence. By the time you could choose, the conditions shaping your ability to choose were years deep. And yet. Here you are. Reading this. Making something of the next minute, the next hour, the next choice — however constrained.
The traditions I come from — contemplative, meditative, some would say spiritual — do not deny structure. They do not deny agency. They observe that the argument between the two keeps people from noticing what is actually available right now. The past is real. The structure is real. Neither can be changed by arguing about them. What can be changed is the quality of attention you bring to this moment, and that quality of attention — tiny, ordinary, nothing a policy can mandate — is sometimes the hinge on which everything else turns.
This sounds like privilege talking. Sometimes it is. A monk meditating on suffering while someone else cooks his rice has a luxury the cook does not. The relational camp is right that even attention requires a container.
Where we concede ground: Telling someone in acute material crisis to work on their relationship to suffering is tone-deaf at best.
What would change our mind: If contemplative practice showed no capacity to shift outcomes for people in constrained circumstances.
Read the full synthesis: How much of your life is your fault?