Your emotions belong to you, but they are also for sale in the attention economy and in end-stage capitalism. Many people are making a great deal of money by jacking into your emotions and manipulating your empathy for their own gain.

But there are things you can do to reclaim your emotions and yourself. In this time of intentional chaos, emotional and empathic manipulation, and manufactured polarization, reclaiming your emotions is a crucial and life-giving activity.

Here are some ideas to help you reclaim your emotions and listen to their wisdom.

Mentioned in this episode:

Ground News: https://ground.news/

Braver Angels: https://braverangels.org/our-mission/

Books: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-off-ramp-project

The Gift of Fear and And Other Survival Signals That Protect Us from Harm by Gavin De Becker

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser The

Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It by Kelly McGonigal

The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren

Ideas have fluidity; they can change and be added to, and they can be wrong, and that's fine. It's just an idea; we have thousands of them.

But ideologies become rigid very quickly, and they tend to become hierarchical (they claim to be the best, such that other ideologies are not worthy), which means that the people who have signed up for them may have a very hard time taking off-ramps from them.

Ideologies can also lean very cultic, because they often become transcendent belief systems, which is one of the four aspects of cultic control that make up Janja Lalich's Bounded Choice model (see episodes 3 through 6 in season 1 of this podcast).

Understanding the difference between ideas and ideologies is essential if you need to take an off-ramp, or create an off-ramp for someone else. Do you have the freedom to change, to think your own thoughts, and to have your own ideas? If so, the changes you need to make might be difficult, but they won't be overwhelming.

Ideas might be hard to give up, but they don't exist to entrap you.

Ideologies, on the other hand, are built to be sticky and often controlling. If you or someone you know got caught up in a rigid ideology, you or they will most likely need some support to take an off-ramp, and it's important to know the difference so you know what help you need for yourself (or how you can help others).

Thank you for working to create off-ramps in this time of rigid ideologies, cultic control mechanisms, intentional chaos, end-stage capitalism, and emotional (and empathic) manipulation. Your presence makes a difference.

Book mentioned in this episode:

Missing the Solstice by Karla McLaren: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6TRWRBZ

Socialism is a bogeyman term for a lot of people on the right -- just as fascism is a bogeyman term for a lot of people on the left.

So let's look at what socialism is, why it was developed, how it contrasts with capitalism and communism, and how it can moderate the most damaging excesses of capitalism.

Many countries combine capitalism and socialism in some way. The two systems don't need to cancel each other out (in fact, they can work very well together), but if people are telling you that these two systems cannot exist together -- and that you should hate or fear socialism -- it's time to question what their end game is.

There are two thriving, everyday socialist structures in the US that nearly everyone has experience with, and I explore them in this episode.

An excellent book about why and how homelessness exists (it's never merely about unsupported addiction or unsupported mental health issues): Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/