When the Tower Falls

How to Build a New World When the Old One Crumbles

In 2016, when I learned in the middle of the night that DJT had won the election, I woke my children screaming, “NO,” over and over. His election was a rejection of everything I held good and right and true: kindness, honesty, fairness, decency, intelligence, empathy. Nothing that has happened since then (and let’s be clear—EVERYTHING has happened since then) has changed my estimation of that man’s character except for the worse. But this time, when I woke to the news that he’d won a decisive victory, I thought, “The tower has fallen. The old rules don’t work anymore. We will have to stop playing by them now.”

I am a Tarot reader, and in Tarot, The Tower is the most dreaded card. It represents those moments when everything we have believed and planned and constructed for our security and safety come crashing down and we are standing in the rubble, unsheltered, realizing that we are going to have to start all over again.

This is a very scary and unsettling place to be. For dyed-in-the-wool liberals, among whom I count myself, it’s easy to conclude that more than half the voting population of our country must be bigoted, cruel, democracy-hating, truth-hating, murder-supporting, felon-supporting, very bad people who will now be unleashed to pursue their hateful agendas without consequence. This is an extremely demoralizing conclusion, and it’s the wrong one. The conclusion we need to focus on instead is: The world does not work the way we were taught.

So how does it work instead? Tarot can provide some insight, since its function is to describe the important aspects of the human condition. In Tarot, the minor arcana, which is similar to a regular deck of playing cards, is divided into four suits, which may be called by various names but which always correspond to the four elements: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. Earth represents the tangible and material—our measurable objective reality. Water represents feeling and emotion and connection and relationship. Fire represents desire and action. And Air represents ideas, values, beliefs. These four elements make up all of creation, and must all play a role in every creative act. But in which order?

In modern Western culture we don’t tend to think in terms of these four elements, but we have very definite beliefs about their order of operation. We start with Air, which is ideas, values, beliefs that we impart through education. Once we have internalized the values and principles and threats and promises of our education, we take actions (Fire) intended to win an emotional response (Water) from others—approval, reward, invitation, influence—that validates our actions and leads to measurable, material results such as money, security, status, comfort, children raised in good school districts (Earth).

But DJT doesn’t abide by this order of operation at all. The man does not appear to have any consistent framework of values. His actions are not informed by any recognizable set of principles. He appears to thrive on hatred as much as on adoration. And his material successes continue to surpass that of most humans while underpinned by nothing that we recognize as foundational—not legality, not integrity, not decency in relationship, not consistency of action, not even noteworthy pre-existing wealth.

Why?

Because the order of operations we have been taught is the wrong one. The effective order of operations is Fire, Water, Air, Earth. Fire is desire. We emerge into this material existence as fully id-driven beings, directed by impulse to taste this, touch that, experience the other. These Fiery actions are received in various ways by our caregivers and elicit various consequences, and we experience a range of emotions (Water) in response to that reception. We feel loved and rewarded for some actions, shamed, ignored, or punished for others. Based on the emotions we feel in response to our actions, we form beliefs (Air). These beliefs can be anything at all. I get everything I want if I scream loudly enough. I have to earn my love by making other people happy. Other people are unpredictable and scary and I have to fend for myself. Everything I do is magic. You get the idea.

So far so good. But this is where it gets tricky. Our beliefs attract and create our realities (Earth). By this I do not mean that our beliefs warp our perception of objective reality, but that objective reality takes the form of our beliefs. However, there is a very important corollary. Our beliefs are only as powerful as their foundations. The beliefs that arise from positive emotions that are derived from the expression of our desires are extremely powerful. These are the kinds of beliefs that change the world. The beliefs and fears that are built on negative emotions, such as sadness or disappointment or shame, and are at odds with our desire rather than fueled by it, do not bring about negative realities per se. Mostly, they do nothing at all. They leave us disempowered, feeling that we are at the mercy of the fates and of petty dictators, with no ability to build the world we wish to live in, and no ability to change the patterns we are stuck in.

Take DJT, a creature of pure id. He does whatever he likes. He particularly likes anything that will get him attention. So he follows his id (Fire). He gets strong reactions, whether positive or negative doesn’t matter to him at all, and those reactions make him feel really good (Water). Out of that positive emotion comes the belief (Air) that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it, unleash a mob on the Capitol and get away with it, break law after law and get away with it, and people will love him and people will vote for him and he can be elected President of the United States (Earth). Twice.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, are a bunch of us who learned not to do any of the things that make us feel good, but instead to do the things that our authorities told us would win us approval or at least keep us out of trouble—spending decades of our lives in school, doing assignments, doing chores, doing what we were told, training for careers based not on passion but on practicality. In fact, we have been discouraged our whole lives from acting on our desires. Have you done your homework? Have you finished your chores? Can you make money doing that? You know that will make you fat. We have also been taught that we are doing damage to some degree everywhere we go—by living on land ripped away from indigenous peoples, by eating food raised in cruel or damaging or poisonous ways, by our dependence on plastics that are killing the oceans made from dwindling fossil fuels won through war and aggression spit out by factories that pollute the earth while exploiting people who suffer to make our advantages possible. Consequently, even when we do act on our desires, our positive emotion is muddied and diluted by guilt. We feel bad about feeling good. Then we try to make ourselves feel good by doing things that feel bad, punishing ourselves at the gym, denying ourselves the foods we like to eat, saving all our money to spend on hospital bills in our old age instead of on things we’d enjoy now, working jobs that bore us to tears and staying in relationships that hurt our feelings because we’re afraid the alternative is worse. Many of us have no idea anymore how to answer the questions, “What do I want? What would I enjoy?” We’ve been disconnected from our desire, we feel bad about feeling good, and our beliefs are mostly fears that imprison us in a reality that we don’t enjoy but are terrified might change at any time for the worse. Which it regularly does.

We have really got to stop this. And we can.

In one way, the process is pretty straightforward. We have to locate our desire and let that desire fuel our actions. We have to use our emotions as a compass, moving towards whatever feels energizing and exciting and good, and away from whatever feels demotivating and bad. That means moving towards things while they feel good, and moving away when they stop feeling good, and not wasting time trying to argue them back into feeling good when they’ve stopped. The belief that arises from this process is that we can succeed at the thing we desire, and that it will bring us joy. Reality will come to meet those beliefs that are based on desire and enjoyment and enthusiasm. It’s like those shiny happy beliefs are beautiful, well-built houses that reality wants to move into, while the negative beliefs are grim and rickety towers with cracked foundations that remain on the market, unsold.

The part of this that is really unfamiliar and may be difficult for us at first is becoming aware of our negative emotion. There is a strong tendency to link feeling bad with failure, so we shut it out and avoid feeling it. Another strong tendency is to demonstrate virtue by feeling bad. “I feel bad,” we say as apology when someone does something nice for us. We feel bad for people we view as victims as a form of solidarity, or we feel bad because we think it's sinful to feel too good about anything. And we feel bad because we’re afraid that feeling good is just one more thing that can be taken away from us. This all seems so normal to us we don’t even view a lot of our negative feelings as negative. But negative feelings will sap our creative power whether we are aware of them or not.

The takeaway here is not—and this is very important—not to feel like a failure every time we become aware of a negative feeling. Discovering a negative feeling is actually a victory—it’s like discovering where the pipe is clogged. Negative feelings show us the places where we are not acting on our desire. They alert us to our fearful and disempowering beliefs. They are the error codes in the system that tell us where to investigate. When we feel angry or depressed or sick or sad or afraid, it’s a cue to get curious and listen to what that feeling is telling us about what we want or don’t want and about our beliefs. Once feelings have had their say, they move on, and other feelings flow in to take their place. If the feeling isn’t leaving, it just means it still hasn’t fully delivered its message. Remember emotion is water. Tears are evidence that something blocked and frozen is thawing. Tears are good.

If we have trouble trusting that our emotions can be useful messengers, and find ourselves hauling up the portcullis and preparing the vats of boiling oil, that is the time to remind ourselves that we live in a culture that has taught us that emotions are dangerous killers best drugged out of existence. This is not true, but our authorities have insisted that it is for a long time, so we need to forgive ourselves for believing it. Our authorities have a vested interest in not helping us develop our full ability to shape our realities. If we did that, they wouldn’t be our authorities anymore.

And with that, we have come full circle. A particularly abhorrent authority has been elected back to office. His only superpower is feeling very happy about making us feel terrible. This is actually a very easy superpower for us to take away. Oddly enough, it is even easier now that our tower has fallen and we’re standing here in the rubble, blinking as the dust clears. Towers are inconvenient places to live built by people who are afraid—afraid of the dangers on 360 degrees of horizon, afraid of barbarians at the base, afraid of tripping and falling off the parapet. Down here, it’s much easier to focus on the problems that are ours to solve. We can clear out the spring, and stop importing water in plastic bottles. We can grow our own gardens. We can pick apples, greet our neighbors, meet our friends. We have lived for too long in the tower. It is time to come down to common ground.