What do you focus your time, attention and money on? What are you working on? That is the world you are helping to reify.
Do you want to live in a world of honor, integrity, creativity and beauty? Then act as if.
It doesn’t matter what the dude or dude-ette next to you is doing.
We’ve been indoctrinated from an early age into accepting that’s just the way things are.
The schoolteacher and philosopher John Taylor Gatto discusses this cult of expertise, in the context of raising children:
Low men and women accept this reality as their own. Experts know better than me, better than my neighbors.
Low women and men who think of themselves as high and beyond these concerns, they pretend that burying those bad emotions that arise from being taught lifeless propaganda and living in filth is how strong people should behave. Be stoic! Just carry on. Trust the experts.
Those who aspire to be high men and women, people of character and passion and creativity and vitality, they see the damage in the world as an obstacle to be overcome.