"Love Is Not the Answer" by Scott Mackey

Issue 112

“Love Is Not the Answer” by Scott Mackey

If this is your first read, welcome to The Conscious Politics Op-Ed (formerly The Conscious Politics Sunday Newsletter), currently being published whenever possible.

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Being conscious, quote unquote, can sound a bit loaded and uppity in certain circles. Of course, I don’t shy away from anything about it and couldn’t if I tried. It is what it is and it’s all I happen to care about, but that’s just me. Sometimes I’ll interchange “living consciously” with “living intentionally” just to mix it up, same for “on purpose.” We always say — just a reminder — how intentions matter because the law of attraction is always on. That means we’re always getting more and more of what we’re thinking about (e.g., we’re doomed) and more and more of what we’re feeling (e.g., anger, fear, hopelessness). It’s also why I am a relentless broken record.

But this much is true: our culture is habituated to and so very steeped in negative thinking, evidence of which I see all the time as part of my other job — facilitator of the Spiritual Workout Weekly Online Intention-Setting Clinic. I offer this clinic solely for the purpose of helping us become more and more practiced, more adept, at thinking in terms of what we want. Most everyone complains that this is hard work, which is why I call it a workout, but I digress.

The point is, practice is critical and while I certainly provide some structure and follow some basic mechanics in my own approach to being conscious, there’s no one way to practice thinking and feeling more intentionally. There’s no one way to learn to think beyond what is and to imagine what’s desired. There’s no one way to truly embody our intentions such that thinking and feeling and talking about them flows from us readily and organically. To be sure, part of the fun is that we steal from each other all the time. We steal ideas about what to focus on: I never thought of that, but I want that, too. And we steal ideas about how to practice embodying our intentions: It never occurred to me to record my intention on my phone and play it on a loop under my pillow all night long and I speak my intentions to my two-year-old are examples of endless permutations.

My approach — clinically and non-fictionally — is rather head-y, devoid of theory, and laser-focused on practice. Choose those thoughts carefully! Be present! Make sure that intention is shiny and clear! What are you believing? Express some gratitude! Be compassionate! It’s serious work for serious people but adhering to our 15 concepts is not the only way to live consciously, not the only way to live beyond what is in an effort to create what’s desired. That became abundantly clear when I read Scott Mackey’s debut novel, Love Is Not the Answer. We met a couple of months ago when I was hocking Conscious Politics and he was hocking his new book.

Escape the real presidential campaign of 2024 by frolicking through a wonderfully-imagined campaign of 2028.

As I write these words there is all kinds of news about wars and court cases and an unwieldy presidential campaign that has, apparently, jumped the shark and is well underway even though only two or three states have voted in the Republican and Democratic primary elections to date. With multitudes of reasons to think, as we do, about all manner of political horror, here’s a book — a novel — that imagines a possibility, that mixes actual realities and imagined new ones with aplomb, that provides excellent practice thinking outside the box, thinking in terms of what could be, thinking beyond the news of the day (which, by the way, has already been created and does not, even a little bit, need you to feed it). It’s for anyone who likes a little fiction to balance out their non-.

Of course, just because I see this novel as an opportunity for conscious politics practitioners to use it as a way to practice being intentional, to practice thinking beyond what is, I’m quite sure Scott didn’t write it for this specific purpose — or did he? He says he wrote it “for the reader that is ready to stop being against ‘them,’ but doesn’t yet know what to be for” and “for those who want to make a difference” and “those who understand the solution is connection to ourselves, each other, and the earth.” I’d say the same things about what this newsletter is for and as I read his book — in pre-publication manuscript form — I thought, wow, this guy and I seem to think extremely similarly.

Of course, the only way to know if that was true was for him to read some of these pages and he did. He ventured into our archive on his own and issued a preliminary report of high praise so, yes, he and I — and we — have very similar views about politics, which is why I believe you’ll enjoy Love Is Not the Answer. Escape the real campaign of 2024 by frolicking through a wonderfully-imagined campaign of 2028. There, the race between familiar candidates — the White, male, Christian-pandering, Republican, red-state senator and the liberal, female governor of a blue state — gets shaken up when a surprise candidate materializes and threatens to upend politics as we know it. And don’t we all want to upend politics as we know it? I’m not a professional reviewer and I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that weapons of love play a juicy role.

Love Is Not the Answer is super fun and kept my interest throughout. The characters are well-drawn and represent the spectrum of people we see on our political landscape all the time — and some we don’t. Scott’s humor is as compelling as his understanding of our system as it is and the way campaigns (have) work(ed). If I thought this book was shit I would have just sent a link to it. But if you’re spending any of your political time and energy lamenting what is and are afraid of what will be, remember that one cannot be tuned to solutions while tuned to problems and feelings of hopelessness and the like. It’s physics. So I say invest some of your precious time and energy in this read instead. It’s a different way than The Conscious Politics Op-Ed to get into that space of thinking in terms of what is wanted. It gooses the imagination. It offers levity. The writer himself says, “Its a thriller wrapped in a prayer, a manifesto disguised as a joke. A reminder that we are in control, but only if we choose to be.” And I have nothing to add to that.

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