What exactly is keeping you and me from being “the rightful lords of our own persons?”

It’s not enemies and competitors in the real world, however potent or formidable they may be. It’s not political adversaries or invading armies or any of the other totally real and fully legitimate forces that may oppose us in the external world.

We can beat those. They’re visible. We see them. We can rally our forces and overcome them.

What’s really stopping us is inside our heads.

Resistance = fear, self-doubt, procrastination, hesitation, susceptibility to distraction, to pleasure, to vice; inability to defer gratification; fear of failure, fear of success; arrogance, complacency, self-infatuation, perfectionism. Do I need to keep going?

All these come from our cave-brain, our fear-brain, our ego-brain. (Seth Godin would say our lizard-brain, the amygdala.)

What you and I are trying to teach ourselves as artists and as human beings, whether we realize it or not, is to evolve from a primitive, tribal, fear-driven, other-directed and other-governed, clueless organism into a conscious, self-aware, self-organizing, self-directed free and independent individual.

We’re like the fish in the comic strip that first crawled up on dry land. We’re trying to breathe and all we’ve got are girls, struggling to stand when all we have are fins.

Can we change?

Can we evolve?

We can if we can identify the enemy and confront it.