Radical Honesty About Complicity and Innocence

Mirabai did not claim innocence; she claimed devotion, even as she was embedded in hierarchical systems. Contemporary anticipatory grief often gets stuck in guilt or false innocence: either paralyzing self-blame or insisting we are not responsible. Radical honesty offers a third path. We are simultaneously inheritors of extractive systems, beneficiaries of them, and capable of transforming them. We did not create climate change, but we participate in it. This is not a moral indictment but a clear-eyed assessment. By acknowledging our genuine complicity—our carbon footprint, our consumption, our silence—we become capable of authentic change rather than performative activism. We stop wasting energy on self-justification and redirect it toward learning and transformation. Mirabai's refusal to perform respectability or justify her choices models this: she named her transgressions and continued. For us, this means publicly acknowledging what we have avoided, what we continue to do, and what we are willing to change.