I am, against my better judgement, attending the No Kings protests tomorrow. Everyone I know and care about in my community will seemingly be there, so it feels dumb of me to not at least join in the communal outcry.
It's against my better judgement, however, because the No Kings rallies have seemed very pointless to me - a collective outpouring of grief and anger directed toward no well defined goals.
I feel such things do far more harm than good by providing a release that may bring a temporary sense of relief and belief that things are changing for the better, but turns into bitter resentment when the same bad things keep on happening anyway. The more people are lifted up and brought down like that, the less energy they have to actually do anything about the things against which we are protesting.
In other words - these protests sap energy that needs to be reserved for the real work of making lasting change.
I'm attending this time not only due to FOMO, but because I want to find the others and start making real plans for lasting change.
I'm just arrogant enough to believe I have all the answers, but not so arrogant I'm unwilling to listen to others - who engage with these issues honestly and directly - as they challenge me and help improve and strengthen these answers.
A Summation of the Problem - Supremacy
A new think piece is written every second picking apart the details of the world's problems from the exclusive and narrow points of view of the people writing those pieces. I read them to understand their points of view and see how it fits my mental model of the solution. Rather than list every single one of those details, I prefer to look as what all of these complaints have in common and try address that.
Racism, sexism, transphobia, poverty, abuse, exploitation, division, harm - all of these things can be traced to a single corrupt ideology:
Supremacy.
Not just "white supremacy" or "male supremacy", though I will acknowledge those seem particularly strong and odious, but the very concept that some people are just better than others. Too often, the common forms of supremacy are met with counterpoints that are, themselves supremacy - black supremacists, for example, see a world in which those with darker skin are in control of society, potentially to the detriment of others.
Supremacy can never be a solution to supremacy - you can't fight corruption with corruption.
And, make no mistake, the ideology of supremacy is corrupt and wrong from its face to its core.
The ideology of supremacy is deceptively simple, and you likely believe in it to some degree. It's defined by two simple beliefs:
- Some people are just inherently better than others.
- Everyone should pay deference to their "betters".
Supremacy finds purchase in such simple ideas such as, "Someone has to be in charge." and "That person's the boss, so we must do what they say."
The entirety of western history is consumed with determining the criteria of who should be considered "better". In the time of warlords and conquerors, it was "might makes right". In the time of kings and gods, it was the "divine right to rule". The dominance of money has replaced much of this with "who owns and controls the most of everything".
America's two political factions - for we only allow two - are both supremacist in nature. "Conservatism" adapts its set of beliefs to allow a handful of families to continue to hold power, and to limit who may seek power based mostly on a permission system - you must be this rich, or believe in these things, or ingratiate yourself to these people in order to even consider seeking power among conservatives.
"Liberalism" - as originally defined by DeSouza and expanded upon throughout the Enlightenment and beyond - believes that all individuals have within them the ability to rise above their situation and become fully self-actualized, regardless of where they started. On the surface, it would seem to support the idea of respecting the basic humanity of each individual and push for treating them with dignity. But then it finds itself caught up in the division between who is and is not self-actualized and creates a "meritocratic" system that allows individuals to rise in power.
The problem with meritocracy: How do you define merit?
Those with "more" merit are considered "better".
And we're right back to the corrupt ideology of supremacy, based on who has more "merit", however that's defined.
We can't agree on the definition of an absolute "better" because it doesn't exist - there are far too many variables to consider.
While it is true that, within very tightly bounded contexts, some folks may be a better fit than others, those narrow contexts do not confer any sense of absolute "better", even if an individual would appear to be a better fit across many contexts.
As an overly simplistic example, Simone Biles will always be a better gymnast than I am, and I am likely to always be a better programmer than she is. Part of this is due to genetics - I'm at least twice her size, so throwing myself through the air as she does requires more energy against gravity than I am willing or able to muster - but mostly it's because of how we each have directed our time and effort throughout our lives - she toward becoming a world class gymnast, me toward better understanding how to utilize computational power.
Supremacists seem incapable of thinking about things in this way. They are constantly striving to define "better", and they will rarely define a "better" that would exclude themselves. They may consider a "better" that is a goal for them to reach, but they will not consider unreachable goals to be a "better". When they come across people they deem better than themselves, they use their proximity to these people as a "halo" to fool others into believing they are like them.
They seek being considered "better" out of abject fear - if they are not at the top, then they may wind up at the bottom, and they believe there must always be an exploited bottom to support a beknighted top. They simply can not conceive of a world where people can treat each other fairly and with mutual respect.
And all of the media and culture they wrest control over constantly reinforces these ideas to everyone else. To "win", they must be the best. To be the best, they must compare themselves to others who they consider lesser. And, because this is genuinely an unnatural concept for a species whose survival and dominance of the planet is due almost exclusively to communal cooperation, they must define those conditions of "best" and "lesser" and constantly apply them in such a way as to raise their status.
This is why we have wars and racism and sexism and various phobias - because a minority of people so consumed by fear spend every waking hour spreading that fear and division to others in hopes of rising above it.
The decent among us, who believe in ideas of equity, equality, human dignity, and common respect, are constantly bombarded by these messages of fear and division. It's in the stories they publish, the films, TV shows, and radio programs they produce, in the economies they create, in the laws they force upon us. Decent people know in their hearts all this is wrong, but we play the game anyway because we literally know no better.
Fear is, after all, an inductive force.
We allow their fear to override our own beliefs and logic, forcing us to always react to them rather than to push back. In this way, we are constantly trying to prove our basic value and scramble just for the right to exist as they place more and and obstacles in front of us to protect their sense of power.
This is how hierarchies and centralized control keep coming back, even when most of us see their corruption and futility.
Revolutions are fought when enough people finally decide to push back. But, in a society that only knows hierarchies and fear, those revolutions often just lead to a different form of hierarchy and supremacy.
Supremacy is Built on Fear; The Solution is to Build Trust
All fears boil down to the same thing - the fear of the unknown.
Fear is just another word for unpredictability. All negative emotions and mental health problems derive from our complex reactions to fear - anxiety is just prolonged fear; a great deal of obsessive and compulsive activities, including drug and similar addictions, exist as a bulwark against fear.
As an example, one way my OCD expresses itself is in an obsession over ensuring the house is locked and secured whenever we leave it or when we go to sleep at night. When I'm feeling particularly unstable, I may find myself checking the locks at least three times before leaving or finally settling down for bed. I spend an enormous amount of mental energy trying to convince myself I already checked, that everything is secure, that I have nothing to worry about... but a nagging sensation of anxiety lingers, and often pushes me to check juuuust one more time.
I developed this particular OCD from my mother, a single woman raising her young child alone in apartments she could barely afford in neighborhoods where she never felt safe because her ex-husband decided he'd rather play tennis and sleep around rather than be a father and a spouse. Even knowing the source of my OCD does little to affect it - the fear is so deeply conditioned, the effort to break it feels insurmountable.
But I have attempted to mitigate it through the years. My wife and I installed a home security system that allows me to check in on things when we're away and sends me alerts when something seems out of place. I don't actually find myself checking it obsessively at all - I'm confident it works well enough that I can trust it will inform me if anything bad should happen such that I can address it.
In other words, what I did was replace my fear of the unknown - what may happen when we're asleep or away - with a system I can trust to do the worrying for me.
Because the opposite of fear is trust. And the only way to overcome fear is to build systems of trust.
The supremacists know this, which is why they sell us on things like police departments and a surveillance state. They basically say, "Trust us - we'll protect you. But only so long as you do what we say."
That's not trust - that's extortion.
Trust does not demand repayment. Trust only demands that we agree to some mutual beneficial action and that we will do what we said we would when the time for us to act arrives.
But trust is a difficult thing for many because it is intangible, and can be easily broken. Too many believe that building and maintaining trust in a community is too difficult, not worth the effort - and they become supremacists as a result, dividing the world into those who are trustworthy in their eyes and who is not. Their criteria of trust becomes their definition of "better" and - poof! - we're right back to the hierarchy.
To some degree, those hierarchies may be the inevitable consequence of each of us having our own mind. But giving into fear and using hierarchies to protect ourselves against "others" does not guarantee safety or peace - it demonstrably and historically prevents safety and peace from ever taking root.
We allow supremacists to lead us with their fears because we struggle to competently address those fears. And we often struggle because we take their fears seriously.
But not all of those fears are truly serious. Many of them aren't real at all.
Here's a common one: "If we don't lock the basic necessities of living - housing, food, clothing, companionship - behind paywalls and money requirements, then no one will have any desire to work."
That is provably, historically, demonstrably untrue.
We just won't want to work for them.
Most people actually enjoy creating things. A great deal of what we consider our humanity is wrapped up in the things we produce - art, culture, architecture, etc. When given the time, resources, and freedom, people ALWAYS spontaneously create things. We plant gardens, we make meals, we weave cloth and make clothing that suits our environment and our tastes, we scrawl on walls and in the dirt, we build stacks of rocks or sculpt things in clay...
The internet was not built by supremacists - it was built by hobbyists who freely and openly shared their knowledge and code with one another. The early ARPANet, upon which the modern internet is based, was built with military supremacist purposes in mind, but the people who actually built it tended to care little for such things.
They created email so they could send messages to one another. They created file transfer protocols so they could send documents and code to one another. They created the TCP/IP protocol so that just about any computer, regardless of manufacturer or location, could connect to one another. Then they used all this to send funny jokes to each other, share their fandoms, and otherwise build community.
The supremacists continue to see the internet as a threat to their power, so they first ignored it, then embraced it for the ease with which it allowed them to spread their ideas of fear and division, then sought to control it to keep anything but their own messages from filtering out.
Most supremacists can't code. Programming requires a certain peace of mind and focus that supremacists struggle to carve out among their incessant sense of fear. They offered gobs of money to the people who built the internet to convince them to direct their work toward the supremacists' selfish needs, all while lying about their motivations.
Mark Zuckerburg and his ilk, for example, initially convinced us that their social networking projects were intended to connect us with our friends, help us reinforce community, and otherwise improve our lives dramatically. We're the ones who actually actualized those goals by evangelizing to our friends and family to join these networks and build these communities.
Zuckerburg et al lied to us, though - they did it for money, power, and influence.
And, when the things they built threatened that, they poisoned them.
Zuckerburg sold us out to political operatives who used fear to manipulate and divide us for their political purposes by altering the algorithms that curate our feeds to prioritize content intended to enrage us. As a direct result of this, there are members of my extended family who - so filled with the fear being force fed into them - treated me with such disrespect and indignity, both online and in person, that I haven't spoken with many of them in a decade.
Musk bought out Twitter and turned it into a Nazi bar.
They told us to hand over our community engagement to them, then turned our communities against us and each other, all so they could profit and acquire more power and influence.
The No Kings Rallies are the direct result of all of this.
We Build Trust When We Build and Maintain Community
Community is any group of people working together toward a common goal. As individuals, we exist at the intersection of every community to which we belong - our family, our neighborhood, our city, state, country, our self-identity, our gender, our interests, etc. Our individuality is defined by the affinity we express toward each of these communities.
Supremacists don't want you to choose which communities to which you belong - they believe they can only win when your attention is focused on them. They insert themselves throughout our communities, pretend to be part of them, try to win our trust, then redirect our attention toward their narrow, fear-driven desires.
A lot of people realized this during the pandemic lock downs. The danger of intermingling with people directly - a real danger that was easily mitigable, but made impossible due to the overwhelming expression of fear it engendered, especially from supremacists - forced many of us to stay in our homes and around our communities. We couldn't go to their office spaces to do their work for them - we had to stay at home, work remotely as much as possible, and deal with the extra time we had.
Some, understandably, freaked out.
But a large number of people felt a sense of freedom for the first time. Their movements may have been restricted, but their time and their minds were suddenly their own to do with as they chose.
People started new hobbies. They baked sourdough. They created art. They learned how to code or sculpt or paint or write. Many now popular YouTube channels got their start during the pandemic.
Some folks were able to leverage these hobbies into replacements for their jobs. Rather than have to dedicate a minimum of 40 hours a week toward their bosses and the desires of the supremacists, they were able to focus on things that were important to themselves.
As someone whose life from birth has been directed by school to get accepted into college in order to join a workforce focused on the desires of and in service to supremacists, I found it unbelievably freeing to finally have the time to think for myself.
When they started pushing us all to go back to work, many of us resisted. We finally saw the futility in it.
Everything we're seeing now in politics and in business - with the push for AI and the threats to replace us, with the push toward authoritarianism with threats of violence to keep us in line - is a direct consequence of us experiencing that freedom.
The supremacists are terrified that we will stop prioritizing them.
They are right to be. But they should not fear the alternative.
I believe we are at the forefront of a new revolution. Fewer people are whispering about it, more are directly screaming for it.
But the ones I pay most attention to are the ones who simply talk about revolution as a practicality. You can't always hear the whispers, and we all eventually get sick of the screaming. But talking with one another openly and honestly about alternatives, about how to bring about real change - that feels new and important.
And I want us all to meet this moment.
Revolution Toward a Lasting Peaceful Solution
As I said at the beginning, I'm just arrogant enough to believe I have all the answers. It was my intent to share them with you in this post, but I've taken up a LOT of your time already here, and I want to present these solutions in full in a a manor that allows you skip all this if you prefer.
So, I have shaped out the solution in part II and laid out the bones of what I consider an actionable plan in part III.
The gist of it is simple, and you may have already derived it if you have read everything I've written thus far:
Hierarchies exist because of supremacy.
Supremacy is the corrupt belief that some people are inherently better than others and that everyone should pay deference to their "betters".
Supremacy exists because of fear and requires the spread of fear to persist.
All fear boils down to the fear of the unknown - unpredictability
The opposite of fear is trust - confidence in an assured or likely outcome.
To reduce and eliminate the negative effects and consequences of supremacy, we must build systems of trust.
Trust is built when we can rely on one another to look out for each other's needs - when we treat each other with basic human dignity and respect.
Communities are people who work together toward one or more common goals, which lead to mutual support, respect and dignity.
To effectively build systems of trust, we must focus on and prioritize the communities that matter most to us as individuals.
Only we as individuals are capable of knowing what our goals are and which communities we should prioritize.
Supremacists, out of their fear, seek to control and own everything, to direct all of our efforts and labors, to decide who should be trusted, who should be ignored, and who should be declared an enemy. They seek to amass and centralize power to use as they see fit.
Decent people seek control over their own lives and understand their peace and stability can only persist when those around them are are also at peace and are stable. They declare no enemies. They are not concerned with power - they understand their true power is embedded in the communities to which they belong, built on their own capabilities and those of the other individual members who contribute back to the whole.
We must reorient our world to reflect the needs and desires of decent people, not supremacists.
This requires us to develop a sense of confidence in ourselves as well as in our communities and our ability to support one another.
We have already proven time and again that this solution works. Even when we're focused on the needs of the supremacists, we have a tendency to work communally. You may, for example, hate your job and hate your boss, but still love your co-workers because you rely on each other for support every day.
We don't need the supremacists to have that community. We don't need their money or their orders to create good things and help people - we do that anyway.
We don't need them at all - we only need each other.
Once we realize and internalize that, we can work together to improve the world and protect ourselves from the depredations of the supremacists.