I believe all negative emotions and mental health issues - narcissism, supremacy, anger, hatred, otherism, anxiety, depression, OCD, etc. - boil down to the same thing: fear.
All fear ultimately boils down to the same fear: the fear of the unknown, or of what comes next.
Fear is our response to unpredictability.
Consequentially, I believe all forms of positive emotions and good mental health - contentedness, love, cooperation, tolerance, celebration, friendship, etc - derive from a sense of trust.
All trust ultimately boils down to a sense that, whatever may come next, everything will be fine.
Trust is our response to a sense of predictability, formed by the connections we've made and the experiences we've had.
When I look at social interactions and the world they define through this prism, everything makes sense to me. I've always said that, if you want to understand a person, you need to understand what motivates them.
Fear is our strongest motivator. Fear causes pain and anxiety. When it doesn't alleviate, it evolves into depression and activities that stop making sense to people who don't feel the fear.
Why do people harm themselves?
Why do people make choices that benefit others while hurting themselves?
If you understand what they fear, you can start to understand the choices they make.
You can also use those fears to manipulate them into making the choices that benefit you.
And that, in a nutshell, is the secret to attaining power over others: Identify their fears, exacerbate their fears to the point of requiring action, offer them mitigation in exchange for value.
Not a solution, mind you - mitigation. If you solve their fear, they will no longer need to give you anything. If you mitigate their fear - offer a solution that lasts only so long as they continue to depend on you - you can hook them in perpetuity.
If people have nothing to fear, they are not easily motivated. If people fear something you can't mitigate, you can't control them. Sometimes it's just easier to create new fears that you can control and offer mitigation.
Did you know that four out of five single fashion models agree that halitosis is their number one turn off? That's why I use "Deez Minty Nuts" every day to keep my breath fresh, and a personal guard to keep the ladies at bay.
If you're a decent person, all of this should horrify you. Decent people do not want to see others suffer, and so seek solutions rather than mere mitigation strategies. But decent people have their own problems to solve, and the solutions they thought they could trust seem to be failing more and more.
Turns out they weren't actual solutions, just mitigations in disguise.
And the people mitigating the problems suddenly seem awfully cozy with the folks who created them.
One term for this is "enshittification".
Why would anyone wan to manipulate others like this?
Simple: The pursuit of power.
If you gain money, you gain influence, which allows you to gain more money and more influence. The influence you have, the more power you have. The more power you have, the more control you believe you have.
The more you control, the less you believe you have to fear.
But, if you lose that control, there's always someone right around the corner who will - at best - take your power from you and - at worst - punish you for having power in the first place.
So you must gain and hold on to power at any cost in order to keep yourself safe.
But, in so doing, you tend to make enemies. Power and control always demand an imbalance - you need to have power and control over something or someone; power does not exist in a vacuum.
Those who seek power inevitably become paranoid. Power is driven exclusively by fear. The higher one rises in any hierarchy, the fewer peers they have. Any peers they have are competing for the same next level in the hierarchy. Those who believe in gaining power at any cost will lie, cheat, steal, or commit worse against their peers in order to attain that next level.
They believe that self interest is the highest moral good, while completely ignoring that cooperation is very much in their self interest.
Competition guarantees there is a chance they will lose, but they are too focused on the win condition. It's the gambler's fallacy writ large.
The people who sit at the top of any hierarchy have the most the lose and, therefore, are the most afraid. They can't trust anyone - even their closest friends and family. They demand loyalty, but understand loyalty only lasts until a better deal comes around - indeed, that's how they express their loyalty to others as well.
They are isolated.
They are afraid.
They are desperate.
And they want the world to feel the same way so they can maintain their power.
They rule by fear because that is the only way to rule.
And, because they have made us fear a world without rulers, we can't imagine one without them.
They chase power to assuage their fear.
We keep them in power to mitigate ours.
In a world defined by fear, the only solution is to build trust.
We build trust by pushing our fears aside, turning to each other, and promising to work together to build stability for one another.
Stability - knowing you will be well fed, well loved, and well rested according to your cultural and personal preferences - is the foundation of a peaceful, trusting community.
Stable communities are the foundation of a peaceful society.
Fear comes from the top and spreads through the bottom of a community. Trust is built by individuals working communally, treating one another with dignity and respect, and focused on ensuring everyone's needs are being met without questions of equity or fairness - because both are built in to communal living.
The individual sits at the center of every community to which they belong. The affinities they feel toward each community is what defines their uniqueness as an individual. In this way, we are both individuals and members of many communities - to use a metaphor from quantum physics, we are both waves and particles and which we are at any given time is affected by the context.
In order to make things better, we need to stop directing our attention, our money, our labor - our very lives - toward the people at the top who seek power by driving fear into our hearts. We need to turn toward the people and communities who matter most to us, over which we have the most influence.
This can be difficult. The people who seek power manipulate and pervert natural human societal activities in order to control our attention, labor, and lives. They create parasocial relationships that model their ideal ways of living, then same us when we don't meet their standards. We often grow rather attached to these relationships, and mourn them when we must let them go.
The best communities are those which you can meet in real space in real time - face to face. AS humans, we are optimized to identify social cues expressed by others, but we're best at it when we are in the same room. The subtle movements, scents, and sounds we make all communicate things that are lost the more we are separated.
But, after we have seen how quickly and dangerously disease can spread among crowds, many of us are leary of re-entering public spaces. Many who have re-entered these spaces have led with their fears, resolving to claim those spaces for themselves and never let them be taken away again. This has made these public spaces dangerous for those those individuals identify as a threat.
I question the wisdom of "public space" to begin with. A city park is a public space, and it should remain so and openly accessible to anyone who is able to use it. But physical space already puts a hard limit on who will actually be able to use that public space. There are public parks in Ohio, for example, that I am likely never able to going to visit or take advantage of because I have never been to Ohio and I have no plans to ever visit (nothing against Ohio, mind you - I just don't have much of a connection to it).
The people in power leverage this by trying to create outrage about things over which we have little if any influence. The news is filled with horrific things happening around the world, begging us to form an opinion about it, even though we have nothing to do with it. Our brains are so filled with opinions about meaningless things, we have no time to focus on the things that actually matter to us.
A city's public parks, therefore, aren't actually public - they should be for the people living in the city first, and anyone else who can access the park as a secondary concern. Similarly, the land defined by a city should be prioritized to benefit the people living in that city first, and for anyone who can access that land directly as a secondary concern.
The people living in that city should have the most influence over who their neighbors are, with less influence over who their neighbor's neighbors are. Communities are formed from the ground up - they can not be forced, they must be established and nurtured by every member.
This is why so many feel disconnected from the places where they live. Before the pandemic lockdowns, we hardly knew our neighbors. Both my wife and I left our neighborhoods and our city each day to go to work in another community, like so many others. Between the commute and work hours, I averaged 10 hours a day outside of my home, with very little energy left for much else than helping prepare dinner, engaging with my wife and son, and preparing for the next day. There was no room to build community around me, unless I found a stock of excess energy and time.
During the lockdowns, when I found myself unemployed and isolated, we chose to extend our quarantine to our neighbors. We went from barely knowing each other to having regular game nights, inviting each other to family celebrations, sharing dinners at the doorstep, and building relationships that are still going strong.
The people desperate for power panicked - we were getting by fine without them. In fact, we were finding our lives were better without them. Even though many of us faced financial stresses during that time, many of us also starting realizing just how manufactured those financial stresses were.
After all, if we're the ones actually doing the work, why do we need the people claiming ownership over it?
The push for "return to office" combined now with the messaging that AI is going to take all of our jobs are both reactionary measures the power seekers have put out there out of fear they are losing their power. The rise of authoritarianism is another major proof point.
To control us, they have to control the message, which is why they are consolidating all traditional media.
Newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations have always been owned by wealthy interests because of the costs associated with mass production. Independent organizations often rely on advertising for revenue, which makes them answerable to business owners - who are also power seekers. All media is biased in line of the biases of their owners, publishers, editors, and writers. That bias comes through not only in how they report on the topics they cover, but in how they select what to cover at all. A bias of omission is still a bias.
"All The News That's Fit to Print" - the long time slogan of the New York Times - is, more accurately, "All The News We Could Fit (Based on The Advertising Numbers For the Day)".
All media carries a bias - even seemingly anodyne memes. Therefore, you must always consider who created the media, and for what purpose.
With so many formerly "trusted" news sources being scooped up by billionaires - the Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, etc. - we must consider their motivation.
Which is: To control the message.
This is the same reason so many social media companies seem to have become more controlled, more hostile to peaceful and respectful communication.
Twitter and Facebook both used to be extremely valuable places to connect with friends and colleagues and to learn best practices for a variety of things. It made their owners and investors rich.
But those sites were also used to organize against people using their power to hurt others. The Arab Spring was a wake up call for people in power to realize how these tools could organize people against them. The Black Lives Matter protests validated those fears.
Twitter tried to be all things to all people, but lost control. Elon Musk - one of their noisiest users at the time - made a joke offer to buy them. Because he was in a position to do so, they held him to it. Rather than try to continue Twitter's original goal, Musk decided to bend it into a vision of his idea of social medias - one where he controls the message. As one of the richest men in the world, he desperately needs to control the message in order to maintain his position.
It must eat him up that Larry Ellison recently surpassed him as the world's richest man. Ellison's son owns Skydance Media, which has been on a buying spree scooping up failing traditional media outlets like CBS. This allows Ellison and his son to control the message on those properties - which are substantial.
Mark Zuckerberg - the luckiest man alive - has absolutely no idea what he's doing or how he got into the position he holds. He built his empire on humanity;s basic need to keep in touch with their communities. But, when other power seekers started pointing out how Facebook allowed folks to organize against them, he let them poison the well with bots, state-run accounts pretending to be real people, and looser moderation policies that allowed harassment to find more users.
All of them are all-in on AI. If people can't be trusted to do what they want them to do, then they'll manipulate people into building them a machine that will.
Look at the obscene salaries they're offering AI developers. They're trusting in their ability to blind people with cash so they won't see they're devising their own destruction.
And, because everything is gated behind money - and the power seekers control all the money - those developers will take it, because they fear what happens if they don't have enough money.
They'll lose their homes.
They'll lose their stability.
Because some other power seeker is their landlord or owns their mortgage.
Some other power seekers has prevented local people from providing nutritious food at a reasonable price so that they can dominate the market.
Some other power seeker has made it expensive to buy locally designed and created clothing so that they can dominate the market.
And, if you complain too loudly, they'll raise the prices further.
They already have.
Do you see it now?
Do you see the system they have built for us? How ridiculous it is?
Why do we agree to it?
Fear.
What do we fear?
We fear a world that's different, because we don't believe we've ever experienced it, and we don't trust it.
We think we have solutions, we're pretty sure we know the right thing to do to stop this, but we don't trust those actions because the people in power have threatened and harmed others who have tried to stand against them.
If we stand up, we're afraid we'll stand alone.
If we try to find the others, we're afraid they will reject us.
We're afraid they won't understand us.
I'm afraid you don't understand me.
I want to push you to action, but I'm afraid of how you will react.
I want to organize you to do the right thing, but I'm afraid I'll only be met with reasons why you can't.
I'm afraid of your fear. Not just of what you fear - of your actual fear itself.
But I trust myself. I think about this stuff A LOT. Too much.
It has made me unbearable to be with for too long a period in person.
I see everyone acting in fear and I want to take them by the shoulder and shake them out of it.
Everyone knows what's wrong.
Everyone understands the problems.
Everyone is voicing and acting on their fears.
And it's making everything worse.
The solution is to build trust.
Start with yourself.
What are you afraid of? No, really... what are you afraid of?
Confront it. Be honest with it. Dig into it.
Beyond your initial fears are deeper fears - understand them.
At the end of every one of those fears is the fear of the unknown.
"What if I stand up and no one stands with me?"
"What if they commit violence, but I'm unwilling or unable to respond?"
"What if I leave them, but they find me and do even more harm?"
"What if I become like them?"
"What if I am one of them?"
"What if I'm the problem?"
Breathe - this was not meant to make you anxious. What you are feeling is fear. And there is a fear in confronting your fears as well.
Fear is not a friend, but neither is it an enemy.
It is an alarm.
Rather than run from it try to silence it, you do best when you try to address it.
"What if I stand up and no one stands with me?" Prioritize building communities of people who will stand with you - and commit to standing with them.
"What if they commit violence, but I'm unwilling or unable to respond?" Build communities of trust who will stand with you against such violence, who will care for you if the violence succeeds, and for whom you will care if they are in need.
"What if I leave them, but they find me and do even more harm?" Prioritize your health and safety, but do so by building trust with people. Seek places that provide shelter and protection for those who need it. Once you are confidently safe, work to build more such places to help others.
"What if I become like them?" Treat people with respect and dignity, meet fear with actions that build communities of trust, and focus on what matters most to the people and communities that matter most to you, and you won't become like them.
"What if I am one of them?" Make a change. Face your fears. Turn your effort toward building trust.
"What if I'm the problem?" Be honest with yourself about whether this is true and, if so, why. Then, resolve and commit to make the necessary changes.
Trust that you can make those changes.
Trust in your ability to find the positive qualities in other people.
Trust that you have value. Not because I or anyone else says so - you have value simply by existing.
The people who trust you agree. If you don;t feel anyone can trust you, it;s because you can;t trust yourself.
Make yourself someone worth trusting. You do that by opening yourself to trusting others.
Stop leading with fear. Start opening yourself to trust.
Stop fighting.
Start building.