Ten years ago on the eve of Trump’s 2016 election I finished Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. In it he wrote this:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.

Intuitively it seems that he’s right. And: I’ve found myself resisting that conclusion since I encountered it. The initiative john a. powell and I are launching—A Politics of Belonging—is premised on this radical proposition: can we create an us without a them? Can we build a mass movement… without a Devil?

So today I want to take this question seriously, by asking: why do we believe in the Devil? What does it do for us? And what can Belonging offer instead?

Here’s the TL;DR I’m coming to: The Devil is a useful fiction: a story we tell to make sense of the world, meeting real and important needs. To let go of the Devil, we need new ways to meet those needs. History shows this is possible: movements like Polish Solidarity and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and leaders like Mandela show that we can create transformation without “othering.” We are right to feel that the system isn't working—and that meritocracy and trickle-down economics are lies.

But the deepest lie is the Devil himself. The deepest truth is that it's the logic of the system—domination and separation—that is the real problem. Belonging offers a truer story built on a truer logic: that humans thrive through cooperation, and that the system works when it's designed around everyone’s belonging. Here's the radical proposition: if there is no Devil… might it finally be possible to build a movement for all of us?

What has the Devil done for you lately?

john and I—and I know we are not alone!—are interested in replacing a politics of “othering.” But before we can transform a thing, we need to understand it. I think invoking the Devil (the idea of naming an enemy, of evil, of a figure responsible for harm) is a powerful move that meets many needs simultaneously. I want to enumerate them as I understand them here:

1. Legibility — explains my suffering: he did this to me!

2. Strategy and agency — provides a target for action: get rid of the Devil! Burn the witch!

3. Emotional satisfaction — gives my rage a home: fuck the police!

4. Innocence — absolves me of complicity: I’m not the Devil

5. Identity consolidation — tells me who I am by naming who I’m not: I’m anti-Devil

6. Permission/urgency — justifies the intensity of my response: if we’re facing the Devil, anything goes

7. Bonding — shared enemy creates sense of community: We are anti-Devil!

8. Cosmic meaning-making — related to legibility but deeper; it explains why bad things happen to good people: this is the Devil’s work

9. Simplicity — reduces the mental load of holding complexity

10. A finish line — related to agency but meeting a deeper need; the promise that there will be an end to suffering: once the Devil is dead, peace will prevail

Turns out: the Devil is meeting a lot of needs. This is its strength, and why it is so hard to replace. It also gets a lot right: it is correct that harm is being perpetrated, that some people are more responsible than others, and that an urgent response is necessary. All of these needs are valid, and important: if we are to let go of our belief in the Devil, we will need to find new strategies to meet these needs.

What I want to do in this post is provide alternative ways to meet these needs that the Devil is meeting, to support people in letting go of the need to believe in the Devil himself. But I feel a need first to explain why we have to let go of the Devil, even as I don’t think this is a matter of persuasion. I believe in the somatic truth my friend Jesse Marshall once articulated:

The body will only let go of the old strategy if it is offered embodied experiences of the safety and efficacy of other strategies.

That is to say: I don’t believe that I can persuade you cognitively if you don’t already agree. The ask is too great, and I want to honor the need for safety that makes us resistant to letting go. So what I want to try instead is to invite curiosity, for you to join me in this inquiry: what would it look like to build a mass movement without an enemy?

Choosing a more honest story

Many of you have probably heard the quote popularized in The Usual Suspects:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

I want to postulate the opposite: the greatest trick we ever pulled was convincing ourselves that the Devil exists. Believing in the Devil IS the source of his power: it is we who project him into the world.

I believe the Devil is a fiction: a story we make up to help us make sense of the world. Which means that to replace the Devil we have to tell a better story: a “truer” fiction.

First, some definitions. When I say “the Devil” I am bundling several related concepts, each of which I see building on the previous in a slippery slope that ultimately leads us astray.

1. The first is what I call “oppositional” politics (following the brilliant work of AnaLouise Keating, as discussed here). This is the act of defining ourselves in reaction to—and opposition to—an other: we are this because we are not that. This is distinct from “othering” (below). While this rhetorical move is completely understandable—identity formation in human development necessarily begins in opposition—it makes the mistake of allowing the existing reality to define us… which means there is no way out. To accept the terms is to stay imprisoned by their logic: by definition we require the thing we are opposing to exist, and thus can’t transform it. Here’s Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa, in my view best-in-class on this:

   It is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counter stance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat… All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against.

   This move accepts the logic of us vs them: the precondition for violence.

2. The second aspect I am referring to is what john powell calls “othering.” This is what I see as the crux of our current politics (as practiced across the political spectrum, albeit in asymmetrical ways with different impacts), and what I am seeking to replace with a Politics of Belonging. My definition is related to but slightly different from what john and OBI use: for me at its core “othering” is about refusing to recognize someone else’s inherent belonging. It is the first step toward dehumanization: it sees them no longer as human first, but “other” first. This move legitimates violence.

3. The final aspect—the invocation of the Devil—is about the creation of an enemy. This completes the three-part move. It is a deeper form of “othering” that sees the “other” not just as not belonging, but as an active threat, as a problem that (implicitly or explicitly) must be eradicated. This is the final step in dehumanization; this move actually necessitates violence (as discussed here).

The Devil is this third step, but it requires the first two. I’m interested in interrupting the story at all three levels, and I think there is a story that can do that: the story of belonging. This is the offering that launched this newsletter back in 2019: the invitation to create an “us” without a “them.” So what’s the alternative?

1. Define what we are for (not only what we are against). It is important to be clear about what we oppose: there is a necessary role for opposition (we should be anti-fascism!) Listening to our resistance is an important clue to what we value: if we oppose injustice… we are drawn to justice. If we oppose coercion, we are drawn to consent. The opposite of oppression is liberation. The invitation is to not let our opposition be the only thing that defines us: what we are for must survive the elimination of the thing we are against. Being anti-fascist is good; but who are we after we defeat fascism? I love John Paul Lederach’s framing:

   How do we create spaces and processes that encourage people to address and articulate a positive sense of identity in relationship to other people and groups, but not in reaction to them?

2. Embrace difference, not domination. As I have written previously: the very act of defining an “us” by definition creates a “them”: “them” who are not “us.” Identities and categories have boundaries, of necessity. The key here is to create an “other” without “othering”: it is refusing to make that difference the source of a power-over relationship, of superiority/inferiority. It is to celebrate difference without domination. Humberto Maturana Romesin and Gerda Verden-Zoller have my favorite articulation of this aspiration in their work on the “biology of love,” where they write:

   Love is a manner of relational behavior through which the other arises as a legitimate other.

3. Bridge, don’t break. This is the hard part: we have defined ourselves, we have acknowledged the other; now we must bridge the difference. The temptation is to engage in what john calls “breaking”; what I would call creating an enemy. It is to start from the truth that others are causing harm, and leap to the fiction that therefore they are the enemy. Instead we are invited to a more difficult truth: that their behavior is harmful and must stop, but their humanity is non-negotiable. The minimum ask here: refuse to “break.” Refuse to take the easy off-ramp of naming the enemy. The harder task, if you have the capacity (and not everyone does at all times, and that’s okay): is what john calls “bridging” to the other.

I want to be clear that there is no symmetry between the “us/them” we are imagining here. There is a massive structural difference in power between the Trump regime dehumanizing trans activists and migrants, and social justice activists naming Trump as an enemy. The former is an existential threat: the explicit threat of state violence targeting minoritized identity for destruction. The second is a response to that threat. They are NOT the same. And yet: they operate from the same logic; they accept the premise that there is an us and a them. We didn’t create the us/them, but we can choose not to go along.

A Politics of Belonging sets as a boundary condition refusing to “other.” Opposition is okay; othering is not. That proscription extends to breaking: we must decline to create an enemy. Those are the boundaries. The invitation goes further: we are invited to self-define based on what we are for (Keating’s invitation to “post-oppositional” politics). And we are invited to bridge: to connect with the other.

What this looks like in practice

Before I go back to the needs the Devil is meeting, I want to weave some case studies drawn from history that I believe offer a counter to Hoffer’s assertion. Specifically: the Solidarity Movement that emerged in Poland in 1980; the U.S. Civil Rights Movement; and the later stages of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. I want to draw three key lessons that illustrate the three moves I’m naming above:

1. Poland explicitly organized around an “us,” a positive identity that was NOT framed purely in opposition. They chose Solidarity, not anti-Communism. This shift proved transformational: Solidarity leader Adam Michnik explained that “after years of reference to ‘they,’ Poles could finally visualize ‘us.’”

2. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement—particularly as embodied in the coordinated communication of leaders like Dr. King and John Lewis—repeatedly declined to “other” White people. Instead they named the harms (segregation, racism) while still inviting the “other” to join the Beloved Community: a place where we all belong. Many White people accepted this invitation, marching in solidarity with Black people to demand an end to segregation.

3. Mandela walked the longest bridge, ultimately negotiating directly with the leader of the apartheid regime that had imprisoned him. And though he named De Klerk’s responsibility for harm, he nonetheless chose to engage his humanity, creating the conditions for a negotiated end to apartheid.

The common thread I want to uplift here: the decision not to “other” or name an enemy created the conditions that enabled transformation: it allowed the other side to defect. Polish members of the Communist Party joined Solidarity. White people marched with Black civil rights activists. And De Klerk ended apartheid from atop the regime itself.

This is my counter to Hoffer. THIS is what naming the Devil cannot do. There is an empirical basis for building mass movements—especially SUCCESSFUL mass movements—that decline to anchor on a Devil.

Reclaiming the Devil’s power: refusing to live within the lie

If believing in the Devil is the source of his power, then letting go of that belief is an opportunity to reclaim our alienated power. This was the central insight of Vaclav Havel’s famous The Power of the Powerless (the essay that inspired Polish Solidarity): the power of the system depended on the everyday actions of ordinary people. Havel called this the daily choice to “live within the lie.”

This profound essay had the dual impact of showing the wizard behind the curtain (the system depends on a lie), AND showing people the agency they possessed (if they stop believing in the wizard… the system will collapse). How do you defeat totalitarianism? Not by waging an unwinnable war against Moscow, but by withdrawing consent from the system. By refusing to live within the lie. As the famous line goes:

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

I want to walk through what I see happening: the fiction that got us here is no longer serving. This is the good news: increasingly people are refusing to live within the lie.

The breakdown starts with people’s lived experience: people feel viscerally that the system isn’t working; they feel and see the harm, and start looking for answers. They start questioning the story, and begin to realize that the fiction is a lie. That they were set up to fail, that the system isn’t a meritocracy, that the promised gains are not being delivered. And they begin to consider a new conclusion: actually, the system is rigged. And from this insight we reach what seems like a logical conclusion: someone is rigging the system. We create the Devil. This is a better fiction: it’s closer to the truth. The system is rigged; some people are benefiting and are causing harm to others.

Here’s a graphic that tries to illustrate this move. This is an adaptation of the metacrisis image I created in my last post: the key idea is that the top—the results of the system—flow from the foundational logic of that system, and the whole system is made coherent and intelligible through story (the middle layer). I’m deliberately obscuring the foundational logic of “what’s actually happening” because I think that is the lie the Devil is hiding. More on that below.

The paradigm in the left panel is the neoliberal paradigm that is breaking down. It assumes that humans are naturally competitive and individualist; that relying on the market is the best way to meet everyone’s needs; and that if everyone works hard the system will produce good outcomes. On the right is our actual experience: we know the system isn’t working, we begin to realize the story we’ve been told is a lie… and this is the opening.

If we stop here we miss the deeper truth; we miss exposing the foundation layer—the logic that is driving the system. The deeper truth is that the system isn’t being rigged by the Devil (whoever we may think that is). The deeper truth is that the system is working exactly as designed: on a paradigm of separation and domination. The real Devil is not any person or people but rather the underlying logic of the system: the lie that humans are only fundamentally selfish and competitive, and that supremacy and domination are the only ways to stay safe.

This is the fatal flaw of naming an enemy, an external Devil: it doesn’t actually address the root layer driving the crises. If we get rid of one billionaire, the same system logic will produce another. Worse: by naming a Devil—by participating in us/them politics and othering someone we deem an enemy—we are actually participating in the system’s logic. We are engaging in the logic of separation that justifies domination. As Black feminist Audre Lorde wrote:

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.

Choosing belonging

This is our power. We can make a different choice. We can refuse to live within the lie, and choose to live within the truth. The fatal flaw of the current system is that it is built on a lie: as our current crises so clearly show, the current system is contrary to life. It is destructive and parasitic: of our planet, our relationships, and ultimately our psyches. As the AI arms race aptly illustrates: we are collectively creating outcomes that no one actually wants. That is the inevitable logic of this system. And the overwhelming public backlash to unregulated AI testifies to the widespread yearning for a different system: one that serves life, not profit. That honors our inherent birthright to belonging and significance.

The power of belonging as a system and story is that it is true, and internally coherent. It does not depend on a lie—AND it can deliver the goods. In this story the foundation is a truth of how humans evolved: we are wired for coordination and cooperation, or we would still be stuck in caves. The story reminds us that interdependence and caring for everyone’s needs is the best way to achieve mutual thriving. And acting from foundation belonging through solidarity and interdependence has the benefit of actually creating a system that works for everyone.

We are right that we need to assertively push back on those who are actively causing harm (billionaires, people launching wars, people supporting fascism). What I’m inviting in this post is that we don’t make the mistake of making them the Devil. That we invite them to join us in a world of belonging… without waiting for them to agree. The existence of billionaires like Tom Steyer shows that the so-called Devil can join our side, can support policies that transform the system that created him. Encouraging such defections is important. And: the harmful behavior of billionaires like Elon Musk means we can’t wait for their transformation.

Mandela didn’t wait for De Klerk: he applied pressure, he demanded accountability…. AND he bridged to his humanity. Solidarity didn’t name Brezhnev as the enemy, but nor did they wait for Soviet transformation. Instead they built what Vaclav Havel called the “parallel polis,” reclaiming power to meet their own needs without waiting on a totalitarian state. Dr. King never dehumanized White people, even as he excoriated their behavior and demanded accountability (perhaps most famously in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail).

Our belief in the Devil is the difference between revolution (accepts the logic of us/them and seeks to put new people on top, ultimately perpetuating a cycle of violence) and transformation (changing the conditions so no one is on top: there is no “other”).

Meeting our needs through belonging

I think at some level we know the Devil doesn’t exist; it just meets so many needs that it feels scary to let it go. So let’s revisit our needs; here’s a table with how I see it (thanks to Claude for backstopping my woeful graphic design skills):

I want to be honest that there are some tradeoffs. There are some losses that we have to be honest about: we lose the emotional satisfaction of blaming the other, and the sense of innocence that comes with externalizing the Devil. I think those are compensated for by reclaiming a sense of agency: we’re no longer solely dependent on other people changing, we can start building the world we long for right here right now, by refusing to live within the lie and refusing to continue the logic of us/them and othering.

And we lose the simplicity and seductive belief that if only we defeat the Devil we can finally have peace: that’s a genuine loss. The work we are undertaking is more complex; it feels harder at some level. And: there are some massive wins for Belonging. Primarily because it is the only story that targets the root layer: what it loses in simplicity it makes up for in truth. And therefore it is also the only approach that can lead to transformation. Not the end of all violence and conflict, but the end of systems of domination and supremacy.

I want to close here with my favorite passage from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It’s an exchange between a tenant farmer being evicted from his land, and a tractor driver being paid to bulldoze the property. It’s worth quoting at length:

Tenant: “Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill.”

Tractor driver: “You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: 'Clear those people out or it's your job.’”

“Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank.”

“Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: 'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up.’”

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.’’

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn’t men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property’s doing it. Anyway I told you my orders.’’

“I got to figure,’’ the tenant said. “We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”

I love this passage, because you watch the farmer follow the logic of the Devil to its logical conclusion, then it is the tractor driver—himself complicit in the system—who reaches the insight about the logic of the system. Naming that root lie then illuminates the potential for transformation: if the system is manmade, then we can change it.

I wanted to give this topic a full post, because it is THE hardest thing about a Politics of Belonging. My invitation lands as: “you want me to bridge with the Devil? Are you saying the Devil belongs too?”

And I’m saying: what if there is no Devil? Might that make it possible to build a movement… for all of us?

I want to give the last line here to Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite artists declining to live within the binary lie. May it be so:

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated.

In community,

Brian

p.s. I’ll be in public conversation about these topics… next week! Please join me June 9th for an interactive conversation with Humanity in Action Executive Director Azi Khalili (I was a fellow with HIA in Copenhagen in 2004, and served on the board; I’m a big fan of the organization) :

It’s a wild time to be alive. So much to say/feel/do, and—for me—not enough time to write. In lieu of a normal post exploring a specific topic, today I want to share a few of the threads I’m holding and weaving in this moment: each of which is a newsletter topic in its own right. Some of these I will develop into full posts as time and life permit.

Introducing a “Politics of Belonging”

This has been the primary focus of my professional energy these last few months. A partnership with friend and thought partner john a. powell of the Othering & Belonging Institute in service of organizing coherence to help build a bigger tent to expand the pro-democracy movement. It’s an intentionally transpartisan play, an effort to operationalize my longing for a movement for the 100%, under the boundary condition of john’s invitation to “belonging without othering.” We’re inviting everyone to locate their work inside this frame, and to adopt that core commitment to not othering in our campaigns, our organizing, and our narratives.

The focus for 2026 is primarily within the U.S. to leverage the 250th anniversary and influence the midterms, especially as the Trump coalition is fracturing around Epstein and Iran in particular. But we very much hold a global aspiration; we are planning to host a salon/conversation in Berlin this July to explore how this invitation may resonate there. Our Concept Note isn’t quite ready for public distribution, but I welcome expressions of interest if you/your organization would like to partner.

Much more to say in the coming months. In the interim, I invite you to practice interdependence by checking out work from partners like Next250, this beautiful invitation to civic joy from Connie Razza’s team at Future Currents/United Democracy Alliance, or to join Garrett Bucks’ 50 potlucks in 50 states tour :-)

Ultimately, I hope you all will join us!

Articulating a principle of Protective Force

This will be my next newsletter post. It’s this feeling I’ve been wrestling with in an existential way since Renee Good was murdered: in the face of escalating violence, we must respond with escalating nonviolence. It is my effort to try to resolve the quandary and tension I experience between three principles that I hold dear:

1. A deep commitment to protecting life

2. A deep commitment to transformation, embodied in a deep commitment to nonviolence as both moral principle and strategic imperative

3. A deep desire to live; I don’t want to die, or be a martyr

What, therefore, is our guidance to act in the face of the state’s willingness to use lethal violence with impunity? This is an extension and deepening of the question I took up here, and my effort to articulate a principle I am calling “protective force.” Not violence, but force.

I’m drawing on Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha (itself influenced by the Bhagavad Gita); Walter Wink’s work on responding to domination; the philosophical underpinning of the martial art of aikido; and my interpretation of Jesus, particularly the “temple cleansing” discussed in the gospels.

Perennial Sunflower: inviting white men to transform

I attended two beautifully held convenings in the last couple months. The first was convened in late March by Garrett Neiman, Otis Pitney, and Chris Crass, initiators of a field-building effort called Perennial Sunflower. It’s an effort to build coherence and connect the many different white men who are organizing other white men toward justice. It was a beautiful gathering held at Pendle Hill, a storied Quaker Retreat Center west of Philadelphia, featuring a number of organizations doing deep work, and some individuals whose work I’ve been following and influenced by for years.

It was a treat for me to show up as a participant and not convener: I know intimately how hard field-building is, trying to connect across difference and bring coherence to something that is still emerging. Big props to Garrett, Otis, and Chris: especially cool to witness Chris’ facilitation; he’s one of the OGs in the white male organizing space and has dedicated his life to it.

Most of my work is—by intentional design—in multiracial and multigender (and usually multinational) space. And: I think white male organizing is absolutely essential; we (the “left” or people committed to social justice) have been getting crushed here, leaving many alienated white men ripe for recruitment by authoritarian actors. Lots of takeaways, but I want to name two here:

1. Jonathan Smucker—whose book Hegemony How-To made my best-of list back in 2018—offered a beautiful presentation (a preview of his forthcoming book) articulating a theory of what he calls “inclusionary populism.” It’s brilliant. And: I found myself wanting to marry it with a Politics of Belonging, and try to blend inclusionary populism (which explicitly pivots on the creation of an “other” in the form of the plutocratic 1%) with belonging without othering (naming the villainy without “othering” the villains). I think it can be done, and it will be the cornerstone of the electoral strategy I see as the expression of a Politics of Belonging.

2. I listened all week for what I call the “resonant wavelength.” That nugget or memetic kernel that captures the zeitgeist, that can carry across contexts. I would be going straight from Pendle Hill to the North Bay for a convening organized around the climate crisis and AI… what might connect these two gatherings? On the third day one of the men—from a cool initiative called Real Men’s Circles, a working-class-centered intervention—said it simply and it landed in me as the thing I’d been looking for: “We show up for our brothers.” That to me feels like the essence of 2026, and the thing that gives me hope. The challenge: expanding our conception of who we consider “our brothers”… and what it means to “show up.”

The EarthKind Collective: confronting the Metacrisis

From Pendle Hill I was home in Seattle for a week before heading down to another beautiful retreat space: this time for the third gathering of the EarthKind Collective, held at Commonweal. EarthKind was incubated at the One Project by Evan Steiner, a friend of mine and participant in one of Building Belonging’s transformative philanthropy cohorts. Evan is probably the closest person I’ve found to someone working from my own theory of transformation: I see him practicing the art of systems curation, focused on identifying leverage points for transformation at scale.

The EarthKind Collective is explicitly organized around a deep understanding of the metacrisis: such a treat to be among kindred spirits confronting the massive scale of the problem. Lots more to say here, but here’s my very short summary of the core idea.

1. The “polycrisis” is the term that refers to the many crises we face, and the idea that they are interrelated (the climate crisis drives migration, which stresses social systems, which contributes to authoritarianism, which increases racial violence, etc).

2. I see our current crises (the polycrisis) as the inevitable result of an underlying paradigm/worldview of domination and separation. A worldview that sees the Earth as a “resource” to be exploited will inevitably destroy that “resource” (so too with humans seen as “other,” etc).

3. When we attempt to solve the polycrisis from within that same mindset (domination and separation), we inevitably fail, because we are only addressing the symptoms and not actually the root cause. This is the idea of the “metacrisis”: our approach to the polycrisis IS ITSELF part of the crisis.

They have a beautiful summary/strategy doc that isn’t yet ready for sharing, but it’s a brilliant contribution to the field (building on work by folks like Rufus Pollock, here). I have a slightly different take with some important nuances, which I’ll elaborate once the doc is public so we can grapple with it together. In the interim, here’s the graphical depiction I made (building on Rufus’ schematic) with how I understand it:

Lots more to say about what transpired there, but the main thing for me was grappling for the first time in a deep way with existential AI risk. We heard a breathtaking and deeply disturbing presentation from Stuart Russell—an AI OG who literally wrote the textbook—on the state of AI and the arms race to super-intelligence (when AI breaks free from human control and begins making its own decisions… which without safeguards in place could be an existential risk to humanity). It hijacked my nervous system for hours… and honestly took a full two weeks before I was able to metabolize what I’d heard into something I could hold.

That’s the bad news. The good news is I think AI can become one of those issues that lets us see clearly the best and worst of humanity: our brilliance, and our breathtaking hubris. While we were there One Project Founder Justin Rosenstein published a piece in Fortune arguing that AI ought to be regulated as a planetary commons: by the people, for the people. There is a huge supermajority of people who agree: that this technology is too powerful/dangerous to be left in the hands of a small plutocracy whose interests are aligned with short-term profit and not long-term life. AI, in other words, is a stress test for whether we're capable of building an economy that belongs to all of us.

I think this provides an opportunity to articulate what I am calling an Economics of Belonging (with due respect to Martin Sandbu’s book with that title, I am not trying to rescue capitalism but to transcend it). It’s about embodying the principles of belonging in our economy: ensuring that our economy is aligned with life and honoring all beings. Crucially: an economics of belonging has to be situated inside of a broader Politics of Belonging, one that also addresses core questions of identity, healing/reparations, and justice. I disagree with those who try to choose one side of the class vs race debates: it’s both, and we must attend to both material/economic AND social/identity concerns.

Confronting the billionaire class

Building on this idea of existential AI risk driven by a handful of billionaires (and the companies and politicians they are influencing with those billions) is a broader question that is gaining urgency: how do we engage the billionaire class?

This question took sharp relief for me this week listening to a Daily podcast on political violence in America, where Robert Pape described what he called one of the two most significant political shifts of this generation:

A shift of wealth to the top 1 percent, which starts in the mid 1980s. It doesn’t matter which party is in power, wealth is being shifted from the bottom 90 percent to the top percent… And it’s coming out of the entire bottom 90 percent, pretty much evenly at the different quintiles.

This is extraction and theft: the inherent logic of domination, expressed through racial capitalism and its current expression in the destructive ideology of neoliberalism. I see this as absolutely catastrophic for pretty much everything: the concentration of power at the top is destroying democracy, contributing to popular immiseration and a deep sense of precarity and scarcity among the 90%, and to Pape’s point—it is driving political violence. All present trends will only exacerbate this, the AI race chief among them (the Silicon Valley class now saying the quiet part out loud in talking about a “permanent underclass”). I don’t see any path forward that doesn’t require both stopping this trend AND reversing it.

Scot Nakagawa had a great piece on this as the central fault-line of this moment, and potentially a transpartisan frame we can organize around: what he calls “concentrated power vs distributed power.”

I’m interested in extending the logic of my “protective force” principle into the economic sphere as well. If we understand this phenomenon—rightly—as the destruction of life at scale… how then shall we respond? There’s a fine line here: we need to refuse to dehumanize them (I see billionaires as symptom, not cause)… while refusing to allow their harm to continue.

The metaphor that feels most apt here is thinking about extreme wealth as an addiction, and thinking about the billionaire class as people suffering from addiction. It impairs their judgment and can lead to serious collective harm. Indigenous people have a name for this: what they called the “wendigo” or “wetiko” virus. It was their way of explaining the self-destructive behavior of early colonists who showed such casual disregard for the commons. Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk wrote a great piece on this, explaining how the logic of supremacy can become embedded within us: many of these billionaires I see as “infected” by wetiko.

In the case of the ultra-rich, there’s evidence that extreme wealth/power has an active corrosive effect on pro-social behavior: it functions like a disease (this idea informed the launch of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute). Witness Elon Musk calling to eliminate empathy, or Marc Andreessen’s declaration that he doesn’t engage in self-reflection. It is no accident that these men are actively seeking to distance themselves from the qualities that are perhaps most central to what it means to be human; it is our responsibility to ensure that they do NOT have the power to make decisions that affect the rest of us.

This is what I’m hoping to get at in articulating a principle of protective force, and its policy implications (wealth tax, negative income tax, eminent domain to reclaim commons assets, etc).

In search of agency

Another wavelength I’m picking up that I want to name before I close: an emerging recognition that part of how we respond must be to reclaim agency. Our organizing must support people in accessing their intrinsic power. This is a truism of organizing… and a lesson we (including me!) too often forget. This seed was planted reading this provocative piece from Samuel Hammond “Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy” (hat-tip to my colleague and friend Christina Antonakos-Wallace for flagging). It’s a pretty savage critique of how we (I’m focused on the implications for the progressive/social justice “left,” which I consider myself a part of) have allowed the logic of neoliberalism to colonize our work.

In particular it has led to what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls “associations without members.” Meaning: we are speaking “on behalf of” without “in accountability to.” We—and I very much implicate myself in this critique—have (unintentionally/inadvertently) robbed people of their agency. Of their chance to directly inform the process and outcomes that affect their lives.

While thinking about this I listened to a delightful podcast interview with Savannah Bananas founder Jesse Cole, in which he dropped this nugget:

Nothing matters more than making people feel like they matter.

This feels like the piece we’ve been missing, and the piece we’re slowly remembering. When we say none of us without all of us, the “all of us” need to be actively involved, asserting agency, reclaiming power from victimhood.

I look forward to claiming more space for slowness, for reflection, and for writing. Thanks for bearing with me. I’d love to hear what wavelengths you’re picking up, what signals are breaking through the noise, and what is giving you hope and inspiration in this moment.

Our next subscriber gathering will be Monday, May 18th @ 9am PT (noon ET, 5pm UK, 6pm CET/CAT, 9:30pm India). This one will be open to all subscribers. If you are interested in joining, please RSVP here. These are informal small-group gatherings to practice bridging toward belonging: come as you are!

In community,

Brian

I was 9 years old—right between the ages of my two children right now—when I first understood in a deep way that I was different. The first Gulf War had just started: the first war I had any consciousness of. I didn’t understand geopolitics, but felt very clearly that something was wrong: surely killing other people can’t be a good answer to conflict. I couldn’t help but imagine the experience of those directly affected.

My way of processing my feelings was to write and submit to my teacher a first-person narrative essay from the perspective of Iraqi children watching bombs fall steadily closer to Baghdad. The essay hadn’t been an assignment; I just felt moved. Writing was how I expressed myself. I was already sufficiently socially attuned to know that this wasn’t something I could bring to my peers, from whom I already felt very different. Surely adults would understand.

The next thing I knew I found myself in an intervention: the principal, my fourth-grade teacher, and my parents. I considered myself a smart kid, but it took me a long time to understand why I was there. Eventually I understood what the adults were after: they wanted to know why I cared: do you know Iraqi kids? Did you see images on TV? They wanted to know why I felt empathy for people I didn’t know who lived far away and who were very different from me.

I felt incredibly alone. I knew in that moment that if they didn’t already understand why I cared, there was no way I could explain it to them. A better question to me seemed: why don’t you care? I learned that day that something was deeply wrong with the world: that it was not just the obvious “war is wrong,” but that adults seemed to accept it as inevitable, as something not worthy of deep care or empathy—and certainly no sense of responsibility to do anything about it.

Several takeaways for nine-year-old Brian:

1. There is something deeply wrong with the world.

2. Our current systems of authority are at a fundamental level not trustworthy: they aren’t capable of feeling or acting upon what should be obvious.

3. Other people do NOT feel this way. To share my feelings is to be weird: kids are not supposed to think/feel these things.

To those three I felt very clearly a fourth thing (that I also now realize is part of what makes me different, because I’m certain many children also intuit in a deep way the wrongness of our world but feel talked/coerced out of it):

I am not the weird one. I refuse to let go of my empathy.

The system is what’s weird: it needs to change.

[I feel a need to include a caveat here in defense of the well-intentioned adults in my life: they weren’t trying to pathologize me or make me feel weird. They genuinely didn’t understand: their nervous systems did not perceive the world the way I did. They wanted to help; they just didn’t know how.]

From different… to neurodivergent

I’ve long accepted that I am different: my whole life experience has taught me that. But only in these last few months—at the suggestion of my partner Leela—have I turned my attention for the first time to exploring my self-understanding through the lens of neurodivergence. I first looked into autism, as a way to possibly explain why I move through the world so differently from others, and feel so little allegiance to many social norms. But that didn’t quite resonate. It wasn’t until I found this graphic that I finally saw myself:

While I don’t resonate with the label “gifted,” I did feel deep resonance with virtually all of the traits identified in that heading (as well as some from the ADHD and Autism circles: e.g. ability to respond rapidly to crisis/craving novelty, or pattern recognition/preference for direct communication). For the first time I began to consider the possibility that my “difference” is actually neurodivergence. As I did a deep-dive into the literature, I found particular resonance with the common thread linking these three domains: what is called “asynchronous development”, and this short definition in particular:

Advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm.

The shoe fits: I’ll accept the label of neurodivergent. Since then I’ve been exploring the unique ways my divergence manifests, and I’d like to share them here both for my own evolving understanding and in hope that it may help others see themselves.

My high complexity and high sensitivity orientation

Part of the reason I reject the “gifted” label is because it represents what our society values (intelligence = good) without acknowledging the pain of what our society suppresses (big feelings = disruptive). I also think each individual dimension—like all personality types, neurotypes, or enneagram dimensions—has both a light and shadow side. To call it “gifted” is flattening and does a disservice in my view to our self-understanding.

There are three distinct components that form the core of what I am coming to understand as my neurodivergence. I’ll sketch them briefly here, then add two more dimensions to complete the picture.

1. High complexity: This is about thinking in systems, processing lots of inputs and information rapidly, and seeing patterns in complexity. I am drawn to the universal, and see and understand the world as fractal, holding multiple scales (individual, interpersonal, systemic) concurrently. I engage in what I have learned is a specific and uncommon form of cognition that Jennifer Harvey Sallin calls “meta- or matrix thinking,” and construct my own mental frameworks (what she calls matrices) to hold it all, and to help me find the patterns that connect across scales. In particular I’m constantly seeking coherence, and am hyper-attuned to ruptures that break wholeness. This is about how my brain perceives and tries to make sense of the world and architect coherence and belonging.

My own sense is that this domain—and the “meta/matrix-thinking” aspect in particular—is what we mean when we talk about “gifted.” But without some moral tether or values-orientation—toward life, not profit or domination—this capacity can be dangerous. Not everyone with a high complexity neurotype is oriented toward coherence and belonging: a gift wielded unethically can be a curse.

2. High sensitivity: This is about feeling broadly and deeply, across scales concurrently. I’ve described this as unboundaried empathy: I feel others’ emotional states and nervous systems, both at an individual level but even more as a collective/systemic experience. In particular I’m highly sensitive to ruptures in relational fabric: I’m hyper-attuned to anything that fractures the whole or that is contrary to belonging. This is about how my heart feels and tries to make sense of the world, and tries to restore coherence and belonging.

I resonate here with some of the literature around “highly sensitive people” or “empaths.” At scale I think this is the domain of the feelers/healers, people who can work with and shift the energy in a room/system. In many indigenous traditions people with high sensitivity who can feel and sense across scales we would call shamans or mystics. I’ve had the great fortune to be in the presence of people with a more powerful version of this gift than I possess (unclouded by the high complexity brain dimension, and often including in its place a cosmic more-than-human dimension) and it is extraordinary to behold.

Most of the “gifted” folks we tend to call to mind do not seem to have this dimension: it seems less common for these two capacities to intersect.

3. High complexity + high sensitivity: This is the moral/existential dimension, where my brain’s sensemaking and my heart’s feeling intersect. I often intuitively sense when something is wrong (a rupture in the fabric of belonging)… AND my meta-thinking brain often sees ways to resolve it. At a not-fully conscious level, my nervous system is constantly trying to co-regulate the world around me. But because I work systemically/universally, I often sense how things are broken and could be fixed at huge scales. This creates a feeling of existential weight and overwhelm: I feel the pain and know that it doesn’t have to be this way… but I know I don’t have the capacity alone to change it. My nervous system can’t co-regulate the world.

I name this as a unique dimension, and it’s the place where I feel the most profound alienation. This is the realm of moral philosophers and systems theorists, and people called to address injustice at national and system scale. It’s not a very visible archetype in our society, both because I think it’s profoundly threatening to existing systems… and because people with this particular intersection are prone to burnout and collapse (Simone Weil here is both a personal inspiration and a cautionary tale).

I think this is also the element of my neurodivergence that gets me in the most trouble socially (and may have been what my partner Leela was getting at when she suggested I look into it). I construct my own moral frameworks to govern my behavior. After I lost trust in our major systems and sources of authority (I was raised Catholic and rejected that for its obvious contradictions), I constructed my own moral framework in my adolescence and early adulthood—one which I intended to be universalizable and work at all scales. (For those who are curious: inspired by Rawls’ theory of justice, indigenous cosmologies about right relationship, and Simone Weil’s thinking about rights and responsibilities).

Consequently, I refuse to be beholden to societal notions of “should” if I don’t agree with them… and it can get me in trouble. One example: I famously had a conflict with my then-girlfriend during my monogamous days over me sharing a bed platonically with a former lover. I figured: I would share a bed with a platonic male friend, so as long as I’m not engaging sexually what’s the moral harm? I understood the societal norm: I just didn’t agree with it. My then-girlfriend… had a different perspective.

These are the three dimensions that seem to fit most neatly within the neurodivergence framework, and in particular under the rubric of asynchronous/atypical neurological development. Now I want to introduce two more elements that feel fundamental to understanding my own divergence from the norm to complete the picture.

Positionality and embrace of difference

4. High positional capacity: This is about my personal power to make change. It’s the intersection of the many privileges I was born into: those named above, plus my physical size, my deep sense of agency/drive to action, my race/gender/class/ability/nationality, my general competence, my access to structural power, and my social fluency in how to navigate those systems of power. I learned at a very young age that I held a lot of power: that others would follow me, and that my decisions and actions influenced outcomes. I learned that I could restore wholeness: I could see what others couldn’t, and could use my skills to intervene to re-create coherence in the system, especially at a collective interpersonal level (e.g. in my family, or among a group of classmates on the playground).

It felt important to name this fourth dimension; the first three felt incomplete without it. Where the intersection of my high complexity and high sensitivity is the primary source of my alienation, it is this unusual positional capacity that is the primary source of the tremendous weight that I feel. I think there are two different things going on here. The first is a dimension of difference that many people have (what we often call “privilege”) that on its own is worth naming, but isn’t really neurodivergence. The neurodivergent dimension is feeling in that difference a sense of responsibility, one connected to the three sources that precede it.

It is also the most publicly visible piece of my difference: I am in the 99.7th percentile for height, so on that dimension alone I stand out. My physical presence—inseparable from my other sources of privilege, visible and invisible—influence how people engage with me and therefore how I move through the world.

5. Drawn to difference: This is about appreciating people and gifts that are different from me and mine. When I first heard Cyndi Suarez talk about being “attracted to difference,” I realized: yes. That’s me, always has been. And of course: most people are drawn to sameness. Where others find belonging and safety in homogeneity, I find belonging and vitality in diversity. There’s a second dimension here that has to do with status (which is why I pair it with the positionality point above): I love experiencing other people’s power, and witnessing their gifts. Which means I have very little experience of jealousy: I feel very little possessiveness, and don’t feel threatened by the success of others. This makes me very resistant to engaging in social comparison, or to feeling shame around my own worth relative to others.

This feels worth naming as a unique dimension because it is another area where I get in trouble. Because I don’t often feel what people “normally” feel in situations of social comparison, I can inadvertently violate social expectations about how people are “supposed” to show up. And because it feels so intuitive to me, I underestimate how unsettling it can be for others. As Claude AI played it back to me when I was exploring this dimension:

It’s a radically different orientation toward identity and power.

To give one example: when I worked at the Gates Foundation I applied internally for a senior-level job, and rolled into the interview (literally: I had a broken foot at the time and was using one of those knee scooters). I thought I aced it: I genuinely enjoyed the hard questions the recruiter was asking, had fun grappling with complexity, felt grounded and confident, and thought I responded well. So when I didn’t get the job I asked the recruiter if he would be willing to give me some feedback. After some hesitation, he finally leveled with me: at some visceral level, he just didn’t believe me. It didn’t seem credible to him that I could be that relaxed and confident (on a scooter no less!) and so seemingly unattached to outcome. I didn’t match his template for how someone shows up in a high-stakes interview, so his nervous system went into distrust.

He read my authenticity as performance, or perhaps even some form of manipulation.

A gift and a curse

Taken together, these dimensions show the gift and the curse of my neurodivergence, especially how it manifested in childhood through asynchronous development.

The gift: my brain could understand the system; my heart could sense and identify the source of the rupture; their intersection illuminated the systemic interventions that could restore justice/wholeness/belonging. Here I resonate with Donna Haraway’s concept of “response-ability”: sensing and feeling the world, attuned to what it is needing/asking. And my positional capacity gives me unique leverage from which to act: agency for transformation.

The curse: there are two. The first is the sensory overload/overwhelm that comes with feeling the world and attuning to coherence. As Anna Branten writes (in one of my favorite essays of 2025):

Living with constant pattern recognition is not a superpower. It is a strain. A nervous system with open gates, a radar that never switches off… We wonder how the rest of the world cannot see what we see.

She calls this the role of the “wayfinder,” which I resonate with: it’s the term we landed on at last year’s Belonging @ Scale gathering in Boriken. Here’s Branten again:

The wayfinder has always existed - in every culture, every era, every story of human change. Often unnamed, but always described in similar terms: the one who sees too early. The one who pays a price… Necessary for the group’s survival. Dangerous because her gaze destabilises what already exists. And so she is punished. Rejected, silenced, or isolated. The group needs her, but cannot always carry her. She sees what must change, but change generates fear.

So the first curse is isolation, alienation… and even punishment. The second is that my positional capacity—especially at a young age—conveyed a sense of responsibility. An embrace in childhood of the Spiderman idea that to those with great power comes great responsibility. This is the companion for me of my capacity for “response-ability”: it confers a sense of responsibility. I felt compelled to act.

But of course: it’s not enough to feel the problem and see possible solutions. To actually transform these systems takes incredible collective effort: it’s far too much to hold alone. It’s overwhelming. And—especially in my youth—I couldn’t ask for help. I felt clear that no one else understood what I was seeing or feeling, or felt any sense of responsibility toward it.

And of course the totality of my experience is that I very much WAS alone—on each of the five dimensions named here I’m way out at one end of a bell curve, which makes it very difficult to connect back to the “norm.”

No surprise, then, that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on alienation… and that I orient my lifework toward building belonging.

Bridging toward belonging

There is powerful medicine for me here.

As I begin to understand the ways in which I am different, I also gain more empathy for others and how their nervous systems operate — and how they are different from mine. Being wired for complexity is genuinely useful when times call for transformation, but it makes me ill-suited for maintenance, operations, and linearity: that’s where brains wired for stability are far more gifted. I need those people. We need each other.

I’m embarrassed to admit that it was news to me that most people do not construct their own mental and moral frameworks to navigate complexity. I had erroneously assumed that others experienced the world more or less as I do. Understanding that we are each using fundamentally different tools to make sense of the world has made me both more humble and more curious.

Understanding difference illuminates possibilities for bridging.

So far my strategy has been to “find the other ‘others’”: my kindred spirits who were also seeking to re-create coherence and belonging. People who can “get” me in my difference without being turned off by it… because they too are different. I’ve been doing that now for almost 35 years, and fortunately I have finally found my people. We exist! :-)

But I don’t want to be only with my fellow eccentrics (I love Francis Weller’s reminder here that the etymology is ec-centrum: away from the center, those of us who thrive on the edges far from the norm :-) I want to belong across difference, not only within my difference. I want to connect. I want to bridge.

I want to take the chip off my shoulder: the anger and hurt I have felt toward others for not being able to understand me. This was one of the core insights Leela offered me in this domain: a bridge is built from two sides. While I am waiting for others to understand me, to see the gift in my difference… can I do the same? Can I reach across to meet them in their nervous systems? Who is accommodating who?

This to me is the exciting frontier of neurodivergence as I am exploring it (acknowledging that I write here as a newcomer to the space). Thus far the discourse has been around dominant culture “accommodating” the differences of the neurodivergent. I see this as a form of inclusion: it’s nice, but it’s not belonging. Instead I see neurodivergence as an invitation to society: listen to us. Try to find the wisdom in our difference. Don’t “accommodate” us so we can fit into the norm. I want the norm to change so that we too belong.

And there is a reciprocal responsibility that I will take upon myself (without speaking for other forms of neurodivergence): can I find the wisdom in the norm? As someone wired for transformation and difference, can I appreciate the gift of stability and sameness?

That is the work I am excited about this year. And to me it’s the essence of bridging toward belonging: weaving coherence. Helping everyone find their roles, where they can share the fullness of their gifts.

After publishing this post a subscriber (thank you Rachael!) pointed me to Paula Prober’s book Your Rainforest Mind. I found this podcast interview with her, and found a ton of resonance, so wanted to update the post here to share with others who may feel seen by her framing. (“Rainforest” is a metaphor for the mind-as-ecosystem, recognizing that all ecosystems belong on Earth—so it’s not a question of better/worse—AND that the rainforest is the world’s most complex and diverse ecosystem… with unique gifts and challenges).

—

Thanks to those who made it this far. As always, I welcome feedback: what resonates, what doesn’t, what sense are you making?

In community and solidarity,

Brian

My worldview cracked the first week in January, after the Trump regime kidnapped the sitting head of state in Venezuela, murdered Renee Good in broad daylight in Minneapolis, and openly threatened to seize Greenland by force.

I felt a gnawing fear that my theory of change and approach to pushing back against fascism—rooted in a deep moral and strategic commitment to civil resistance and nonviolence—might no longer be adequate to this moment.

I felt a pull to confront a question I’ve avoided for my entire adult life, one that has frustrated my best efforts whenever I turn my attention to it. There are actually three questions, at three different degrees of scale and time. The immediate question that we are confronting in Minneapolis, is this:

1. How do we protect innocent people when the state is willing to kill, but we refuse to?

There is a second question that is about the world we are trying to create. In a future world where everyone belongs, in which we relate from a place of nonviolence, non-domination, and interdependence:

2. What do we do with those who choose violence?

Beneath both of these questions is a deeper question, and one that has been the driving focus of my work for over twenty years (inspired by Riane Eisler’s groundbreaking work distinguishing Domination and Partnership systems):

3. How does a partnership system (committed to nonviolence and noncoercion) prevail in the face of a domination system (with guns and money)?

So today I want to share how I am holding these questions, and offer some thoughts about how we must shift our strategy and tactics to meet this moment.

TL;DR: The United States has crossed a dangerous threshold: the regime now exercises lethal force without justification. We must adapt our strategy. From our foundation of nonviolent resistance, we have an opportunity to intensify focus on encouraging defections—inviting those enabling the regime to withdraw consent. I offer a moral frame that can connect us across borders and adapt to different local contexts: Protect life. Refuse domination.

Before I begin, a caveat. I’m going to work hard to stay in my lane in this post. My work in Building Belonging—and in this newsletter—is to help link vision, strategy, and tactics across scales and geographies, to move us toward coherence and help ensure that the actions we take are building belonging in the world… at scale. Part of what I bring to movement work is experience drawn from a career working in conflict prevention and anti-genocide work internationally: much of the lens I bring to America is informed by what I’ve seen and studied in other contexts. This work is not abstract or philosophical: it has direct implications for how we show up in confrontations right now, whether in Minneapolis or Iran.

And: I am not a frontline organizer. There are many great resources right now on concrete actions you can take both to support those in Minneapolis, and to engage on the right side of history wherever you live. I will name two here before returning to my inquiry.

1. The best no-regrets thing you can do is become involved locally, AT YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD level. This has a triple-benefit: you build material belonging with people. You develop a mutual aid network that can support people in times of need. And you build resilience that can withstand state pressure: ICE cannot defeat broad-based solidarity. Find out who’s organizing in your community (Indivisible, SURJ, Neighborhood Unions, etc) and join them! If it doesn’t already exist: invite your neighbors over to begin a conversation.

2. Here is a list with links about concrete ways to support Minneapolis in this moment. I would add: one simple thing you can do is speak up. In your workplace, in your friend group, on social media: NAME THAT THIS IS HAPPENING… AND THAT IT IS WRONG. There is power in what Vaclav Havel calls “refusing to live within the lie.” I liked this LinkedIn post with a suggested template for those of you in more corporate/dominant culture settings (especially in positions of leadership) on how to bring it up with your teams in a sensitive and non-confrontational way. When you refuse to pretend like this is normal, you give permission for others to name and act on their truths.

We have crossed a Rubicon: this is a new world

I start from this premise. The events of the first week of January 2026, taken together, herald a new world order. The clear message connecting the kidnapping of Maduro to the murder of Renee Good to the posturing over Greenland, is what Trump deputy and chief advisor Stephen Miller said to Jake Tapper on CNN:

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.

The very next day Trump reiterated Miller’s argument, dismissed international law and any form of accountability/constraint on his exercise of power, and declared:

I don’t need international law… My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.

To be clear, we’ve been sliding down this slippery slope for awhile. And: it’s incredibly important to acknowledge/name when we cross a line, because it requires different strategies and tactics to respond. As authoritarianism expert Masha Gassen put it on Ezra Klein’s podcast: “we’ve been on this descent and then fell off a cliff.”

Many commentators have rightly pointed out that the Trump regime’s behavior is nothing new: it’s what America has always done… in other countries, and to “other” people in our own country. Unaccountable state-sanctioned violence against Black and indigenous people is actually one basis of our founding… and has always been our imperial footprint overseas (the most direct precedent for Trump’s raid in Venezuela was then-President George Bush’s similar invasion of Panama in 1989).

But. And this is an important but, because it is what distinguishes this new paradigm: this is the first time we have not attempted to justify it. America’s founding has always contained a paradox: on the one hand, the shining city on a hill and beacon of hope enshrined in our founding documents and creed; and on the other, built through the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans brought to our shores against their will, and the theft of land.

As recently as 2003 President George W. Bush argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary to preserve democracy and defend America from the threat of “weapons of mass destruction.” His regime felt it was necessary to lie—sending Colin Powell to the UN to repeat that lie—to provide a veneer of legitimacy to mask the raw brutality of the action. And some of those involved even believed their own lies (arguably including Bush himself).

Trump felt no such compunction: he said he was going after Venezuela’s oil. He wants Greenland’s strategic location (and: he wants it for his own ego). He dispensed with the pretense of offering any ethical or moral claim, instead appealing to the oldest law of authoritarians: might makes right. His regime immediately defended Jonathan Ross, seeking to discredit Renee Good and offering zero accountability.

This is the bad news: the Trump regime is proudly announcing that the gloves are officially off, and unapologetically brandishing the iron fist. It marks the end of pretense, and the formal renunciation of restraint. It is a profoundly dangerous escalation, intended to instill fear and despair.

This escalation requires a shift in nonviolent strategy and tactics. Nonviolent civil resistance is best-suited to moments of authoritarian consolidation: think Germany in the mid-1930s. We have now crossed a dangerous threshold: our government is willing to murder its own citizens in full public view… WITHOUT any pretense of accountability or justification. It is this latter dimension that marks the phase-shift, and which in my view requires a fundamental reorientation in our posture.

Why this moment matters

The bad news: this is a moment of heightened danger, first and foremost to front-line protestors who now face lethal force with state-sanctioned impunity. The regime is trying to intimidate us and push us into despair. The good news: so far I’m incredibly encouraged by the response: Minneapolis is standing up and saying “not on my watch”… and providing a template for the rest of us to follow.

It’s also a rare opportunity: as the mask is removed, people are forced to reckon with who America has become. It introduces moral dissonance, and thus creates an opportunity for what I think is the most important and least understood lever of civil resistance: encouraging defection (what the literature calls targeting “pillars of support”). As Serbian movement strategist Srdja Popovic reminds us:

Empires fall not because people oppose them, but because they find their support eroded. To win, you need to convince others to defect.

This window will not remain open forever, and it’s dangerous if we miss it. The moral reckoning forces people who have thus far backed Trump into a difficult choice:

1. Do I hold on to my moral commitments and beliefs, and let go of Trump?

2. Or do I adjust my moral commitments to accept the premise that “might makes right” and stay with Trump?

And it forces those of us who consider ourselves opposed to Trump to face our own moral reckoning: if we accept that fascism has arrived on our streets, and if we acknowledge that this regime is willing to execute its own citizens with impunity in full public view… what are we willing to do? Will we honor our own internal red line and refuse to collaborate with the systems that allow this regime to continue?

If people choose to downplay or normalize this moment, it becomes MUCH more difficult to slow the advance of fascism. We face an existential imperative to do everything in our power to act assertively on the right side of history… before it’s too late.

Fighting violence with nonviolence

So what do we do now? Build on what works… and adjust to meet the moment.

This is still true: nonviolent civil resistance is the best and most powerful tool to resist and respond to fascism. We are not yet to Iran—with the state willing to murder thousands of protestors—nor are we to Germany in 1939, when the march to extermination was already underway. We need to hold these two truths: we are in a new and profoundly dangerous era… and we have not yet lost, and this is NOT inevitable. The powerful and widespread resistance in Minneapolis is offering us the blueprint: we must become bigger than the threat, and refuse to retreat.

The literature on civil resistance (drawing from Gene Sharp, as well as Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan among others), names four core levers of popular power in the face of domination regimes that are willing to use lethal force against their own citizens:

Minneapolis is doing an incredible job under extreme pressure, particularly by providing sanctuary/protecting targeted populations, and applying mass noncooperation (to include a Jan 23rd general strike). On the frontlines that is the most important work to do. For those of us at more remove (for the moment!) there is an opportunity to move more assertively on the other two fronts: encouraging defection, and attacking the regime’s legitimacy.

It is in these arenas that I think we need the biggest strategic and tactical shifts, and they’re connected. The goal must be defection, encouraging those supporting or enabling the Trump regime (actively or passively) to withdraw consent. The strategy must include challenging the legitimacy of the regime… including and importantly its moral legitimacy.

I want to attempt here to offer a moral throughline that can bring coherence to our movements and scale fractally across local, national, and international levels. This means both a moral frame and a way to reach the three primary audiences currently enabling the Trump regime.

Our moral commitment: Belonging without Othering, in service of life

The Trump regime’s core weakness in this moment is its moral legitimacy. Emboldened by their raid in Venezuela, Trump and Stephen Miller went to the press to announce their moral principle: might makes right. Domination is justified. And Greenland is next!

Many people—including the majority of Trump’s base—need some clear shared authority (be it the Ten Commandments or the “law”) as a proxy guarantor of order and stability. It is our responsibility to offer a better moral principle to counter the dangerous claim to domination.

Here’s what I would offer: Belong without othering. Protect life.

True belonging—the kind that sustains us through crisis and gives our lives meaning—cannot be built by excluding or dominating others. That’s false belonging, and it crumbles under pressure. Real belonging means building communities, systems, and cultures where everyone has a place and no one needs to be cast out to make us feel secure.

Real belonging serves life. Not profit, not power, not ideology—life. All life. This is our North Star: Does our behavior protect life, or destroy it? Does this action create belonging, or does it require othering?

These aren’t abstract principles. They’re tests we can apply to every behavior, every policy, and every system.

This is a major strategic shift for us as a movement: we have embraced pluralism, contextualism, and diversity. While we have deep moral commitments that drive our work toward justice, we rarely state them explicitly; those few who do tend to do so in religious terms (and here I deeply appreciate the contributions of people like Rev. Dr. William Barber and Texas State Representative James Talarico).

It’s also a tactical shift: many of our current campaigns and ways of signaling our belonging (on the right side of history) explicitly create an “other.” We demonize billionaires, MAGA supporters, police (ACAB)… and ICE agents. For good reason: we’re furious. We are being violated by the very government who is sworn to protect us.

But here’s the thing: a moral movement—in the Kingian tradition of nonviolence—recognizes that people are NEVER the enemy. We can and must resist and combat harmful behavior and harmful systems… and remain welcoming to people (I love this Topos report on how to target villainy, not villains). Here’s how friend and Kingian nonviolence practitioner Kazu Haga describes our task (and yes, it’s radical):

We are in need of a truly nonviolent revolution, not just of systems and policies, but also of worldviews and relationships. We need to understand that people are never the enemy, that violence and injustice itself is what we need to defeat, and that the goal of every conflict must be reconciliation.

I want to acknowledge that this is really hard work. And acknowledge that it can feel emotionally satisfying to unleash our righteous anger on those who are hurting us. Unfortunately: it’s not strategically effective.

Let me be clear: healthy anger that clearly names harmful behavior while honoring the humanity of the perpetrator (declining to “other”) is essential. It mobilizes us toward action, and invites the perpetrator to take accountability, repair, and return to belonging.

Unhealthy anger, by contrast, is the kind of anger that includes othering, flattens their humanity into a unitary identity of “perpetrator,” and risks losing agency inside of victimhood. We know this from our intimate relationships: people respond to blame and attack with defensiveness, and by fighting back.

We are in the business of transformation: we must refuse to use the master’s tools.

The invitation to defect: strategic off-ramps and moral courage

I think it’s helpful to name the three different audiences that I see as the primary forces propping up the Trump regime (for a research-based deep-dive into the Trump coalition, check this new report from More in Common).

Each audience responds to a different message: my goal here is to build on the coherent moral through-line I offered above… and cater it to the specific needs/values of the core constituencies we need to invite to take action. We have to remember: we are asking people to do something difficult. To walk away from communities or beliefs that give them a sense of belonging and significance. It’s a big ask, and requires moral courage. We need to support them in doing the right thing.

I will name here the three main audiences whose actions are currently enabling fascism, and the core values-aligned messaging I think each needs to hear. Then I’ll double-click on the third group, which I recognize may feel counter-intuitive to readers.

Here are the three main groups I see whose actions enable the regime:

1. Hardcore MAGA base (active support for Trump, see world as binary good/evil and zero-sum; many in the evangelical community/Christian Nationalists see Trump as appointed by God; core values/orientation around winning, power, and not being subjugated)

Core message: Belonging built on dominating others is weak. It falls apart the moment you face real pressure, because it’s held together by fear, not loyalty. It will always be under attack.

Real strength—the kind that lasts, the kind your kids will be proud of—comes from protecting life, not destroying it. Warriors protect. Bullies dominate. There’s nothing strong about shooting unarmed women in the street or caging five-year-old children. The only sustainable path to security and belonging is to be someone worth fighting for.

This is your moment of choice: Build belonging through what you defend—your family, your community, your honor—not through who you destroy. Belong to a movement that requires enemies to feel strong, that has to keep finding new people to other and eliminate... or belong to something that actually protects life.

2. “Anti-woke” conservatives and more “traditional” law and order Republicans (value stability, economic security, and sameness; nervous about the pace of change and feel attacked for privileges and identities they had taken for granted; core values of duty, loyalty, hierarchy-as-order, and sacrifice )

Core message: We are called to protect life, not dominate. Domination is always wrong: our loyalty must be to life and to each other, not to subjugating those with less power. A nation that “others” its own people, that cages children and shoots unarmed mothers, isn’t creating order—it’s creating chaos. This regime is asking you to choose othering over belonging, and domination over stewardship. That’s not Christian or conservative—that’s a betrayal of everything you’re trying to protect.

This is your moment of choice: choose morality; protect life. The golden rule is commonsense wisdom: act with integrity to protect life, and to oppose those who would divide us through domination.

3. Wealthy elites… to include many Democrats who self-identify as liberal or progressive (those sitting in the halls of power, particularly in the upper echelons of companies, corporate boards, cultural institutions, and financial institutions; core values around achievement, pragmatism, focus on “reality”, autonomy and status)

Core message: We were wrong. Not about our values—but about what reality requires right now. We believed institutions, norms, and incremental reform could contain authoritarianism. We operated as if we all belonged to the same democratic project.

We need to recognize that we do not: this regime is committed to domination and othering, not liberal democracy. Every time we treat this as normal politics, we enable the continued destruction of the system we want to protect. This isn’t about abandoning reason or institutions—it’s about recognizing that we need a new strategy. Life requires protection.

This is our moment of choice: We have power. What are we using that power to protect? Will we use our power to protect life, and oppose fascism? Will we take action inside our institutions to withdraw consent from a domination system that we know will ultimately destroy us? How do we want to remember our actions when we look back on this moment?

Fascism feeds on liberalism

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: fascism depends on liberal complicity. Not because liberals want fascism—they don’t. But because liberalism’s commitments to neutrality, incrementalism, and institutional preservation create the conditions fascism exploits. The playbook we’ve been following—the one that feels reasonable, measured, responsible—is part of the architecture holding the regime up.

Liberal elites were the last pillar who enabled Hitler’s complete takeover of Germany. Not because they agreed with him—they despised him. But because they refused to break with institutional norms even when those norms were being weaponized against democracy itself.

This is the deeper truth at the heart of Riane Eisler’s work on how Partnership systems can prevail over better-funded and heavily-armed Domination systems: domination systems DEPEND on partnership. They are parasitic. Even the most rigidly authoritarian systems depend on relationships, on trust, on care, on parenting, in order to produce functional humans.

This is the source of our power: we cannot defeat a domination system by playing its game. We can—and must—withdraw consent. Fascism depends on us playing by the rules; we must recognize that the rules have now been hijacked to enable the takeover of the federal government. When the Trump regime declares that ICE agents can enter our homes without a warrant, we need to recognize that we are living in a new world.

Yes, we can and must use existing tools to push back (filing suit, requesting injunctions, etc)… AND we must recognize that isn’t enough. The system cannot save us: only we can do that. The only way to stop ICE from entering our homes is to aggressively organize to prevent them access, following the playbook that Minneapolis is developing in real time.

I know this is hard to hear, especially if you’re someone in an institutional role trying to do good from the inside. You’re thinking: “If I quit, someone worse takes my place. If I refuse to cooperate, I lose my ability to mitigate harm. The best I can do is stay and resist where I can.”

I understand that logic. I’ve used it myself. And there are contexts where it’s valid.

But we have to be ruthlessly honest about when that logic becomes a rationalization for complicity. When does “I’m doing what I can from the inside” actually mean “I’m providing legitimacy to a system that’s committing atrocities?”

This is a moment of reckoning for all of us. The Maduro kidnapping. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The threats to Greenland. The invasion of our homes without warrants. Each of us need to decide—and then uphold!—our red lines. What’s the line where we say: “I can no longer participate in this, even in the name of harm reduction?”

All of us are implicated: in buying from Amazon while we know their AWS infrastructure provides the digital backbone for ICE operations. Owning mutual funds at Vanguard or Blackrock that hold plurality stakes in Target, Hilton, and Home Depot. The more structural power we have, the more responsibility we bear. Those of us at senior levels in banks or law firms or cultural institutions, who are fearing pressure from the Trump regime: you are right to be afraid. And that cannot stop you from acting.

A global call: Protect Life. Refuse Domination.

This moment demands solidarity across borders. I’ve been struck in conversations with practitioners in other countries that Minneapolis hasn’t yet jumped borders: people are watching with a combination of shock/fear (the killings) and inspiration/solidarity (the courageous resistance). But we haven’t yet translated our specific struggle to something that can carry: “Abolish ICE” has no meaning in other countries.

I want to offer here a simple lens to invite people to apply in their contexts. Whether you’re in Minneapolis, Tehran, Warsaw, or Seoul—the principle is the same: Protect life. Refuse domination.

This works both as strategic principle and personal practice: choose belonging over othering. Protect life, refuse domination.

The tactics will differ based on your context, your resources, and the threats you face. The specifics matter, but so does the coherence. The through-line holds: we choose belonging over othering. We defend life over profit and power. We refuse to choose or accept domination. Honor Alex Pretti. Refuse to become Jonathan Ross.

This is the call to moral courage. This is not a time for despair. Minneapolis is showing us the way: when we stand together, when we refuse to retreat, when we protect life and build belonging—we are more powerful than the threat. The window is open. Let’s act—together.

My nervous system has been in a heightened state all month; I’ve been grounding in community, with my children, taking inspiration from Minneapolis and working in solidarity here in Seattle and in my global networks. I feel sad, scared, angry, and resolute. We didn’t ask for this moment, but here it is. And here we are, choosing life.

In community and solidarity,

Brian

2025 was a rough year for the world. Here on the west coast of the U.S. it began with fires ravaging Los Angeles and ended with massive flooding across western Washington. This climatic upheaval mirrored what was happening in our collective body: the destruction unleashed by the second Trump administration both within the federal government (the dismantling of USAID, e.g.) and targeting the most vulnerable among us (immigrants and trans people in particular) and an increasingly militarized foreign policy: closing the year with escalating violence against Venezuela. This against a global backdrop of continued fraying of the world order: still no end to the Russian incursion in Ukraine, Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza (and increasingly in the West Bank as well), and renewed mass violence in Sudan. Sigh.

But for all the darkness… there was also light. I have drawn inspiration from the large-scale mobilizations here in the U.S. to resist fascism, both protests (like No Kings Day) but even more importantly the deep solidarity in refusing to allow our neighbors to be kidnapped, and the proliferation of mutual aid efforts across the country: Chicago’s efforts to resist ICE provided a great template for the rest of us. A broad movement-led coalition successfully elected Zohran Mamdani as the mayor of New York City, over the furious efforts of the plutocratic Democratic establishment. Globally a wave of what have been dubbed “Gen Z” protests led to regime change in Nepal, Madagascar, and Bulgaria, and continue today in Iran and beyond. I hear echoes of the 2019 wave of movements… this time with more sophistication and greater recognition of the need for transformation, not just revolution.

I’ve become more drawn to the Chinese Zodiac in recent years: I like the idea of cycles, and listening to the different energies of the elements. In 2025 I resonated deeply with the year of the Wood Snake: a time for shedding what no longer serves, for outgrowing what now constrains us, and for listening deeply to what wants to emerge. The Snake is Yin fire: quiet intensity, inward-directed. 2026 brings us the Fire Horse, a rare once-every-60-years co-incidence of double-fire. The Horse already represents Yang fire; the Fire element amplifies that impulse: a year of creative destruction, of energy, of passion, of new beginnings. Ready or not… here it comes.

We’ve already seen Trump’s brand of fire-horse: I’m writing this in the days after his regime kidnapped a sitting head of state in Venezuela. It would be stunning if it weren’t so archetypally him. I see Trump as our Shadow manifest, our exiled and unhealed parts returning to haunt us. This isn’t the first time the U.S. has launched unilateral illegal regime change in Latin America (ahem, Panama), but it is the first time it’s been so brazen… and in the globalized digital media age.

Our fire horse must be more grounded, more disciplined, more directed: in service of building belonging, not only destroying.

Integrating 2024… and practicing 2025

2025 for me ended up being a year of Shadow Integration. Following Carl Jung’s work, this is about trying to bring into the conscious those hidden parts of ourselves that we have exiled to our unconscious (and which can drive our behavior without our full awareness). Like many called to social justice, I am a light worker: I thrive in the positive, the hopeful, the glass-half-full-ness of life, and it fuels my creativity. But: it can also lead me to ignore or suppress the darkness, and those aspects of myself or the world that don’t fit neatly into my hopeful narrative.

I worked on integrating my key lessons from 2024, and give myself… a B minus. I continue to struggle with “detaching with love”: it’s so hard for me to give up on someone’s potential. And I’m understanding in a deeper way the need to create more space between my “yes” and my “and”… but it’s so tied to my wounding that it still feels very effortful. I am getting much better at caring for myself and I’m proud of that, and I found a lot of utility in the “how-to-give-Brian-feedback” framework I arrived at in 2024.

As for my 2025 intentions… maybe a gentleman’s B. I’m proud of myself for my deep collaboration, particularly with core Building Belonging team member Christina, and for incipient explorations with Belonging @ Scale partners Kai Cheng Thom, Rajkumari Neogy, and Pat McCabe. I still struggled to express my feelings externally and allow others to feel my vulnerability… and I fear I didn’t do a great job of letting go of my need for others to recognize my light. Ongoing work that I’ll carry into 2026.

Key learnings from 2025

Almost everything fits under the broad heading of Shadow Integration. I spent the first half of the year exploring my relationship to control and surrender… and closed the year with a deep inquiry into my relationship (or lack thereof) with the “dark” emotions: grief, anger, and shame, and their more extreme manifestations in despair, rage, and hatred.

One frame I used for the work: becoming “right-sized.” Where in my childhood I took on more than was appropriate (too big in too small a self), in my adulthood I fear I’ve swung to the opposite pole: shrinking my bigness for fear of the impact on others. Shadow integration for me has been a process of discernment in reclaiming my appropriate “size” (and yes, I am large :-) This also corresponded to relational work, right-sizing my relationships to where we can best thrive… slow, ongoing, and both beautiful and painful at the same time.

But without further ado, key learnings (which I will spend 2026 trying to integrate!):

1. I am neurodivergent.

The biggest mistake I have made (and, sadly, continue to make) in my life is assuming that other people will think/react the way I do. I fear I have caused lots of avoidable harm (to myself and others!) with that mistaken assumption. While I have long known/accepted that I am different, I just wrote it off as a personality thing: we’re all different, and this is just my unique brand of weirdness. But this year my partner Leela encouraged me to look into it through the lens of neurodiversity, and I learned that many of the ways I think and process the world in my nervous system are very different from most people. I will write a separate post on this, but I am coming to understand that the core feature of my neurodivergence in childhood is what the literature calls “asynchronous development” (which, though different from other expressions of neurodiversity like autism or ADHD, shares “atypical neurological development” as its distinguishing feature):

Advanced cognitive abilities and heightened intensity combine to create inner experiences and awareness that are qualitatively different from the norm.

In my case, I have always seen the world in systems and patterns, and think and perceive and feel at all scales simultaneously (I, We, and World). Where most people develop physically, emotionally, and cognitively at the same pace, my intellectual and empathic capacities (I resonate with some of the discourse around “highly sensitive person”) far exceeded my nervous system’s ability to hold them at a young age.

I was recognized/tracked for my intellectual “gifts” while largely unseen/unsupported in my emotional/existential grappling. This has been a profound shift in my self-understanding around my sense of loneliness and alienation, an “aha” that I am still sitting with. It is also giving me a lot more compassion for others, and helping me replace my self-protective judgement with more curiosity. Instead of an angry “why can’t you see?!” I’m trying for a curious “what do you see?”

2. I have shame.

This is one of those things that most people would react to with “no shit, Sherlock” but for neurodivergent me it felt significant: I can be a little slow sometimes. I was hung up on Brené Brown’s definition of shame as “I am bad” and associations with low self-worth, which I don’t resonate with. And I struggled to differentiate my adaptive trauma response (which I acknowledge) from the feeling of “shame.”

But a long session with ChatGPT helped me name the specific form of shame I struggle with: what I am accepting as “relational capacity shame.” This is the adaptive mechanism downstream from my trauma, and shows up as me not trusting others to be able to hold all of me… so I hold back and don’t share my full complexity / humanity / emotionality / bigness. I found it helpful to distinguish between my trauma response (which shows up as bodily activation—think fight/flight/freeze/fawn etc), whereas my shame shows up as subtle armoring, withdrawal, hypervigilance, and attempting to manage other people’s reactions/emotions (more in the cognitive/emotional realm). Thus they require different approaches for healing.

Sticking with our Jungian theme, this looks like me projecting onto others before they can project onto me… a self-protective strategy I would very much like to let go of.

3. Once I embrace my light… it’s much easier to take accountability for my shadow.

Last summer I finally welcomed in an exiled piece of my Light: what the Enneagram calls “the Challenger.” This too will land with those who know me as not-at-all-surprising… like I said, I can be slow. For years I’ve hidden behind my primary Enneagram type of “the Enthusiast,” finding it more palatable in social justice circles, where the Challenger is viewed with suspicion and even hostility, especially expressed in bodies that look like mine/dominant culture.

But it turns out: I’m definitely ALSO a Challenger, and once I acknowledged that I found myself much more able (to the great relief of my collaborators) to take accountability for the Shadow dimensions of that gift. As Xavier Dagba notes: the brightest light casts the darkest shadow 😬.

4. I aspire to credibility, not legibility.

I desperately want to be understood. Part of my feeling of loneliness/alienation is feeling that others don’t “get” me. This year I explored a shadow side to this: what if a part of me “likes” being misunderstood? What if feeling misunderstood keeps me safe? 😬. If a funder chooses not to support my work, I can say “well, they just didn’t get it.” This saves me from the vulnerability of rejection, or the possibility that maybe they did understand… and there’s something I’m missing.

This year I want to confront that fear, and put a different spin on my desire to be understood. Yes I want to accept the responsibility to communicate complexity (see intention #3, below)… AND I want to set a different bar. What if instead of being understood (with connotations of cognitive comprehension), I aspired to being believed? As a trusted friend told me: “Brian, your ideas aren’t credible. They’re just too far out there for most people… especially in the context of a short 45-minute pitch session. But: you are credible.”

So while I still long for people to understand my ideas (what I think of as intellectual legibility), I’m going to hold myself accountable for something different: I’m going to ask them to believe in me (personal credibility). This feels much more vulnerable… and also much more honest about how humans work. We trust people first, and ideas second: I want to lean into that vulnerability this year. (This in the context of fundraising, but it has broader applicability for how I try to connect with others—including my parents, e.g.—around my work).

One helpful dimension here for me that I’m still sitting with. My parenting partner Jennifer also introduced me to Human Design work this year (speaking of things I don’t cognitively understand but nonetheless can deeply appreciate), and got me a session that I found really powerful. Part of what it revealed—which feels consonant with my emerging self-understanding in the context of neurodivergence—is that things which feel intuitive/obvious/true to me, do NOT feel that way to most people. Which leaves a credibility gap that at best leaves my interlocutors feeling confused; at worst mistrustful. Understanding this difference in our design (or our neurotypes, if you prefer) feels like a powerful unlock for learning how to communicate across that gap: if I know something is likely to be met with skepticism, I can acknowledge that pre-emptively and support my interlocutors in meeting me in my difference.

As with 2024’s lessons, these feel like insights that I have intellectually grasped but will take lots of work to actually integrate into my body and change my behavior: very much work-in-progress for the year ahead.

I’m not sure where to capture this, but I did want to celebrate another major victory this year: I did some incredible work on my jaw, which I recognize as the central axis of my trauma and tension, the hinge between my head and my heart, between my calm external presentation and my often-intense/existential interior/emotional life. During my psychedelic journey in late September, I was able to recognize some of my jaw tension as ancestral pain and trauma. It was stunning: I worked up my matrilineal line and gained consent to let go of a burden that many of us had held for far too long… and it was like flipping a switch. My jaw has been SO much lighter since then. It’s still an early warning sign that I’m approaching the limits of my capacity (when it starts firing, I need to pay attention!), but it is no longer a constant tension.

Some choice quotes to capture for posterity (from therapists, partners, and insights that all landed in me with the “oof” of truth and helped me arrive at these core lessons):

• “Brian: he who holds space for everyone except himself”

• “Stop tolerating abuse to get to love”

• “You’ve been living in other people’s projections your whole life”

• “What gets exiled comes back hostile” (Martin Shaw, quoted by Tim Merry)

• “Healing is about becoming better at feeling” (this one via Afsa Rosette)

• “I wasn’t emotionally developed enough to handle you with the care you need” (also Afsa)

• “The more you feel your emotions, the more others will be able to feel you”

• “I didn’t deserve that” (my personal unlock to access grief)

• “What is the sensation in my body of giving or receiving love?” (my self-love practice)

• “Belonging is the antidote to shame” (hat-tip to Rajkumari for this one)

2026 intentions

My intentions are efforts to act on and integrate my learnings, in the direction of my calling. Back in February I arrived at a new commitment, building on my intentions for 2025:

I am a commitment to embodying power without domination. I will bridge across differences, shining my light without insisting that others see it.

This still feels right, and I’ll carry it with me into 2026. Here are the four intentions I’ll be working with this year:

1. Listen to the darkness.

This is a subtle but important shift from my 2025 work. Last year I focused relentlessly on integration: naming and reclaiming my gifts and my light, in order to take more accountability for my shadow… and bring it into my consciousness where I could work with it. But I still saw darkness as something to be overcome, integrated, rendered in service of light. This year I’m leaning into something that feels very edgy for me: just accepting the darkness, and listening to its wisdom without trying to transform it. Darkness and light are different energies; they are a polarity that work together. What if the work isn’t to integrate, but to respect the difference?

Soul-friend Lindley Mease introduced me this year to the indigenous Aymara concept of Ch’ixi, which I find very challenging to my natural disposition toward integration and higher synthesis. Ch’ixi asks us to hold polarities without trying to integrate them. Here’s Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui:

The notion of ch’ixi… reflects the Aymara idea of something that is and is not at the same time. It is the logic of the included third. A ch’ixi color gray is white but is not white at the same time; it is both white and its opposite, black… The potential of undifferentiation is what joins opposites… ch’ixi combines the Indian world and its opposite without ever mixing them.

As a natural bridger/connector/integrator… this cosmology is provocative for me. I’ve always been drawn to difference, but my instinct is always “to include and transcend”, always seeking a higher synthesis. What if… I didn’t? This points to my work for the year: can I listen to the darkness… without insisting that it become integrated with the light?

2. Explore my relationship to grief… and anger.

This is related to the above: I’m aware that I don’t have much relationship to the “dark” emotions. I can access the full range of “light” emotions: happiness and joy, curiosity and awe, e.g. But sadness takes intentionality for me to drop into… and I don’t have any relationship with despair. Anger takes effort… and I don’t feel connected to rage. This matters for two reasons: one, I want to reclaim my full humanity. And two: I see all my work as fractal, and I understand that the energies driving fascism and this moment are ones that I can’t locate in my own body. I fear that I won’t be able to respond effectively to dynamics that I can’t understand/feel in myself.

I want to bring in an update to my 2024 lesson on “detaching with love” and re-work last year’s intention around “naming the ouch” (it turns out, I’m still not very good at that). I’ve learned that when I feel pain or am hurt, the first thing I do is humanize/empathize with the perpetrator. There is Light in this: I refuse to fight fire with fire, and I recognize the wounding that is driving their behavior. And there is Shadow: I tolerate harm—and even abuse—in an often-vain effort to encourage their healing… telling myself that on the other side of their healing genuine love awaits. Ouch. Instead this year I want to try this practice:

• Feel my own pain first: name harm (to myself!) and allow my nervous system to feel the injury.

• State my boundary clearly: “This behavior hurts me. It’s not okay.”

• Hold compassion second, not first: compassion as truth, not bypass: sit with their experience AFTER I sit with my own (ugh so hard for me).

• Let their healing be their responsibility: instead of my relational labor. Check in with myself about my own willingness, what the relationship means to me, an honest assessment of their capacity… and ask their consent (both to do the healing work, and to accept support). Absent those conditions… it is time to detach with love.

3. Experiment with the Embodied Exemplar.

I first named this archetype last January in Borikén… and this year I want to lean into it. What if in addition to my work as a Bridger, connecting people… I also practiced the role of the Beacon, shining a light to invite people back home? There are a couple components here: the first is practicing what I preach, which is acknowledging that we trust people first, and ideas second. Am I willing to be more vulnerable and make myself the thing I am asking people to invest in? I’ve long sought more examples of the embodiment I aspire to: power without domination. Collaboration without coercion. Could I begin to share my own embodiment as one example in that direction? Not as answer, but as invitation? Instead of seeking others to follow, or asking others to follow me… to invite mutual accompaniment on a difficult and lonely journey? After all, as Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us: the bridge is made by walking.

The second is to lean more into story, as part of my commitment to letting go of being misunderstood. Yes my theory of global systems transformation is complex, of necessity. And: it is my responsibility to find a way to communicate and connect with others if I want to be successful (both fundraising and in inviting people to join this vision). Story is the bridge… I want to practice telling my story, seeking credibility rather than legibility. Connection first; transformation only occurs in relationship.

4. I want to be more gentle… and playful.

Especially within myself. One of my main takeaways from my psychedelic immersion in early October was discovering that my inner monologue is a relentless taskmaster: not unkind per se, but constantly speaking the language of urgency, of need, of imperative. And: I really do NOT like that. It feels coercive. So instead I want to work on shifting that internal monologue into invitations. It was this conclusion: there is no healing without consent.

I’m pairing “play” here, which was another takeaway from my psychedelic journey: I long for more ease and playfulness in my life. I’ve carried a (largely self-imposed) weight of responsibility since early childhood, and while I don’t want to put it down… I also don't want it to crush me. I think of this as integrating “exceptional Brian” (the brain-forward meta-thinking and future-oriented neurodivergent me) with “playful Brian” (the heart- and body-centered flamboyant unicorn me that delights in the present): I’m coming to understand that both are different ways to answer the call my soul feels summoned to.

Since high school I’ve resonated with the quandary expressed in this E.B. White quote: “I arise each morning torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy it. This makes it difficult to plan the day.” Recently it occurred to me for the first time: what if those aren’t in opposition? What if one way to improve the world… is by deeply reveling in it? Not as hedonistic escape, but as reverent appreciation? What if play is the highest expression of aliveness? What if Eros and Logos are not opposed… but different paths to the same end? I’ve long been good at “fun”: at its best, I derive great enjoyment from my work. But that is a different energy from play. The paradox: I am coming to believe that play is one way to change the world… and for it to be “play” I have to relinquish that intention and give myself over to the experience. I’d like to do more of that this year.

Domains for practice

No healing without consent… and no transformation without practice. Working with darkness is not for the faint of heart, and I know myself well enough to know that I will need well-held containers and trusted confidantes… including those who can tell me hard things in ways that I can hear. I will continue to look to my close partners for support and accountability, as well as the Belonging @ Scale crew as a container for practice with kindred spirits.

A few intentional practice grounds I’m considering:

1. The Light Dark Institute. This was one of my most powerful immersions last year, and continues to reverberate in me. I’m hoping to return to deepen my exploration of power, control, and surrender.

2. Collective containers for grief. I’m not sure what form this will take yet, but I’ve been slowly wading into these waters, principally through the work of Francis Weller. I am eager to explore collective spaces, and probably men-only spaces. I’m considering the next Men’s Jam through YES, and am asking support from friends like Jordan Lyon who are more familiar with this edgy terrain.

3. Return to sport. It’s been over a year since reconstructive surgery to repair my torn ACL and meniscus; I’ve been really missing team sports. I’m actively doing physical therapy now to get back to full-contact: I intend to try basketball this winter, and to return to Ultimate in the spring/summer. I miss camaraderie, competition, and the delight of play with diverse humans.

4. Podcasts and conferences: I want to challenge myself this year to share more about what I’ve learned, and to convene and engage in more public spaces. My sister Trina and I are talking about launching a podcast. I’d love to present/workshop at convenings/conferences with kindred spirits, and challenge myself to communicate complexity through story, to connect without requiring shared understanding.

5. Fundraising. I’ve never liked fundraising, because I see it as the dominant culture I’m trying to transcend/let go of: it reminds me of my lawyer/debate background, and the energy of “selling” and “convincing” that I find so draining. But: the revolution must be funded, and I’m challenging myself this year to share my story, to invite partners to join us in resourcing this important work, and to take a chance on something bold. This is a fractal domain that will test all of my intentions and learnings: it feels hard, vulnerable, and necessary. I will need support to help me hold myself accountable.

2025 Top 10 list

Finally, for those who’ve made it this far, a parting gift :-)

I used to do a very labor-intensive “best of” list each year… but now I hope you’ll accept in its stead my top-10 list of podcasts and articles that influenced my thinking and perspective last year.

Regular readers will see their influence in my 12 newsletter posts this year. The thread I spent most of my energy on was trying to understand fascism: its roots in victimhood, its present political manifestation in the United States, and the unprocessed grief and shame that animates it.

Without further ado:

1. Grief Is the Healing: Malkia Devich-Cyril on Organizing Through Loss, Fascism Barometer Podcast with Ejeris Dixon, 2025.

2. The Long Dark, with Francis Weller. How to Survive the End of the World Podcast, with adrienne maree and Autumn Brown, 2025.

3. Money is a Claim on Energy, with Nate Hagens. The Regeneration will be Funded podcast, 2024.

4. When toxic polarization becomes a civil war–and what we can do about it, with John Paul Lederach. Nonviolence Radio podcast, 2025.

5. Mariame Kaba, Love in a F*cked up World podcast, with Dean Spade, 2025.

6. For Those Who See What Others Don’t Yet, by Anna Branten. Substack: 2025.

7. How I Journeyed Through the Darkness of Collapse, by Ernesto van Peborgh Substack: 2025.

8. The Inner Work of Systems Change, by Adrian Röbke. Network Weaver: 2025.

9. Donnie Maclurcan on Post-Growth Economics & the Future Beyond Capitalism, Better Future with Michael Mezz podcast, 2025.

10. Inner and Outer Democracy: The Practice of True Inclusion. Tara Brach podcast, 2024.

Best wishes to all for a fruitful and generative year of the Fire Horse. Onward, together.

In community,

Brian