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.

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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

As I discussed in a recent post, fascism is a movement driven by emotions. Understanding and addressing those emotions (and where they come from) is essential to our ability to respond effectively, and ultimately to prevent fascism from rising again.

French-Israeli scholar Eva Illouz identifies four primary emotions driving populist authoritarian movements: fear, resentment, disgust… and love (of country, a nationalist framing). That resonates with my own understanding and reading of history, and feels explanatory of the emergence of the authoritarian movements currently ascendant around the world (Hungary, Israel, India, Brazil, and beyond).

But fascism is different. In my view it activates and is animated by different emotions. Specifically, I think it comes down to a sense of loss and wounded pride, which left ungrieved metastasizes into shame… which is finally compounded by humiliation.

I want to explore this argument through the lens of the postbellum period following the U.S. Civil War (the last time we had a fascist movement in the United States), in the hope that some distance from our present moment can make things easier to see.

Here’s where I’m coming out (TL;DR): I think fascism’s appeal turns on emotions, and in particular how unprocessed grief can metastasize into shame, and feed a sense of victimhood and grievance in the face of humiliation. Fascism thus becomes a way to avoid shame by directing it onto those deemed “others” as scapegoats for violence.

The implications for our movements are profound:
1. We must acknowledge loss.
2. We must create and support spaces for processing collective grief.
3. We must avoid the use of shaming and “othering” in our communications and tactics.
4. We must actively invest in co-creating new aspirational identities for people to embrace as they shed those which no longer serve.

5. There is radical potential in organizing our movements around Belonging.

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For the purpose of exploring this idea—which is essential to our ability to effectively combat fascism—I am going to center the emotional experience of those people who find themselves seduced by fascism. To be clear: my primary sympathies are with those who do NOT choose fascism, and who are victimized by those choosing fascism. It is admittedly a bitter pill to hold space for and try to understand the emotional experience of the perpetrators.

In a future post I will devote attention to the untended and undischarged emotional experience (primarily grief and rage) of those who are targeted by oppression and fascism. Today I find myself called to try to understand what is motivating the perpetrators; if we do not, I believe we will be unable to effectively respond and prevent fascism’s rise. If you are not in a space today to empathize/humanize with the “other,” that’s okay: I invite you to care for yourself, listen to your body, and return if/when you feel ready. Otherwise, please join me in a journey to try to understand.

From loss to shame to violence: the emotional arc of fascism

Here’s how I understand the sequencing:

1. A sense of loss… and “wounded pride”

This loss is usually both material (objective) and subjective… it is the felt sense of loss that is far more important than the actual loss. In the case of many southern White people after the Civil War, this is the material loss of the war itself, and the emancipation of formerly enslaved people (for enslavers, the loss of wealth and “property”).

But the deeper loss is psychic: the loss of their position in society, their claim to honor (both wealthy enslavers as well as poor White people who benefited from the “psychic wages” of the system of white supremacy). They experience a sense of what Arlie Hochschild evocatively calls wounded or “stolen pride.”

2. Shame

The healthy response to loss is grief. But that grief is made more difficult by the concurrent emergence of shame, which I see at two levels.

1. The first is the sense of shame most correlated with the emotion of embarrassment: a feeling that “we should not have lost.” This is the sting of defeat… which on its own hurts, but can be overcome.

2. The second source of shame is deeper, and harder to confront: this is the reckoning that perhaps the loss is justified; perhaps the South should have lost. Perhaps the source of pride (dominant position in society over enslaved Black people) was itself actually a source of shame. For southern Whites, both enslavers and those who benefited from a racialized caste system alike, this is confronting the painful possibility of finding themselves on the wrong side of history. It is the sting of a moral failing, and can be experienced by the perpetrator as “moral injury” (especially for the vast majority of Southern people and soldiers who did not actually own enslaved people).

These are deep emotions, and too identity-shattering to confront alone. Shame and grief are both social emotions and experiences: they are too big to hold alone. This is a fraught and potentially dangerous stew of emotions that require careful and collective tending to navigate, to process as grief and move to repair (righting the wrong — reparations) and healing.

I think here of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process—which rightly centered those harmed by apartheid and allowed them to be seen for all they had suffered. But an important and under-appreciated (by outsiders) part of Truth and Reconciliation was that it also offered a way for perpetrators to atone, to take accountability, to repair, and therefore to process their shame as grief before it metastasized into violence. We have never had such a process in the United States.

3. Humiliation

This is the all-important step: the pivot that paves the way to fascism. Humans cannot tolerate the feeling of shame: we experience it (correctly) as a threat to belonging. It feels unbearable. We MUST find a way to get rid of it. Generally there are two paths: grief, repair, and healing (accountability)… or externalizing the shame by blaming it on someone else (impunity).

After the Civil War the victorious North engineered and implemented a process known as Reconstruction: an ambitious and necessary project to remake and rehabilitate the South, and to grant political voice to disenfranchised Black people who had been oppressed under the system of enslavement. To many southern Whites, this had two important psychological/emotional impacts (acknowledging that I am speaking as a non-expert in broad generalizations; the best treatment of Reconstruction I’ve found is David Blight’s Race and Reunion):

1. First, it felt like imposition and coercion: the North exerting its will over the defeated. Many southern Whites experienced this as unjust and unfair.

2. Second, the dominant narrative in the North (during the war and after) adopted a posture of moral superiority: which many southern Whites experienced as hypocritical, shaming, and insulting.

The impact of these two experiences allowed many southern Whites to make an important—and dangerous—shift. It allowed them to experience themselves as victims. They were already resentful (pre-war); feeling unfairly punished gave them a sense of self-righteousness.

[Again, I’m speaking here only to the subjective experience of some southern White people: I happen to believe that the intentions and ambitions of Reconstruction were an equitable and necessary corrective to the degradation of enslavement… and that the South did in fact behavior immorally (not to exempt the North from its also racist and immoral beliefs/behaviors).]

4. Victimhood

Now the locus has shifted: where before they were primarily focused on the sting of their own internal experience (loss, wounded pride, and shame)... the introduction of humiliation shifts the focus to the “other”: the group seen as responsible for causing the humiliation. By blaming the North, southern Whites can avoid the uncomfortable sting of shame. No longer do they have to contemplate how they are perpetrators; instead they can take refuge in victimhood, and the soothing balm of self-righteousness.

Here’s the thing: there is an element of truth to their experience. The North did speak from a place of hypocrisy, by denying their own complicity in the system of enslavement and the (ongoing) oppression of Black people. The North’s effort to avoid its own reckoning (itself motivated in part by shame/denial) left it vulnerable to being named the oppressor. It allowed the South to see and name that hypocrisy, to deflect and avoid confronting their own culpability and feelings of shame.

(This is related to the form of victimhood I discussed here… that analysis helps explain the paradox of perpetrators feeling like victims, especially when they hold objective power).

5. Redemptive violence

This is why fascism is so dangerous, and fundamentally different from other forms of authoritarianism: it demands violence. I previously talked about “aggrieved entitlement,” the predominantly-male phenomenon that paves the way to violence: I think this animated the authoritarianism of Trump’s first term. That grievance comes from a place of not getting something “promised.” The animating force is resentment. The redemptive violence of fascism, by contrast, is motivated by a sense of loss, of something stolen (rather than something denied). The animating force is shame and humiliation. A wrong has been done, and demands satisfaction: the “stop the steal” campaign that led to the violent insurrection of January 6th to me represents this shift from resentment to humiliation, and to me was the threshold from authoritarianism to fascism in America.

In the post-war South, this was the birth of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK): America’s first fascist movement. While we (rightly) see them as domestic terrorists, many Klan members saw themselves as righteous defenders of something sacred (invoking God and defending Christianity, a precursor to today’s Christian Nationalist movements).

As with today’s reactionary movements, these movements were led by elites primarily focused on reclaiming power and imposing racial hierarchy (the self-proclaimed “Redeemers”), and they successfully organized many southern Whites around this sense of victimhood. They justified their violence and terror as a necessary and appropriate response to their feeling of victimhood and humiliation: this was the essence of the “lost cause” mythology that the “Redeemers” so successfully cultivated after the war (leading Reconstruction scholars like Blight to observe that the South “lost the war but won the peace” with this revisionist history).

Implications for movements for justice

I want to be clear that this is not a linear inevitable path: many southern Whites did NOT support the KKK, and found healthier ways to metabolize their loss and confront their shame. Roughly 20% of southern White people opposed slavery and supported Reconstruction governments, and formed the largest percentage of delegates in those governments (derided by “Redeemers” as “scalawags”). Indeed, successful bi-racial governance emerged in several states.

This is also not the full story: many other factors contributed to the rise of the KKK in the post-war period. I’m deliberately focusing today on the emotional dimension, because I think it’s a misunderstood piece of the fascist puzzle.

I’m reminded of Naomi Klein’s great line about conspiracy theorists, which feels equally applicable here to leaders of fascist movements like Trump: they “get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.” If we hope to respond effectively to fascism, we too need to get the feelings right… if we want anyone to listen to our facts.

Returning to our present moment, I’m sure readers will be drawing parallels. I want to emphasize two things: this is NOT a uniquely American phenomenon (or a Trump phenomenon), and we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the broader context. And it is NOT inevitable. The benefit of an emotions-focused analysis illuminates the possibility for change. Unlike explanations which turn narrowly on identity, class position, ideology, or racism/xenophobia, recognizing instead that people are responding to universal emotional experiences (and similar conditions) gives us a sense of agency and potential to invite different choices.

For social movements committed to responding to (and ultimately preventing the re-emergence of!) fascism, I draw three key lessons:

1. We must acknowledge the sense of loss. This is the essential first step: to help people feel seen for their suffering. Right now Trump and the far-right have a near-monopoly on speaking to the pain of people with historically privileged identities and helping them make sense of their loss. In a brilliant essay, Amahra Spence explains (talking about the UK context, though I trust U.S. readers will see obvious parallels):

They take the very real grief of poor and working-class white communities—towns gutted by deindustrialisation, families destabilised by precarity, health and futures eroded by austerity—and redirect it into grievance against migrants, Black people, queer people, Muslims, anyone who can be made scapegoat. And because grief carries a deep desire for connection and belonging, these narratives are working. The far right is providing coherence, ritual and story where the Left too often offers distance, ridicule, or silence.

2. We must support the process of collective grieving. Let me be clear: this work is not for everyone (particularly those targeted by oppressive systems)… but it must be for someone. I’m deeply inspired by Malkia Devich Cyril’s work on “radical loss,” which they define as “the ability to move grief in the direction of justice.” Here BIPOC-led movements for justice are (as usual) charting the course, helping marginalized people metabolize their own suffering and rage and transmute it into justice. We need to develop similar containers and movements to support radical loss for White communities and others with historically privileged identities.

3. We must decline the temptation to wield shame or humiliation. bell hooks reminds us that these are the master’s tools; they cannot lead us to liberation. Healing justice practitioner Prentis Hemphill summarizes the literature on this: “shame impedes change.” Particularly for the kinds of people we are talking about here, they are already feeling stuck in shame: if we compound that by introducing humiliation we inadvertently interrupt any potential for grief and transformation, and instead push them toward victimhood (and the dangerous path to redemptive violence).

From revolution to transformation

As I was thinking about this post (and working on a “pitch deck” for Building Belonging, as we prepare for our fundraising drive to continue our work next year), I came up with a little framework that I think might be helpful for the last point I want to make here.

It describes how I understand the dynamic relationship between the status quo and its defenders, the social justice movements arising to challenge the status quo, and the reactionary movements emerging in response. It also mirrors my own lived experience. Let me present the framework, then unpack it:

The basic idea is that we are all seeking belonging, in response to conditions of alienation. But because our present systems can’t offer belonging, we try for the next best thing. Here’s how I understand the relationship/flow:

1. The status quo cannot offer belonging: belonging is not possible inside a domination system with a hierarchy that privileges some over others. Instead it offers power to those who are privileged in the hierarchy (as compensation for giving up on belonging), and offers the possibility of fitting in to everyone else (always conditional upon pledging allegiance to the power structure, and only in subservient roles). It masks the violence of the domination system by presenting it as a meritocracy, suggesting that those on top deserve to be there (and vice versa).

2. In response, Revolutionary Movements emerge to challenge the status quo, and to demand inclusion for those who have been marginalized and excluded. They correctly identify the flaws of the status quo, but there is a risk in conflating the problem as those privileged by the system rather than the whole system itself. (I personally think that all Revolutionary Movements contain a transformative impulse that is usually present in the leaders, but it is easily hijacked to serve revolutionary rather than transformative aims, because we are all conditioned into the logic of domination hierarchies. It is incredibly difficult to build liberatory movements that don’t replicate the thing we are fighting against). These movements offer at last the possibility of power to those who were excluded in the status quo, but can only offer fitting in to those who were privileged: belonging is still conditional.

3. The success of Revolutionary Movements in challenging the status quo produces a backlash in the form of Reactionary Movements. These movements are usually led by people who benefited the most from the status quo ante, but the rank and file are those who suffered under the status quo… but now feel threatened by Revolutionary Movements. People who didn’t have power in the status quo find that they also don’t have power in Revolutionary Movements… and stand to lose their role in “fitting in” or in their privileged position along an identity hierarchy: it provokes a fear of loss. Instead these movements retrench in the worst aspects of the status quo, offering the false promise of belonging contingent on “othering.” Instead of dressing up the domination hierarchy as meritocracy, they dispense with the pretense and embrace “othering” and domination as the core logic of the system: I belong because you don’t.

Of course, none of these movements can offer genuine belonging. This is the radical potential and promise of Transformative Movements, which explicitly reject the logic of domination and hierarchy, refuse to “other,” decline to contort ourselves to “fit in,” and instead invite us to practice interdependence, reciprocity, and relationships that honor everyone’s dignity.

This has been my life journey: feeling acutely the status quo’s false promise of belonging; feeling excited at the emergence of revolutionary movements that named injustice, and disappointed to encounter only conditional belonging; and feeling alarm at the reactionary movements that weaponized alienation into exclusion and doubled down on domination. None offered a home where I could bring my full self.

I finally found kin among those building transformative movements. Building Belonging is my effort to create the political home I’ve been longing for: for my kindred spirits committed to embodying belonging beyond hierarchy and domination.

Tread softly with identity: loss can trigger shame

I want to unpack one more complex idea here before I close. This is about the relationship between collective loss, shame, and identity. Here’s how I understand the logic flow:

1. All of the losses I am discussing today are systemic (not individual). There are two categories of loss for the people I am talking about today. The primary causes I consider material: loss of jobs and general economic precarity, as a consequence of the ravages of neoliberalism. These losses are a threat to core identities that give meaning and status based on what people do: provider, worker, middle-class, etc. They threaten one’s sense of self and place in society, and are on their own deeply destabilizing. I think of this as a loss of dignity: this is the failure of the status quo.

   1. If I’m not a provider for my family… who am I? This is the loss that can breed resentment and become aggrieved entitlement: a promise not kept.

   2. But even in this instability there is a path out: we can create new identities, new sources of status and belonging. I can provide in a different way, perhaps I can be a parent and caregiver rather than an economic provider.

2. But there is a secondary set of losses as well that are more cultural. As social movements rightfully challenge dominant systems, there is a risk that these critiques can land as targeting people rather than systems: blaming White people rather than white supremacy, blaming men rather than patriarchy, blaming Americans rather than imperialism. This is a much deeper identity threat: it targets who people are. I think of this as a loss of identity. This is the limitation (experienced as threat) of revolutionary movements.

   1. If the problem is my core identities as a White American man, and those are seen to be immutable… then there is no escape. What was a stable identity and source of pride now becomes a source of shame. This is the dangerous form of loss that is experienced as something stolen… and demanding a response.

3. Thus the people most susceptible to fascism are experiencing what I think of as a form of “double grief” that directly threatens identities that were presumed stable and positive. They experience alienation both from the status quo, AND from the revolutionary movements emerging to challenge the status quo. This combination of material loss of dignity and cultural/psychic loss of identity is profoundly destabilizing: taken together it represents an existential disorientation around their sense of belonging in the social order.

   1. It’s this sentiment: I don’t know who I am or what my role is in society… and I feel powerless in the face of forces beyond my control.

   2. This is a deeply vulnerable and intolerable state for most of us; it is doubly so for men socialized into a form of masculinity that doesn’t admit room for vulnerability, and who do not have strong social networks/sources of support.

This is the fertile recruiting ground for fascism, and the context within which we are working.

Reparation… and creation

As always, I fear I’ve overloaded the tree with ornaments here and it’s going to topple under its own weight. I think these ideas are in relationship with each other:

1. Understanding unmetabolized grief and its internalization as shame as core to the fascist phenomenon.

2. Recognizing the interplay between movements for justice and reactionary movements, and the “double grief” (or compounded shame) that makes people more susceptible to fascism.

I think there is powerful potential for solidarity here. What transformative movements recognize is that ALL of us suffer under our current systems, and that ALL of us have a stake in transforming them. We all yearn for belonging: not the conditional belonging of fitting in, nor the false belonging of othering, but the genuine thing. THAT is what we can offer.

So yes, there must be a component of grief and reparations work that seeks to heal what has been harmed. That is essential. AND: the promise of transformative movements makes the invitation to transformation (and the crushing vulnerability of confronting shame and doing deep grief work) worth it.

The bridge, I think, is deep and tender work around identities:

1. The future-oriented work of co-creating new aspirational identities, which must of necessity be post-racial and post-nationalist (giving people something to transform into)

2. And the past-oriented work of grieving the identities we are shedding… and the harms those identities have caused.

I’ll leave it here for today; this post has been percolating in me for a long time, and more lies ahead. A deeper exploration of grief that I feel sure will be part of my personal 2026 journey, ongoing work to interrogate where shame lives in me (I see all of this as fractal… between the world and me)… and more.

I would love reactions/thoughts/constructive engagement: is this helpful? What lands, what doesn’t? Is the revolutionary/reactionary/transformative framework useful?

Our last subscriber gathering of the year (with gratitude for your patience!) will be Wednesday, December 17th, @8:30am PT / 11:30am ET / 4:30pm UK / 5:30pm CET/CAT. I’m inclined to open this one to any subscriber who may wish to join; please RSVP here if interested.

In community,

Brian

It’s hard being a progressive (or as I prefer to call myself, a liberationist) in the United States: we’ve had our hopes crushed too often.

So it was a relief to wake up this morning to the first elections of the Trump 2.0 era and see that finally we have elected a candidate we can be happy about: member of the Democratic Socialist Party Zohran Mamdani’s emphatic victory in the New York City Mayor’s race, over another neoliberal money-backed establishment old-guard Democrat candidate.

That enthusiasm was tempered by early results in the mayoral election here in Seattle, where I live, where the neoliberal money-backed candidate is up in early returns (though there’s still hope that Katie Wilson, the progressive candidate I’m supporting, will pull through in late ballot returns).

This to me is the stakes of this election: there is no hope for the political future of the United States as long as old-school money-backed establishment Democrats cling to power. Our only hope is for progressive liberationists to take over the party, just as MAGA and Trump took over the Republicans.

Some thoughts:

It’s the Belonging (in community, together!)

Regular readers will not be surprised that this is my primary takeaway. What Mamdani did best was bring people together around an inspiring message. He united over 100,000 (!!!) volunteers, en route to amassing over 1,000,000 votes… an astonishing feat for an off-year election. As Anand Giridharadas put it:

The profound insight of the Zohran Mamdani campaign was that people want to be summoned to do more, not less; they want to get together, not lurk on screens alone; they want to belong in hope, not just commiserate in anger; they want to organize, not agonize.

He did this with a bold vision, a relentlessly positive message (yes we can!), an inclusive politics (reaching out to Trump voters without pathologizing their choice, including/especially in communities of color), and by actually doing the street-level work of organizing.

He also represents the next Gen in his embodiment: unapologetically multi-racial/multi-ethnic, social media savvy, and on the right side of history on the major issues of the day (including staunchly opposing the Israeli-led genocide in Gaza).

Framing this as Democrats vs Republicans misses the point

There are two things we need to understand about the shape of party politics in the United States in November 2025.

First, we need to understand that the national Republican party as we have historically understood it no longer exists: Trump executed a complete takeover, and it is now the MAGA party… with some minority holdouts who occasionally offer tepid resistance. We do ourselves a cognitive disservice in referring to it as the Republican party: the party of Abraham Lincoln (and indeed, even Ronald Reagan) is long dead.

Instead we need to view the Republican party for what it is: an autocratic party committed to strongman rule, that is actively supporting fascist takeover. (It’s important to note: not every Republican member of Congress sees themselves as doing this: but in this case, impact matters more than intent). It is also true that in the states, counties, and municipalities outside of the DC Beltway there are still pockets of more traditional Republicanism (though at any level of national prominence they are a dying breed).

Second, we need to understand that the Democratic party is reviled by large swaths of the population… including most of its base. It’s no accident that the most popular figures in Democratic politics in the last decade… are NOT actually Democrats. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rose to power as a Democratic Socialist… in direct challenge to an old-school money-backed neoliberal Democrat. “The Squad” that got elected in 2018 largely did so by distancing themselves from the traditional Democratic party. Bernie Sanders is an Independent.

This is not a “blue wave”: this is an anti-Trump wave, led by liberationists with a vision that rejects the dead-ends of Trumpism and mainstream Democratic politics. The energy in the Democratic party… is not in the Democratic party. Rather, it’s among Leftist political pragmatists who understand that in a two-party system we need to leverage the Democratic party as a tool to claim power… and to reshape the party in our image.

Credit where it’s due: in NYC to the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and all those organizers and canvassers who door-knocked Mamdani to victory… AGAINST a mainstream establishment Democrat.

Abundance (progressive liberalism) vs Liberation (liberationism)

Yes this election is a profound rejection of Trump and what he stands for… thank the deities for that. But I don’t think 2024 was an endorsement of Trump and what he stands for: to me the clearer message was a rejection of the Democratic Party and what IT stands for. The plutocratic gerontocracy at the top of the party (Schumer, Biden et al) did not get the message in 2020, when we held our noses because we understood that the imperative was to get Trump out of power. Consequently, many voters understandably turned their backs: if you won’t stand up for us, why should we stand up for you? (To be clear: I still think defeating Trump was/is imperative, but I empathize with those who made different choices).

There will be those (read: New York Times) who will do their best to refuse to acknowledge the obvious to their rich readers, so let me be clear: the American people (and the base of the Democratic party) have repeatedly and profoundly rejected neoliberalism. Let it die. Our task: defeat establishment Democrats, and follow the Mamdani playbook.

Instead the debate worth paying attention to I think of as Abundance (after Ezra Klein’s new book) vs Liberation. I think there are actually two things going on here, and they get conflated: one is a theory of change about how you win power, and one is about the content/policy platform of what’s needed to respond to this moment. I’ll get to theory of change in a moment (they’re related, of course), but for now let’s focus on content.

In Abundance Klein offers a profoundly reformist agenda, arguing for how we can make government work better for people. I think of it as progressive liberalism: what we might call the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. It accepts the boundaries/core tenets of liberalism (as both a political and economic ethos) and tries to implement the economic ethos. It sees the core problem as liberalism failing to deliver on its promises… and seeks to deliver through technocratic efficiency.

Mamdani, by contrast, campaigned on a Democratic Socialist agenda (what I think of as a more liberationist agenda). It’s a much bolder and more ambitious vision that agrees that liberalism has failed to deliver… and instead of trying to salvage it offers to replace it with a democratic socialist vision. It understands—correctly, in my view—that it is liberalism that is producing the crisis, and therefore cannot be the antidote.

In last night’s most important election, Mamdani’s vision won.

Of course the actual answer is to reject the false binary here and focus on what I call visionary strategy: delivering material gains inside the current reality, while orienting relentlessly toward a bold vision for the future. How we integrate this polarity (visionary future vs pragmatic present) is one of the central quandaries of the moment, and one most pundits continue to misunderstand.

Big tent vs rally the base: theories of change

Here’s another false binary, but one with profound implications for how we organize. In an important conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Klein argued that we need a big tent/broad coalition to defend democracy in the United States. While the conversation was ultimately frustrating and degenerated into false binaries and straw men (I agreed with Anand Giridharadas’ take here), I think it speaks to an important debate in how we think about building power. The other traditional model (which Trump rode to power in taking over the Republican party) is to rally the base.

This debate also played out in a recent conversation between movement strategist Tynesha McHarris and Inside Philanthropy editor David Callahan. This too I found a frustrating exercise in false binaries and straw men: I see these discussions as about balancing (and integrating!) polarities rather than trying to persuasively “win” one side. David argued for a broader tent (expanding from what he sees as an overly narrow focus on “identity politics”); Tynesha argued for centering those most marginalized and building political coalitions around those intersectional interests.

The answer, of course, is to integrate the polarity: they’re both right. Tynesha is right that we do need to continue to center the needs of our base, and to reject the false binary that sees issues of class or economics (so-called “bread and butter” issues) as separate from issues of identity (race, gender, LGBT). And David is right that we do need to be thoughtful about our messaging and our audiences, and how an over-emphasis on identity can play into divide-and-conquer us/them politics.

I think Mamdani got it right: focusing relentlessly on issues that affect everyone (making affordability the centerpiece of his campaign) without shying away from an intersectional analysis that understands how some are disproportionately affected (e.g. offering a three-point plan protecting LGBT rights).

What do we do about rich people?

This is the thing I’m struggling with, especially here in Seattle (but also New York). I’m deeply disappointed in the wealthy voting narrowly to defend their economic interests, and their apparent willingness to throw the rest of the city under the bus. To me it follows logically that those who have the most privilege have an obligation to share that bounty with those who have less; I find it infuriating that those who have the most seek not only to cling to their (usually ill-gotten) gains, but also to deny others the same opportunities (Trump’s big tax break to the wealthy is funded by stealing from those with less wealth).

That said: our (left/progressive) current way of organizing with regard to the wealthy also bothers me. One of my biggest frustrations with current progressive organizing is the willingness to create an “other” for the purposes of creating a “we.” The current bogeyman we all agree on is blaming the billionaire class. I happen to agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist… but I see them as the symptom of the problem, not the problem. And tactically I think making an enemy of those with the most power in the current system is unsound: we need to encourage them to join us, not push them away.

In this I disagree with conventional wisdom in campaigning, which tends to follow Anat Shenker-Osorio’s maxim:

For a message to be successful, it must engage the base, persuade the middle, and alienate the opposition.

For the purposes of winning a campaign, I’m sure she’s right (she’s the comms professional, not me). But I’m not interested only in winning campaigns: I’m interesting in transforming culture and politics, and I don’t think alienating the “opposition” is the path to victory. I don’t actually think billionaires are the opposition: I think our system is the opposition, and it would be great if billionaires would join us in dismantling it, or at least improving it (many do lots of good via their philanthropy, e.g.: George Soros, the Omidyars, Peter Buffett, etc.)

Anyway… I’ll die on this hill another day, just naming something I’m sitting with.

I do want to close on a positive note: this was an unquestionably good electoral outcome for the United States. Yet we know elections are only part of the battle: they matter, but governance and narrative do too. Let’s take the win… and the work continues. As narrative strategist and friend Shanelle Matthews wrote:

After nearly 300 days under a regressive, reactionary, and harmful regime, this victory represents a beacon of hope—much like other victories. It reflects a rejection of Trumpism and a desire for a new era in politics.
The challenging work of addressing the needs of New Yorkers now begins for the mayor-elect, but we should take a moment to appreciate the story this win tells.
We do not have to settle for the lesser of two evils, a spineless Democratic Party, war criminals, poverty wages, mass suffering, cruelty, or exclusionary politics. We have the power to make real change.
Our work continues as well. As Lumumba Bandele recently said, “I organized yesterday, voted today, and without any doubt, regardless of the outcome, I will be organizing tomorrow. Voting is a tool, not the objective.”

I’d love to hear what sense others are making!

Finally, please accept my apologies for the long gap between posts: a busy time of life here, juggling all the things. I’ve been writing a post on the emotional life of fascism, which is sending me down all kinds of rabbit-holes… fascinating, but slow-going. More to share there soon.

I just returned from Cyprus, for the inaugural convening of my Building Belonging colleague Christina’s Belonging Beyond Borders network. Such a gorgeous gathering of wonderful humans… I’m continuing to integrate. A glimpse of beauty and potential:

In community,

Brian

I’ve been avoiding this reckoning. I fear fascism is one of those words that polarizes: it obfuscates more than it clarifies. Instead I’ve used the term authoritarianism, which contains within it its own definition; it’s more intuitive. But there’s a deeper reason: I’ve been afraid of what I might find if I look.

Yet as the Trump regime has ravaged Washington, the U.S., and the world, I’ve found myself called to deepen my understanding of fascism. I’ve been sensing that this moment is different; that an important Rubicon has been crossed. I suspect many of you feel the same way: masked ICE agents pulling people into unmarked vans without bothering to show their credentials… it’s scary. It’s not normal.

So today I want—with some trepidation—to talk about fascism. As Baldwin reminds us: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” So deep breath… let’s face it.

Here’s where I’m coming out (TL;DR):

We are facing fascism: the Trump regime is following a playbook that intentionally seeks to consolidate power by undermining democracy and the rule of law. This knowledge is both deeply unsettling… and it empowers us to act. The first step must be to resist: both passive refusal to consent, and active pushback. We must also empathize: respond to the feelings that are causing people to support or allow fascism, and encourage them to defect and withdraw consent. Fascism as a movement is animated primarily by a sense of victimhood, wounded pride, and loss: we MUST respond to those emotions. Finally, we must invite people to join us in building a better world, one that works for everyone.

What is fascism?

The term originated in Italy under Mussolini, when he named his political party/movement “fascismo,” derived from the Latin term fasces (a military symbol from ancient Rome). Fascism defies easy definition. While there is a fascist playbook (a program of activities that together comprise fascism), it’s less about the specific activities than it is about the intended goal and what motivates them (e.g. there is not a linear relationship between feelings, ideology, and program).

Robert Paxton, the world’s pre-eminent scholar on fascism, offers a working definition in his foundational 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (emphasis mine)

For a more accessible read check out his 1998 article “The Five Stages of Fascism,” where he elaborates on seven core features/characteristics of fascism. I want to highlight five that stand out to me as core to understanding this zeitgeist and its present incarnation (parenthetical notes are mine; rest verbatim from Paxton):

1. The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action against the group's enemies, internal as well as external. (victimhood and redemptive violence)

2. Dread of the group's decadence under the corrosive effect of individualistic and cosmopolitan liberalism. (obsession with purity)

3. An enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem. (yearning for belonging achieved through othering, importance of loyalty)

4. Authority of natural leaders (always male) throughout society, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny. (patriarchal authoritarianism)

5. The beauty of violence and of will, when they are devoted to the group's success in a Darwinian struggle. (militarism and nationalism, zero sum worldview, scarcity mindset)

Readers will already be seeing obviously parallels and drawing alarming conclusions.

How is it different from authoritarianism or populism, and why does the distinction matter?

Though the same conditions can spawn fascism and other movements that look similar (principally authoritarianism or right-wing populism), to me what distinguishes fascism is its emotional appeal and its stated goals. Here’s how I understand the distinctions:

Populism is about privileging people over corrupt elites, and as such can emerge on the Right or the Left (I don’t think these terms are particularly useful anymore, but you get the idea: could be Trump or Bernie). At its best it can be powerfully democratic: Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor is a fundamentally progressive populist vision.

Authoritarianism is a strategy to centralize power in the strongman (often justified as speaking/acting “for the people”). As a strategy it rejects traditional democracy, and can exist on a spectrum that on one hand seeks to preserve the veneer of democracy (this is Viktor Orban’s contradiction-in-terms of “illiberal democracy” in Hungary) and on the other can be outright dictatorship (think Mubarak in Egypt or Assad in Syria before they were ousted).

Fascism is a different beast, and necessitates a different response. Like authoritarianism it relies on wielding the power of the state (and often paramilitaries) to repress dissent and consolidate power, but unlike authoritarianism its goal is not only power for the sake of power. Instead it is animated by a purity politics rooted in a sense of victimhood (as I discussed here) that justifies and even necessitates the use of violence to destroy the “other.” It has always been ethno-nationalist in its expression (this is the “blood and soil” slogan at the heart of Nazi fascism). Fascism is more about feelings than thoughts; is is more a cultural movement than a coherent political ideology.

Authoritarianism in theory can be defeated by replacing the authoritarian (in practice this is more difficult, as Libya, Egypt, and Syria amply demonstrate). Fascism is not so easy to uproot, because the grievances that create fertile conditions for its emergence go much deeper. It is not only about elite capture and corruption (the core grievance of populism); it is also about victimhood, humiliation, and purity: it takes on an almost-religious fervor.

The bad news: we are facing fascism

Let me start by stating the obvious: as with the term genocide, anytime we find ourselves debating whether we are living under fascism we’ve clearly crossed into very dangerous territory. I do think the distinction matters (is this fascistic or fascism) but the alarm bells should already be ringing loudly.

Here is my inescapable conclusion: in the United States, we are confronting fascism. The current Trump regime is fascist (fascist as adjective, not noun). I use the term “regime” to include both the formal Administration as well as the associated cronies and enablers: Musk, Bannon, etc. as well as Republican politicians aiding and abetting at various levels of government, as with the blatant off-census attempt to further gerrymander Texas. Important messaging here (credit to Anat Shenker-Osorio): refer to the “regime,” not the “government.” The government is not the problem; the hostile takeover of the government is the problem.

But don’t take it from me: Paxton himself reached the same conclusion. If you’re still not persuaded, I highly recommend the latest episode of Ejeris Dixon’s essential Fascism Barometer podcast. She interviews Tarso Ramos, an expert on authoritarianism and fascism, who outlines the key features of this regime that have crossed that red line from authoritarianism to fascism. To enumerate a few just in the first six months of Trump 2.0 (here’s a partial list compiled by Rolling Stone back in March… only two months into his presidency!):

• kidnapping lawful U.S. residents, without proper identification, just cause, or due process

• violating court orders prohibiting unlawful deportations

• arresting people solely for opinions the government doesn’t like (e.g. pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist sentiment)

• targeting academic institutions, law firms, and other institutions, withholding funds and threatening retribution for disagreeing with the administration

• deploying Marines on U.S. soil without state consent/invitation

• firing civil servants for telling the truth (e.g. head of Bureau and Labor Statistics)

• the illegal firing/shuttering of Agencies without Congressional approval (USAID), and the hostile takeover/occupation of buildings that do not belong to the Executive (e.g. the U.S. Institute of Peace)

• appointing loyalists to key positions in government, without relevant qualifications for the job

• pardoning January 6th rioters who were found criminally liable for a variety of offenses relating to the insurrection

• cutting funding for public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) and pressuring private actors (e.g. cancelling the Colbert Show) in an attempt to silence critique

• banning books, including on U.S. military bases

There is of course some historical precedent for many of these activities from ignominious parts of our history (as a recent Ezra Klein podcast reminds us: see e.g. President Jackson flouting the Supreme Court; FDR enabling Japanese internment; Johnson deploying the National Guard in the civil rights era); and many examples at the state and local level. We have never faced a fascist regime in full control of the federal government; we are in uncharted (and dangerous) waters.

I imagine you are resisting this diagnosis at some level, at whatever stage of grief you find yourself: denial (no, it’s not that bad), bargaining (well, sure, but we still have some checks and balances!), depression (we’re all fucked). That’s okay. Keep breathing. Let’s take a moment to let it land: this is heavy stuff.

Breathe, and center: it’s bad, but it’s not inevitable

I’m going to spend the rest of this post accepting the premise that we are living under fascism here in the United States. You are free to reach your own conclusions; even if you disagree with my assessment I trust you will agree that our current situation is sufficiently grave to be worth taking this very seriously.

Either way, this is a big fucking deal. We are right to feel scared, to feel overwhelmed.

The fascist playbook is designed and intended to provoke those feelings in us, to keep us stuck in fear and overwhelm so we can’t organize and resist. As you are reading this, if you are American and are allowing yourself to acknowledge for the first time that we are living under fascism… I invite you to join me in a centering practice. (More on this here from a previous post on surviving the speed of catastrophe). Four steps to take right now, even as you’re reading this post:

1. Feel your feelings. Validate them. You are right to feel scared. Of course your nervous system feels on high alert. Those feelings are valid: your body has wisdom—including ancestral wisdom—that often our minds are slow to acknowledge. Allow yourself to feel your feelings, and listen to your body. We can’t respond effectively when we are activated. The first step MUST be to feel, and to allow our nervous systems to calm down.

2. Remind yourself: we can overcome fascism. This is not inevitable. Our actions matter, and our actions can defeat fascism. We have succeeded in the past in different contexts across history, and we can succeed again.

3. Choose agency. Most people right now are choosing to look away, to numb out. That’s understandable. But you can make a different choice. We’ll talk more below about what to do. What’s important here is to choose to engage. To commit to standing on the right side of history, without yet knowing exactly what that means.

4. Listen to those who saw this coming. Many activists and social movement leaders—often/usually BIPOC, women, and queer folks—have been trying to warn us. The New York Times and mainstream media (to include social media) have consistently both gotten this wrong (Trump won’t win, Roe is safe, surely it won’t be that bad…) AND have actively enabled his rise to power (Bezos refusing to endorse at the Washington Post; Zuckerberg allowing disinformation, etc.) Diversify your news sources: consistently the most accurate reporting and analysis I’ve seen is coming from places like Truthout, Democracy Now, The Laura Flanders Show, as well as places tracking/responding to fascism in particular, like Ejeris Dixon’s Fascism Barometer and Scot Nakagawa’s Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.

Act where you have agency: choose your audience

I think it’s enough for one post just to call the question; but I also want to offer some guidance on how to respond to this moment (itself subject of a longer post, forthcoming). For now, I think there are three primary responses to this moment corresponding to different audiences. All three are essential, and must take place concurrently.

In my first post of the Trump 2.0 era I called for a three-pronged approach: refuse, repair, create. While I think that’s still directionally accurate, in light of the fascist threat I think a more specific, assertive, and targeted response is needed. I’ll call this Resist, Empathize, Invite. I’m not sure if these are quite the right words, but I’ll flesh out the sentiment I’m trying to convey, and which audiences are being targeted.

I’m a big fan of the “spectrum of allies” tool for movement strategy:

I personally would replace “radical left” with “liberationists”, but you get the gist. For the purposes of this moment/post, I see three key audiences corresponding to the three key interventions; I’ll name them here and then elaborate.

1. Resist is responding to the regime and its apparatchiks: those leading the fascist charge who must be strenuously opposed. In the diagram this is “our targets” (the Trump regime) and “active opponents” (hardcore MAGA).

2. Empathize: the target audiences here are those who are currently passively against us or skeptical about us. People who support or supported Trump, but don’t want to think of themselves as supporting fascism. They are more moveable.

3. Invite: the target audience here is the vast middle: those who are undecided but turned off by “both sides”, or who are passively with us but not yet stepping into action. We need to mobilize them into action.

I will say more about each of these interventions below. But what’s critical: everything we do must be in “fractal integrity” (credit to Kai Cheng Thom for this coinage which I love). It’s this idea: everything we do—whether in vigorous opposition or loving invitation—must be embodying the world we want to create. We are asking people to do something scary: to oppose a dangerous regime, and to join us in the uncertain task of building a better world. We must make that invitation appealing.

The goal is to move EVERYONE closer to us (including ultimately those we are strenuously opposing). This is the radical work of belonging: it must include everyone.

1. Resist: the time to act is now

Experts generally identify a 12-18 month window to prevent the consolidation of fascist power. Hungarian theorist and former politician Bálint Magyar identifies three stages of autocracy (a useful parallel to the fascist phenomenon based on European experience): attempt > breakthrough > consolidation. Writer and scholar on authoritarianism Masha Gessen contends that January 6th was the clear attempt, and Trump’s election and first 100 days of his second term are the breakthrough. We are in dangerous territory, and time is of the essence.

The way fascism works: the cost of resistance increases exponentially with time. It will become harder and more dangerous to push back as the regime consolidates power. Three first principles I invite you to internalize and operationalize as a mantra of resistance:

1. The time to act is now.

2. Resistance is our civic responsibility.

3. Solidarity is the only path to safety.

The easiest metaphor to use: think of Trump and his ilk as bullies. Bullies are deeply insecure, and they only respond to power: if you give an inch, they’ll take more. But they’re also dangerous and often have the advantage of size, so we must stand together.

What does this mean practically? It starts with resistance: if we don’t stop fascism’s advance, everything else becomes much more difficult. As Steven Levitsky reminds us: checks and balances are only useful… if we use them. There is no cavalry arriving: we are the cavalry. At every opportunity where the Trump administration is encroaching and closing civic space, we have to stand our ground. Be like Harvard, not like Columbia. What we have to remember: the rules of the game are different under fascism. This is existential: this is a regime intent on dismantling democracy.

There are two components to what I mean by RESIST here, and they are different and both essential. This is both about refusing to consent (noncompliance), and assertively pushing back. (I still hold my discomfort with the term resistance as an organizing principle for all of our action, but it is absolutely the right first step as a bulwark against fascist encroachment).

Both tactics carry risk, which is why to the extent possible they should always be done in solidarity: strength in numbers! Non-consent is where it all begins: civil disobedience is a moral responsibility in the face of fascism. We all have this power: to refuse to go along. This is Timothy Snyder’s exhortation: “don’t obey in advance!”

That escalates into active resistance, which I think of as pushing back. This is an escalation of effort and risk. I recommend two tactics in particular: the use of humor/satire, and the (very careful!) use of shame. Humor is powerful because it breaks through fear; bullies cannot stand to be mocked.

There is also a powerful opportunity to wield shame as a tool responsibly. Not to dehumanize or attack the person, but to clearly label their actions and behavior: shame on you! This serves dual purposes: it forces the perpetrator to confront their own dissonance (the sting of feeling ashamed), AND it reinforces/emphasizes the pro-social norm for bystanders. It creates an “us,” those of us who do not behave in fascist ways. It points the path back to belonging: stop behaving in fascist ways.

2. Empathize: we must respond to feelings

This is a major growth area for our movements, and a place we need to bring more attention and intention. Fascism is driven by feelings, and we HAVE to address those feelings. I will write an entire post unpacking what I want to say here, but for now let me try to sketch out the argument.

Here’s the thing: the conditions that animate fascism are the same conditions that inspire people to become liberationists. Principally a felt sense of precarity and broken-ness, and a sense that the system is rigged and doesn’t work for most people. We all share three primary emotions: fear about the state of the world and what that means for us and those we love; anxiety about change (technological, climatic, demographic, etc.); and a longing to belong.

So why are some people choosing to support fascism? I believe the most important thing is a sense of victimhood/wounded pride/loss. This sits upstream of everything else, and we MUST find a way to reckon with it. I unpacked how this operates more fully in this recent post; I see it as the central ingredient in fascism, and the most relevant feature of the American expression of it. Trump is a master at responding to this sentiment, because he identifies with it. As my favorite 2016 election post-mortem observed:

Trump's accomplishment was to take these inchoate feelings of decline and marginalization and to provide a perspective that not only made sense of them but also provided a solution. In so doing, he acknowledged the real problems of his audience (while others ignored them or even contributed to them); he understood them and empowered them to participate in the process of resolving those problems.

Arlie Hochschild’s new book is my favorite diagnosis of this subject in the present moment, though she stops short of offering actionable prescriptions. I’ll offer a few in shorthand here:

1. Do NOT use shame as a tactic. This group is stuck in toxic shame, and needs validation and acknowledgment before anything else is possible.

2. Acknowledge the sense of loss: name the pain. Pain is a portal to transformation: it has to be named and felt before it can be transmuted.

3. Support sensemaking: name the systems. It’s easy to blame people (and most messaging handbooks even in progressive/radical spaces endorse this tactic). I think we need to take the higher and more difficult road, and a more complex truth: we need to blame the systems.

4. Offer people agency, and a chance to be part of building a better world. This is the bridge to Invite, below.

One important messaging tip here: target behavior, not people. We are inviting people to change behavior: to withdraw consent from the fascist regime they may currently be supporting, and to join us. Which means everything we do must (a) acknowledge their potential to change (b) support them in making a different choice.

My sister Trina, a communications professional, has been really helpful for me in landing this insight. For example, she never refers to Zionists (noun, an identity that is immutable), and instead invites us to think of “people who are currently choosing to support Zionism.” A mouthful yes, but it reminds us that these are humans, who are making a choice in a specific moment, who could make a different choice. Our job is to support them in making a different choice… which starts by understanding the “why” behind their current choice.

3. Invite people to join us in building a world that works for everyone

The unfortunate reality is: we’re losing. Fascist forces are on the rise globally and here in the U.S.; we are living through what narrative strategist Shanelle Matthews calls a “reactionary moment.” She frames the challenge:

In this crisis, we must ask ourselves: What story does the social movement left need to tell now? How do we situate ourselves within this historical moment with clarity and purpose? How do we mobilize a broad base with messaging that is both visionary and materially grounded – one that inspires but also builds power at scale?

The bad news: their vision taps into our base fears, and offers simple (false) solutions. The good news: our vision taps into our deepest longings, and offers genuine solutions.

Every post I write for this newsletter takes up this question, so I won’t go deep here. Just to invite those who are called to the work of building/visioning: keep up that work! Yes the terrain is much more challenging in a reactionary era; yes we must devote more energy to resistance; AND we must continue to build the better world we know is possible.

I’m curious how this lands for folks; are you also seeing fascism here? Curious about readers in other countries; certainly I see fascist movements (the AfD in Germany in particular) that haven’t yet claimed federal power.

More to say in a future post about how we respond to the emotions of this moment, and the connection to liberalism and capitalism… but I’ll leave it here for now.

In community,

Brian

For movement strategists this has always been the Holy Grail. Our strength is in our diversity and pluralism; this is also our weakness: movements divided cannot stand. How can we connect our movements so that the sum is greater than the parts? How can we connect across difference, and move toward coherence?

This question has obsessed me for as long as I can remember. And I think we’re finally getting close to some answers, recognizing the interconnectedness of our work. As Loretta Ross noted:

Even though we have many causes we have one struggle.

So today I want to talk about what it takes to build a movement-of-movements, and why I think for the first time in history we actually have a shot at pulling it off. I want to explore this question through the lens of emergence: the science of how complex systems transform.

Here’s where I’m coming out (TL;DR): Emergence (the transformation of one system to a new system) proceeds in phases: disruption > experimentation > coalescence > coherence (a new paradigm/system). I believe the moment is ripe for coalescence: to consolidate our gains, to build on what we’ve learned, and to invite everyone working to build a better world to find their place in a shared narrative. I think we finally have a common aim (captured in the language of liberation and belonging), and even more importantly we have common ways of being…. the emerging coherence I see uses means that are in integrity with our desired ends. Connecting and amplifying these “islands of coherence” feels to me like the essential work of this moment.

Emergence is how systems transform… and human transformation requires human agency

I’ve always been obsessed with the question of how transformation happens… and specifically how transformation happens at scale. As I discussed here, I believe the most compelling answer to that question is the phenomenon of emergence. There are many properties of emergence that I find compelling and relevant for social change work, but the insight relevant to today’s post is about the stages of emergence. I understand it as follows:

In natural systems this happens organically and in some cases even predictably: water subjected to heat becomes steam, a new equilibrium. In human systems, however, I think the process of getting to coherence—systems transformation—requires human intervention at every stage. What I want to emphasize here: there is an essential role for agency. We have the power—and therefore, I believe, the responsibility—to transform systems.

And we all have different roles to play. Bill Moyer famously identified four roles of social activism; Deepa Iyer offers an expanded version with 10 roles; I explored a few other frameworks here. I’ll adapt/offer my own synthesizing of the field for the purposes of this post: Disruptor, Innovator, Weaver, and Builder. What’s important to flag here: all roles are essential. Each is necessary and on its own insufficient to achieve transformation; only together can we transform systems.

Disruption is the first stage of transformation: without it nothing else is possible. This is confrontation and calling the question, as exemplified by powerful social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. This is a time for Disruptors (what Moyer calls Rebels). They are often the first to the frontlines, and essential to igniting the spark that can spawn a movement.

Experimentation comes next: self-organizing across the system to try something different. This is a time for Innovators, creators and entrepreneurs who plant seeds, prototyping new models for the new system that has yet to emerge.

Coalescence is the third stage: beginning to identify patterns across experiments, seeing connections, identifying the common threads that can become the basis of the new system. This is a time for Weavers, for connectors and bridgers, to help find coherence amid chaos.

Coherence: At last the new system has arrived and is taking shape: a new equilibrium is reached built on new principles which coalesced in the previous stage. This is a time for Builders, for synthesizers and stabilizers, people committed to ensuring that the new paradigm is rooted and durable.

Now is the time for coalescence

This is the move from divergence—what emergence practitioner Peggy Holman calls Differentiation—to convergence.

Many social change agents (myself included) have found resonance with this quote from Nobel-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine:

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.”

Yes: this is the transformative potential of coalescence—finding those successful experiments that can move the system from disruption (chaos) to the new equilibrium. It is a hugely catalytic role. As systems change practitioner Charles Leadbetter notes:

Coherence, making sense of how many threads come together and how they could be woven differently, is the main leverage that system shifters have; it is how a small initiative can have an influence over a much bigger system, especially one which finds itself at sea.

There are three different points I want to call out here.

1. The experimentation stage leads to multiple potential new paradigms. That is, there are different “islands of coherence” that correspond to different potential pathways we could take. This means that the new system is not inevitable: there is an essential role for human agency to catalyze that shift. To move from islands of coherence to systemic coherence (a new paradigm) requires coordination and intervention: it is about organizing emergence. This is the work of coalescence.

2. The first step in coalescence (the shift from divergence to convergence) is assessing ripeness: are the conditions right to begin moving toward coherence? I strongly believe that we have reached a moment of ripeness (indeed, I fear we’ve waited too long): there has been enough experimentation to illuminate clear patterns across diverse systems. I believe it’s time to call the question and move toward coherence.

3. I think there are two emerging paradigms currently vying to become the new equilibrium: the first is what I call authoritarian: a supremacist worldview of domination and ownership. Unfortunately this is currently ascendant and claiming structural power around the world. The second I will call belonging—an ecological worldview of right relationship with each other, the land, and all beings. Each of these paradigms is currently reflected in many “islands of coherence”: different nation-states are experimenting with different versions of authoritarianism (Russia, the U.S., Hungary, Israel, etc.), just as different communities are experimenting with different versions of right relationship at different scales (indigenous collectives of water protectors, bioregional regeneration in Colombia, urban initiatives like Cooperation Jackson, networked transnational initiatives like Transition Towns, etc.)

Here’s the problem. Steve Bannon and others are actively organizing the ethno-nationalist far right, an explicitly international effort to consolidate power at the national level. They are seeking to shift the system toward authoritarianism as the new equilibrium: a new age of empire. Which means we can’t afford to wait any longer: if we want to have a chance at shifting the system toward the belonging worldview… we MUST start coalescing and moving toward coherence.

Why now? What’s different?

Calls for a “movement of movements” have been around for decades. Dr. King took to the pulpit in 1967 to decry the “three evils,” explicitly seeking to link the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-poverty movement, and the anti-war movement. This insight was the basis for his launch of the Poor People’s Campaign, which he explicitly conceived of as a shift from reform to transformation, declaring:

We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.

This idea of course was deeply threatening to the existing status quo, as satirized in this 1968 comic:

The status quo successfully fought back the challenge through oppression and state violence (including the assassinations of Dr. King, Fred Hampton, and RFK, three figures who explicitly envisioned multiracial/multi-class movements) to usher in the neoliberal era: a new equilibrium.

That equilibrium survived until the first wave of global protests challenging the neoliberal era kicked off with the anti-globalization WTO protests in Seattle in 1999… momentum that evolved in the post-9/11 era to reboot the global anti-war movement. This led some to call again for a “movement of movements;” a book with that title was published in 2004 trying to call the question around neoliberalism and linking it to the anti-war movement. But those efforts didn’t successfully challenge dominant power in a fundamental way until the current wave of movements, kicked off by Occupy and the Arab Spring in 2011, and finally bringing the missing intersectional lens with the arrival of Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and MeToo in 2013, 2016, and 2017 respectively.

So we once again have powerful social movements disrupting the status quo, and as with the late 1960s there is a growing recognition that our movements are connected. I think three key things are different that make this moment of coalescence possible in a way it wasn’t in the late 1960s.

1. There is greater awareness and understanding of intersectionality, and a broader and deeper analysis of how we got here. Where in the 1960s we talked of racism and economic exploitation, today social justice advocates identify the underlying systems of white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Dr. King was widely pilloried for coming out against Vietnam; today activists (especially Gen Z and Millennials) share a broad critique of American imperialism. This broader (and deeper) intellectual awareness is essential… and knowledge alone is insufficient.

2. The thing that really gives me hope is that for the first time in history, I think our movements are increasingly embodied. We are finally taking responsibility for healing trauma in ourselves and our movements, for building the relational skills necessary to navigate conflict and repair, and recognizing that how we show up is inextricably connected to what we want to change in the world. As bell hooks wryly observed:

   When you’re fucked-up and you lead the revolution, you are probably going to get a pretty fucked-up revolution.

   This to me is the primary distinction between the movements of the 1960s and the movements of the last decade: we now recognize the fundamental importance of inner work… and many more people have access to the resources to do it. Today we are finally integrating Gandhi’s exhortation to be the change, following the lead of elders like Grace Lee and James Boggs.

3. We are better prepared to resist the inevitable oppressive violent backlash of defenders of the status quo (or the authoritarian worldview). First, we have intentionally cultivated “leader-ful” movements: it is more difficult to decapitate a movement that has no clear head. Second, because of the two points above, we have far more resilience and solidarity across movements than we have in the past. No Kings Day summoned an incredible diversity of people and causes to the streets: popular pushback against ICE raids has also come from people not traditionally involved in (im)migration justice. Third, after Trump 1 and because of learnings from other countries dealing with state-sponsored violence (I personally drew huge inspiration from the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, and its evolution toward “be like water” in 2019), we have become more sophisticated in responding to state-sanctioned oppression. In the face of Trump 2.0, this is more important than ever.

Of course these three changes aren’t nearly widespread enough, but I don’t think they have to be. If a dedicated minority transforms ourselves, I believe the ripple effects of that in our movements and systems will prove transformative. This is another insight from Emergence theory: scale (and transformation!) is fractal, not linear.

From emergence to resonance: toward a movement of movements

The good news: many of us are sensing the same thing, feeling the same calling, following the same imperative. Just this week alone (during which I’ve been trying to create time and space to put these thoughts to paper) friends have sent me two different resources playing with similar ideas and reaching similar conclusions:

1. Systems change practitioner Jennifer Brandel introduces the beautiful role/concept of “interstitionaries”:

Interstitionaries are people who operate in the connective tissue of society — between roles, institutions, disciplines, and identities. They’re natural triangulators, cross-pollinators, and weavers of coherence in fragmented times.

Yes! I feel so seen! (hat-tip to fellow interstitionary Sean Andrew for the share). This is putting lesson one into action: working to create connections across movements and systems, recognizing their fundamental interdependence.

2. The good folks at CoCreative put out a report on “the human heart of systems change” (with thanks to Julia Roig for the share). They echo Brandel’s insight—naming what they call the “interstitial paradox” that leaves these essential weaving roles under-resourced—and name that function as essential to the broader work of moving from emergence to resonance. They call this work “Harmonizing the “Social Symphony,” and close with an inquiry around how we can build a “Coalition of Coalitions.” This is putting lesson two into action: explicitly naming love, connection, and inner work as essential to systems transformation.

This is what organic coalescence looks like in action: the co-arising of similar conclusions across diverse systems. What’s missing/what we’re seeking: the energetic effort—and resourcing!—to intentionally convene/connect these systems at the scale and with the speed necessary to respond to this moment of threat and opportunity.

The symphony will not be conducted… yet the music must be harmonized

This is the bad news: we aren’t yet coordinating/organizing/coalescing with the speed and scale we need. There are good reasons for that: we are not Steve Bannon. We rightly reject top-down command-and-control efforts. We don’t want to make ourselves visible and risk being targeted by an oppressive state with access into our digital lives.

We are still searching for a metaphor, one that is aligned with the world we are trying to co-create. The orchestra/symphony isn’t quite it; we reject the idea of a single conductor, one individual directing a collective.

In her foundational work Emergent Strategy, which introduced the concept of emergence to activists involved in movements for social change, adrienne maree brown invoked the metaphor of a murmuration of starlings. It’s a gorgeous image, with important implications for action: focus on what is within our control, adapt quickly, and if each individual follows simple principles the collective will thrive. In the early stages of experimentation, it’s a great way to be in collective relationship.

And yet: I fear it’s the wrong metaphor for our current moment, for our purpose is now different. Scientists don’t fully understand the purpose of murmurations: the prevailing theory is they are designed to help avoid predation (confusing would-be predators with large numbers and coordinated action, like a school of fish). But our goal is not only survival: our goal is liberation. We have a destination in mind, and now—thanks to successful experimentation by a range of innovators and creatives—we have the practices for how to get there. In a time of coalescence, I am drawn to a different metaphor: geese flying in V formation.

Because the fact is, there ARE better ways of doing things. Some strategies and tactics are more effective than others. Geese MUST fly south to survive the winter: they are not agnostic as to direction. They fly in V formation to reduce drag and conserve energy. And they take turns in the lead. To continue experimenting with different formations at this point is to ignore what we’ve learned: it is to waste energy and leave us vulnerable. In the face of the authoritarian threat, I fear we can’t afford to do that any longer.

Here are the lessons I want to draw:

1. We know where we’re going. While in the early days of disruption we were rightly focused on what we were against (white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism etc. and their expression in racialized violence), we now have a vision of what we’re moving TOWARDS. We want liberation. Justice. Belonging. A world that works for everyone, in right relationship with the land and all other beings. It is time for us to fly in the same direction.

2. We know how to get there. I don’t mean we know the path (there isn’t one); I mean that we know how to create the path while walking. I mean we know how to be the change. In the days of experimentation we tried many things, exploring different ways of being, relating, healing, and organizing. Now we have enough data and success from those experiments. We now have the collective wisdom about how to be in right relationship: the work now is to practice. We can be leader-ful (rejecting the false binary of the unitary leader or the fiction of leaderlessness). We need to fly in a V formation.

3. We all have a role to play. What I love about the geese metaphor is it invites all of us to play our roles, inside of constraints. The direction and the mode of travel are set; how we navigate the obstacles along the way is up to us to solve as a collective. Each of us will take a turn in the lead, according to our strengths. There are times we may need the Disruptors to take the lead; other times we may need to follow the Builders. (And there may still be times in the face of threat where we may need to move into murmuration). But the important thing to remember: we all belong. None of us without all of us.

I’m suggesting that at this moment we need to listen to the weavers and the bridgers, and follow their lead to connect with our kindred spirits in adjacent and distant spaces. As Alanna Irving reminds us:

There is no such thing as “self-organizing”—there is always work to be done and a skillset required to coordinate people to move together toward a larger shared goal.

To be clear: I don’t mean our disparate flocks all have to fly together. Like geese, we can stay in whatever family units and flock formations best serve us. What I am saying is that whatever flock we’re part of (the movement for Palestinian liberation, women’s liberation, climate justice, etc.) we need to be heading in the same direction and following the same principles. There is still room (and a need!) for a diversity of tactics, and even strategies… as long as we recognize our common aim.

I’m curious if this resonates, and what others are seeing: do you agree that it’s time to coalesce? What do you see as the emerging coherence? This post from 2019 was my first effort to try to illuminate the emerging “system of systems” and tease out some common threads.

There’s more to say about why it’s been so hard to coalesce, and why our movements resist coherence. I believe a big piece of the story is that coalescence requires integration: it requires us to confront our shadows, to move toward wholeness. That inner work is incredibly difficult… and essential. More on that for a future post. I also think this is the work of narrative and cultural strategy: providing the superstructure within which we can see ourselves.

In community,

Brian

Last week two luminous spirits joined the ancestors: Joanna Macy transitioned on July 19th; Andrea Gibson on July 14th.

Something about the co-incidence of their passing moved me: despite the separation of generations and spaces (I’m not sure they knew each other), they both embodied to me a quality of life that I find deeply inspiring. I didn’t know either of them personally… and yet they left an imprint.

Our monthly community gathering for paid/gift subscribers is next Monday, July 28th, at 9am PT (noon ET / 5pm UK / 6pm CET/CAT / 9:30pm India). I recognize it’s now short notice, but I feel called to open this one to any who may choose to join; please register here for the zoom link. This one-hour gathering is an informal space to practice the art of bridging toward belonging: come as you are.

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Falling in love with the world

It is this quality that unites Joanna and Andrea, and which drew me to them. They embody a deep sense of reverence, gratitude, and love for the world. Joanna exuded this sentiment, a clear-eyed embrace of the complexity of reality alongside an unwavering commitment to the better world she knows is possible. In honoring Joanna last week, Anne Symens-Bucher offered the term “blessken”: a combination of blessed and broken, that speaks to the dual realities of what it means to be alive on this gorgeous and heartbreaking planet.

So often we do one or the other: love its potential and try to distance ourselves from its pain (spiritual bypassing), or get swallowed in its pain and lose sight of its beauty (burnout). To fully embody both is to be fully alive.

Longing for elders

I’ve always longed for elders in my life: mentors who have trodden the path I am trying to walk, who can point the way forward where the path remains un-made, who understand what I’m trying to do and can guide me. And while I have been fortunate to have mentors in my life (shout-out and lifelong gratitude to Barry O’Connell, my undergraduate thesis advisor at Amherst College, and Judy Goldstein, the founder of the human rights fellowship program Humanity in Action), in both cases they were sharing wisdom from different paths, ones that were not mine to walk. That is, they saw and nourished me, but couldn’t guide me per se.

Grace Lee Boggs was my first encounter with what I think of as a true elder: one who lived her life as an embodied commitment to the world she/we are trying to create… who stepped into her role as elder and intentionally cultivated the next generation. And did so with a clear-eyed assessment of what we’re up against… without being crushed by that knowledge.

Joanna had that same quality: it’s impossible to call to mind Grace Lee or Joanna without imagining a smile on their faces, one that always reached their eyes. A luminosity of spirit that shines from the inside out: a radiance that is palpably felt in those who encounter them.

My longing for elderhood crystallized listening to a podcast interview with Bill Plotkin elaborating on his book The Journey of Soul Initiation, where he described the essence of elderhood as consisting of three components (this is me paraphrasing):

1. They locate their primary membership as belonging to the more-than-human world (transcending an immature human-centric understanding of life)

2. They have achieved clarity about their unique role in the broader Earth ecosystem: they have cultivated what he calls an “ecological identity”

3. They have identified a way to embody that ecological identity as a gift to their people and the broader Earth community

Ahh… there it is. THAT is what I long to achieve in my own life. That is the path I yearn for guidance in walking. That is true belonging.

And Joanna had that: an unequivocal embrace of her own role, alongside a commitment to sharing that gift with others.

Death as part of life: tender tenacity

Andrea Gibson wasn’t an elder, but they (preferred pronouns, thanks to reader Cassie for the correction!) stepped into that role anyway as they confronted a terminal cancer diagnosis. In a culture that is so afraid of death, I’m always impressed and touched by people who meet it on their own terms, who walk with love and groundedness into that unknown. I only encountered Andrea in 2023 via their stunning spoken word performance of What Love Is… wow. Such courage, such vitality, such passion, such love, such… power. May we all be lightning, capable of touching each other to the quick.

I was moved to join thousands of people around the country and world honoring Andrea’s passing. Grieving didn’t feel quite right: they engaged their transition and their death with such clarity and open-heartedness that it felt to me like it somehow dishonored their memory and embodied example to mourn. Instead they offered us a way to be in relationship with ALL of life… to include death. What an incredible gift, at the age of 49, to offer us an example of how to join the ancestors with grace. What came to me as I was reflecting on the essence of Andrea: tender tenacity. A refusal to harden in the face of challenge, a commitment to open-heartedness in a world (and facing a diagnosis) that tries to break us.

I felt a similar sentiment joining the thousands of people holding space for Joanna’s transition (the broader Work that Reconnects Network that was one expression of Joanna’s gift to the world shared updates about her hospice). It was the first time I felt part of saying goodbye to an elder, even one I never knew personally. I am so grateful to have the wisdom and heart-ful words of Joanna’s friend (and my new friend who I first met a couple months ago) Jess Serrante. Jess has been chronicling her thoughts and honoring Joanna’s transition via the We are the Great Turning Substack, and her words are a gift and balm to those of us processing Joanna’s passing.

We all have a part to play

This is what I will miss most about Joanna: her steadfast guidance and embodied reminder that we all have a role to play in what she calls “The Great Turning” (the transition from a world of extraction, exploitation, and separation to a world of mutual thriving and care). As I was mining Jess’ words for solace, I came across this sentiment and felt a wave of emotion wash over me:

“Be big because you are”: this is no time to withhold our gifts. Even in her passing she is giving the medicine we (I!) need to receive. (Thanks to for transmitting her wisdom so beautifully).

I feel love for Joanna, and love for Andrea. Love for all my kin who are also moved by their spirits and their embodied examples, their courageous invitations to live life fully in all its complexity. Such powerful people. A gift to have shared the planet with them.

In community,

Brian

Today marks the beginning of the global Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy. So I want to take a break from the darkness—authoritarianism, cruel legislative action, metastasizing police state—to write for the first time in this forum about my own journey letting go of monogamy… and allowing myself to love and be loved in the way that has always felt true to me. I want to share about what it has felt like to finally live and love more authentically, to acknowledge to myself—and others—what I have always known: that I am polyamorous.

This will be the first of two posts: I want to start by sharing my own story and journey. This feels vulnerable to me, and important: I feel a deep yearning to speak my truth, and to be seen for who I am. This is part of how I understand what it means to belong.

In a future post I want to take a more explicitly political stance. The growing discourse around nonmonogamy that is currently edging into the mainstream is too often the “white feminism” equivalent of the radical potential that lurks in re-imagining our relationships outside of patriarchal structures: I am drawn to the more liberatory potential of what Roy Graff calls “open relating.”

I imagine this topic is new to many of you: or at least, a firsthand account may be. As you read, I encourage you to pay attention to your body and what is coming up for you. What do you feel yourself curious about, or drawn to? What do you feel yourself repelled by, or resisting?

I’m doing my best to speak here from my experience. But of course I can’t talk about my relationships without implicating others, and my wife in particular. I’m working hard not to speak for her in this post, though she is in my mind and heart throughout. We have discussed my/our coming out process at length, and she has seen and consented to me publishing this post. I feel grateful for her support and her willingness to stretch to support my desire to be more fully seen and to create space for this public discourse, even where her natural inclination is toward more privacy.

I want my two lives… to be one life

Over the last seven years I have gone on a deep intentional journey to reconnect with my erotic self, as part of a broader commitment to lead a more integrated and embodied life. Over the last four years that has included practicing ethical nonmonogamy (ENM). For me this meant opening what had been to that point a 15-year monogamous relationship (including 13 years of marriage).

[Explanatory sidebar: ENM and CNM, for consensual nonmonogamy, are terms that emerged to distinguish our practice from one of the most visible failures of monogamy—cheating on monogamous partners as an example of unethical or nonconsensual nonmonogamy. I prefer “ethical” because I think you can have consent and still not be ethical, though which term to use is a live debate in the ENM/CNM community. Both terms are intended to be an umbrella for a diverse spectrum of relationships that are not monogamous: everything from polyamory (multiple loving romantic relationships) to swinging (usually mono-romantic, but poly-sexual) to what Dan Savage calls “monogamish” relationships. I think ENM is a useful heuristic, though I also like the idea from Roy Graff that the prefix should also be applied to monogamy… since so much of monogamy as presently practiced is neither consensual—which implies meaningful choice—or ethical, given often-unacknowledged patterns of control and coercive power. For a curated list of resources I have found helpful in my ongoing journey, see here.]

So why am I writing about this personal—even private—journey, in this very public forum?

First, everything about this journey is an expression of my own quest for belonging, and my deep commitment to living an integrated life. This process of becoming for me is inextricably connected to my political commitment to co-create a world where everyone belongs. The radical act of trying to attune to my desires, to act on my deepest truths, and to do so from a place of intentionality and care for everyone involved… is not just personal for me. As early feminists remind us: it’s also political.

For me exploring the erotic and ENM (separate explorations, but in my case connected) was precisely about refusing to hide/deny pieces of myself, about refusing to allow myself to be fragmented by the systems of oppression that keep us from full belonging. It feels incongruous not to write and share about the aspect of my life most deeply connected to belonging that is affecting how I show up day-to-day, and contributing to my ongoing transformation. I want to express myself as fully and interdependently I can. But not only to express: to be witnessed. Seen. Supported, and loved, for who I am.

And it turns out, part of who I am is polyamorous: I have experienced ENM and my first deep polyamorous relationship as a coming home to myself. A felt sense of being fully free—and fully me—for the first time. As I have acknowledged that truth to myself, I have become less willing to hide that piece of who I am, the ways I relate, and those relationships that matter to me. This is not about my sex life: for me this is about what it means to be human, to relate, to practice interdependence… to belong. I teared up watching Colin share his own struggle about coming out (in the context of homosexuality) on Ted Lasso:

But there is a second reason. I am committed to building a world where everyone belongs, and to doing the best I can to dismantle the systems of oppression that prevent us from belonging. I think the intentional exploration of how we want to experience and express intimacy; how we want to explore and experience the erotic; and the intentional inquiry into what kinds of relationship structures best serve us is absolutely foundational to dismantling patriarchy and the other systems of oppression that keep us separated from ourselves, our deepest longings, and each other.

I want to destigmatize the erotic, and our right to pleasure. I want to destigmatize nonmonogamy. I want to create space in our cultural discourse for diverse ways of loving and being loved: to encourage everyone to attune to their own desires, and to strive for interdependent relationships. And I can: I’m a heterosexual, class-privileged, white American, and am read as a man. There are many others (Black, femme, queer, trans, economically precarious, living in rural or religious or conservative communities) who don’t have the option to be “out.” My primary risks are judgment and social ostracization (both of which I have already experienced); others risk their livelihoods and physical safety.

I strive to live my life as an embodied invitation: to encourage others to live their fullest truths, stretch into their deepest sense of belonging. I want to do for this topic (in this post and the one that follows, whenever I get to it) what I try to do with all my writing: share as honestly as I can what I am learning; and curate resources to support others in their own journeys, to find reflected in my story and learnings aspects of themselves and their own perhaps-not-yet-named inquiries. And to invite connection, deeper inquiry, and accountability: to help me practice in integrity.

A journey of becoming

I was fourteen years old, a freshman in my Catholic high school (before I had any interpersonal sexual experience at all) when I first encountered what struck me at the time as a simultaneously radical and obvious idea from Dan Savage: if in conflict between marriage and monogamy, choose marriage (if you’re already married… let go of monogamy and maintain the marriage). Even at that age it made intuitive sense to me.

Evidently I brought that mindset into my first serious relationships (which were monogamous, because I didn’t know there were other options). In a recent conversation with my first serious girlfriend—from freshman year in college, over 20 years ago—she laughed at my polyamorous revelation and said: “I could have told you that!”

After several significant monogamous relationships in/after college (I half-jokingly called myself a “serial monogamist”), I was bound and determined to remain single and non-exclusive for an entire year. At age 23 I defined for myself a set of goals for the kinds of relationships I wanted to pursue, and unwittingly described polyamory—though I didn’t have language for it at the time. I wanted to date multiple people; to explore whatever forms of sexual and/or romantic intimacy felt true between me and my partner(s); to be fully transparent with everyone involved; and to the extent possible try not to hurt anyone’s feelings (or at least to hold care for the feelings of everyone involved).

That lasted about six months… until I met the woman who would become my wife. I felt absolute clarity—a fact that still surprises me to this day—that this was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. And I remember feeling sad that I would have to end the other sexual and romantic relationships I was in (not because she asked; I didn’t even consider that there might be other possibilities).

We dutifully followed what Amy Gahran has aptly called the “relationship escalator”: a set of largely-unquestioned mono-normative (and amatonormative, the idea that romantic relationships take precedence over other relationships) cultural assumptions that structure our relationships. We committed to sexual and romantic exclusivity (this is often the unstated assumption about what it means to become boyfriend/girlfriend); met each other’s families; and I asked her to marry me the following summer: she said yes!

We had a “state of the union” conversation while planning our wedding, and I confessed my two truths: I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, and the idea of monogamy scared the hell out of me. I took comfort in the fact that we were able to have that conversation, and we returned to it over the years as we got married, moved across country, and had two children.

The courage to choose integrity

For me it came down to a question of integrity… and belonging. I was doing so much work in other parts of my life—professionally in particular—to live a more embodied and integrated life… and yet this piece of myself felt out of integrity. It was less about the relationship structure, and more about my commitment to feeling and expressing my authentic truth.

The fact is: I love deeply and expansively, and always have. And in every other domain of life I am free to act upon that love, and express it freely—except when it comes to romantic or sexual intimacy. I experienced monogamy as a restriction on my freedom: a constraint on what it means to be me. I felt a call to become more connected to my erotic relational self: to better understand my own sexuality, desires, and ways of loving, being loved, and sharing intimacy.

I love hard work: I appreciate a challenge. My friends have observed about me that I tend to thrive on a degree of difficulty. And yet: it is difficult to overstate how hard it was for me to (a) be honest with myself about what I was longing for (b) admit that it was not an idle longing but a foundational need (c) ask my life partner to support me in pursuing that need, fearing that she would experience suffering as a result.

Ultimately, it wasn’t my own courage that helped me do what I needed to do. Rather, I sourced inspiration from outside myself. From people in my professional circles who I saw boldly stepping into their own erotic power, and women of color in particular: people like adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism; Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body is Not an Apology; Kim Tallbear’s work on decolonizing sex (and others cited in this post from five years ago, documenting my journey to that point, before we opened our marriage).

And closer to home: I felt like I was failing my children. I was denying myself and my deepest truths for fear of the impact it might have on others… something I would never encourage or ask them to do.

It was those two factors that finally pushed me to do what I had been too afraid to do for my own sake: after 13 years of monogamous marriage, to ask my wife for her consent to explore ethical nonmonogamy. For me the moment Dan Savage named almost 30 years ago had finally arrived: I could not stay in my marriage and stay monogamous. Something had to give. I felt clear that I wanted to stay married to my wife… but I knew I had to let go of monogamy.

The willingness to lose… in order to gain

At my request, my wife and I formally kicked off our ethical nonmonogamy (ENM) journey in the fall of 2021. Though I didn’t fully understand it as such at the time (she did!), it meant the end of one relationship… and the beginning of another. As Roy Graff notes:

Transitioning from monogamy to polyamory when you are partnered, involves consciously letting your old relationship end so you can create a new expansive relationship with the same person.

This was the hardest part: I had to be willing to lose the thing I valued most—my loving relationship with my wife, possibly to include the end of my marriage—to live more authentically. As Dan Savage put it on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

You can’t ask for what you want if you’re not willing to lose what you have.

Oof. The truth is… at the outset I wasn’t fully willing to do that. The foundation of our relationship felt so strong, we were excellent in so many other ways, that I couldn’t believe that we couldn’t find a way to make this work. Couldn’t we choose marriage, and let go of monogamy? Part of my/our journey to this point was me accepting this truth and being willing to let go: to surrender to what our authentic truths might be, whatever that might mean for our relationship.

Ironically, for me this felt like a return to our wedding vows, all those years ago, where we read from Kahlil Gibran: “the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” The goal for me has always been interdependence: finding ways to thrive without losing ourselves or each other. This to me is the beautiful invitation in Prentis Hemphill’s definition of boundaries: trying to find the distance at which I can love you and me at the same time.

Interdependence begins with “i”

Here’s the thing: it is incredibly difficult to stay connected to yourself and connected to your partner at the same time… especially when you may want different things. It’s also deeply gendered under patriarchy: men are socialized to be independent (selfish); women to be codependent (selfless). But of course we want both: self-ful and connected. This is the tantalizing promise of interdependence. Esther Perel explains the challenge:

The core question is how do I stay connected to myself while I connect with you, and how do I stay connected to you without losing touch with myself?

As Brad Reedy reminds us, there are (at least) three dynamics we were/are working on at all times: me and my inner work, her and her inner work, and then us and our relational work. For the “us” to work we each have to be autonomous, self-sovereign, and open: we have to own what is ours, allow our partner to own what is theirs, and to work (and play!) together where our two selves intersect in our relationship.

There is a sequencing in the dance of interdependence. It has to start with the “I.” This is both obvious and radical: of course “I” is part of “We.” And yet, as Martha Kauppi, a therapist who recently published a book on how to support people in nonmonogamous relationships, explains:

Some people haven’t yet given themselves permission to get in touch with what they want.

Yes, that resonates. We are all socialized to internalize dominant culture desires: a very patriarchal heteronormative and objectifying view of desire. I grew up knowing what society wanted me to want… which did not resonate with me. Yet I had very little social/cultural support to identify what I actually wanted (much less the relational skills to communicate those desires, even if I were in touch with them). This is doubly true for people socialized female, with the attendant burden of a cultural expectation of people-pleasing, and in particular the pressure for heterosexual women to cater to male desire.

I want you… to want me

This is about boundaries: knowing (and being able to communicate!) what we need to feel safe, to feel like we are able to be our full selves. But it’s also about attuning to our desires, which I actually think is much harder (I tried to unpack these concepts in the context of nonmonogamy here). Martha puts it bluntly:

These are not behavioral skills, these are developmental tasks.

Yes! One of my main takeaways from this journey: this work is not optional for anyone who wishes to be in loving relationships, regardless of what structure you may choose.

This is what I’ve always wanted (maybe what all of us have always wanted?) I want you—your autonomous, boundaried, beautiful self, centered in your own desires—to want me. To want the authentic, vulnerable, autonomous, and expressive self that is me. But I can’t trust that you are acting from choice if you haven’t first done the work to center yourself and get in touch with your desires and boundaries. From that grounded place—and only from that grounded place—can you then express authentic interdependent desire for me. As adrienne maree brown wrote in Pleasure Activism:

The first step of consent is tuning in to your own desire.

This for me was one of the epiphanies of polyamory as a relationship structure: it makes me feel safe. I realize this sounds paradoxical; most people find safety (or at least the perception of it) inside monogamy. But for me monogamy always felt forced: how could I be sure my partner was choosing me, and not defaulting to me because the structure demands it?

This is part of my wounding as a large White male-bodied person under patriarchy: my life experience has taught me that I can’t fully trust the “yes” of people with less social/structural power, because the very conditions under which we are engaging are rife with oppression that make it difficult—and can feel unsafe—for people to be honest with me about their truths.

ENM relieves me of this burden. I know each day that my partners are choosing me… because they don’t have to. They could be with anyone… and still choose to be with me. That for me is security: I can relax into knowing that I am chosen, and loved. As this random Twitter user put it:

Opening deeply: the power of choice

This is actually what it’s all about (with a nod to Kate Loree for her recent book with this title). Polyamory is my truth; monogamy may be yours. Both can be beautiful ways to relate: provided we choose those structures from a place of agency and desire as expressions of our deepest truths for how we choose to love and be loved. I love this definition of “open relating” from Roy Graff:

Open Relating is about creating and maintaining conscious, connected and autonomous, expansive relationships, regardless of their dynamic and how many people are involved. Doing so requires first an honest unflinching look at our own vulnerabilities, fears, needs, wants and desires.

Yes. That’s what I’ve always wanted. I’m encouraged by the movement toward concepts like “conscious monogamy” and “radical monogamy” and even the paradox of “open monogamy” (which seeks to expand the definition of monogamy to include nonmonogamy, eye-roll emoji). Like my embrace of polyamory, it’s about doing the hard work to get in touch with your desires, and to co-create with your partner(s) a relationship structure that enables interdependence. As Marie Thouin notes:

Monogamy from a place of freedom is absolutely wonderful! But “default monogamy” from a place of social pressure is a choice made on your behalf—and that breeds all sorts of trouble. Freedom isn’t a relationship style: it’s the sovereignty behind it.

And it need not be sexual: many asexual people prefer polyamorous structures where there isn’t so much pressure on one person trying to fulfill all of your needs.

I’ve loved the radical invitation to really feel into what types of intimacy I seek in my relationships, and have been inspired by the Relationship Smorgasbord. The tool invites us to think about what forms of intimacy we wish to share in any given relationship, and to be explicit about that. I think this tool can also be hugely helpful for monogamous relationships, to help step off the “relationship escalator” and be more intentional about the kinds of relationships you want to create: I wish I had this during my monogamous years.

I particularly appreciate the provocation to distinguish between emotional and romantic intimacy, and physical and sexual intimacy; and I love the idea of keeping the categories of kink and power exchange separate from sexual intimacy. It’s been hugely helpful for me in distinguishing between the kind of intimacy I seek in ALL relationships (emotional and intellectual, yes please!), and the specific forms of intimacy I seek in specific relationships.

Learning (and un-learning) how to love… and be loved

In a future post I want to explore more fully some of my learnings from this journey to-date, and what I see as the fractal implications for the world (beyond the narrow I/We that is my practice ground). But I want to name three things that I have appreciated most about this journey. To be clear, I think most of these benefits are accessible inside of monogamy: it just requires that much more intentionality to combat the mono- and amato-normative patriarchal culture we are conditioned into.

1. There is no place to hide. As someone who loves self-growth and shining light into the shadows, this is one of my favorite things about ENM. The very nature of the structure demands that we upskill our capacities if we want to be successful, especially around communication and processing feelings. To give one example: jealousy is a common issue (in all relationships, but in nonmonogamy in particular). In monogamous relationships, a common way people deal with jealousy is by removing the perceived “threat,” often by limiting freedom. I feel jealous when you hang out with your attractive coworker after work; please stop doing that. In nonmonogamy, we are invited to do the deeper work to understand what the jealousy is trying to tell us. Is there some deeper attachment wounding there? Fear of abandonment? Insecurity about our own appearance or self-worth? Is it actually envy (wanting what someone else has) rather than jealousy? Is there an unmet need or longing that hasn’t been voiced? That deeper inquiry to me is what it’s all about: better understanding myself and my partner(s) is the hallmark of intimacy.

2. The erotic is the best playground for embodied interdependence. Interdependence is difficult under normal circumstances: it’s incredibly hard in the realm of the erotic. In our patriarchal sex-negative culture, the whole enterprise is cloaked in shadow. We have to peel back layers of shame, social stigma/expectations around body image, around performance, about self-worth, about our right to pleasure, about identifying, naming, and negotiating our desires. I love to play Betty Martin’s 3-minute game with new partners, because it’s such a radical practice: to set a baseline foundation of consent, and on top of that foundation to reach for desire… is transformative. And: to intentionally explore the erotic requires me to get out of my head and into my body... to allow a different part of myself to lead. To stay in my body means I have to slow down, to listen carefully, to pay attention. To be in dialogue not only with my partners’ bodies but also with my own, and to extend equal care to each.

3. I am a different person with different people. More accurately: different people reflect/refract back different pieces of myself. And there is something about the subtle dynamics of intimate relationships—and sexual relationships in particular—that brings a lens not present in platonic or familial relationships. In monogamy I only had one partner with whom to gain insight about myself in that sphere, so it was hard to discern what was about me, what was about her, and what was about our unique interpersonal relationship. With multiple partners, it becomes much clearer: oh. Turns out that’s a pattern I need to look at, and it’s not about my partner at all… I’m the common denominator here. Or: oh, that’s a function of patriarchy and the system, not any particular person. Feedback lands differently when I hear it from multiple people. It’s also a great invitation to celebrate what is unique and special about each relationship: to see them as positive sum and abundant, and not in competition with each other. To honor that I get to express different aspects of myself (and so do my partners!) in different relationships… and that I (and therefore We) are stronger because of it.

I will stop here for today. There is so much more to say, and so much that feels difficult to put into words. I feel so grateful to my wife, for her support and understanding, and all the work she has done and is doing as we continue to evolve our relationship and co-navigate uncharted territory.

I feel grateful to those who have lent a supportive ear or held space for me, especially my sister Trina and my friend Lauren. To the many trailblazers and content creators who continue to influence and shape my journey, and offer an invitation for what a more embodied and integrated erotic life might look like. To the partners I have been fortunate to learn, grow, and practice interdependence with on this journey. And especially to my partner Leela, who has helped me feel and embrace my polyamorous identity, and continues to push me to be a better version of myself.

I’m so proud of the work my wife and I are doing, and the example we are setting for our children. I am excited they will get to grow up in a household where they feel fully at choice to form the types of relationships that work for them: to expect consent and reach for desire. This is hard work, and it’s deeply liberating.

In a future post I will continue to explore nonmonogamy as a lens into cultural change, exploring some of the themes that I see as most relevant beyond the narrow boundaries of interpersonal relationships (moving from I/We to World). I welcome any thoughts and reactions, and am happy to answer questions (if there’s interest, I’m willing to host an Ask Me Anything using the Substack chat/thread feature, for example :-)

In community,

Brian

I am moving with my family (wife, two children, and mother-in-law) back to Seattle from my hometown of Ashland, Oregon… tomorrow (!!). That move has been all-consuming, so I’m claiming a few quiet moments over coffee before re-commencing the frantic “fuck it, just throw it in a box” final stage of the pack. I’ve given myself permission to back-burner all other life considerations (with gratitude to my readers for your patience), but am feeling called to share some observations about what I’m seeing in this moment; an update to this post in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s inauguration.

Obviously it’s a dark time in the world: Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the most brutal thing I’ve ever witnessed (the normally propagandist Israeli state media reported on IDF soldiers deliberately murdering Palestinians during aid distribution); the Trump administration’s erratic and destructive behavior on seemingly everything, including the unprovoked air strikes on Iran; state-sanctioned kidnapping of people in the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and flouting federal court edicts… we could go on.

When the world feels dark, it’s important to take moments to celebrate the light. Zohran Mamdani’s resounding victory in the New York City Democratic Party mayoral primary is such a moment: a powerful reminder of what people are capable of when we act together. And it comes on the heels of powerful nationwide protests (No Kings Day) that to me offered an emphatic “No” to the Trump Administration and an invitation to solidarity that people are answering. I want to highlight three powerful trends that I think are pointing in the right direction.

1. Hunger for transformation

This is the thing I’m most excited about. For the first time in my life, I’m seeing people in positions of elite structural power beginning to express openness to transformation. It’s slow, and it’s still in pockets, but it’s real, it’s palpable, and it has the potential to be transformative. The demand for transformation is finally moving from the margins closer to the center.

I opened this post with an adaptation of the Three Horizons Framework (previously discussed in more detail here, and here in the context of movements for social change). In brief:

• Horizon 1 is the status quo: the ship is clearly sinking

• Horizon 3 is the world we need… and crucially, it’s a world that is possible. We created these systems; we can create better ones.

• Horizon 2 is the bridge from here (failing system) to there (new system in which we all thrive).

I think the framework is a neat heuristic to conceptualize social change, and I want to call specific attention to discerning between what we call Horizon 2- (well-intentioned actions that end up inadvertently perpetuating the status quo) from Horizon 2+ (interventions that move us closer to the future we need). This is the primary difference between liberals and liberationists: liberals think the system can be saved/improved/reformed; liberationists understand that the system must be transformed. The good news: people are moving along the spectrum… transformation is becoming more possible.

Specifically, I’m seeing people in positions of structural power in the current system (funders, policymakers, senior officials in multilateral agencies) express a humility and openness to new ideas that I have not previously witnessed… even after Trump 1. There is increasingly a recognition that those who got us here can’t get us out: and a willingness to look in the mirror and include themselves in that diagnosis.

This is a double-edged sword: the bad news is that those in power don’t have the answers. I’ve now witnessed two different global gatherings of elite power-holders in two different sectors: the people who HAVE THE POWER to transform the system… and in both cases everyone was looking around for answers. The good news is that they recognize they don’t have them; the bad news is: they don’t have the answers.

This creates an imperative for those of us who play bridge roles in the system to bring in new voices: to lend our credibility and trust to allow those who have answers (nearly always relegated to the margins) to bring their wisdom to those who have structural power… and to do so in a way that re-centers power where it ought to belong: with those who are co-creating solutions.

2. People are showing up

The day after I published my post-inauguration post, I was inspired to see AOC and Bernie launch the “fight oligarchy” tour that became the first organized mass expression of solidarity. That has now coalesced into a broader national movement, now with leading organizing groups at the table: the April 5th Hands Off protests and June 16th No Kings Day protests were organized by huge progressive coalitions that successfully brought millions of Americans to the streets to oppose Trump’s authoritarian cruelty and to demand better for our country (and importantly: to signal to the world that we do NOT support this administration).

I want to give huge respect and admiration to the front-line activists in Los Angeles who stood up to ICE in defending their neighbors: their bold action in the face of an authoritarian police state inspired many of those who showed up on June 16th. People are drawing red lines: you won’t kidnap our neighbors. And putting their bodies on the line to stand up in solidarity. It’s incredibly inspiring.

When we organize, we win

This is the important thing. So often we become accustomed to our marginalization, to not winning… that we forget that we can. That people actually WANT what we are offering… if we can get them to believe it’s possible, and if we can communicate in a way that resonates. That to me was the recipe for Zohran’s dramatic victory in New York City: in the face of yet another tired corrupt old white man (with lots of love to those elders and white men standing on the right side of history), Zohran led a grassroots people-based campaign that centered material concerns and explicitly invited a big tent.

While the billionaires shoveled their money at Cuomo, Zohran toured the boroughs on foot, at one point walking the entire length of Manhattan Island: this is leadership. Honestly, take three minutes to watch this video; I get chills.

The Mamdani campaign knocked over 1 million doors (!!)… and mobilized 40,000 people. THAT is the source of our strength, and our power. Huge props to the Working Families Party (and let’s also acknowledge that Zohran is a member of DSA - Democratic Socialists: though I think WFP deserves the lion’s share of the credit); the WFP slate won across the board in the Primary. Amazing organizing work.

Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman (the embodiment of failing Horizon 1) is willing to put hundreds of millions of dollars into defeating Zohran; the race isn’t over yet (reminder: India Walton won the Buffalo Democratic Primary in 2021 on the Working Families Party ticket against the $-backed old-school incumbent… only to lose in the general when the power elites organized to defeat her). It is our job to back our leaders when they do the bold thing: it is our job right now to show up for Zohran Mamdani. We the people are the source of our power.

All right, I’ve finished my coffee, and these moving boxes aren’t going to pack themselves. Time to get back to it.

Happy Pride month to all those celebrating; I will be back in a couple weeks writing from my new home in the Emerald City… about my personal journey from monogamy to polyamory, as part of celebrating the global Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy. Until soon.

I won’t be holding a monthly community call in June (as you have no doubt already surmised); our next gathering for subscribers will be Monday, July 28th @9am PT (noon ET, 5pm UK, 6pm CET/CAT, 9:30pm India). I hope to see you there!

In community,

Brian

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Alfred Adler famously described two fundamental human needs: to feel a sense of belonging, and to feel a sense of significance. While I write frequently in this newsletter about our universal need for belonging, I fear I’ve devoted insufficient attention to our need for significance… our need to experience power, agency, and a sense that we matter. In particular, I fear I’ve underestimated how widespread our experience of powerlessness is… and how the quest for power—or more accurately, the desperate desire to avoid the devastating feeling of powerlessness—is increasingly driving our politics.

In particular, I want to unpack the implications of Steven Wineman’s observation, which feels central to understanding and responding to this moment:

When internalized powerlessness is paired with objective dominance, it creates a lethal dynamic in which we unwittingly respond to our own victimization by oppressing others.

So today I want to talk about victimhood, trauma, and power.

TL;DR: The central feature of trauma is the subjective experience of powerlessness. I believe much of our current dysfunction (authoritarianism in dominant culture; othering and disposability in social justice culture) is motivated by a desperate effort to reclaim agency in the face of feeling powerless. Thus, our movements must focus on providing opportunities to access agency and the felt experience of power-with (not power-over or power-under) if we are to be effective in responding to the rise of authoritarianism.

The Drama Triangle: a desperate bid for agency

I’ve been thinking about the concepts I’m trying to weave in this post for many years (see e.g. this post where I first tried to unpack what I called “victimhood and the paradox of power”). But the understanding that is crystallizing in me and that I’m trying to convey in today’s post is indebted to Steven Wineman’s brilliant self-published 2003 book Power-Under: Trauma and Social Change.

Here’s how I understand the logic flow (this is me talking, weaving/interpreting Wineman):

1. The defining experience of trauma is the feeling of powerlessness.

2. When confronted with experiences that trigger our past trauma, we often assume a role described in Stephen Karpman’s “Drama Triangle”: Persecutor (Perpetrator), Victim, or Rescuer. I think this provides a useful heuristic to engage the concepts I’m exploring today, and a more helpful frame for my purposes than the more common fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses often discussed in trauma literature.

3. In all cases the move is a desperate attempt to claim power in the face of a subjective feeling of powerlessness.

   1. The Persecutor seeks to assert agency by stepping into power-over: you are making me do this.

   2. The Victim asserts agency with a claim to power-under: I am being hurt and deserve attention and help; they blame the persecutor and try to recruit rescuers.

   3. The Rescuer (that’s me!) asserts agency by being of service: we try to help the victim (doing for others what we wish they would do for us).

I think the Drama Triangle provides a useful prism through which to make sense of this current moment of rising authoritarianism: both its expression in dominant culture (visible in the rise of far-right nationalism that is increasingly fascistic in its expression) and its expression in social justice movement culture (via the phenomenon of “cancel culture”: what Kazu Haga et al call “a culture of disposability and othering”).

Victimhood from a place of domination: from victim to perpetrator (power-over)

It’s important to hold in mind that the central feature animating all of this is the subjective experience of powerlessness: this has powerful implications for the antidote (which MUST be about reclaiming agency and power in ways that do not perpetuate violence and domination).

This article by Lynne Forrest is my favorite deep dive into how the Drama Triangle operates, with a particular emphasis on understanding how the axis rotates around Victimhood. She explains why she thinks it is more accurate to call it the Victim Triangle:

No matter where we may start out on the triangle, victim is where we end up, therefore no matter what role we’re in on the triangle, we’re in victimhood.

She explains that most of us have a default “starting-gate” position on the triangle:

Our starting-gate position on the victim triangle is not only where we most often enter the triangle, it is also the role through which we actually define ourselves. It becomes a strong part of our identity.

Let’s start with those currently perpetrating domination and violence at a mass scale: this is Trump and Musk et al (as well as those authoritarians in power around the world: Putin, Orban, Erdogan, etc). They are Persecutors who experience themselves as Victims; it is no accident that Trump launched his 2016 campaign by declaring “I am a victim.” Trump’s claim to victimhood is core to his rise to power; an article in Politico called it “his one superpower.” Indeed, a recent research paper looked at his narrative strategy alongside that of Hungary’s Viktor Orban and coined the term “hijacked victimhood” as the central feature.

I think that’s giving Trump and Orban more credit than they deserve. While I agree that they have an intuitive sense that this “strategy” is effective, I don’t think it’s an act: Trump genuinely feels like he is the victim. It’s important to note here that the sense of victimhood can be real (they are actually victimized) or purely perceived: for Trump (and many Perpetrators) they are actually NOT the victims. But because they are so entrenched in the identity of victim, they are unable to conceive of themselves as perpetrators.

This is particularly dangerous: a sense of subjective victimhood when paired with objective power is the primary path to mass violence. They are unable to see or conceive of their own dominance. Wineman explains (explicitly reflecting on Israel/Palestine, writing way back in 2003):

The dominants lose sight of their objective power and experience the world as victims.

This entrenched self-understanding of victimhood helps explain Trump’s use of the phenomenon Jennifer Freyd coined as DARVO: a tactic (drawn from her research on intimate partner violence) of Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim-Offender. Trump, himself a serial perpetrator of sexual assault, is a master of this tactic. The accusation of perpetrator can’t penetrate his self-conception of victimhood… indeed it challenges that fragile narcissistic identity. Here’s Forrest:

[The Persecutor] overcomes feelings of helplessness and shame by over-powering others. Domination becomes their most prevalent style of interaction.

It’s worth going a level deeper to understand how this manifests and to understand the psychology of it. Wineman explains:

In order to acknowledge yourself as a dominant or an oppressor, you have to see yourself as an actor—as someone with the capacity to act upon others. If the essence of your experience is that you are acted upon in the world, it becomes difficult or impossible for you to conceive of yourself as having anything like this kind of capacity. If the essence of your psychological reality is that you are small and powerless, how could you possibly hold the power or the sense of agency to be able to dominate or harm anyone else?

This is what’s so hard to understand when we observe people with objective power (having access to and using “power-over” as domination): in the phenomenon I’m describing here, they are doing so from a self-conception of deep victimhood. Objectively they have power (which the rest of us can see clearly); subjectively they do not experience themselves as having power.

Victimhood from a place of subjugation (power-under)

Let’s shift focus now to the experience of those without objective power: people marginalized in our systems of oppression. I want to focus on how this dynamic plays out in social justice movement culture. There are two different dimensions I want to name here:

Victim to perpetrator: power-under. This is the same dynamic as above, but this time without access to objective dominance. In this case the victim is acutely aware that they don’t have access to dominant power (unlike in the first case, where the victim-turned-perpetrator is acting from lack of awareness of their objective power); however, precisely that understanding can mask their ability to recognize the power they do have, and/or their potential to cause impact/harm on others. Wineman explains:

Someone acting from an internal state of sheer powerlessness can have an enormously powerful impact on anyone in their path. This is the dynamic that I am calling power-under.

Victim: this is the role we imagine when we think of the term. Someone in need of help, lacking agency, feeling persecuted. In this role the victim does two things: blames the perpetrator, and tries to recruit rescuers. This points to the dual power in victimhood—particularly for a person with marginalized/oppressed identities. Blaming the perpetrator is a claim to innocence, appealing to a sense of righteousness. This in turn motivates the appeal to rescuers: as the righteous victim of injustice, compensation and repair is demanded. This is the appeal to being centered, to receiving care, to redressing wrongs. Particularly for those whom dominant culture relegates to the margins and deems outside of our ethic of collective care, this can feel like a powerful claim to inclusion and belonging.

However, even without going to perpetrator, remaining in Victim mode can also be a claim to power-under: wielding power from the subjugated position to insist on punishment for persecutors, on care from rescuers, etc. Danielle Carr explains the seductive logic here:

This wound provides our new identity, at once the thing that gives us the right to speak and the only thing we have left to say when we do… Our trauma is the guarantor of what we believe we are owed.

In social justice culture this shows up most commonly as someone with marginalized identities “cancelling” someone with more privileged identities (e.g. a woman of color accusing a White man of perpetrating harm, and insisting on punishment/exclusion from community). Because the objective power dynamics are so obvious (white man with dominant power = oppressor; woman of color marginalized from power = victim) it can cloud the actual dynamics at play… which may be much more complicated.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that all roles on the Triangle are matters of subjective experience: the victimization may be real or imagined (or a combination of both). Because it touches on our core traumas (triggering the feeling of powerlessness that pushes us into the Triangle in the first place) it can be very difficult to discern.

A word on rescuers…

This me 🙋‍♂️. Rescuers are core to making the Victim triangle operate… and many of us are drawn to social justice work. Forrest explains our motivation:

Rescuing is an addiction that comes from an unconscious need to feel valued. There’s no better way to feel important than to be a savior!

The downside, of course… is that we need someone to save. Which means just as victims recruit us, so do we recruit victims. And in order to have a victim, we also need a perpetrator: someone we are saving the victim from. Our claim to power is a claim to being needed, and we too don the mantle of innocence: I am not a perpetrator! And also subtly elevate ourselves over the victim (unlike you, I’m doing something!) Unfortunately, this claim to power also breeds codependence. Forrest again:

We may notice that we feel better when we are fixing someone else – it gives us a false sense of being in control which feels temporarily empowering. We may fail to recognize that our increased sense of power is often at the expense of the other, leaving them feeling disempowered and “less than.”

Oh. That doesn’t sound great.

Gender, victimhood, and authoritarianism

Victimhood in our society is deeply gendered by patriarchy: women are often cast in the role of martyrs (victims), men as perpetrators/actors. Rescuing also tends to be coded feminine (though of course any gender can play any role, and all of us can rotate through each role).

Under rigid patriarchal definitions of masculinity, men have a uniquely difficult time identifying as victims. To be a victim is to be without power; to be without power is fundamentally un-manly. According to patriarchal masculinity, victimhood is shameful. And yet men (like all people living inside systems of oppression) are victimized. So we’re stuck: it’s the paradox of feeling like a victim without being able to say “I’m a victim”… because our claim to identity and honor is defined in opposition to victimhood.

If the choice is victim or perpetrator, masculinity requires that men choose perpetrator. Many turn instead to rescuer… but doing so from a power-over position requires mental gymnastics. It requires women to accept the role of victim (which explains much of the anger directed at women who dare to assume agency and power), and it requires naming those in subjugated roles as the “true oppressors” (I believe this dynamic explains much of the backlash/hostility directed at trans people). In an article exploring the question “Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns?” Jeremy Adam Smith concludes:

Stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

Shame—and the desire to avoid it—thus becomes a driving force of authoritarian politics. Arlie Hochschild’s new book explains how Trump masterfully plays on shame and an unacknowledged sense of victimhood (manifest as resentment) to give his supporters a sense of pride and agency. She profiles one working-class white man in rural Kentucky who mused aloud:

If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?

Trump offers an answer in four steps, converting shame into blame... and pride.

1. Reframing loss (impersonal, systemic) as theft (someone did this to you)

2. Identifying the “threat” as an alliance between powerful elites benefiting subjugated “others” (both of whom are unjustly positioned above Trump’s audience)

3. Trump presents himself as the answer, punching back (imagining himself as victim) against elites, and returning what was “stolen” (by subjugated “others”: immigrants, people of color purportedly benefiting from DEI programs, etc.)

4. This allows people who are struggling (and men in particular) to adopt the banner of righteous victimhood: they see Trump as their chosen rescuer, and therefore must see “others” (racialized, marginalized) as their persecutors. Their vote/support for him is thus an act of agency in restoring their rightful place (and allowing them to escape the feeling of victimhood and access a sense of heroism).

There’s lots more to say about how these complicated dynamics play out, and how gender operates inside of these movements that is beyond the scope of this piece. But I do want to add that women in authoritarian movements also step into gendered roles, seeking male “rescuers,” claiming the power-under of victimhood (and often playing Rescuer roles with respect to children, a phenomenon visible in the “save the children” movement inside QAnon).

Building movements that build agency

My point in writing this post is to call greater attention to this phenomenon: to better understand both the psyche of those perpetrating from a place of powerlessness, and those utilizing power-under in ways that inadvertently perpetuate domination and prop up false oppressor/oppressed binaries.

If we understand trauma and the subjective sense of powerlessness as primary drivers of authoritarianism (and the authoritarian streak within movements for social justice) then our movements MUST do three things:

1. Offer people opportunities to exercise agency and experience their own power.

2. Support people to build more resilient and complex identities that hold room for both their oppressed and oppressor parts.

3. Support people in trauma healing.

The good news: we’re making progress on number three (e.g. Staci Haines’ The Politics of Trauma and Prentis Hemphill’s What it Takes to Heal are two recent books about how to build our capacity for trauma healing in the context of social justice work).

The bad news: we have a long way to go on building agency, and on supporting people in cultivating more complex identities that reject the false binaries of our systems of oppression.

I think the sequencing flows this way (agency and complex identities before healing) in part because accessing power and agency IS a key piece that allows us to experience more of our own humanity and support our healing from trauma. I think it’s a three-step process:

1. First we have to understand how we have been victimized (Wineman conceives of victimhood as a necessary “transitional” identity: understanding how we have been harmed by systems is essential to the process of politicization that enables transformation). This is about centering ourselves and understanding how we have been harmed (e.g. many men still do not understand their own victimization inside of patriarchy, and as such cannot escape it).

2. Then we have to locate the cause of our suffering: the systems of oppression that keep us locked in the false binaries of oppressor/oppressed, and activating the shame that keeps us stuck in the Drama Triangle. We have to strenuously reject any efforts that seek to blame the “other” for our plight.

3. Then we have to find ways to experience our own agency and power as actors capable of changing these systems… by working together in solidarity.

The good news is, more people are recognizing and turning attention to these imperatives (indeed, just yesterday a new podcast episode from Starhawk hit my feed entitled “Trauma and Agency”… I love co-arising emergence).

From victimhood to empowerment: escaping the Drama Triangle

David Emerald proposed a framework he calls “the empowerment dynamic” for how to exit the Drama Triangle, with corresponding roles for each, as follows:

I think it’s a great framework and departure point (though I see the energy for action in the Drama Triangle coming from fear and shame rather than anxiety, and the energy for action in the Empowerment Dynamic coming from love and solidarity).

This is the individual/internal path to liberation: moving from victimhood to empowerment, claiming the agency and power that is denied us by systems of oppression. Wineman again:

One of the cornerstones of liberation is surely that people experience a sense of power and efficacy, and have the ability to control their own lives in a range of meaningful ways… Subjectively, liberation from oppression involves a straightforward progression from powerlessness to empowerment.

It is also the objective path to liberation (fractally: transforming ourselves to transform the world). As we decline to act from domination/power-over or victimhood/power-under and instead cultivate the capacity to act from agency/power-with… we are practicing liberation: what Bobbie Harro calls “the practice of love.” This is essential if we want to build more successful movements and broader coalitions. I think Wineman has it right:

What is probably most important is to develop programs and strategies for addressing the real powerlessness in people’s lives, and to do so in ways that don’t play to and manipulate power-under, but that… offer them ways to express rage and to gain a sense of power and safety that is not at the expense of Others.

This requires a deep commitment to the humanity of everyone: oppressors and oppressed alike. It requires acknowledging that all of us contain elements of both. Here’s Wineman, channeling collaborator Aurora Levins Morales:

We need to fully grasp the humanity of those who too easily become defined or treated as Other… If we agree to accept limits on who is included in humanity, then we will become more and more like those we Oppose.

We do this both as the only viable path to transformation for “them”… and as part of honoring our own humanity. As adrienne maree brown recently noted:

Part of our job is humanizing ourselves enough to see the humanity in everyone else.

I want to close it here, though there is so much more to say.

I want to write soon about Shadow integration: it feels core to so much of what this moment is inviting in us. I recently returned from a soul-confronting immersion with the Light Dark Institute looking at my own shadow, explored through the lens of kink and BDSM (profound technologies for shadow work, it turns out). And I spent two whole days interrogating my complex relationship to victimhood… so much more to say and to unpack in myself.

I’m curious how this lands, and how people see the implications for movement strategy. What should we be doing differently to respond to this authoritarian moment?

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I’ve always had a negative association with the verb “to fight”; it lands in my body as aggression, as violence, as the kind of win/lose binary that I want with my entire being to reject and transcend. Part of this is my own embodiment: as the largest kid in my class, to fight was to be a bully: it was to enact domination. I want no part of that.

In addition to my principled perspective, I have strategic concerns. In our movements I fear fighting can lead us in the wrong direction: it elicits a defensive response (Newton’s third law); it activates our fear centers (and thus pushes people toward more conservative positions); it implies a winner and a loser (a zero sum mentality that triggers scarcity thinking); it feels destructive rather than creative; and it can lead to burnout/exhaustion (fighting as an energetic cannot be sustained).

And yet: it’s also a powerful call to action. What could be more foundational to movements for social justice than the idea of fighting for our rights? And what could be more important in this moment than fighting against authoritarianism? After all, right now Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders are rallying thousands around the banner of “fighting oligarchy.” Clearly we are drawn to the idea both of fighting for (something we value) and fighting against (a threat to what we value).

So today I want to explore how to orient to “fighting” in the work of building a world where everyone belongs.

Here’s what I’m coming to (TL;DR): the “fight” response is a natural human reaction to a threatening situation; it is one of our body’s instinctual mechanisms designed for survival. Yet there is an important distinction between the aggression of an animalistic “fight” response, and the equally fierce but non-aggressive energy of our innate drive to protect what we love.

The power of “fight” I want to invoke in our movements is not “fight” at all. Instead, it’s a combination of two energies: defend the sacred; and blend with the “other” to invite transformation. That is the only power I’ve encountered capable of moving us toward a world where everyone belongs… if we are courageous enough to accept the invitation.

Fight is not only a trauma response: it’s a healthy response

I think part of where I’ve been hung up is in the trauma literature about fight / flight / freeze (and the many other variations: appease / fawn, etc.) Joslyn Reisinger explains:

A trauma response is an emotional or physical reaction to a stimulus that reminds you of a distressing event you once experienced. It’s a term that describes the way in which your body responds to a perceived danger or threat.

A “fight” trauma response is commonly associated with aggression, anger, hostility, and attack: not energies I aspire to. It turns out I’ve conflated a trauma response (ultimately maladaptive when it persists beyond the threat itself) with a stress response (the natural human response to threat): which also is fight / flight / freeze, etc. (I want to credit this insight to Emily Athena, helping spawn today’s newsletter).

But they are not the same: a stress response can be healthy and necessary, and done effectively in a supportive context need not lead to trauma. I like George Oldfield’s contribution that we can even develop capacity to transform our stress response into what he calls a “challenge response”: where we’re still primed for action, but less in pure survival mode (our body releases adrenaline and dopamine in the face of a challenge, rather than cortisol associated with a stress response).

Sam Dylan Finch offers the healthy definition of fight in the context of a stress/challenge response:

Fight is best understood as a surge of energy that prompts action, and encourages us to confront the threat rather than avoiding or disengaging.

That sounds like something I can get behind… and even sounds essential as an orientation in our movements for justice.

Fighting the good fight: the case for “protective power”

Finch offers parenthetical definitions alongside the more common fight / flight / freeze: where flight is avoid and freeze is dissociate, fight is… approach.

Ahh… this resonates for me. I took a course on Somatics, Trauma and Resilience back in 2021 with the inimitable Staci Haines, and one of the exercises invited us to identify our conditioned tendency in the face of threat: fight, flight, freeze, or appease / dissociate. I didn’t identify with any, so I asked for help.

When prompted about what I do when faced with a threat, I had an immediate answer: I engage. I face up, address it head on. I always have. But not with aggression, or anger, or hostility, or an impulse to violence. The impulse for me is a combination of protectiveness (we protect what we love) and curiosity: what is the nature of this threat, how do I best defuse it.

When I tried to get in touch with this energy, I immediately thought of the iconic image that kicks off this post: Ieshia Evans confronting heavily armed riot police in Baton Rouge, at a Black Lives Matter rally protesting the police killing of Alton Sterling.

It’s a powerful image on so many levels, but for me I felt a visceral resonance. I love everything about her energy: calm. Poised. Not aggressive, not attacking. Resolute. Feet shoulder-width apart, balanced, ready. Standing her ground. Dressed for life, not violence. She radiates conviction, a commitment to justice. And while we can’t see her eyes, I imagine they are soft, open: an invitation.

Yes, that’s it. This is the essence of the fight energy I relate to… that I aspire to. It’s an expression of what I am conceptualizing as “protective power.” In its nonviolent commitment it explicitly rejects the domination logic of power-over, while exerting another form of power that exists not to oppose but to transform. I think there are two components... and both are hugely important.

1. Defend: We protect what we love

I launched this newsletter six years ago with this reflection: we protect what we love. (I also resonate deeply with the indigenous concept of “defend the sacred”: water protectors, land defenders).

I suspect that for most of us called to the work of social justice, this is the animating impulse. It is about preventing harm or destruction of what we love: it is a fundamentally defensive posture. In the image this is Ieshia standing her ground: refusing to allow injustice to persist.

There are many ways to achieve this narrow goal, including through the use of violence. But there is a second dimension.

2. Blend: the invitation to transformation

I’m not getting the words or sequencing quite right, but bear with me. I think the very first act at the moment of threat is engagement: turning toward. In the case of Ieshia, it is literally interposing her body between those she loves and those who pose the threat.

That act of engagement has two purposes. The first is protection: defend the sacred.

But there is a second impulse, one that I think Ieshia gets at in her embodiment: the invitation to transformation. This is the longer-term strategy: I don’t only want to stop the violence… I want to prevent it from happening again. This is the idea I was getting at with Bryan Stevenson’s concept of “stone catchers”: both things are needed.

I love this line from teammate and friend Kazu Haga (get his new book out today!):

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.

This. This is what fighting cannot do. Fighting might meet our short-term need for protection; it cannot meet our long-term need for transformation.

Richard Strozzi-Heckler draws on the aikido concept of “blending” to explain the subtlety of this move:

It’s using the energy of the attacker to neutralize their aggression, instead of neutralizing the person (read: go to war), bringing the confrontation into a harmonious reconciliation, instead of a zero sum game of winners and losers.

In the image above the riot police are primed for violence: they are ready to deal with rocks and physical force. To instead face a young woman standing in a non-threatening way in her own power… is to be presented with a mirror. To see themselves through her eyes. An opportunity for self-reflection. Engaging in that way creates an opportunity for transformation (not a guarantee, to be clear: Ieshia was still arrested).

But it honors the humanity of the other, and remains focused on what the “fight” is really about: not us vs them, but rather the systems of oppression that trick us into believing there is such thing as “us” and “them.”

Sweet surrender?

I want to introduce one more edgy idea before I close. I’ve been thinking a lot about the energetic of domination systems, and what it takes to sustain them. And reflecting on two metaphors that have emerged recently among social justice strategists and thinkers: Vanessa Andreotti’s concept of “hospicing” modernity (an intentional nod to Deb Frieze and Meg Wheatley’s pioneering work), and the concept of “composting” (I’m not aware of the lineage/origin there, but it has spread rapidly in my networks in recent years).

The common thread is the idea that an old system is dying (our present system is clearly no longer fit for purpose and incapable of responding to the intersecting crises we face): hospicing is about supporting the transition and alleviating suffering, while composting suggests that in the death of the old we find nourishment for the new.

Here’s my radical idea: I think the system wants to collapse. I think it takes such incredible force, coercion, violence, and toxicity to prop up domination systems, that they are desperate to crumble. I often illustrate this point with the somatic exercise of the clenched fist: it wants to relax. The energy of hate/fight/violence is exhausting to sustain.

This idea was planted in me a couple years ago listening to Luna Matata’s gorgeous and provocative podcast interview on what it means to “peg the patriarchy.” I was so inspired I bought a hat, shirt, and stickers brandishing that slogan… and it’s far and away the most misunderstood thing I wear. We are so conditioned into the oppositional response that even fellow students of patriarchy hear it as an an invitation to fight: something we do “to” patriarchy, with an angry energy. “Fuck the patriarchy!” No: pegging properly understood is an act of care done in trusting relationship. It is an act that requires gentleness, an invitation to sweet surrender.

Professional dominatrix Kasia Urbaniak explains the longing here beautifully:

People are deeply desiring the surrender and submission of being held in the attention of another person… To be witnessed there and guided to a place where they feel safe enough to release, be vulnerable, and be held and led.

There is something really powerful there, about that invitation to surrender. I resonate with it in my own experience, as someone conditioned into power: it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting being conditioned into domination. I resonate so hard with Lady Gaga’s lyric in Shallow:

Tell me something, boy

Aren't you tired tryna fill that void?

Or do you need more?

Ain't it hard keepin' it so hardcore?

Speaking only for myself (though I suspect many other men as well, who may not have language for their experience), this is the root of much of the anger I suppress: the pain and fury of being conscripted against my will into a system that forces me into domination. In this I resonate with the Jamie Tartt character in Ted Lasso:

To be clear, I’m not saying we surrender: our work and commitment to justice must endure. I am suggesting: if we cease to give it our fight energy, if we withdrawn consent from the oppositional response and instead focus on protecting and blending… might they choose to join us? This, as Kazu reminds us, is the all-important distinction:

In movements that are violent or simply use nonviolent tactics, the goal is victory, where victory is defined as “your” people beating “those” people to win your demands. The victory is over your opponents. But in a principled approach, there is no victory until you’ve won your opponents over. (emphasis in original)

It’s time to let go of fighting

While I mean this literally/linguistically (I work really hard not to use fight language or martial metaphors), I’m not so naive as to think we can drop the term right away. Instead I want to invite us to reimagine our relationship to it, to anchor in our commitments.

I recently landed on my new commitment, the one that will guide me in 2025 and likely beyond:

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

Most of us—myself included—have precious little embodied experience of power without domination. Yet if our aspiration is a world where everyone belongs (which must be a world without domination)… we must practice what we want to become. I will do this translation work: while I will not “fight,” I will vigorously defend what I love (and my love is expansive). I will blend with the threat, and invite transformation.

I’m encouraged to see a number of people reaching similar conclusions. Kazu’s new book is about “fierce vulnerability”: I think that’s right. Kai Cheng Thom, Valarie Kaur, and others talk about “revolutionary love.” PolicyLink recently launched a campaign calling for a Revolution of the Soul (hat tip to Uma Viswanathan for pointing me to it). And of course Dr. King, John Lewis, and many others invoked the invitation to “beloved community.”

It’s hard work. Michael McAfee and Ashleigh Gardere at PolicyLink explain:

Taking responsibility for all is an invitation to transcend reductive identities and oversimplified paradigms. It is an avatar of wholeness that does not reduce people to any least common denominator. It demands that we honor the personhood, dignity, and complexity of each of us. When we say “all,” we must mean everyone.

This adds another layer that feels important: the invitation to transformation is not just “out there.” It is not only “them” who need to change. This is deep inner work: we too must transform. That’s another thing I fear a “fight” orientation allows us to skip over: our own complicity in the very thing we oppose. Yes we want to “fight oligarchy.” But who doesn’t shop at Amazon, or use Google, message on WhatsApp or Instagram? I’m sure there are Tesla owners at these protests. We are all complicit in different ways and to different degrees in propping up the system: it is on us to transform together.

Kai Cheng and I are playing with a concept we are calling “Radical Bridging” (homage to Pat McCabe/Woman Stands Shining, who calls herself a “radical bridger”): it’s not for the faint of heart. I just haven’t seen anything else that actually leads to transformation. (More on this idea in a subsequent post).

I’ll leave it here for today. I’m curious if this resonates, if you have different associations/connotations with “fight” energy. If you see something in the word worth retaining.

I want to close with another image that remains seared in our collective memory, a reminder that defending what we love and blending with the “enemy” is a deeply inspiring act.

There’s a reason we all still remember Tank Man: it’s a testament to the contagious power of courage, standing your ground in the face of injustice… and the threat of violence.

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Today marks one month since the inauguration: it feels like an eternity. I feel many things watching the spectacle of an unelected billionaire take an axe to pillars of our already-fragile democracy: targeting the civil service, trans people and immigrants, diplomats and health professionals… with wanton disregard for the impact on the lives and livelihoods of human beings.

For me perhaps the most jarring feature of this moment is the yawning chasm between the brutality of the Trump Musk Administration’s actions… and the response. Or more accurately, the stunning absence of one. In the very moment when we need it most, the Democratic Party has utterly abdicated responsibility.

Each day brings a new outrage, a new shattering of democratic norms, a new Rubicon crossed: elevating a vaccine denier to the head of Health and Human Services; inviting the neo-fascist AfD to the table in Germany; elevating someone with virtually no relevant credentials to Secretary of Defense; blaming Ukraine for Russia’s invasion… and still, crickets from Washington. It feels like everyone is looking for the adult in the room, and slowly realizing that help isn’t coming. Those that got us into this mess (the “liberal” Democratic establishment) will not get us out.

We desperately need a vision people can rally behind, a sense of solidarity to encourage us in the face of this existential threat, and strategies and tactics that can give us a sense of a agency and efficacy that feels adequate to the moment.

So today I want to write about what we can do. I feel a version of what I felt on January 6th, 2021. The bad news: this is who we are. This is where we are. This is happening. The good news: this isn’t who we want to be. This isn’t where we want to be. We don’t want this to be happening.

What might a coordinated response commensurate to the gravity of this moment look like? The good news: I actually think that there is a quiet consensus emerging among movement leaders and strategists about the vision, principles, and practices that will help us navigate these turbulent waters. It’s wider and deeper than I’ve ever seen it… even if it’s not yet visible in the way it needs to be. I want to try to illuminate some of what I’m seeing, and invite others to bring their own sensemaking and visions to the table.

1. Vive la résistance!

In 2016 we had a unifying narrative frame, a giant umbrella that served as the identity for our coordinated actions: the Resistance.

In 2024 the vibe is different; resistance isn’t it. I think that’s a good thing: it speaks to maturity and lessons learned from eight years of struggle.

To me what resistance got right was the idea that we won’t go along with the pillaging of our country: it was a powerful cry of “no” in the face of intolerable behavior. That’s incredibly important, and we need to hold on to that instinct.

Yet I think it missed three things:

1. As Carl Jung reminds us: what you resist, persists. The idea of resistance metaphorically centers our imagination on what we are resisting. It’s not enough to be against something; we have to be FOR something.

2. It accepts that we have less power. After all, the term originated in France as the cry of the oppressed against Nazi occupation. As Michelle Alexander beautifully wrote: we are the majority. Trump and his ilk are the authoritarian outliers.

3. The idea of resistance imagines that the problem lies outside of us. In fact, the reason the Trump phenomenon is so pernicious is because most of us are complicit with it in different and complicated ways.

And yet we do need something into which we can channel our energies, a vehicle for solidarity. A unifying narrative.

My own sense is the answer has something to do with refusing to be complicit. Withdrawing or withholding consent. The worst insult during WWII was to be a collaborator: to go along with the Nazis. We need to encourage people to refuse to go along. This is a powerful place where we all have agency: we always have the choice not to cooperate. Musk and Trump are fashioning themselves as kings. Yet kingdoms always depend on people going along… as the French revolution demonstrated. Ultimately all systems depend on the consent of the governed. It is incumbent upon us NOT to consent.

I resonated recently in a conversation with Bridgit Antoinette Evans about the notion of “cycle breakers”: people who refuse to be complicit any longer with systems of supremacy and oppression. The buck stops here.

We need to support people who make that choice… in the face of risks to their livelihoods.

2. Time to take to the streets! March 1st?

In the wake of the 2016 election we had the Women’s March: an immediate nationwide (and indeed global) mass demonstration of solidarity, putting the incoming administration on notice that a vocal majority of the population would push back against his vision. This provided the first concrete expression of our new identity in solidarity… and importantly, offered a tangible visible symbol of resistance in the form of the pink pussy hats.

What’s missing thus far from 2025 is this visible sense of national and international solidarity. It’s essential. Public demonstrations alone don’t usually change policy. But they do provide us with a sense of solidarity, mutuality, and courage. To know that we are part of a broader movement emboldens us to do the right thing when the time comes; to know that we aren’t alone.

We need to do it again. We need a nationwide gathering, one that can resonate beyond our national borders—we are not alone in facing down the rising specter of authoritarianism—and one that allows us to wear a tangible/visible symbol of solidarity. It has to be radically inclusive and not based on identity. I also think the gathering has to be fun: it has to find that balance between acknowledging the gravity/brutality of the moment… and offering a different way to be in relationship to it. We need hope; we need courage; we need joy.

And we need a symbol. Ideally everything is fractally consistent and reinforcing the identities and behaviors we want… and inviting others to join us. I’m not an expert in this stuff, but I personally find myself drawn to the polyamory symbol: the infinity heart (my newest tattoo!) Or unicorns. Ideally something that can be a bumper sticker, a wrist-band, a hat, a pin: something we can easily wear/brandish to signal solidarity and that can resonate across countries and cultures. Something widely available, that speaks for our values, and evokes positivity.

As for action, my instinct is to start small: a 15 minute walkout during the work week. A precursor to a general strike, or to a more targeted action. Everyone just stops what they’re doing and walks out. Into the streets. Maybe banging pots and pans. Maybe singing… who doesn’t love a good protest song? Signaling loudly and proudly: we will not go quietly into the night! I’d love to get students involved too: I’d like my kids to walk out (and their teachers too)… so important to do something small/manageable during the workweek.

It turns out that March 1st is Zero Discrimination Day: how about that as a place to start? Noon Pacific, 1pm Mountain, 2pm Central, 3pm Eastern, March 1st. A 15-minute walkout. To demonstrate our strength, our solidarity, our commitment, to let each other know that the resistance is alive and well… and smarter, deeper. Ready to meet this moment.

Also: I just learned of an emergent mobilization group called 50501 (50 protests, 50 states, 1 day)… doesn’t appear connected to any social justice movement infrastructure, but bless them for proposing something. They are advocating for March 4th (March Forth Against Monarchy). Still seems narrowly coordinated against this administration… which to me misses the broader point that Trump is a symptom of a deeper cause… but sounds like they’re doing some coordination to get the word out, and offer people a vehicle to express solidarity, which is hugely important. (The next step is to connect it to a broader vision/strategy so we don’t burn out).

3. We need a policy win: birthright citizenship?

Demonstrations of solidarity are necessary but insufficient: we also have to achieve tangible wins that affect people’s material lives. In 2016 we had No Ban No Wall: a spontaneous and coordinated inside/outside game to thwart the President’s most outrageous first initiative (inside being civil servants who refused to go along with flagrantly unconstitutional executive actions; outside being those in the streets signaling that the public is on the side of justice). Thousands of people swarming to airports to stand in solidarity with Muslims and immigrants… and succeeding in notching a key early win: the first tangible victory of the Resistance. It also showed very clearly that we wouldn’t stand idly by while the most vulnerable among us were targeted.

Ideally this is something that shows our values, that appeals to a broad swath of the country, and that we can win on. I am not an expert on this either, but my sense is birthright citizenship is probably the place to start: something absolutely foundational to our country, and a key pillar in pushing back against the ethno-nationalist agenda. A place to echo our core message: we belong here. We all belong, and refuse to be divided. United we stand.

We already have a preliminary success: so far appeals courts have blocked the order, and it could escalate to the Supreme Court in a matter of days. This is a time/place for us to make a public stand about what we stand for as a country… and even if we lose (if the Supreme Court were to overturn a century of established case law) it’s a powerful opportunity to state our values clearly to our fellow residents and the rest of the world.

4. A blueprint for organizing at national scale… locally

In 2016 we had Indivisible: a blueprint for organizing and sustaining ongoing activity. It was the first effort to build enduring infrastructure—outside the Democratic Party!—to maintain the momentum of the Resistance and channel it into effective political action over time. This built on the success of the Tea Party, and became a key pillar in efforts to retake the House in the 2018 midterm elections.

We have rightly grown skeptical of betting on electoral politics, and rightly distrustful of the Democratic Party as capable of advocating for or protecting our interests. After all, the Indivisible effort alongside powerful social movements ushered in the Squad in 2018… only to be thwarted, stifled, and isolated at every turn by the plutocratic gerontocracy at the top of the Party.

But the broader lesson holds: we need to offer people a place-based and community-centered opportunity to take collective action. The most tangible and important thing people can do: build community, and gather with others. To have the felt experience of belonging to something larger than ourselves, united in common purpose with kindred spirits around the country.

I don’t see an obvious heir-apparent at the moment, though my initial sense is that the most effective and smart group with national scale at the moment is SURJ: Showing up for Racial Justice. The positive: politically savvy, clear-eyed about the authoritarian threat, a loose chapter/franchise model with easy national uptake, broadly inclusive values. Room for improvement: primarily targeting White folks (not the vehicle for multiracial organizing); still adopts a “fight” frame; and uses win/lose logic… which I think keeps us trapped in the current oppositional paradigm.

I still long for a political home that can invite people into the practice of building belonging where they live. I don’t see it yet… but the need remains urgent, and it has to bootstrap on existing infrastructure to respond rapidly to the moment.

5. Follow the movements!

My own reading of human history is that broad-based social movements are the single best vehicles for large-scale social transformation. So my attention will always be drawn to them (as one piece of a broader puzzle, which necessarily must also include institutions, electoral politics, etc.)

In 2016 we had the Fight Back Table: a movement-led coalition of progressive groups to coordinate strategy and tactics, centering BIPOC leadership and with broad support from core philanthropic partners.

Unfortunately, the progressive coalition has fractured. In 2016 the Left had a broad (but fragile) alliance against the incoming Trump administration between what I think of as money, politicos, and movement: Silicon Valley and the managerial elites; the DC/NY political/journalist/philanthropic class; and BIPOC-led social justice movements. It was this alliance that enabled the effective Resistance.

In 2024 only social justice movements have stayed the course in combatting the rise of authoritarianism. The money has split: Silicon Valley has turned largely for Trump, East Coast technocratic elites bet on the Biden/Harris ticket… and lost. Meanwhile the political establishment is wandering in the wilderness, lost with only themselves to blame.

While the headwinds we face are more formidable, the answer remains the same: follow the movements. The same folks who organized Fight Back are more deeply rooted, more interconnected, and more savvy than in 2016… and in my view they still offer the most promising avenue to collective action commensurate to the challenge.

Per everything else I’ve said here, it can’t be about “fight back” this time. Rather, it must be about what we’re building… inviting people into the hard but rewarding work of creating a country worthy of our aspirations. Indeed, this is where I take my cues: looking to those leaders who have consistently been right about both the threat we face and the antidote to it.

And it’s also my source of courage and hope: the people I am fortunate enough to learn from and be in relationship with are doing incredible work at different levels of scale to respond to this moment. The task before us: to make that work more visible in a way that can invite a larger movement… without putting a target on the backs of those most threatened by this administration.

There is a particular role for those of us insulated by some privilege from the worst ravages of this administration. We need to be the ones more on the front lines… a buffer to provide space and breathing room to the organizers and activists who we need to support in navigating us through this darkness.

Block, Bridge, Build: Refuse, Repair… Create?

We need a framework to help us orient to this moment: something that we can apply in whatever way suits our particular gifts, social location, and callings. The good folks at the Horizons Project—in my view one of the sharpest organizations about how to respond to the rise of authoritarianism—offer a framework called Block, Bridge, Build that I think can be a helpful starting point.

I love me some alliteration :-) and can get behind the framework as a useful heuristic. In particular I love that it helps us see our different roles in the broader movement: some of us are called to the front lines to oppose a particularly draconian action (block); others are called to build bridges across difference and bring new people into the movement (bridge); still others are called to build the new world we long for (build).

And: I find myself yearning for a bit more nuance. In particular a framework that acknowledges our own complicity, because I actually think it points to our greatest potential for transformation. As Dan Savage reminds us: where there is dissonance, there is hope.

Block Bridge Build implicitly assumes that we are “right” and have the answers, and that the task is to transform the “other side.” I think that’s half-right. Yes we do need to transform the other side… but I actually think the most effective way to do that is by transforming ourselves.

This is why I don’t talk about “smashing” the patriarchy: I think it’s the wrong metaphor, and misunderstands how patriarchy operates. It’s not out there: it’s inside us. To me this subtle shift is actually hugely important. I find myself called in a slightly different direction (I’m not wedded to these words, just trying to capture the idea/connotation… this is how I might implement the Block Bridge Build framework):

1. Refuse. This is the part about withholding consent, declining to cooperate with injustice. It’s taking responsibility for ourselves and our own integrity, and doesn’t require anyone else to change. It simply says: no. I will not. This is about breaking the cycle: refusing to perpetuate systems of supremacy and domination.

2. Repair. This feels increasingly central to everything. It’s about healing, but healing runs the risk of feeling like an internal job: repair reminds us that healing is relational, that it takes place interpersonally. We have all been traumatized by living in these systems, and we have all hurt each other. Repair asks that as we bridge across difference (which we do need to do!) that we are attentive to repairing the ruptures that have kept us separate.

3. Create. It bothers me that this isn’t alliterative, but I don’t think this moment calls for “re” anything. It’s not rebuild, renew, recreate. That’s what repair is about. No, this moment is calling for us to build and create something we’ve never had: a global community that embraces difference without allowing that difference to be a source of domination/subjugation… at global scale. Yes indigenous communities—especially in the pre-patriarchal era—found ways to cooperate across difference… but never at the scale this globalized moment requires.

Gesturing toward… a world where everyone belongs

(Borrowing this title from the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures collective… a source of inspiration).

I want to be so bold as to offer my own answers/intuitions here… and invite others to riff/play/nuance/co-create.

1. Belonging. No surprise to readers that I think this is the most compelling north star/vision, and it can’t be human-centric either: we are trying to create a world where we live in interdependent right relationship with all beings. This means EVERYONE: we cannot use “othering” in our movements; those are the master’s tools, and we won’t wield them. This is what I see as the biggest mistake social justice movements made in the Trump era: they assumed that people with privilege already belong (white people, men, etc.) But here’s the reality of living under systems of oppression (whether as oppressor or oppressed, and most of us hold both roles concurrently): none of us belong. Which means we all have something to gain.

2. We are liberationists. I want to offer this as the new identity, beyond liberal, progressive, radical, etc. A liberationist is a person committed to building a world where everyone belongs. One who commits to the three steps above: breaking the cycle of supremacy in themselves and their relationships, repairing the rupture, and co-creating the new world we long for.

3. Fractal integrity: our core principles. We are doing something bold: we are trying to create a new culture. New norms for how we behave and how we treat each other. We need principles to guide us on how to orient to this world. I would offer the principles of Building Belonging as a place to start, a way to put our values into actionable practice. These are drawn from my own experience distilling best practices from successful social movements around the world (I wish I had a handy graphic here to circulate… anyone with skills out there?). If I had to put one stamp on it, I’d call it “fractal integrity” (a coinage from Kai Cheng Thom at our Belonging @ Scale convening in Borikén last month). Everything we do must be consistent with the world we are trying to create.

4. Principles into practice: building capacity for transformation. Ah yes: learning by doing. Practicing the world we want to create. Ideally this is the work of political home: communities of liberatory practice. Places where we can learn how to remain centered and grounded in our nervous systems amid conflict; where we can practice naming our needs and setting loving boundaries; where we can practice giving free rein to our imaginations to construct the worlds we long for. Crucially: we need more multiracial spaces to do this work. Yes there is still a need for caucus spaces, for the sense of relaxation and somatic safety that comes among people with shared cultural identities. And: we risk missing the deeper lesson here, that somatic safety and shared identity need not be a function of race or gender or class. Belonging is possible across difference… and we need more embodied experience feeling that truth.

I intended this post to be a short riff on what this moment is calling for, born out of my own anger at the Democratic Party’s abdication of responsibility, my inspiration from being in dialogue with folks doing essential movement strategy and narrative work, and my felt sense of the hunger and desperation so many people are feeling for a sense of agency in the face of an existential threat.

I’d love to hear what others are seeing, emergent frameworks to help coordinate collective action, and narrative responses commensurate to the gravity of this moment. In the meantime: build community and connection where you live. We get through this together.

In community and solidarity,

Brian

Eighteen months after we first gathered in Medellín, Colombia, a small crew of us arrived in January on the island of Borikén (the indigenous name for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico) for the second annual Belonging @ Scale convening.

It was for me a profound spiritual transformation. I’m still integrating—tenderly, slowly—much of what happened there, and what is moving through me. I want to do my best to share here from my own experience: not to speak for the collective, but instead for how I was moved. I feel protective: of the seeds we are tenderly nourishing, of the profundity of my own experience in the face of fear that it won’t be understood. That my efforts to render it via the imperfect medium that is the written word may not do justice to something that feels so important to me.

And yet: I know I’m not alone in yearning for transformation, for spaces where we can experience embodied belonging, where we can grapple deeply with kindred spirits around what it takes to transform systems and culture at the scale this moment requires. It is in that spirit of mutual grappling that I share these reflections: an effort to illuminate the path I am walking in hopes that fellow Wayfinders may find it useful, or feel inspired to share their own journeys.

I am conscious that I am writing this in the early days of the second Trump presidency: an onslaught of executive orders, policies, and illegal executive actions designed to instill fear, sow chaos, and overwhelm. I recognize that many people on the frontlines and in targeted communities are struggling for survival. To name just one example that hits close to home for me: I spent five years at USAID, and am acutely aware of the devastation resulting from the wanton and capricious decimation of that agency and all those who rely on it (imperfect though of course it is).

It is against that backdrop that I share today’s reflections. We gathered in Borikén precisely because of this context… and our recognition that our current efforts are not enough. I choose to align myself in deep solidarity both with those suffering under authoritarian regimes and with those trying to create a more liberatory world… one where we all belong.

From driving my vision to following my calling

If our inaugural gathering in Medellín (July 2023) was about Earth… for me Borikén was all about Spirit. It was a powerful through-line woven throughout our time on the island, and for me personally manifested in three distinct experiences that shook me to my core.

[Sidebar: I resonate with the language of Spirit; you may need to translate it into whatever concept resonates for you. Life-force, Source, religious people might say God, physicists might call it quantum… I’ve long gravitated to Emerson’s notion of “Oversoul.” Whatever you call it, I’m referring to the interconnected fabric of life that connects us to all of creation.]

First, some backstory. One piece of my wounding is a story I have held that I am all alone: that in the spaces I’ve moved through in my life I don’t find others who hold the questions I hold, who see what I see… or who see me. I have felt unsupported. In the context of my professional work it feels incredibly daunting: my vision is incredibly audacious, and I have often felt alone—and deeply uncertain—in trying to bring it into being. In Medellín I received a very clear answer that challenged my wounded story. The Earth reminded me: She’s been here all along. When I felt alone or struggled, I would always turn to nature: camping, mountain biking, hiking, backpacking, walking in the park, my semi-annual pilgrimage to the redwoods. This short paragraph can’t do justice to the sense of relief I felt in acknowledging that truth: the Earth supports me, always has, and always will.

That was my July epiphany in Medellín. Then in August I went on a plant medicine journey that deepened that insight. I was able to acknowledge two things:

1. I’ve felt a powerful calling my entire life, pushing me forward. Metaphorically that’s how I’ve experienced it: something behind me, compelling me forward, guiding me toward decisions at key inflection points in my life. Leaving my home in southern Oregon to go back East for college; going to Europe for a human rights fellowship; going to graduate school for international conflict mediation; joining USAID, trying to support the Arab Spring, and ultimately going to Myanmar; returning to the West Coast and transitioning to join the Gates Foundation; leaving Gates during the first Trump primary to eventually launch what would become Building Belonging… and Belonging @ Scale. In each of these major life decisions I felt two things at the same time: utter conviction that this was the right decision… and an inability to explain in “rational” language why.

2. I’ve never consented to this calling. I’ve done it, yes: it has guided my actions, and I’ve followed the mandate. But I’d never fully acknowledged—much less embraced—this force in my life. On the medicine journey I finally did: feeling the support of the Earth, I decided to answer the call. I consent: I will do what is mine to do. Metaphorically this shifted the “push” to more of a “pull”: now my calling moved out in front of me, pulling me forward.

And in Borikén I finally completed the move, in a way that feels deeply liberating and utterly profound.

Supported by Earth… guided by Spirit

The flow goes something like this:

1. The Earth supports me… and all life.

2. She would never give us a task we can’t succeed at: we are all born for a purpose. It is our job to live into that purpose to the absolute best of our abilities. I would go farther: it is our obligation to share our unique gifts. The Earth has endowed each of us with our contribution to life… we must share that gift with the world.

3. Earth provides the support: Spirit provides the calling. In my redwood metaphor that I find so grounding in my own life: I root deeply into the nourishing support of the Earth and the complex web of life She makes possible. And from that rooted place… Spirit calls me to the unique task that is mine: to grow into my fullness, to become the redwood I am intended to be (in relationship to all other beings: the ferns that support the understory, the mycellia connecting my roots to other trees, etc.)

4. My job, therefore, is twofold. First, to continue the inner work required to root deeply, to accept the Earth’s support. This is about healing my trauma and working to be a better human, always in relationship. Second, to answer the call from Spirit: to attune to the unique task that is mine to do, and to follow the calling.

And here’s what feels relieving: in this understanding, it’s not me driving my vision, with all the enormous weight I feel trying to figure out the next step, often alone. Rather, it’s me listening deeply to what Spirit is telling me… and when I get stuck, to ask Spirit for guidance. This feels like a much more honest description of what I’ve always felt to be true, and what I tried to get at in my resonance with the “Source” concept. To say it’s “my” vision always felt incomplete and even somehow dishonest: yes it’s coming through me, but I never saw myself as author… more as vehicle. Prism. Acknowledging my relationship to Spirit is the first time I’ve felt in integrity with the work I feel called to do in the world. Yes: it is bigger than me. And yet I have a role to play; we all do.

In 2025 I’m looking forward to acting on this insight, to finding ways to more intentionally deepen and hone my spiritual practice, to ask for guidance when I am stuck.

It takes a big body to hold a big heart

For many years I have resonated deeply with the giraffe: obviously for my height (I’m 6’4”), but I also like the idea of being able to see far from its vantage, and its association in Nonviolent Communication with the ability to hear deeply. Only last year I learned something else about it: the giraffe has the largest heart of any land mammal (evidently this was part of Marshall Rosenberg’s inspiration for choosing it as the creature embodying the gift of NVC).

Staci led us in somatic bodywork on Wednesday: a powerful experience, facilitated by a master in the craft. I was paired with Pat: as it turned out, absolutely perfect for the work that I needed to do. At one point, once we were dropped into our bodies, Staci posed a question: what does your heart want to say? And I heard very clearly the answer: “I’m huge.” I expressed to Pat my fear that people can’t see my big heart inside of my big body, that patriarchy conditions people to see me as a threat, and she reminded me: “it takes a big body to hold a big heart.”

I laughed out loud with relief: yes! I’m giving myself more permission to lead with love. To worry less about whether people will see my heart inside of my body, and more about sharing my heart with others. Last year I got a rainbow unicorn tattoo over my heart, in part to remind myself of my connection to my inner child and to my capacity for love. After returning from Borikén I got my second tattoo: an infinity heart, the symbol of polyamory. To commemorate my commitment to my partner Leela, and to serve as a more public statement of who I am: someone who loves multiply, and deeply.

While this is a personal sentiment, it also feels key to responding to the current crisis of masculinity driving authoritarian politics, and to why so many men are struggling to find a place where they can belong. Society sees our potential for violence, but not our potential for love. I’m reminded of adrienne maree brown’s riff on Lao Tzu: “trust the people, and they become trustworthy.”

Or as I’m feeling it: love the people, and they become loveable. So many men (well, all people) are desperate for love… and when they give up on the possibility of receiving it they often turn to violence. I resonated with this vulnerably-written and self-revelatory article where one wounded man—in therapy working hard to decondition from patriarchy—comes to recognize himself as what Terry Real calls “love-addicted.” Can we men find ways to share our longing for love with more vulnerability? Can we take responsibility for feeling and expressing our feelings? Can society see in us our longing for love… and not only our potential for violence? Can others see that my big body is to hold my big heart?

I don’t want to lead alone

This was a clear theme that resonated with many of us there: the exhaustion of leadership. And I felt Spirit gently laughing at me, as it finally became clear why I (we) had been called to the Kineo Center in particular. Founders Dan and Tonya established it as a retreat for wounded leaders… to heal from the burnout and sense of isolation that often accompanies those of us called to work in pursuit of collective care. Oh. Right. That resonates. (Of course I had seen that in the billing when I booked the retreat center, I just hadn’t personally connected it to me/our collective and what we were needing at this particular moment in our lives and in history. Sometimes I can be a little slow… not yet fully attuned to what Spirit is asking of me).

I’m tired of being lonely. I’m tired of holding onto trauma stories that keep me trapped in isolation, and I’m tired of leadership archetypes that thrust me onto a pedestal I never asked for. I feel ready—at long last—to let go of my pain and take full responsibility for my healing. It feels really good to trust my own capacity and strength, and to hear that reflected back to me by others.

I received a clear call in Borikén —from Spirit and the group—to step more fully into my leadership. Rajkumari generously shared with the group a Systems Constellation offering facilitated remotely by his friend in Poland… and it blew my mind. One clear transmission for me personally: my ambivalent relationship to my own power is a blockage in the system. And it is my responsibility to get in right relationship with the power that is uniquely mine to wield; to do otherwise is to continue to fall short in answering my calling, and to get in my own way—and cause impact to my partners—in collaborative efforts.

It felt both challenging and relieving to hear this. Relieving because it feels true, and resonates with my own sense of what’s needed. Challenging because I’m not sure everyone is ready for me to step more fully into my power (or perhaps I’m not sure I’m fully ready?). I experienced it as powerful and new to hear a very clear request from the group for me to step up: it landed as consent to me playing my role, and I felt deep relief. It hearkens back to my first Strozzi commitment: I want to lead from a place of invitation and noncoercion. I can only do that if my teammates consent to my leadership (in the role that is mine to play, just as I invite/welcome/consent to their leadership in service of their respective callings).

This is what I mean when I talk about yearning to experience other people’s power. I want other people to want to experience mine too… and to help me channel it effectively. It’s too much to hold on my own: my calling is too big. I’m ready to step into my power… but don’t make me do it alone.

From bridge to beacon: Embodied Exemplar

One of my contributions to the group during our time there was to lead a session exploring theories of scale. I invited each person to name their boldest experiments/visions, and then asked the group to see if we could identify the underlying theory of change/hypothesis animating the vision. My sense is this: when it comes to scale, we are very clear about what we do NOT want. But we don’t yet know what we do want… or how to practice it (indeed, this was the animating premise that launched the Belonging @ Scale initiative).

It was a fun and generative exercise… if you’re a theory of change/framework nerd like me :-) With apologies for my truly bad handwriting:

I ended up finding language for one theory that I’ve observed out in the world but hadn’t yet named as a path to scale: I call this “embodied exemplar.” It’s born of my own longing for examples and models to follow on my often-lonely path: what I lamented/longed for in this post exploring what it means to be a “good white man.” It’s this insight: for many people, we can’t be what we can’t see. We can’t strive to become something we don’t know is possible.

So the very existence of that thing we long for—what the good folks at Wolf Willow Institute call a “positive deviant”—can be a massive catalyst for transformation. A beacon in the darkness. This is the power of representation: seeing a Black man as U.S. president forever transforms our collective imagination about what is possible. I see it as a major and under-utilized path to scale in social justice movements… in part because of our understandable allergy to figureheads and top-down models of leadership. We fear the dominant culture model and refuse to elevate people… and in my view miss an opportunity to give more visibility to different ways of embodying power.

Part of my motivation in identifying and bringing together the people who are part of Belonging @ Scale is because I see each of them in different ways as embodied exemplars of something the world needs. And to speak more personally: something I need. Staci embodies a form of leadership in a White body that I aspire to; Marielena a fierce humility I aspire to; Kai Cheng a bold public generosity that I aspire to… and so on for everyone involved. And I trust—no, I know—that I am not alone in needing what these specific people are offering.

In Borikén I began to lean tentatively into something I have thus far rejected: the idea that perhaps I too could be an embodied exemplar… a beacon. In the past I’ve resisted invitations in that direction for several reasons:

1. It sometimes feels like the tyranny of low expectations for White men. I tell myself the story that part of why I get invited to speak is because there are so few White men embodying the quality of leadership I aspire to… and that what makes me unique is not actually any specific thing I’m doing but rather the contrast between what I’m doing and what people expect from someone who looks like me. (Like when I get complimented by strangers for being a good father when I’m doing the kind of routine everyday parenting for which a mother would never be complimented).

2. I’m hyper-aware of my own imperfections, and the gap between the person I am and the person I want to be. Maybe a blend of imposter syndrome on the one hand, and a fear of being put on a pedestal on the other… being seen for the things I’m doing well without holding the full complexity of the many ways I continue to struggle.

3. I don’t want to lead alone. My authentic truth in leadership is that to embody it well… I actually don’t want to be alone. That is part of the archetype of leadership (as embodied by dominant culture/White men) that I explicitly reject.

Those three things are still true. And: I’m allowing myself to relax my resistance… a bit. To explore the possibility that if I can hold all that complexity with other people (I don’t ask for perfection)... perhaps others can hold that with me? And that maybe my story about low expectations isn’t always true; perhaps I can trust my discernment around when an invitation feels grounded in being seen for my gifts, rather than in contrast to how others with my identities show up in the world? And finally: I don’t have to go it alone. I can accept an invitation to speak… alongside a fellow Wayfinder. It is this last possibility that feels most exciting to me, and one I’m in the early days of exploring with Kai Cheng.

Toward “fractal integrity”

Kai Cheng gets credit for this particular coinage: when she said it, it resonated deeply with me, and I sensed within the collective as well. It’s a beautiful way of capturing what I mean when I talk in Building Belonging about I/We/World, and what I understand Grace Lee Boggs to mean when she says that we must change ourselves in order to change the world. We must embody in our individual and relational lives the kind of world we want to create.

In our movements: we must treat each other well. If we believe in building a world where everyone belongs… then we must act and communicate in a way that lets everyone know that they too belong. This is what I think Toni Cade Bambara had in mind when she said we must make our movements irresistible: we must embody the invitation to the world we long for.

Anyway, more to say here, but wanted to capture that poetic framing as an invitation to others who may resonate.

Can we hear the dissenting voice? Positionality inside of a polarity

On the first day Kai Cheng led us in a polarity workshop, where she invited us to hear the wisdom of the “dissenting voice.” Can we hear the kernel of wisdom on the other side of a polarity… when that person is standing alone?

We continued to play with polarities throughout our week together, and I found myself resonating with and returning to the idea of the dissenting voice… until finally something clicked. It happened on our last day together, and only later did it crystallize into the concept I’m now trying to articulate. It goes something like this:

1. I tend to see most complex/stuck issues as polarities; the famous idea that the opposite of one great truth could be another great truth. A polarity has two sides, each of which has an upside and a downside. The “infinity loop” image popularized by Barry Johnson’s work in what he calls “polarity management” captures this:

   

2. As a lifelong bridger/mediator, I often find myself in the middle, trying to help the system see itself: to help polarized people recognize that what they are seeing as a “problem” to be solved (by their side “winning”) is actually a polarity to be managed… with multiple truths. Each side is “right” about something… and usually missing something else.

3. As a consequence, I often feel like the dissenting voice. In dominant culture I’m way too radical, and seen as weird, out there, alone. In social justice culture I’m seen as normative, representative of dominant culture, too privileged and proximate to power. In each sphere I often find myself articulating a perspective that is not shared by the group… and often feeling alone in doing so (even where I sense others may share my perspective… few are bold enough to go against the crowd).

4. Yet there’s something particular that happens in social justice spaces, where my positionality discredits my voice. It’s this phenomenon: when I try to articulate the upside of a polarity that is more often privileged in dominant culture (e.g. urgency, inside the polarity of urgency vs slowness, e.g.), by virtue of my identities only the downside of the polarity is heard. So I might be trying to make a case for the “fierce urgency of now,” but because of my visible identities my interlocutors might only hear the false urgency of white supremacy culture.

This felt like a profound aha for me, as an experience I’ve encountered repeatedly and hadn’t yet found a good way out of: where my (presumed) positionality drowns out what I am trying to say. And it feels much bigger than me. This dynamic feels to me at the core of our current polarization, where each side can’t hear the other in part because we can’t hear the upside of the other’s pole inside of their identities… which we associate with the downside that seems so obvious to us.

A time for Radical Bridgers… and Wayfinders

This is the work we are called to do… and it’s incredibly difficult. But it doesn’t have to be lonely! I consider everyone in our gathering in Borikén to be what Pat calls “radical bridgers.” People deeply committed to seeing and holding the whole, to playing a bridging role between the polarities… turning binaries into spectrums. In this global moment of intense polarization, we need more radical bridgers to reconnect across differences and paradigms… and together point the way forward.

In her introduction Mila invoked her ancestral connection to people who are Wayfinders… and I resonated deeply. It was this thread that I connected to most strongly in Moana, and where I found myself tearing up watching Moana 2: she is a Wayfinder. Like Elsa in Frozen 2, she MUST go (and yes, longtime readers will know that I identify profoundly with the young female protagonists of contemporary Disney movies). Updated after publishing to add this little gem; thanks to my sister Trina for the share:

Yes! This resonates so hard… and explains my connection to Moana, Elsa, and others called to this role. This is Moana’s calling; it is her role. More than that: the collective depends on it; the future of her people depend on her answering the call, on voyaging.

And yet there’s a unique pain there, because in order to go… we Wayfinders have to leave. That means leaving people behind: people I love. And people who usually don’t understand why I’m leaving… because they are called to stay. Just as some of us are Wayfinders… others are Stewards. Caregivers. While I am amphibious and polyamorous and called to multiplicity… others are not.

How can we find ways to honor and support everyone’s callings? And the question on the table for those of us in Borikén: how can we support ourselves and each other in the lonely and uncertain work of wayfinding?

Anyway, this process of integration (ongoing!) has been enormously helpful and feels profound to me. I fear it won’t feel that way to readers… but I trust you will take what serves and leave the rest.

I want to express deep gratitude for the generous stewardship of David Hsu at Omidyar for the grant funding that made Belonging @ Scale possible: I am humbled by his faith and trust in what we are trying to seed here.

I’m also humbled and grateful to the land and people of Borikén for so graciously hosting us; to Dan and Tonya for their vision with the Kineo Center; to Myrna and Lourdes in particular for generously sharing their relationships and wisdom; and to Bibi Balanani, Guaribo, Pluma, and Adela for welcoming us to their native land… and sharing their healing gifts.

Finally, I’m so grateful to the Belonging @ Scale team: some truly beautiful humans and souls doing inspiring work to build belonging in the world; I feel honored to count them as friends and collaborators.

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I am writing this on the return trip from a profound and spiritually transformational week in Borikén (the indigenous name for the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico). I worked hard to set my 2025 intentions before arriving for our second annual Belonging @ Scale gathering (a name that may evolve as we feel into our collective intentions)… and now I want to share them here with the benefit and refinement of a week of deep intentional practice.

I always choose intentions that show up fractally in my life: in different relationships and contexts (professionally, personally, as a parent, lover, friend). I orient toward what I call “I, We, World”: meaning that what I practice at each level is fractally consistent with the other levels: my inner work is connected to my relational work is expressing my calling in the world.

2024 for me was about “repairing the ruptures”: a deep commitment to the relational work of healing, connecting (and reconnecting) and collaborating. Where 2023 closed with a focus on “I,” 2024 for me was about “We”… and I’m feeling clearly that 2025 will be more about World.

I’m still integrating deep learnings, and trying to move slowly. As John Dewey said:

We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.

The bridge from last year’s learnings to this year’s intentions seems to center on this theme: the deep longing to see and be seen. I mean this not in the narrow sense of sight with our eyes, but in the spiritual sense of appreciating another in their wholeness: a soul-seeing, if you will. As I was thinking about this theme over the last couple weeks, I received an email from the good folks at Rooted Global Village, in which they observed:

There is a familiar ache — one that speaks to the desire for intimacy and connection with oneself and others. A longing to be in authentic relationship — to let ourselves see and be seen — which is so deeply human.

Yes. A yearning for intimacy, for interdependence, for the felt experience that we matter to each other. This to me is belonging in action: the active quality of embodying that belonging to self, and of letting others know that they too belong.

Key Lessons from 2024

My 2024 intentions focused on deep collaboration; slowness and feeling my feelings; and exploring the edge of my preferences where they become boundaries. I am sitting with four broad categories of lessons emerging from my efforts to embody these intentions.

But my biggest takeaway from 2024 (actually finally landing in my body in these early weeks of 2025, thanks in part to some deep conversations with my partner Leela) is actually upstream of the four lessons that follow… so I’ll start with this big truth:

I have trauma.

This is a massive shift in my own self-understanding, and the story I tell about myself. I have been in deep inquiry for years about whether and how it shows up in my own life (including a week-long exploration back in 2021 of Somatics, Trauma, and Resilience), but I’ve been slow to come to this conclusion. First, because it’s not acute, and second because relatively it seems so much less significant than the capital T trauma I see all around me.

But I’ve had to confront the reality that my past wounding/conditioning is coloring my perceptions of the present… which is one definition of how trauma works. I have two core wounds:

1. There isn’t space for my emotional experience; I am too big to be held.

2. People can’t see me inside of my body; I am made out to be the perpetrator.

The common thread here is the definition of trauma that Sarah Peyton offers as being “too alone” (hat-tip to Rajkumari Neogy for helping make that connection for me):

[Trauma is] the experience of something difficult, during or after which we are not accompanied by warm and precise understanding, either from ourselves or from others.

I have long known where these wounds come from, but it feels significant to name them as trauma that is getting in the way of how I want to show up in the world.

This realization feels quite liberating, actually: I am entering 2025 committed to finally letting go of those stories and healing. It feels good to be holding these intentions heading into the Lunar New Year of the Snake: a time of shedding and rebirth. I want to take off the dark-colored glasses that keep me hypervigilant for evidence to confirm the stories I fear… and thus create a self-fulfilling prophecy that prevents me from seeing a more complex and generous reality. I am tired of being complicit in my own non-belonging: it’s exhausting carrying around my armor all the time, and expecting not to be seen… and then behaving in ways that elicit the very thing I fear.

This is hard work, because of course I get ample evidence moving through the world that confirms these stories: that actually it isn’t safe to share my emotional vulnerable self; that people do cast me as perpetrator. And: I feel strong and resilient enough that I can re-conceive what it means to be “unsafe.” That is to say: I can handle it. I am no longer a child where the unsafety felt existential: I have other sources of resilience, and can resource myself when I am not seen.

So this is a core understanding that informs all that follows: a deep intention to let go of these old stories that are keeping me tethered to my trauma, and to move into the new year with tenderness, discernment, and a commitment to seeing the world in all its nuanced complexity.

With that context, I want to share my other four lessons-in-the-process-of-being-integrated:

(A number of people have asked about my retrospection and intention-setting process, so I’ve included that at the end of this post in case it’s helpful for others.)

1. Detachment with love

I value my ability to feel deep compassion for another person’s suffering, and to see their full potential. The downside of this gift is a tendency toward rescuing or enabling: to wanting their healing more than they themselves want it. I can inadvertently subject us both to the pain of trying to be in relationship with someone’s potential, rather than their present reality. I am slowly coming to understand that I can better honor myself and people I care about by loving from a distance.

Giving them the gift of acceptance (of who they are at present) and appreciation for their humanity… and myself the gift of detaching from outcomes, or needing them to be something for me that they are not choosing to be. As my Building Belonging teammate Kazu beautifully reminded me (quoting a friend, I believe): “Sometimes space is the thing that helps you move towards relationship.” This is the deeper work inside of my commitment to distinguishing boundaries (core needs) from preferences: once I acknowledge that a relationship cannot meet my core needs, I need to accept that reality and enforce my boundaries. As Genny Rumancik put it on the very day I was writing this:

Yes: I need to detach with love.

2. Create more space between “yes” and “and.”

Ahh… such a deep and valuable learning. I feel like people in my life have been trying to tell me a version of this for years, and I finally got it (I may be slow, but I’ll get there with some support!). This is the deeper work inside of my commitment to slowness. My strength: my brain and my nervous system process very rapidly. My weakness: sometimes that rapid processing can bypass the work of letting impact or emotions land fully in my body… or in allowing that impact on me to land in them. My tendency—when receiving feedback, or in conversation about complex topics—can be to acknowledge my partner’s point/perspective with a “yes, I hear you”… and then pivot too quickly to “and what about.” Or to move too quickly from “I see you” to “can you see me?”

On a good day I have landed the “yes” in myself and am genuinely ready to move on… but they may not be. My “yes” may not have yet landed in their nervous systems. On a bad day… it may also have not yet landed fully in mine, and they are rightly not feeling fully seen or heard. There’s a deeper thread here in the context of my work for justice: given my positionality and identities inside of our systems of oppression, sometimes a “yes” is all that is possible. Sometimes there isn’t space/it isn’t appropriate to try to offer my “and”: they won’t be able to hear it, and I can undermine the gift of being seen if I then insist that they also see me. Sigh… ongoing work for me, especially given my deep commitment to repairing ruptures (nearly always a two-way street!) My mantra: as a person who moves fast, slowness is a gift for the person I’m relating to (and usually, also to me!)

3. It is my responsibility to take care of myself (and to accept care!)

Two seemingly contradictory learnings here. First: it is my responsibility to see and care for my own pain. I can—and must—give myself the care I yearn to receive from others. That allows me to be more patient and grounded in relationship, and to postpone my needs so I can attend to others more impacted (often necessary in justice work across lines of marginalization and privilege).

Second: of course I need to receive care. As my therapist reminds me: support is a human right. I need to focus more on letting support in: both from the Earth (a deep source of resilience for me this year, amid difficult times), and from people who love me. I would like to be less focused on insisting that care be transmitted through my love languages, and more accepting of care that is offered via the love language of the giver. I’d like to let more love in, however it is expressed.

4. How I receive feedback… and change behavior.

I was really pleased this year to come up with a framework for how I receive feedback (I suspect this may be more universal, but I intended it as specific guidance to my close partners for how to get me to change behavior). I initially wrote about it at the end of 2023 at a more general level (how to transform!); this is adapted specifically to how to integrate feedback from others for behavior change. I want to share it here both to remind myself, and in case it might be helpful for others:

1. You: lead with love: honor my humanity and intent, and seek consent to offer feedback.

2. Once I consent, I center you: we work to understand the need/why (including any connection to past wounding or trauma patterns), and the impact, and the request (it hurts me when… because… could you please…?)

3. Once you feel heard/understood, we switch and center me: am I ready to consent to this request? If so, skip to the next step. If not, work to understand the resistance: what is the need the current behavior is trying to meet? Why is this difficult? What is the wounding/trauma here?

4. Once needs are understood, dialogue about strategies to meet both our needs: maybe your request is the best way forward; maybe there is another strategy that might better address our unmet needs. And here’s the hard part: Sometimes my ability to change behavior is influenced by a change I may need in you as well: if you want me to express my feelings more, I may need you to focus on more intentionally holding safe emotional space. Can we be open to mutual transformation?

5. Consent to behavior change, and agree on what success looks like.

6. Practice! Signpost when trying the new behavior, celebrate successes, and refine/improve as needed until transformation has occurred :-)

So often feedback I receive comes with an expectation that the act of making the request will lead to the change… and then my partner is frustrated when it doesn’t. Painting the fuller picture of what is needed (at least for me!) has been really helpful. I genuinely want to change behavior if something I’m doing is negatively impacting someone I care about… and I need help to be able to transform.

Each of these are what I call lessons observed but not yet fully learned: it will take ongoing practice to integrate them. They inform this year’s three intentions.

2025 Intentions

This is going to be a rough year for all of us: responding to authoritarianism and defending those most marginalized, while trying to continue to build the world we know is possible. We need each other more than ever… and we need to continue grounding ever more deeply into the unique work that is ours to do. I share these intentions in that spirit: where my inner work connects to what will support my relationships and community, and serve what the world is needing.

1. Shine my light… but don’t insist that others see it.

There are two components here. One is to continue to share my gifts with the world: boldly, in integrity, guided by my calling. This is the piece of me I associate with my redwood self. My work here is to continue to root deep and grow tall, heeding adrienne maree brown’s reminder: “however big the work is, is how deep within yourself you need to go.” My vision is expansive; my inner work therefore must be very deep. This is also about taking care of myself when I don’t feel seen; when I feel like my gifts aren’t appreciated. Grounding in my calling, accepting support from the Earth, receiving love from those who do see me. My redwood drawing nourishment from relationships in order to stand in its fullness.

And there is a second piece: to give others the gift of being seen… without making that gift conditional on being seen in return. This is the piece of me I associate with my giraffe self: attuned to others, seeing far and with my NVC giraffe ears trying to listen deeply. It is also part of what justice asks: to be the first mover, to initiate repair, to listen… and to see. Here I love the Zulu greeting/concept of sawubona: I see you. I honor your humanity. I want to give that gift to others… and to let go of my attachment to being seen in return. As someone who deeply yearns for intimacy (which Esther Perel beautifully defines as letting someone know that they matter)… can I be the first to offer and invite intimacy?

2. Allow people to feel me… and invite them to see me.

Last year I did a much better job feeling my feelings; this year I’d like to try to do a better job sharing them with others. I have so much love, but I fear that others don’t always see it or feel it through my identities and my armoring. I want to stop letting that fear prevent me from showing people, and giving them a chance to see me. This is the part of me I associate with my rainbow unicorn self. I got a rainbow unicorn tattoo this year over my heart: to remind myself of my essence, even when others can’t see it. I want to embody and project more softness/openness… and I want to let people know when I’m feeling hurt. And harder still: when they hurt me. My partner Leela helped me realize in 2024 how hard it is for me to take up emotional space. It feels much safer and easier for me to claim intellectual space; much more vulnerable to ask for emotional space. I’d like to do a better job:

• More proactively naming my core wounding to close partners early in collaboration, so they can see the old shape I am trying to escape/transform and help me hold myself accountable to my healing/intentions.

• Naming when something isn’t working for me, and inviting collaboration around a way forward that works for everyone (rather than trying to engineer a solution or advocate for a specific strategy that I have come up with in isolation).

• Naming the “ouch” when someone says or does something that hurts me (and trying to do so without blame, owning my feelings and my sadness/grief/hurt). A line I’d like to try: “can I share how I have been impacted?”

• Advocate for my voice to be heard (not just to speak, but to be heard)… and to do my best to share from my heart. I often tell myself the story that others aren’t curious about my experience… I’d like to challenge that narrative, and be more proactive about inviting consent to share when there’s something I’d like to bring to the collective.

The Zulu response/counterpart to sawubona is shiboka, translating roughly to: it is good to be seen; I exist for you.

It is good to be seen: I’d like to reveal more of myself in order for that to be possible.

3. Practice deep collaboration and mutual influencing.

This is the same intention I had last year… and I’m running it back. Some good—and painful—learnings this year, and it remains a core intention. There are two components… and the first enables the second. Here’s the thing: in my I/We/World framing, We is the bridge from I to World. Any vision I want to see realized in the world can only be achieved through deep collaboration. The vision I feel called to is huge; far beyond my capacity. I am humbled in the face of it. I desperately need help… and companionship. Accompaniment. Solidarity. Belonging. I want to work alongside and learn from people who are also holding big visions, and collaborate where our visions intersect. I don’t want to lead alone.

Second: I want to step more into my rightful power. This is something I have been resisting and struggling with for years, in part because of my positionality inside of social justice spaces. And it finally clicked (the fourth piece just this week in Borikén, actually) that I need four conditions to step into power:

1. Trust that my collaborators are anchored in themselves and their own visions (so I won’t pull them away from their callings). I need to feel them in their groundedness, and see where our visions intersect.

2. Trust that they can hold and meet me in the bigness of me and my vision. I resonated this year with the metaphor that I am a big ship that leaves a big wake. It is my responsibility to move with attunement so I don’t capsize others: and I want deeply to work with those who won’t be thrown off by my wake.

3. A deep commitment to solidarity: we have each other’s back, and will do the hard work of navigating rupture and repair together.

4. Their active consent/desire/request for me to step into the leadership that is mine to do… and their support and guidance to help me find my proper place/right relationship to my power. Including giving me feedback on where I can do better in moving toward my vision in a collective context… and supporting me in landing/integrating that feedback.

I had a chance to practice all three of these intentions in a deep way this past week while in Borikén with the Belonging @ Scale team… and it feels profound. I’m really excited to have that group as a fractal within which to practice… and to bring these intentions into other domains of my life. In addition to to my core relationship, I will be seeking other containers and practice grounds.

Domains of Practice

Some things I’m thinking about:

1. I’m really interested in more proactively cultivating an intentional spiritual practice this year (a key lesson for me from Borikén), including integrating ceremony and ritual.

2. 1:1 liberatory leadership coaching, particularly focused on the third intention around deep collaboration and right relationship to power and leadership (of course informed by the other two)… I want to get guidance from others who shepherd big visions in multiracial transnational contexts.

3. Considering more plant medicine work… if I get called to the right container/context in which to journey. And somatic bodywork… such powerful medicine there.

4. I’m going to take singing lessons! I’m interested in exploring ways to express my voice that challenge me and take me out of my head and into my body. I always store my tension in my jaw; I’ve learned it’s a sign that I’m holding something back from being expressed (or absorbing external pain, and trying to prevent it from entering me). I’d like to practice connecting the channel from my core/center to my voice.

5. I continue to be interested in the intersection of power, shadow, and the erotic. I’m still considering ISTA Level 2, and would love to find a way to take a course with the Light Dark Institute.

2025 will be a big year of transition and transformation for me: transitioning Building Belonging into its next phase with a new leadership structure; getting a W2 job—hopefully in a role practicing transformation and unlocking resources inside of philanthropy; moving with my family back to Seattle from southern Oregon; and co-creating the next gathering of Belonging @ Scale (or whatever we choose to name it that captures that sentiment). I look forward to practicing my intentions, and invite support in holding me accountable.

In community,

Brian

Retrospection / Intention-Setting Process

In case others are curious/interested in cultivating their own practice… here’s what I did this year. It took about three weeks of carving out time in between work, relationships, parenting, and holidays.

1. I center in my intentions for the year, and use that as a prism for all that follows.

2. I keep a running notes file during the year of things that feel significant and likely to be key learnings, so I start with that.

3. Then I go back through my calendar and photos to remind myself of what I was doing, and with whom, and capture highlights in a google doc.

4. I aggregate and go through all my notes from therapy (blessedly my therapist sends an email summarizing key themes/takeaways after each session: godsend!)

5. This year for the first time I also read through all my journals (9 of them!) and dictated key themes and highlights into the google doc.

6. Then I went through the google doc (60 pages!) and bolded things that felt fractally important.

7. I bucketed those items into a total of 22 themes… which I then whittled down to the four lessons and three intentions you see here :-)

I also created intentional time and space to sit and feel and think and reflect. In particular I spent some solo time in my spiritual sanctuary: the redwoods (where I identified in November a number of key themes that ended up emerging in December). I realize this may sound like a lot of work: and it is. And it’s essential. As the saying goes: lessons will be repeated until they are learned. I challenge myself with the practice from Dragon Dreaming, which says we should spend fully one quarter of our time reflecting/learning/celebrating… before turning our attention once again to dreaming.

I was pleasantly surprised this year how clearly the process yielded results: I felt no ambiguity in the key themes and the work that is mine to do.

Annual Best-of List

Usually I do an entire post devoted to this, but I just haven’t been able to muster the energy/motivation. Instead I’d like to point to a few podcasts that I’ve found helpful in my journey this year; apologies for not including more ceremony/curation here:

1. Three Black Men on the World as Ritual

2. The One Question to Finally Let Go of Control with ALOK

3. All creativity happens in relationship

4. Colette Pichon Battle — On Knowing What We're Called To

5. What It Takes to Heal with Prentis Hemphill + adrienne maree brown

6. Is Racial Repair Possible?

7. Finale: What did we learn? Where do we go from here?

8. The Mono/Poly Relationship: Challenges and Solutions with Dr. Elisabeth Sheff

9. The Art of Movement Building: Personal Liberation for Public Change with Mamphela Ramphele

10. Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 2

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Two weeks ago I was honored to join about one hundred practitioners in New Orleans to explore the emerging field of “relational reparations.” It was an essential place to land post-election: a gathering led by and centering Black women, explicitly embracing indigenous principles, and trying to hold concurrently the urgent need for material reparations alongside the equally important work of relational repair and reconciliation.

The U.S. election underscored what has long been clear: we are living in a moment that requires the fundamental transformation of our systems. We remain deeply divided and deeply disillusioned: if we are to have any hope of charting a new course, we simply must do things differently. When dominant culture is so manifestly inadequate to the task, it is increasingly important to look to the margins to find glimmers of brighter futures. bell hooks calls the margins:

A site of radical possibility… It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

This was the purpose as I understood it of the Gathering by the River: an opportunity to gather with kindred spirits to ground in radical possibility. I want to share some reflections here about what transformation requires, what repair asks of us, and what we can learn from efforts to gather differently.

Convening the system… to transform it

Readers of this newsletter will know I am deeply interested in the question of how to transform systems, and for years have been exploring the transformative potential of “systems convening.” The premise is to try to convene the entire system in a room: a fractal of the whole.

The “Gathering by the River” was the brainchild of June Wilson as she stewards the final spend-down of the Compton Foundation, and a beautiful collaborative effort by a group of people for whom I have deep respect: including friends CC Gardner-Gleser, Caitlin Brune, and Hanni Hanson, as well as an all-star organizing team of staff and fellows (shout-out to Monica, Audrey, Bryan, Shelley, and everyone else who made it possible).

In this case, June and team were interested in convening the “reparations” system, which they conceptualized as follows:

They centered the gathering in one part of the system… the oft-neglected aspect of relational repair. They explain the why of “relational reparations”:

We are referring to work where material and institutional reparations intersect with interpersonal healing and transformation. We believe that when we do justice work that bypasses human relationships, we haven’t really confronted how supremacy operates within all of us and any attempts toward true healing will remain incomplete.

They did a beautiful job getting the system in the room: I encountered people in all the spaces named above.

I felt so grateful to be among people who hold no illusions about America, and who nonetheless are working toward liberation with conviction and care. The organizers described the purpose of the gathering as follows:

To explore the ecosystem of relational repair in the context of settler colonialism and slavery in the United States. We gather here to support the practices of relational repair and connect the practitioners doing this work.

Convening the right people is the necessary first step. But then comes the work of how to hold transformative space: how to create the enabling conditions to make transformation possible.

The importance of creating the container/vibe

The Compton team did a beautiful job setting the stage, both through three pre-convening Zoom sessions, and through two days of pre-convening activities on the ground in New Orleans. The Zoom sessions set the tone: they created an opportunity for the participants to connect with each other, for June and team to model collaborative leadership, and to invite us into different ways of being/relating. Specifically, each session included a 30 min practice that signaled clearly to the participants: we are trying to do something different here. This is a space for transformation.

Shana Nunnelly offered a sound bath. Ariana Felix hosted a workshop on worldbuilding and imagination. Francina Kahl hosted a tea ceremony. I attended the first and third, and they were exquisite. In each case I experienced Black women offering their unique gifts: what I felt very clearly as a deep vocation where I, We, and World intersect. I also experienced the radical power of being held… and witnessed how transformative that felt for many of the Black women on the calls in particular. These are people on the front lines of social justice movements, often holding incredible space and entire communities… to have loving and tender space held for them felt beautiful to behold.

Celebrating Black women

My favorite aspect of the convening was the gift of experiencing such a diverse range of Black excellence. The choice of New Orleans was deliberate in that context. As an exhibit at the African American Museum of Art, History, and Culture noted:

More than that: the convening itself showcased the specific gifts of Black women working toward liberation. The most powerful moment of the entire convening for me was the invocation / welcome from June herself, which felt to me like a simultaneously inspiring and cautionary tale about the role of Black women in America.

Her tenacity and vision made this convening possible… and frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine anyone other than a Black woman of her stature being able to pull it off. And yet: the act of holding it all together—through yet another traumatizing election—stole her health. Battling bronchitis, she had to step away for two days from the convening she had poured her heart and soul into… and her body as well.

This is the cruel truth of our country: our path toward liberation has long been led by Black women… and they can’t do it alone. It’s too much. As the exit polls illustrate: Black women are doing their part.

It’s on the rest of us to step up if we want to get out of this mess. As June pleaded: it is time for us to “carry the water.”

Men are missing in action

This is the unfortunate counterpoint. In a group of over 100 practitioners, only ten were men (and only three of us were White). It is to the great credit of women—and women of color in particular, as the voting patterns make clear—that they are leading the path toward liberation. And it is a disaster for our movements and our hopes of liberation that more men are not doing the work alongside them.

It is time for us to treat this situation as the emergency that it is. Men are uniquely ill-suited for this moment in history, because we have been socialized and conditioned into the very patterns and behaviors that have brought us to the brink: domination, competition, disconnection, alienation. I’ve written extensively about this and won’t rehash it here except to note: if we take this problem seriously, it requires a systemic response. I’m not talking here about MAGA men or those fueling rising authoritarianism (though I am also concerned with them); I’m talking about our brothers, husbands, lovers, fathers, sons, and friends who are missing in movements for justice.

My consistent experience in movement work has been that—even in spaces curated for diversity and seeking gender balance—we only get 10-25% participation from men. I have now actively curated 8-10 cohorts through my work in Building Belonging, and consistently the biggest struggle is finding men ready to step into liberatory work. And those that do show up are a rare breed: the men I connected with in New Orleans were universally deeply tender-hearted souls, very far from the mainstream norms governing masculinity in America.

And while White men remain the biggest problem, it’s important to note that this isn’t just or even primarily a problem of Whiteness (a majority of Latino men voted for Trump) and it’s worth understanding why. There are profound implications for what we must do to respond, but suffice to say for now: it is time to treat men missing in liberatory action as the crisis that it is.

Repair is radical

I felt the same thing I always feel entering these types of spaces. First, a profound sense of relief and relaxation: ahh, I am among my people. I belong: I can let my guard down, let go of my tendency toward hypervigilance. Second, I see reflected in the eyes of “my people”—who very much do not look like me—a question. Sometimes curious, sometimes skeptical, occasionally hostile: what are you doing here? A sense of non-belonging.

I understand; I feel the same thing when I encounter White men, even in spaces devoted to justice. It’s a reminder of how far we have to go, and how difficult this work is. Of course Black women in America are skeptical of White men. Of course they are guarded. We have so little experience with deep authentic multiracial relationships.

In my cloistered upbringing in overwhelmingly White southern Oregon, I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with a Black woman until my first year of college on the east coast, at age 18. One woman I connected with at the convening told me that she had no meaningful relationships with White people at all until she was 28. We still lead profoundly segregated lives… even when we move through multiracial space.

The convening showcased several “relational repair” cohorts: White women with wealth partnering with Black women to practice wealth return (reparations) in the context of relationships (repair). The key takeaway for me: this work is really hard.

And: it’s incredibly liberatory! I was touched by the honesty and the grappling; I particularly enjoyed witnessing the relationship between Francina Kahl (a Black woman) and her friend/colleague Jackie Gow (a White woman). They talk about their experience on their podcast; this episode in particular really resonated: is racial repair possible? The answer: yes… but it asks a lot of us. As friend and teammate Kazu Haga reminded us yesterday: in the entirety of human history, we’ve never had to connect/repair across as many dimensions of difference/harm as we do today.

Repair is a radical act.

We are desperate for reconnection

This is what gives me hope. In my many conversations over the course of the week, I consistently encountered openness, vulnerability, curiosity. Connection. The question is genuine: they want to know why I am there. What brought me to this work? And I want to know about them: what keeps you going? Two of the convening emcees—Felicia Ishino and Sharon Chism from Sankofa Impact—introduced a refrain from Zulu culture in southern Africa that we were invited to share with each other.

Sawubona: I see you. I honor your dignity and worth. I am because you are.

Shiboka: It is good to be seen.

And honestly: it feels really good to be seen. And to give the gift of seeing someone. It’s a universal need, and one we are desperate for.

I actually find it really hopeful that our culture is so hungry for those examples of connection across difference. It’s why we love those movies that show racial repair (though most of the ones White culture celebrates can be rightly critiqued for white saviorism). But lurking in the problematic portrayal is a deep longing: for reconnection. For belonging. My favorite example in recent years was the Grammys duet featuring Tracy Chapman, elder Black icon, joined by Luke Combs: a young White man making his name in country music. A deeply unlikely pairing… and an utter joy to witness:

I love everything about it. But what I like most: it offers White men another way to be in relationship with Black women. Luke shows up with deep respect: not trying to lead, nor trying to follow, but simply accompanying. Joining. Connecting in right relationship, a relationship that honors her leadership, her gifts… and brings his own to deepen and enhance the experience.

This I think is the invitation June was getting at, and the invitation we (well, I’ll speak for myself) are longing for. To join, to be part of, to contribute… to belong. And it is my deep felt sense that so many of us are hungry for it. I think people are willing to work for it, too. I know I am. But we really need to believe—and to see—that it’s possible.

The art and beauty of repairing the ruptures

The convening felt like an apt invitation to reflection and introspection as the year draws to a close. Back in January when I set my intentions for the year, I chose an overarching theme: Repairing the Ruptures. So it felt like a gift to have an opportunity to gather in community with others committed to that work, clear-eyed about how difficult it is.

I’ve always been deeply interested in repair, in what it takes to return to connection. Perhaps it’s the middle-child in me, or the empath/rescuer who deeply sees the humanity and wounding in others and wants to alleviate it. Growing up I didn’t learn many practical skills in the art of relational repair: it was not something I saw modeled, in my family or in the world. I saw clearly that we were broken, and it felt so weird to me that society didn’t seem to acknowledge what felt so obvious. I love this inflection point in Ted Lasso, because he at least names the truth:

Except he’s not quite right. It’s not that we need to change: it’s that we need to repair. Change isn’t the antidote to brokenness; repair is.

Increasingly I’ve found myself drawn to this conclusion: repair is everything. Rupture is inevitable… but if we can find our way back to relationship, anything is possible. If we understand the original wound of all systems of oppression as separation… the antidote is reconnection. Not the faux unity that papers over harm, but an honest reckoning that seeks to make amends, to repair the violation.

I actually think relationships are stronger on the other side of repair: it’s the felt sense that we can do hard things, that we care enough to make the effort. I’m reminded here of the Japanese concept/art of kintsugi: the process of repairing a broken dish by lacquering the cracks with gold… rendering the original even more beautiful after the repair.

I actually prefer the term kintsukuroi, which translates to “golden repair.” Yes… that to me carries the connotation I’m seeking, of something so attractive that it’s worth confronting the difficulty and vulnerability of seeking amends. It also reminds us that repair is an art, a craft to be cultivated in pursuit of beauty and connection.

What are we willing to risk… in order to repair?

I want to close with deep gratitude to June and the team for all the heartfelt work they put into hosting the convening, and for the gift of their invitation to join. And to everyone I encountered there, for the deep gifts of their work in the world, and the inspiration of their commitment to liberation.

I remain committed to repairing the ruptures in myself, in my relationships, and in the world. And I am feeling a powerful call post-election and post-convening to better-embody that invitation, to try to illustrate in a more compelling way the fruits of liberation. I fear sometimes that people see in me the struggle… but don’t see the reward. They see the work, but don’t see the joy. I want to do a better job sharing what it feels like to be moving toward liberation.

I will leave it here for now. Much to reflect on as I prepare for the second gathering of Belonging @ Scale, rapidly approaching in January in Borikén (the indigenous name for Puerto Rico). A chance to be with my people, to practice building belonging together, and to move toward liberation.

In community,

Brian

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Today is a day for feeling the hurt. A day when we have no choice but to confront the dark chasm between the world as it is… and the world as we long for it to be. Today is a day for grieving that gap.

Last night the latent stress and anxiety that had been bubbling in my chest all day hardened into the familiar feeling of dread: the oppressive weight of sadness. Discouragement. Grief. Not quite despair… that’s not yet an emotion I have allowed myself to feel.

Hold for relief/mourning

This was the title of my calendar block this morning. Sadly, it is the latter feeling I find myself sinking into. I feel fortunate to have spaces and communities to turn to: Prentis Hemphill and the Embodiment Institute anticipated this moment and held a truly gorgeous post-election gathering space (link to the recording here; well worth the watch/practice). As they put it:

No matter what happens on Election Day, we know that we need each other.

We’re making space to name what our bodies are feeling, space to grieve and space to name what we’re longing for. Right now is the perfect time to be in a community of people with liberatory visions, taking courageous actions, and moving towards the future where all of us have safety, freedom, and dignity.

It was exactly what I needed. Over 2,000 people joined from around the country to be with each other, and to listen to the wisdom from Prentis, from movement elder Alta Starr, and to practice with Oscar Trujillo.

Prentis set the tone, inviting us to keep dropping in. They invited us into our task for today: “opening up to what is.” The space was exactly what I needed: an invitation to feel, in a well-held container, with kindred spirits together struggling to hold the complexity and contradictions of the moment, the “churning” of feelings inside us. Prentis again:

We’re not offering a solution to the churning; we’re offering a space for the churning… first we have to listen to the churning.

As we closed, Alta offered another beautiful invitation, one grounded in her own commitment:

An invitation to staying soft, staying open, and reaching out to connect… with what can help me stay soft, stay open… not shutting down.

Mmm. Yes. Connecting in ways that allow us to stay open, not to return to the rigid protective shapes that have got us to this place. Prentis built on Alta’s offering to ask this question:

Where might I find connection that can allow me to be with what is here without requiring me to contort myself into what has been?

The Earth holds us all

After the beautiful community space, I felt called to nature: to be among the redwoods and Ponderosas, and the gorgeous maples and oaks that are sharing their beauty in this season. I moved slowly, still tending to my knee (7 weeks post-surgery). Listening deeply to the water moving inexorably downstream, following its mandate to return to the ocean. Watching the leaves drop, unapologetically, inevitably, to the ground. Such breathtaking beauty, giving generously of itself, trusting deeply in the cycle of life.

On a day of darkness, it feels important to also see the light. To appreciate the beauty that exists in this world. I felt my body calming, my feet in the leaves, the sunlight warming me after its 93 million mile journey to bring us light, and life. As I felt myself drawing resilience, I found myself better able to allow into my consciousness the dread that I felt last night. To allow myself to wonder about my relationship to fear, and to despair.

The fear of hope, and the fear of despair

My wife shared with me a dream she had the other night, in which I said to her “I’m scared.” In the dream she said to me what she repeated as she retold it to me: “I’ve never heard you say those words.”

Sigh. I felt self-conscious writing my last post, about my relationship to sadness and tears. Self-conscious not because of the topic, but because of the contrast with the moment we were in: a few weeks pre-election, the bombardment of Gaza worse than ever. I feared that it felt self-indulgent to explore my inner feeling state in a time of such external strife. And yet: it feels deeply related. If we can’t feel our feelings, if we aren’t in touch with our fear and our sadness… they drive us.

Yesterday my 7-year-old asked me why people vote for Donald Trump, and I answered that they were scared. And that those of us who voted for Kamala… and I paused. Are also scared. Yet it feels to me that there is something different about our fear. Ours is a fear rooted in hope, in a conviction that things can be better (to be clear, not that Kamala would make them better, but that we together are capable of caring for everyone’s needs). Theirs is a fear rooted in despair: etymologically, it means “without hope.”

That’s why I don’t let myself feel despair: I refuse to live without hope. I refuse to give up on us.

I wrote about this five years ago in the context of anger, contrasting the “anger of hope” with the “anger of despair.” I still think that’s right, but I think I misnamed the animating emotion. Yes it is expressed as anger, but underneath is fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of what we are capable of doing to each other in our desperation. Fear that there won’t be enough for all of us. Fear that we might be alone; that our efforts won’t be enough.

“Caring for us, and you as a part of the us”

I loved this tender line from Oscar Trujillo, as he guided us in an embodiment practice. This to me is what it comes back to: we have to care for all of us… including ourselves. We have to extend the love we long to receive.

I’ve been trying to narrate this election to my children—ages 7 and 9—and strike that balance between “things are fucked” and “our work remains the same… conditions just got more difficult.” Trying to assure them that they will not be affected… and acknowledging that that is part of the problem, that under our toxic systems suffering is not equally distributed. And trying to convey the deeper truth that actually we are all affected, because we are all connected. And until we recognize that fundamental interdependence… we actually won’t make it out of this quadrennial doom loop. As the saying goes: lessons will be repeated until they are learned.

We are not alone

This morning I said goodbye to my sister’s yellow lab, Estrella. She has lived a good long life. I felt surprisingly emotional in our parting; what I felt was gratitude. For how much love she has brought into my sister’s life; I have found peace knowing that she is there for my sister. I found myself marveling at the beautiful reciprocity of that love. Here is a being who has enjoyed what we all so deeply long for: the unself-conscious giving and receiving of love, rooted in a deep knowing that this is our birthright.

I’ve been trying to find a song to capture my mood, to accompany me in this moment. I finally settled on John Lennon’s Imagine: it strikes the right note for me of grounded hope tinged with sadness: recognizing that a better future is possible… and that we have a long way to go.

In his voice you can hear that he knows that many of us will not make it to that Promised Land… as he himself did not. But that we must work to get there all the same. I love the look on his face when he sings the line “You may say I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.” It’s that conviction we need, to know that we are not alone, that a better world is possible.

I am feeling love and tenderness in my heart as I type these words. I feel heavy, but it’s a heaviness no longer of dread, but of an honest reckoning with the weight of this moment, and the work that is ours to do.

I still feel yesterday’s tension in my jaw… but now it’s co-held alongside more expansiveness in my chest. I’ve been texting with friends and loved ones today, reminding myself that I am not alone. That we all want a better world, and are struggling in our own ways to get there.

Tomorrow I will turn my attention once again to strategizing, to dreaming, to co-creating the world I long for. Today is a day for grieving the world as it is, and to doing it together. I hope you are able to be with your people today, and to find spaces to grieve, to feel, and to connect… in ways that open you toward belonging.

In community,

Brian

I went sixteen years without crying.

Sure, I’d had quiet tears emerge during evocative movie scenes, or the tears of joy/awe that accompanied the births of my children. I’ve experienced the hot tears that come with gritted teeth in the face of extreme physical pain. But not a sob, or the full-bodied release of sadness or grief… since my last long-term romantic relationship ended when I was 23 (a three-and-a-half year relationship with my college sweetheart).

Rationally I understood that crying is a normal human emotion, and a way that human bodies process and express sadness and grief. I watch with amazement—and if I’m being honest, some envy—how easily my children cry, how readily they feel and express their emotions. I’d noticed that since becoming a parent my emotions were far closer to the surface, way more raw: I would tear up more easily at movies, books… many things, really. But still: I wouldn’t cry. Not sob.

Today I want to talk about my process (ongoing!) of returning to my emotional self, to allowing myself to access and express sadness and grief in the way humans were meant to.

TL;DR: Patriarchy sucks. And: I am capable of giving myself the care I yearn for… and am slowly building the capacity to allow others to witness my vulnerability.

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Why can’t I cry?

Obviously as a student of patriarchy I understand why I don’t cry: I can remember innumerable examples growing up where I was told in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that it wasn’t okay to cry.

I was always a sensitive kid, and a sucker for sentimentality. When I was a teenager I got all the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and would read them at night by myself… a rare safe space to feel in a world and body where that wasn’t encouraged. But once adolescence started, I understood the way all boys do that crying wasn’t allowed.

But I don’t believe in that shit: I wrote my foundational piece on patriarchy back in 2019. I already gave myself permission to reclaim my humanity and my emotional self… intellectually, at least.

So, like the good rational man I’ve been socialized to be, I decided to look into it: why can’t I cry? Is it that I have nothing to cry about? Or that I’m suppressing my emotions? I started my inquiry in earnest in the fall of 2021, attending Staci Haines’ flagship Somatics, Trauma, and Resilience course at the Strozzi Institute dojo in Petaluma (highly recommend!) Despite doing deep work, I remained unmoved (well, unmoved to tears, to the full-bodied release that I witnessed literally everyone else there experiencing). I felt some envy, and frustration: damnit, how come I can’t feel?

Six months later as part of deepening my commitment to embodiment and better understanding/integrating my erotic self, I attended an ISTA course. I set a number of intentions and inquiries for that weeklong immersion, but a key one was this: can I cry?

Once again I found myself disappointed: while people fell apart all around me, I couldn’t collapse. I accessed pain, sadness, grief, and tears did come… but the same tears as always. Careful. Under control. Contextualized. Disembodied. One of my goals there was to lean into surrender… and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let go. I felt frustrated with myself.

Allowing myself to feel

But something happened during my time at ISTA. Something powerful. When I returned home, it finally happened: my first full-body cry in sixteen years.

It’s been three years now since I embarked on this journey to reclaim my emotional self, and in particular my human capacity to cry. To express and release sadness and grief. And it’s still really hard for me. I realize that I’ve had a tendency to rely on my resilience strategies to discharge the feelings in my body, rather than feeling and expressing them.

In her course, Staci distinguishes between survival strategies that keep us alive but prevent us from fully healing from trauma and keep us closed off, and resilience strategies that help us metabolize trauma and remain open. Good news for me: I’m really good at resilience, at discharging emotions so they don’t get stuck in my body. Usually through physical activity: mountain biking, hiking, or otherwise leaning on nature to replenish me.

Bad news: I’m not very good at feeling. (Yet!) I have learned to discharge my feelings without actually feeling them. Or: I “fix” the issue. I solve whatever thing is giving rise to the sensations… a strategy Prentis Hemphill observes can be a cop-out:

We move toward fixing to skip over feeling.

It’s been interesting to me to note all the subtle ways I “solve” and discharge what I track in my body (often pre-cognitively) as “unpleasant” sensations. Tightness in the jaw, in my chest; constriction. I will intuitively start massaging my chest, or unhinging my jaw. What if I didn’t? What if I listened to those sensations (dare I say, felt them?) and what they are trying to tell me?

I want to feel more. Both for myself, but also in service of connection with others. As I told my somatic therapist in a recent session: “I wish I didn't have to prove to people that I’m human.”

And: people could be forgiven for not seeing my humanity… because I’m not allowing them to. I’m not expressing my vulnerability, my feelings… the things that make me human. It’s a barrier to the thing I long for most: belonging. Intimacy and connection with others.

Feeling me… so I can feel you

This year one of my 2024 intentions was to slow down and allow myself to feel. Honestly, it’s a radical practice. I learn so much when I slow down… and I appreciate in new and different ways why it’s so hard, and why more people don’t do it. As Emily May aptly put it:

For sure. Way easier to just go for a mountain bike ride. And yet: I am a commitment to repairing the ruptures of patriarchy. Including in myself. Which means I owe it to myself to feel my feelings, to expunge the enduring vestiges of supremacy from my body: I will not violate my own integrity for the sake of ease.

That’s not all. I’ve been in a deep inquiry around empathy in recent months, and have reached this troubling conclusion: my capacity to feel what others are feeling is limited by my capacity to allow myself to feel it. How can I truly empathize with someone else’s sadness if I never allow myself to truly feel sad?

It’s been a rude challenge to my self-conception as an empathic person. And I am: I’m really good at cognitive empathy (intellectually understanding someone else’s experience). But it turns out that’s one of only three dimensions of empathy, and not the one people I’m closest to want from me most. There is also what researchers call “emotional empathy,” itself further divided into three distinct sub-components. The one I struggle with most is what they call “emotional contagion”: feeling what the other person is feeling (I actually think I’m pretty good at the other two components: feeling distress at their suffering, and feeling compassion). As Brené Brown put it:

In order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.

As always, my commitments are fractal and interconnected. The work I need to do for myself is also the work I need to do for my relationships is also the work I need to do for the world. Sigh.

It’s fun to grow

I like watching myself get better. Since that foundational moment in April 2022, I’ve now had four additional full-body cries. And I’m getting better at recognizing the need, and intentionally creating space for it. A few weeks ago on a trip to Seattle I felt the familiar welling up: a tightness in my throat and jaw, constriction in my chest. Aha: I need to cry.

I think the universe is pushing me in this direction: for the second straight year I’ve had a debilitating injury that has prevented me from accessing my primary sources of resilience (last year’s wrist surgery meant no mountain biking; this year’s ACL reconstruction means not only no mountain-biking, but also no hiking or even walking… at least for a few weeks). Which means that if I want to discharge this stuck energy in my body… the only way out is through.

Interestingly, I wasn’t yet sure what the emotion was, or the source of it. I knew I needed release… but from what? I’ve consistently turned to music and movies to help me access and release my emotions. That first time back in April 2022, I knew exactly what songs I wanted to listen to, and in what order. Even then I wasn’t yet fully cognitively aware of what I was needing until I heard the specific lyrics/chords that unlocked the feeling in me.

This time it took me almost two weeks to create the container: no kids in the house, my partners’ needs attended to, cleared my professional plate, so I could claim space for myself. I knew that I needed to watch the end of the movie Encanto, but even with that clarity I still wasn’t totally in touch with exactly what I was feeling. It wasn’t until I got to the scene I had not-fully-consciously been waiting for that it hit me: the unlocking, the release… at last.

Honestly, it felt really good. To let myself feel.

Undamming the flow

One key for me has been getting in touch with my resistance, trying to understand without judgment why this is so hard for me. In her work on human sexuality, Emily Nagoski frequently refers to the “dual control model” where she uses the metaphor of accelerants and brakes. I’ve found it helpful in my emotional work to identify the brakes… and then to work really hard on removing them. I think of this work as undamming work: an homage to the climactic scene in Frozen 2 (one of my favorite movies), and a metaphor that reminds me that I am natural and healthy; it’s these supremacist systems that I’ve internalized that are the problem. They need to go… to let me be me.

It turns out: I don’t trust people to hold me when I collapse. I unpacked this more in the stone-catchers post, and it still feels deep. The truth is it still doesn’t feel safe to fully emote in the presence of others. I hold a high bar (an appropriately high bar, given my identities and life experience) about who I let see me in my vulnerability. And I’m practicing letting more of my vulnerability—more of my humanity—show. With discernment.

But there is a deeper practice I’d been shirking, that I’m only just now leaning into. I don’t actually need others to give me that care (I mean, of course I do)… but I don’t have to wait for them. I can provide that care to myself. It’s a revolutionary practice: I can give myself the care that I’m yearning for. I’ve been slowly easing into this work with my somatic therapist: she’s an incredibly skillful space-holder, and I feel safe to allow myself to collapse in her presence.

This week was powerful medicine: I had my longest cry yet, a consistent release of emotion for over an hour. It felt incredible. Cathartic. And even then I was aware I was holding back: I cried, yes, but not as audibly or as bodily as I would have without her there as witness. I wasn’t trying to be stoic… but it still felt too vulnerable to fully let go, even in the presence of this person I trust. Fucking patriarchy.

I’m proud of myself for naming my care needs. And proud of myself for creating containers in which they can be met (therapy, a quiet space alone in my home, in my hammock by the creek). And even more proud of myself for actually feeling. This week felt like a real breakthrough: the first time I’ve given in to a full cry without the crutch/assistance of music, or a movie. I’m getting better.

I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve been fortunate to have close friendships my whole life, including close male friendships. And in the twenty-five years post-adolescence that I’ve been in deep loving relationship with a variety of men, I can’t recall even a single time where one of us truly cried in front of the other, even in the face of deep heartbreak.

Worse: we won’t even allow our wives to witness/hold us in that vulnerability. I was married for 14 years before I let my wife see my truly cry.

It’s a fucking tragedy.

I still have lots of work to do. My kids still haven’t seen me cry. Well, that’s not entirely true: they know which movies get me, and these days I can rarely make it through a whole book without tearing up (holy hell I was a wreck for an entire chapter of When You Trap a Tiger… whooee). But they haven’t witnessed my sobs. I’d like to give them that gift; after all, they do it so easily. It’s inspiring.

I want to close with gratitude to Prentis Hemphill, for inspiring this post. I was listening to their podcast interview about their new book on Glennon Doyle, where they vulnerably named their own struggle learning how to cry. This is how vulnerability and courage works: it inspires others to lean more deeply into our truths.

In community,

Brian