One thing that the current system does really well is make us all forget our own agency. We inherit and are sort of force-fed ideologies which make it very hard to change or learn. The flavor of those ideologies varies widely by target demographic, and the nature of the system itself makes each of us feel like we came to the conclusions we’ve been given entirely on our own- but in reality, none of us, not one, are immune to propaganda. To me, when my thoughts are still being driven by this removal of agency, it often feels like a little burr stuck in my hair when I’m thinking about a decision, like there’s something catching in my thinking, but I can’t quite find it, and I don’t know how to get it out. But something doesn’t feel clean or clear. 

As someone with a beard which gets stuff stuck in it all the time, I’m painfully aware of the etiquette around helping people become aware of stuff stuck in their hair. For clarity, if you’ve ever had a conversation with somebody with a beard who had something stuck in their beard, and you didn’t say anything, just know that they were annoyed at you when they next saw a mirror. So this is me trying to carry beard etiquette into politics, with this reminder-

Regardless of what signs are in your yard, what you’ve loudly said online, regardless of it all- you’re free to vote for whoever you want when you enter that voting booth. You have agency. 

Maybe you hate the government and think the democrats are a bunch of sold-out corporate hacks who lie every time they open their smug mouths. Maybe you feel like the whole country’s going to hell, so you’ve been planning on voting for Trump, but you can feel some little burr caught in your thinking, because on some level you can tell that you wouldn’t trust him alone with any woman you care about. Or because no mater how much you hate this entire shitshow of a government, some part of you can tell that he’s a selfish con man who really doesn’t give a fk about any of us. Or because you learned that if he’d just put his daddy’s money in a high-yield savings account he’d have twice his current wealth, so when you look at the math, he lost as much money as he currently has pretending to be a businessman and bankrupting businesses. Maybe it was when he said he wanted firing squads, or to be a dictator, or how he wants the government to track young women’s period cycles. Maybe some part of you can tell that even though Harris is a complete scum bag, the people you care about will be safer under her leadership than they would be under Trump. Whatever the burr is, if any of those things feel real to you, you can choose to vote against him, even if it’s for someone you hate almost as much, just because she’s obviously a little bit less of a cartoon villain. if any of those things actually rubbed you the wrong way- no matter what sign you have on your lawn, without saying anything to anybody- you still have agency. You can walk into that booth in privacy, choke back the vomit that comes up as you do this, and check the box next to Kamala’s name. I grew up and live in a tiny super conservative town, most of the guys around here would have some hard times in their friend groups if they admitted they voted for Harris, and most of them don’t actually want a dictator. So this is permission. If it’s what you need to do to keep your community for now, you can vote against the failed businessman who wants to be a dictator, and lie about it. 

Maybe you’re appropriately outraged about what Biden’s administration is doing in Palestine, and can see the cycle of accelerating right-ward drift in US politics, and that we absolutely need to stop it now. And maybe you can feel a burr of thought sticking in the idea of voting third party or not voting as a way to try and address that, because some part of you understands that there is no option of clean hands here. You can tell that Stein is polling at 1%, and that she’s not going to get the 5% she’s aiming for to get funding, but that her 1% might hand Trump the white house. You can tell that the democrats don’t actually care at all if they lose this election, because they’re not trying to win elections, they’re just trying to continue acting at the political wing of the corporations. Put succinctly, you can tell that the work we need to do in order to create real change can’t be done from a ballot alone. There is no vote that can fix this. You can tell that you need to dedicate your life to creating alternative systems which draw energy away from these evil systems which only give us these options on a ballot. You can tell that a long term, committed strategy of diverse tactics is necessary, not just one vote that won’t only fail, but is likely to make this system far, far worse, is not actually holistic ethics. Some part of you can feel that to pretend otherwise, to pretend that you can address the systemic change necessary from a ballot box, is to pretend to have far more agency in a single moment than we actually do- and that’s neither courage nor strategy. Maybe some part of you can tell that voting against Harris is prioritizing opposing one pretty run-of-the-mill US war criminal over the actual lives and bodies of the victims of the system she represents, who will suffer far more under Trump. But you’ve been campaigning for Stein, or saying you won’t vote for her for a year. Isn’t it hypocritical to do anything else now? Doesn’t it make you a liar? 

Put simply, no. It just makes you good at strategy, instead of getting hung up on tactics. Condemning Harris for the last year has been a great tactic. Now, voting for her is the best tactic we have in this election- and then we get back to the real work of educating and organizing. We use a diversity of tactics to structurally guide the collapse of the system that made us make that evil choice, while simultaneously developing personal, relational, community, and society-based systems which render it irrelevant and reveal it’s nature. That’s the work. Voting for Harris does nothing to create a better world or oppose the system that’s ending the world- all it does is choose the circumstances in which we think we’ll be better equipped to do that work. If all we do is vote, then we’re letting them run the whole game. But if we use our votes strategically in order to shape the context in which we do the rest of our work, then our votes are ethical and strategic action to shape the game board in the way that gives us the best odds of success. 

Most of the arguments I hear against voting at all, and many for voting third-party, rest on the idea that our engagement validates the system, or lends credibility to it, or makes us complicit. There’s a very real risk of that, but it’s easily addressed. If voting at all, or voting for Harris, makes us less likely to engage in the meaningful work of real change, then our votes have made us complicit and lent credibility to the system. If we do that, then we’re giving up more agency than we’re exercising; we’re putting ourselves under the boot. But voting absolutely doesn’t have to do that. We can vote and then engage more than we would have if we hadn’t voted, because of how bitter the vomit we had to choke back while checking the box next to a war criminal tasted. So this idea that it’s complicity is a false dichotomy. It’s not EITHER voting OR lifelong action- the most effective strategy by far is both. 

The propaganda model strips us of our agency in many ways. One is through binary thinking. We’re taught to think of politics like sports, where you always support your team. This is emotional training for blind nationalism, and it locks us all into their game. Another is by reducing the entire spectrum of possible engagement down to just electoral politics. That’s their game, that’s their system. So long as we’re only playing that game, we’re guaranteed to lose. But when we start engaging off their board, when we refuse to accept the rules of their rigged game- then our engagement in electoral politics becomes strategic in our favor. So there’s no lie or hypocrisy at all in spending a year saying we won’t vote for her, and then voting for her- it’s just 4th scale political strategy, it’s big-picture. 

And just like how a lot of my conservative neighbors would have a hard time socially if they named that they’d voted for Harris, so a bunch of my leftist friends would have a hard time socially if they made the same vote. So this is my meat light shining on your agency- you can absolutely not tell anyone who you voted for. You can lie about who you voted for, if that’s what keeps you safe right now- physically, socially, mentally. You have agency, and your agency lets you see tensions honestly. I’m crystal clear about my hatred of Harris and everything she stands for- that’s not some little burr stuck in my thoughts that I can’t quite see or reconcile- that’s clear as day, and my strategic choice includes facing that honestly. 

And your agency goes all the way. You have the agency to completely disagree with me. Even if your lawn is covered in Harris signs and you’ve been cheering for her, but you have some little burr of thought that maybe you think a failed businessman who wants to be a dictator would be great, or that Stein getting 1.1% instead of 1% in her performative failure that is likely to hand the dictator the white house would be better, you have the agency to go vote for Trump or 3rd party and never tell anyone. 

Our collective agency is where real power grows. Unions have always been the heart of resistance to fascism. I’m just learning about vote swapping, which seems awesome, check it out. Voting down-ballot is incredibly important, and may determine whether this election matters at all, because it seems like if the Republicans still hold Speaker, then they may not certify this election unless it goes to Trump, which is horrifying. So regardless of your political leanings, if having any of your votes matter at all ever again is important to you, it seems strategic to vote for the democratic candidates down the full ballot. 

Back to the point though- out beyond the propaganda, beyond the binary thinking, beyond the weird pretense that we’re not all learning all the time- we’re all actually completely free to do whatever we like. Like I said, this is just me shining a light. You have this agency already- I don’t have the authority to give it to you any more than the propaganda model has the authority to take it away. Your agency is innate. All the propaganda model can do is try and make you not realize that you have this agency, and all well-intentioned people can do is try and reveal your agency to you. You have the agency to performatively fail in a way that makes things worse. You have the power to act strategically in small ways, and you have the power to dedicate your life to structural change. You have the power to learn, grow, and heal. In the Wise Words of Captain Planet: “The Power is Yours!” Use it wisely.

So Kamala Harris’ commitment to and perpetration of genocide and climate change disqualify her from receiving my support. Genocide is a red line. Add to that her bragging about how she’ll be tougher on the border than Trump would, and all the other explicit platform pieces and rhetoric of hers which is signaling exactly what kind of leader she is and will be. The people insisting that well, this is still the Biden administration, maybe she’ll be better once she’s in office. Or that we can pressure her to stop committing genocide once she’s elected, or whatever other fantasy thought-and-prayers nonsense people say sound absolutely delusional to me. She’s taken over five million dollars from the perpetrator. Literally all she’s ever said about the genocide is that the perpetrator has the right to do what they’re doing, she’s been 100% consistent on that. Her VP pick said that the perpetrator expanding their territory is a necessity for the US. She’s not being coy or subtle about this, she’s all in for genocide.  In any just world, both she and Biden would have been dragged in front of an international court for their crimes against humanity a year ago. Like, does anyone actually believe that if you ask the international war criminal who is funded by the largest corporate cartel in the history of the world really nicely to just chill, that she will? The people defending her, or downplaying her criminal complicity, are pissing on the graves of her victims in a way that looks wildly disrespectful to me. She’s a war criminal, and in any healthy world she’d be both morally and legally disqualified from ever holding any position of authority again, let alone leading the largest military and economy the world has ever seen. 

There is a logic chain that flows from this foundation for me that might surprise some people, though. I’ll share some links in that chain before I share my conclusion. 

The first link is best understood through a single person: Miriam Adlson. She’s a deranged billionaire, and she wants just one thing: the complete eradication of Palestine and all Palestinians, including the West Bank. The Democrats are too soft for her, so she went to Trump at the beginning of this election cycle and said: “I’ll become your largest campaign donor, if you promise me one thing. I want the West Bank annihilated in your first term.” Trump happily took the money. So we know that if Trump wins the White House, the West Bank will not last four years. As a continuous homeland, Palestine will be gone; it will only exist in the diaspora. Yes, Harris is absolutely committing and committed to genocide And scales of harm matter, especially to the victims. Someone who blows up a hundred houses and someone who blows up a thousand houses are both guilty of the same crime. But the people who live in the 900 houses that are or are not destroyed are the only people who really understand the difference between those two criminals. 

I genuinely understand why people say: “If the democrats lose, it’s their own fault.” and “A vote for Stein is just a vote for Stein.” There’s some truth and integrity in those statements. I’d just ask you to picture an old-school scale. If this side is heavier, then the West Bank is 100% going to be blown into oblivion. If this side is heavier, then maybe it won’t be. You have one weight to place. In reality, placing your weight anywhere other than this side of the scale will make it more likely that this one is heavier. Netanyahu visited Trump at Mar a Lago like last week. They have a strong preference for Trump winning this election, and it’s worth paying close attention to what they want, because it’s guaranteed to be the opposite of what any healthy people want. So when Netanyahu says, with his actions, that he strongly prefers Trump, I believe him. 

The race is neck-and-neck. So despite all the rhetoric about how a vote for Stein is just a vote for Stein, in reality, every vote that doesn’t go to Harris makes a Trump win more likely. 

We can and absolutely must talk about how hey, this scale seems like maybe the most evil thing in the world. We should destroy this entire scale. Yes. I 100% agree. This scale is irredeemable, and driving us towards an unlivable world. And. For as long as it impacts people’s lives, we are responsible for the effects of where we place our weight. 

The second link takes a super quick recap of Accellerationism. Accellerationism is a compound political belief. The first part is  that the current system is inherently irredeemable, and incapable of creating a healthy or livable world. The second part is that people won’t change the system until it gets so bad that it’s completely impossible to pretend it works, so we should try and make it as bad as possible as soon as possible so that everyone wakes up and changes it as soon as possible. The two common critiques of accellerationism are these: 1. the propaganda model is so highly refined that people today can literally watch their towns washed away and their government shoot their neighbors down in the street, and still not wake up to who their actual enemies are. So the idea that if things get bad enough, people will wake up seems to be as much of a fantasy as the idea that Harris will stop committing crimes against humanity once she’s in office. and 2. The effects of accellerationism are always heaviest on the most marginalized people in a society. So accellerationism literally trades the lives of the most marginalized people in a society for the possibility that people will wake up and take meaningful action.

Very few accellerationists know they’re accellerationists. Accellerationism today tends to sound like these phrases: “I can’t support genocide, so I can’t vote for Kamala.” or “We just have to try something different” or “I don’t care, I just know that I can’t vote for someone this evil.”  If you fill in those statements, giving them the full benefit of the doubt for the best possible argument, what they’re saying is this: “The increase in harm that my accellerationist action will cause in the short term is less than the harm over time that will be caused if this system is not changed in the very near future. So yes, everyone will suffer because of my choice, especially the most marganilized, but I still think it’s the best possible chance we have of a livable world, and I believe that cost is worth paying for that possibility.” An honest accellerationsist can say that complete sentence, and will stand behind it. Most people saying those first couple of statements can’t say that, because they don’t really believe it. 

But regardless of what their motivations  or beliefs are, in effect, in reality- voting third-party is an accelerationist position. Similarly, not voting to keep our hands clean is an accelerationist position. The very idea of a protest vote or a protest abstention relies on the idea that somewhere, someone might care about your protest, that your protest might have some impact. Let’s be real here- literally no one cares if you don’t vote, or vote third party. The only effect it has is to make the lives of the most impacted people worse. As Trump unleashes the rabid, racist, rapacious IDF on the women and children of the West Bank next year, does anyone think that the Palestinians will thank people in the US for voting Third Party? For Not Voting? As the air is crushed from their children’s lungs under the rubble of their homes, do we think they’ll say: “Ah, those people who voted for Jill Stein or stayed home are so ethical?” 

The third link is about our experience here. Trump is openly saying that he will use the US military on US civilians, including political dissidents. He tried the last time he was in office, but the Pentagon refused. So he purged the entire DoJ and loaded the supreme court with crazed religious extremists, so this time he would be able to do it. He wants camps, and he wants me in them. The impact will be far worse on more marginalized people, but everyone in this country is at risk in a way that’s very hard to overstate. Sometimes I think that in our rightful emphasis on how much more fascism impacts marginalized people, we’re somehow left with the idea that white men would be safe. We won’t be, especially those of us who openly oppose it. When they ask their AI who needs to be in the camps first, it will be the people who are educating, organizing, and agitating at the top of those lists, regardless of their identities. Again- marginalized people are always impacted most. They’re born impacted, that’s multiplied by intersectionality marginalized identities, and that just increases the more they educate, organize, and agitate. But that doesn’t mean that any of us are safe under fascism. This narrative that “well, the white guys will be fine” is a wild underestimation of how bad things can very quickly get if Trump takes the white house, appoints two more Supreme Court Justices, and unleashes the US military on political dissidents to round us into camps. My point isn’t fear-mongering here, it’s just trying to keep this conversation real. This is what Trump is saying he wants to do, and I believe him. The Democrats are on the same path, Biden and Harris are all-in on Cop Cities, and the CIA is now training IDF concentration camp administrators. While both political parties in the US are owned by the same people and headed in the same direction, the differences between them are extremely important. The degree to which we think they’re identical is the measure of our own ignorance of how bad things could get in the next four years. Recognizing the ways in which the two parties are extremely different is just as important as recognizing the ways in which they’re identical. Unless we’re holding both their similarities and differences, we’re not looking at reality. 

The fourth link in this logic chain is just a little bit of history. I remember thirty years ago, when a third party candidate, Perot, got 19% of the popular vote in this country. It did not break the duopoly. In fact, third party candidates have pulled over 5% like a half a dozen times in the last century in the US. In 1912, a socialist pulled 6%, Eugene Debs. So the argument that if a third party gets 5%, then the duopoly in the US will somehow magically shatter and we’ll all be free to compete in fair and clean elections is a belief that one can only hold if they have no knowledge of US history. So it looks like the two-party system is already fully aware of the risk posed by third parties, and has a well-practiced set of mechanisms in place already to prevent third parties from threatening the duopoly. If 5% could break the duopoly, it would have been broken many times by now. Add to this that the most popular third party candidate at the moment, Jill Stein, is currently polling at less than one percent, nationally. This means that even if getting 5% of the vote would make a substantive difference, Stein would have to get five times what she’s currently polling at to achieve that goal. That’s never happened, ever. A candidate getting 5% larger turnout than their polls suggested in a strong deviation from the polls. A candidate getting 500% more than they’re polling at is a fantasy story, and not even a believable one. 

The fifth link is about what winning means to the democrats. A while ago, I said that the role of the Democrats in our current system is to lose. This was kind of poorly phrased. A more precise understanding requires some shared vocab. I have a real love/hate relationship with game theory, but the vocab is very precise and useful here. We’ll start with Win States. A win-state is the condition or set of conditions that a given player considers success. This is important to understand for two reasons. The first is that win-states are entirely subjective, and can be antithetical. The nominal win-state of elections is taking the white house- that’s nominally both parties’ goal, and only one can achieve it. Their win-states are the same.  If my dog and I are on a walk, and we encounter a rotting raccoon carcass- my dog’s win-state is rolling gleefully in the carcass, and she’s happy if we both roll in it. My win-state is no one rolling in the carcass. Different win-states. So they’re subjective. The second reason is that many people say that their win-state is something other than their actual win-state. This is called “Identity Concealment,” and it’s an incredibly effective tool of manipulation. Telling people you want something totally unrelated to your actual goal can keep the entire focus and conversation away from your actual goal, and it’s hard to overstate how powerful a tool that is. The War on Drugs is a great example of Identity Concealment. The stated goal, the stated win-state of the War on Drugs, was minimizing drug abuse in the US. Any social worker could tell you how to do that, it’s incredibly easy. Provide housing, education, support for DV survivors, therapy, and supervised use sites. Decriminalize everything and provide support. Do those things, and in a year, you could cut drug abuse in half. Done. What the US did was overthrow a bunch of democracies, install a bunch of brutal dictators, and fund a bunch of horrifying cartels in Latin America. Domestically, they enslaved- err, I mean, excuse me, incarcerated a bunch of poor, mostly Black people into prisons, which are just one large system to traumatize people, destroy families, and increase the rate of recidivism as much as possible. All of these things had the effect of destabilizing Latin America, making it easier for the US to exploit both labor and materials, and increasing drug use domestically. One possibility is that the US is just so catastrophically incompetent that given infinite funding and resources, they can’t achieve the most simple of goals and can’t even recognize their failure over decades, can’t see that their tactics are having the opposite of their intended effect. This is what many Republicans believe, as part of the propaganda they’re fed to make them think that the government is the entire problem. Another possibility is that they’re playing an Identity Concealment game.  If their actual goal was destabilization of Latin America for exploitation, enslaving a bunch of poor, mostly Black people,  and absolutely destroying urban communities of Color- then the War on Drugs has been a smashing success. Especially when we consider that taking the effective approach to addressing drug abuse would have cost a fraction of what they spend destabilizing the world and crushing communities, it starts to look pretty obvious to me which is the reality. Their actual win-state is not the same as their stated win-state. 

So I said that Democrats’ role in this system is to lose. While there are ways in which Democrats losing, and threatening to lose, elections benefits them and the status quo, a much more accurate way to say that is this: The democrats are playing an Identity Concealment game, where their actual win-state is not their stated win-state. To me, it seems pretty clear that their actual win-state is maintaining corporate funding. They do that regardless of whether they win or lose elections, whether or not they hold the white house. 

Understanding this is integral to voting strategy. There’s a lot of people saying things like: “We can teach the Democrats that they can’t win while supporting genocide.” That argument is based on the belief that Democrats’ win-state is winning elections. It’s not. They know that by their standards, they absolutely can and do achieve their win-state while supporting genocide, wholly regardless of whether or not they win the election. Put simply, they’re categorically lying about what their win-state is. If you don’t believe me, just take this position for a spin. Remember that 70% of enrolled Democrats oppose this genocide. With that in mind, instead of thinking that Harris and the Democrats are playing to win elections, look at their actions based on the belief that they’re playing to keep corporate funding. Just see how it lines up. 

The sixth link is about value sets. Two more vocab terms about ethics:  Deontological ethics are the innate ethics of an action. Statements like “Violence is wrong.” are deontological. Teleological ethics are about the effects of an action. “The end justifies the means” is a teleological statement. In reality, we all balance these all the time. If a child runs to your house and says: “Someone’s trying to hurt me, will you hide me?” and you do, and then some huge angry dude covered in blood with an axe knocks on your door asking if you’ve seen a child- you’d probably lie. That’s teleological ethics. You may think lying is bad on a deontological level, but the effect of lying in that situation is good, so your teleological ethics take precedence. In that situation, someone who believes purely in deontological ethics would say: “Lying is wrong. The Child is hiding in the closet behind me.” On the other hand, if someone said: “You can end climate change right now by taking the lives of every single person you love,” I don’t think anyone could do it. That’s our deontological ethics taking precedence over the teleological. Despite strange people trying to claim otherwise for weird reasons, in reality, we all balance these all the time. 

When people talk about Red Lines, what they often mean is that the action being considered crosses the tipping point from teleological to deontological. But this is a logical fallacy, it’s an Appeal to Emotion. The argument goes: “This thing is so bad that any engagement with it is morally unthinkable.” You can reveal the fallacy by applying the same ethics to a less emotionally charged subject. Imagine you’re locked in a room, and every day, you’re presented with two foods. Anchovy and Pineapple Pizza, and Haggis. That’s all you’re ever offered. You may hate both, and to give up your life rather than choose one would be ridiculous. So refusing to engage with the system that is governing people’s lives because of how evil it is is absolutely an Appeal to Emotion Fallacy. Like many fallacious arguments, it’s actually at least two fallacies kind of stuck together. The other one is a little  lesser-known, it’s called a Fallacy of Composition, or a Composition/Division Fallacy.  It is the presumption that what’s true of any part of something applies to it’s whole. Imagine someone saying: “Your butthole smells like poop, so all of you must smell like poop.” Fallacy of Composition. Many people saying that they can’t vote for genocide seem to believe that their strategic vote for a better world makes them as guilty as Netanyahu, Biden, and Harris. It absolutely does not, any more than your entire body smells like your butthole. 

With that in mind, I invite you to consider this question: What’s more important to you: the bodies and lives of the most at-risk people on the ground in Palestine and here, or opposing one specific, run-of-the-mill war criminal politician? They’re not the same goal. If opposing one horrible war criminal is more important to you than the lives and bodies of her actual victims, then vote third party, or don’t vote. But if the lives and bodies of the victims are your top priority, then voting for her is the best choice on the ballot, before we get back to the real work. 

From this logic chain, a deeply counter-intuitive conclusion emerges: The best way to oppose genocide is to vote for the candidate currently committing genocide. This is true because anything other than that vote is guaranteed to exacerbate the genocide, and create exponentially less safe conditions within the US to change the entire system. This is the exact opposite of an endorsement. This is a complete and absolute condemnation of the Democrats and everything they do, and the entire system. Any system which forces us to vote for genocide is irredeemable, and must be destroyed at all costs. But simply pretending that abstaining or voting third party is not action against that system- all it does is drive it faster. 

The conclusion here is not that the people endorsing Kamala and terrified of Trump were right all along- they’re not. They’re largely second- and third-scale liberals who have absolutely no coherent Theory of Change. They’re just running away from Trump, exactly as they’re taught to, in a way that is driving the entire society towards fascism. Their vote for Kamala is an act of terror of Trump and Hope that Kamala may help them. Mine is neither. I know that Kamala is my enemy, and I know that she’s just a few steps behind Trump on the same exact trajectory. They still believe this system is salvageable, and while most won’t say it, they’re prioritizing their own stability. I don’t believe that, and that’s not my priority. But not prioritizing my own stability is not the same as believing in accellertionism. This distinction is nuanced, but it’s very important. Accelerationism is a strategy- I just think it’s a bad one. I’m not willing to condemn all the most marginalized people in our society, and myself, to a fascist hellscape for the sake of a chance that a bunch of people who’ve been propagandized their entire lives not to recognize their enemy might wake up. Frankly, people who are voting third party or abstaining don’t look to me like they have any theory of change either. History shows us that achieving 5% does nothing, and we know Stein can’t even get 5%. The Democrats don’t care if they lose the election, that will teach them nothing at all. We know that any vote other than a vote for Kamala makes a Trump victory more likely. If there’s a strategy for voting 3rd party that doesn’t rest on those three points, then I’ve never heard it. And remember- saying: “I just can’t do it,” while emotionally totally valid, is not a strategy. It’s just self-excusal, in a way that causes harm. 

I’ll add this- while she’d obviously be better than Harris or Trump, I think Stein is an awful politician and a very bad candidate. She’s terrible at coalition building, I don’t find her public speeches inspiring or even terribly relevant. She has sketchy connections to dangerous people that at the very least are terrible optics. The Green Party in general is always a mess, like they waffled between West and Stein this campaign in a way that looked like weird disorganized infighting. If the Green Party operated on the 4th scale of political consciousness, they’d try and pull 5% exclusively from the locked-in red or blue states. Trying to swing purple states away from Harris is such a harmful strategy that it makes me lose any respect I ever had for them. I look forward to Stein’s retirement. On this note, if you’re in a hardcore red or blue state, and you feel like voting for Stein to try and get 5%, I think that’s an ethically sound action.

Contrast that with Claudia de la Cruz. Her entire campaign is coalition building. She’s one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve ever seen, she’s simply electrifying. PSL is on the ground, all the time. They live, act, and organize in the real world in a way that I just don’t see from Stein. de la Cruz is the candidate most aligned with my ethics by a long, long shot. So when Stein voters tell me to vote my conscience, I’m like- cool. That’s not Stein. And in an ethically holistic analysis, if i didn’t live in a state with Ranked Choice, it wouldn’t be de la Cruz either. But de la Cruz is someone who I look forward to following, working in alignment with, and seeing grow more and more over my lifetime. 

Genocide is a red line for me. It disqualifies anyone from receiving my support. Everything Harris says, all her pretty platitudes, are coming from a mouth that aggressively supports genocide. So she’s disqualified from my support. So my utter and complete condemnation of her manifests as a vote for her. That’s not support. That’s me actually opposing thegenocide, instead of performatively just focusing on one person who supports it. I have to choose whether my purity is more important to me than the lives of the children in the West Bank. I hate that, and I’m committed to the complete destruction of the system that makes me choose that. But once I’m looking at it clearly, it’s no choice at all. 

People say to me: “It’s nice to hear someone resentfully voting for Harris. I’m so sick of all the liberals who are just defending her and talking about how great she is.” No part of my vote is resentful. Because it wasn’t Harris who crossed the red line for me. This entire country is built on the wrong side of the red line. Literally every president in this history of the country has been a war criminal, our entire economy is built on the violent oppression of the most marginalized people in the world. The US military is the largest terrorist organization in the history of the world, by an order of magnitude. There are 196 countries in the world. The US has invaded or maintained military presences in like 192 of them. That’s not defense, it never has been. This is a brutal g-sidal empire, built on the blood and labor of it’s victims around the world. That is all it has ever been. Remember Identity Concealment? Imagine the IDF, standing on the bodies of their victims, singing proudly about this now being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. You’re looking at the history of the USA. This is the world we’ve been living and voting in all along, we’re just seeing it more clearly. If any ethical person was looking at high resolution footage of what the founding of this country looked like, what the labor practices of this country have looked like, what the foreign relations have looked like, literally any of the foundations of this entire state- it would all be over the line. So we need a meaningful, shared Theory of Change. At the moment, most people who see how completely intolerable this system is often just have an emotional response, which sounds like: “It’s totally unethical to support or engage in this in any way!” They’re right, emotionally. But as Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. We’re in it. And for centuries, there has been a group of people who understand that, and have worked to build a lineage of thought and change. Most of the people today who I respect in that lineage of strategic change don’t mince words about this. They vote strategically and get back to work. 

Think of it like this: If a physically unstoppable group of people came to your house, and said: “Listen. This nice guy is gonna knife you one time, or this other mean guy is gonna knife you ten times. You choose.” You’d be pissed. You’d hate that set of options, and might struggle for something different. But in the end, you got knifed. And then the same thing happened the next week. And then the next, and every week for years. You tried different options, you tried refusing to answer. When you refused to answer, it was more likely that you got knifed ten times. By the hundredth week, if no other options had any traction whatsoever, you’d eventually pick the single knifing, from the nicest person you could, and then get back to work trying to end the system that was doing that as quickly as possible. The first time, you might feel resentful. By the hundredth time, you’d be more likely to feel a quiet, life-shaping anger. You’d realize that talking to the people holding the knives had zero impact other than the number of times you got knifed. That’s voting. Voting is talking to the people with the knife. You can refuse to vote, stay silent- it’s only going to increase the odds of it being worse. You can vote third party; suggest something other than knifing. It just increases the odds of it being worse. 

Obviously, the thing we need to do when the system only offers us unethical choices is to destroy the whole system. But back to the trolly problem- you can’t do that from the switch, which is the voting booth. From the voting booth or switch- there is no other option. So to combine my metaphors, do you think you’ll be more effective at destroying the rails having been stabbed once, or ten times? Voting is only ethically confusing when we haven’t yet recognized the nature of the system. Once we see that it’s a trolly problem, it’s not confusing at all. Yelling: “I would body-slam the train off the tracks!” may feel good, but in reality it’s just abandoning the agency we do have for the sake of some facade of ethical purity. Picture this: if you were tied to the rails in a trolly problem, what would you say to someone at the switch who refused to touch the switch, to keep their hands clean? Who would only try to pull it in a direction that it structurally doesn’t go? Would you respect their ethics? 

The villain in a trolly problem is the system that created a trolly problem. Once we’re standing at the switch with the trolley five seconds away, choosing the better option does not make us the villain, or even complicit- it just makes us responsible and ethical people. Complicity comes when we pretend that we have more agency in a single moment than we do, and when we don’t commit our lives to destroying the rails. 

So I don’t resent Kamala Harris any more than I resent the better switch position in a trolly problem, or the number one. Is any number of people run over by a trolley acceptable? Is one an acceptable number of times to be stabbed? Of course not. No. Never. Do I resent the number one for being the more strategic choice in that scenario? No. It’s my preference. But that awareness is built on the embodied understanding that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are simply what the system is. They’re brutal war criminals intent on ending the world. There’s no hope in choosing to be stabbed just one time. I’m not endorsing it. I’m condemning it with every fiber of my being- and once I see that this is the nature of the system and the agency I have from a voting booth, I still choose one.

One of the things that I hope people take away from this video is that supporting Kamala Harris is just as unethical as not voting for her. Would you call your choice to only be stabbed once “support” for the stabbing? In my opinion, the only ethical vote for Kamala Harris is a complete damnation of her, and a commitment to the complete destruction of the system she represents. A vote for her from hope or purely from fear is deeply unethical, because those are neither strategic nor commitments. Most of the people voting for Harris have no Theory of Change, and are not acting or risking anything to create a better world where they don’t vote for war criminals. 

Most of the public dialogue seems to miss this conversation entirely. It seems like a lot of people are either just saying they won’t vote for a war criminal, or trying to paint Harris, and the situation we’re in, as better than they are. To be quite frank, both of those positions sound equally delusional to me. And the people saying both often sound like they’re trying to convince themselves of something, because they can tell their perspective is incomplete. I don’t think anyone who has been planning on voting third party actually thinks it will help anything, it just looks like a well-intentioned effort towards not being complicit, leading to a strategy that actually makes them more complicit in ways that it hurts to look at. And I don’t think anyone actually believes we can move Harris closer to humanity once she’s elected, they’re just looking for some rationale for their vote, but they’re also not seeing the whole picture, because it would ask a lot more of them than just voting. So it felt important for me to add my 2c to this conversation, because I don’t hear anyone else talking about how from this set of awarenesses, a vote for Harris is the most utter and complete condemnation of her that I could possibly make. Whether or not you agree with my logic here, I hope that you can at least see that. Also, for the record, I live in Maine where we have Ranked Choice, so it’s easy for me. I wish that all the energy and money going to Jill Stein went to getting Ranked Choice, I think that would be a far, far more strategic use of energy at this time. 

I’ll wrap up with this: the entire movement condemning Harris, saying we wouldn’t vote for her, has been absolutely healthy, helpful, and positive. It has kept a spotlight on her crimes, and been a key part of every tiny head-nod she’s made towards humanity, including calling for a ceasefire and picking Walz. The fact that those performative little meaningless gestures are nowhere near enough is evidence of how irredeemable she and the system are. Point is, a diversity of tactics is always the strongest strategy. We’ve needed the public pressure, and it’s helped. I’ve chanted in the streets that I won’t vote for her, and that was ethical and powerful. Well-done, everyone. And. Carrying that tactic into the voting booth is no longer good strategy. On a ballot, it becomes active complicity in the escalating horrors that Trump will perpetrate, both here and there, if he wins. So nobody has to say it,  though as election day gets closer I think as many people publicly recognizing these truths as possible is helpful. The trolley is here, and yelling “just throw the lever!” is helpful now. But no one has to say it, it stings my mouth as well. The only way I can get the words “I’m voting for Harris” past my lips is by publicly saying that my vote for her is a complete damnation of her and everything she stands for, and explaining why. Whatever we say or don’t say though, once we’re in the voting booth, I hope we remember this. Performative failure is not strategic action. It helps no one at all, and causes a lot of harm. As US citizens, none of our hands are clean already, so let’s stop pretending that they can be, however we vote, and vote for the candidate with a pathway to victory who will cause less harm, and then get back to work destroying the system that forced us to make such an unthinkable choice. 

In any violent conflict between groups of people, it’s easy to share emotionally evocative anecdotes which are so horrifying that they paint the perpetrators of those atrocities as categorically evil. But this is the logic of zooming in on the devastating effects of one punch during a fistfight without ever asking why the fight is occurring. It’s also a frustrating truth about human psychology that if someone is exposed to one emotionally evocative atrocity first, then they are very likely to form an opinion based on that which is incredibly resistant to changing based on emergent context. From this, we can see that emotions are a terrible metric of ethics and politics, because they’re so easily manipulated. Whoever decides what we’re exposed to first has the ability to control our politics, regardless of what context or even overwhelming counterpoints emerge later on. Most people feel that those who hold opposite views to their own have been emotionally swayed in this way, and we are all susceptible. Especially when there is emotionally evocative content on each side of a conflict, this means that we can write off the other side as having been emotionally swayed. 

I am just as susceptible to this as anyone else, none of us are exempt and all of us have been heavily swayed already. This is why Chomsky said that: “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control,” a statement that inspired this delightful book, titled: “A Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense” by Normand Baillargeon, which Chomsky endorses and recommends. Anyway, as someone whose perspectives on the country of Israel have spanned the full spectrum at different times in my life, this is my best attempt to share some of the facts about Israel which shape my beliefs today, beyond the emotionally charged rhetoric. For me, the picture that these facts paint in conjunction is far greater than the sum of their individual parts. I can be guilty of hyperbole from time to time, and I’m doing my best to stick to things which are objectively true, and which anyone who likes can go verify. 

one

The concept of Zionism was born in the late 1800s, and a man named Theodor Herzl is widely called the Father of Zionism. Herzl and the early Zionisits considered many possibilities for where to put the new country of Israel, including Argentina, Kenya, Mozambique, a few others, and Palestine. They discussed how each location had different pros and cons, Argentina had more arable land, a more hospitable climate, more distance from their enemies, and less oversight from European powers. They openly discussed how they would eradicate the indigenous population of each country, and the challenges that they would face in each location. Herzl wrote about this, it’s all verifiable by his own hand. The primary reason they settled on Palestine, despite it’s challenges, was that they wanted a purely Jewish state. This meant that they’d have to commit an ethnic cleansing wherever they went, they were explicitly copying the US model. But by the late 1800s, a lot of people in colonial countries were starting to talk about how that might be unethical, so they needed a bulletproof justification, and the history of Jewish people on that land gave them a ready-made excuse for their pre-planned genocide, again, Hertzl and friends were crystal clear about all this, you can go read it from him, if you have the stomach. From this, we can see that the explicitly colonial project of Israel is not, and never was, about the land that it is currently occupying. All of the arguments about how that land is their by right and they can’t live anywhere else are, by this one fact, exposed as being pure propaganda.

two

The second salient fact here is that while the specific numbers vary by study, no one debates the fact that the overwhelming majority of Israelis have virtually zero blood from that region of the world. Most Israelis, especially in the settlements, are from suburbs of New York, or Russia, or any number of other places, and the handful that have any genetics from that region have like 5%. Statistically, they’re just white people from Jersey who Israel paid to come steal some Palestinians’ houses. Zionists have ready-made defenses for the implications of this fact, they’ll say that it’s the result of the horrors that Jewish people suffered, and they’re rebuilding their communities, and that blood quantum is not the only measure of identity- all things that sound valid, and have meaning. It’s very true that blood quantum is far from the only measure of identity, and a hyperfocus on blood quantum is inherently genocidal, as we see with indigenous populations in the US relative to the legal system that requires people to have one quarter indigenous blood to qualify legally as indigenous. So without the fact that Zionism considered Argentina, these arguments might have some merit. But when we know they considered Argentina, and specifically selected Palestine for the propaganda to excuse the genocide that they always planned on committing, then the fact that they recruit millions of people who have zero ancestry in the region to come steal Palestinian’s homes starts to look less like healthy cultural regeneration and more like intentional weaponization of paid settlers to steal land from the indigenous people. Because the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have genetics from that land going back millennia. So while yes, blood quantum is not the whole story, it would be absurd to ignore the fact  that a population which is like 95% genetically foreign is intentionally displacing a population which is like 95% genetically native. Again, depending on what study you look at there’s a decent margin of error on those specific numbers, but no one debates the clear trend. 

three

The next fact that bears remembering here is this: at the moment, over 12% of the trade that happens on the face of the planet annually goes through the Suez Canal, which is part of Egypt. It’s here, and you may remember when a ship named the Ever Given got stuck in it and shut down 12 percent of global trade for a while.

This means that for the US and Israel to engage in trade north of Africa, they have to be on at least civil trade terms with Egypt, which is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, and solidly part of the Arab Bloc. This prevents the US and Israel from engaging in military and economic ways that would lead Egypt to bar them from trading through the Suez. Bear in mind, Egypt makes a lot of money on that trade, so they’ll put up with a lot, but it’s still true that if the US were to piss Egypt off enough, they have the power to shut down access. For a long time, Israel has wanted it’s own canal. There’s a whole plan for this, it’s called the Ben Gurion Canal. Ben Gurion is widely remembered as the founder of the country of Israel, and he made detailed plans for the complete military expulsion of all Palestinains, and implemented a lot of those plans, as Israel’s Defense Minister. So the fact that he’s a widely celebrated historical figure looks very similar to how Columbus is hailed as a hero in the US, after writing and implementing a genocide. If you look at a map, the logical place for the Ben Gurion Canal to hit the Mediterranean Sea is a little strip of land right here,

called Gaza. The Ben Gurion Canal would have a lot of effects. It would allow the US and Israel to trade outside the control of the Arab Bloc, freeing them from the annoying little constraint that they had against far more aggressive military actions in the middle east. Ecologists also say that it would salinate the entire surrounding aquifer and land base, literally salting the earth, killing the entire ecosystem while making it impossible to grow crops or drink the water, but that is such a small, trivial fact that it hardly bears mentioning, right? The point is that the financial benefits to the US and Israel would be nearly incalculable. Some people believe that this is one of the reasons that the US continues to hand Israel blank checks- the Ben Gurion Canal would allow them to simply take all the oil in the Middle East without any fear of economic reprisal in the form of limitations on trade, and that’s not to mention the money they’d save in not needing to pay Egypt for every shipping container they wanted to move north of Africa. 

four

The fourth fact is this: Every single Israeli has free health care, free education including college, and free child care. Everything, from dental work to having someone to watch your kids, is free in Israel- and it’s all paid for by the USA. If a US citizen wants some actual support from their government, the best way to get it is to move to Israel. All it will cost you is your soul, and potentially the impacts of being dragged by a genocidal government into a regional war against nuclear powers. So when politicians in the US ask how we would pay for health care, just remember that they are more than happy to pay for not just health care, but college and even child care- for Israelis, with your money. Every IDF member who is wounded as they commit genocide is tended with US tax dollars. But this is just one facet of this fact. The other facet is this- Israel has materially supported every genocide on the face of the planet for the last fifty years. They are currently selling weapons to Russia for Russia to use in Ukraine. The US gave Israel those weapons, and Israel is selling them to Russia. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. From their direct support of the atrocities happening in Sudan today, to their support for China’s ethnic cleansing of the Uighur Muslims, to Ethiopia’s genocide, to the Juntas in Argentina- Isreal has armed the perpetrators of most of the human rights violations on the planet, with US aid. The US it’s self arms many perpetrators of human rights violations directly, first and foremost Israel, but then it gives Israel so much money and so many weapons that Israel acts as a bargain bin for dictators and tyrants worldwide. If you want to take the lives of a few million innocent people but you can’t afford the weaponry to do it, look no further than Israel. Since it’s all free for them thanks to US tax payers, they’ll give you amazing deals on weapons of mass destruction beyond your wildest dreams! 

five

The fifth point I want to make is not factual, it’s ethical.  Because it’s about ethics, but I’ll leave it up to you, with a hypothetical. If someone drive by your home and shot into your window, what would you do?  The  first thing I’d do is call the police. But imagine the police do nothing, and the next night, the same person does it again. Still, the police do nothing. Every night, the same person drives by and shoots at your family- you’re losing family members daily, and the police refuse to intervene. Very quickly, I would take up arms and defend my family. This metaphor carries on a larger scale, there’s sequential steps to ethical resistance. So when people talk about how the Palestinians should engage in peaceful resistance, I agree. The thing they’re missing is this: the Palestinians have. In 2018, Palestinians organized a series of Gandhi-style peaceful protests called the Great March of Return, simply walking up to the barricades, peaceful and unarmed. The IDF simply opened fire, over and over and over again. Just as the Indians knew that the British would do this, the Palestinians knew that the Israelis would do this. But while the world saw India, the world has remained blind to Palestine.  

And back to the metaphor, if I were armed and standing in my yard, and someone starting shooting at my family- I would not call the police, I would immediately defend my family, with whatever tools I had available. 

Let me ask you another question. Imagine that your family has lived in the same place for tens of thousand of years, and then international government, like the UN, told you that tomorrow, they were giving a third of your land to a group of refugees, and you had to evacuate to make room for them so that they could have your house, what would you do? What if, the very next day, those refugees started leaving the land they’d been given and taking the land you’d been evacuated to? What if, all the while, they daily assaulted everyone in your family, women, children, everyone along the way? What if they took 90% of your state and locked you and your entire community into what human rights organizations called the largest open-air concentration camp on the planet? What if their entire stated goal was to get rid of all of you, all together and take 100% of your land? 

Under those circumstances, can you imagine how some people might believe that armed resistance was wholly ethical? Can you imagine how especially once you organized a massive peaceful resistance movement, and the international community did absolutely nothing, then even more people might believe that armed conflict was ethical? 

Ok, that’s it for the ethics, back to facts. 

six

Since the day the UN drew the borders of Israel, in 1947, Israel has been openly and intentionally violating those borders, and stealing land from the Palestinians in violation of both international law and the fundamental principles of human rights. The Palestinians have tried every possible form of resistance, ranging from peaceful to armed, and thus far, nothing has worked. The world has ignored their peaceful protests, and used any armed resistance to excuse the atrocities they’re suffering. 

I am older than Hamas, and the same age as Hezbollah. Both of those organizations grew in response to the atrocities of Israel, and any attempt to paint Hamas or Hezbollah as the cause of this conflict is pure propaganda intended to excuse genocide. Yes, Israelis have suffered. But comparing the suffering that the aggressors experience when their victims resist genocide to the suffering the victims experince is to openly support genocide. 

Notice that I put that part in the facts section, because it’s not up for debate any more than climate change is. Every single time a reporter says: “Do you condemn Hamas,” they are supporting and excusing genocide. It’s like asking “Do you condemn slave rebellions?” or “Do you condemn a woman who defended herself when she was being attacked by a man?” 

If you carry these facts with you, then any emotionally evocative propaganda that you see, from either side, will be grounded in reality. I started with a strong condemnation of emotional politics, and I want to end with a clarification to that. When our politics are shaped by emotions alone, then they are easily manipulated. But once we carry these facts, once we are engaged in healthy intellectual self-defense, then our emotions become central. We should be outraged. We should be far more outraged than we are, and we should allow our outrage to drive us to action which stops Israel, by any means necessary. I believe in the right of self defense. I believe in it in my driveway for my home, I believe in it for Palestine, I believe in it for Lebanon and Iran and Egypt. The only countries at play which don’t have a claim to the right of self defense are the USA and Israel, because they’re not defending themselves, they are the aggressors. I don’t get to attack someone and then claim Self Defense as a cause, that’s not what the words mean. If I wait in a dark ally and then jump on someone screaming “I’m going to take your life and your money!” and then proceed to try, and they break my arm, whose fault is that? If their six friends show up and take my life, whose fault is that? Who did that? Do I get to claim that I was acting in self-defense, or would you laugh at that absurdity? How would you feel about a clip going around that just showed my victim breaking my arm and me screaming, with zero context, as though my victim was a horrible violent person? 

I understand that I’m talking about human lives. It must be horrible for the people of Isreal to lose loved ones. It would be horrible for my family if I tried to mug someone and take their life, and they killed me. But the fact that it would be horrible would in no way make it my victim’s fault, and pretending that the conflict is balanced would be to excuse my aggression. 

This went longer than I planned, but to recap, here’s the six facts that I think ground any conversation about Israel.

1. Zionism considered many possible locations, and chose Palestine so they had a good excuse for genocide. 

2. Most Israelis have virtually zero ancestors from that land, and almost all Palestinians have almost 100% of ancestors from that land. 

3. The US and Isreal really want their own canal so that they can commit more atrocities in the middle east without the risk of Egypt barring trade. 

4. The US subsidizes the entire Israeli economy, including health care, education, child care, and infinite weaponry which Israel uses to support unspeakable human rights violations around the world. 

5. Everyone has the right to defend themselves. 

6. Israel has been violating international borders and laws and stealing land from Palestine since the day it was founded, and their explicit goal is a pure Jewish state, which means the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Not all votes are the same. Obviously this is true in the sense that votes in swing states matter more, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that in the same town, in the same ballot box, for the same candidate- two votes can lead to very different worlds.

This essay explores four different scales of political thought, political consciousness. Understanding these scales of thought is deeply valuable regardless of what your politics are, because political leanings are different than the scale at which someone is thinking, so right-wing and left-wing politics all exist at every scale. While I am both sharply critical and celebratory of both left- and right-wing politics throughout this piece, I make no pretense of Superior Neutrality. Personally, I’d much rather listen to someone who I disagree with who is honest about their politics than someone pretending to be above it, so my politics are obvious in this. I’m not above all this- I’m in it, like all of us are, whether we acknowledge it or not. If you disagree with my politics, then I invite you to think of my transparency as me being honest about my biases. To any conservatives reading this, I’ll add that while there are sharp critiques of the right-wing in here, the conclusion gets into the deep strengths of conservatives, how desperately those strengths are needed, and what liberals and leftists have to learn from the right. So while I don’t pretend neutrality, I also don’t think I’m one-sided here. 

First Scale: Selfishness

Starting from the smallest scale of political thought, there’s pure selfishness, which is to say- voting for one’s own benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else. Most people think that this is how everyone opposite of their political views is voting, so democrats think that conservatives are voting for their own personal benefit at the expense of community health and wellness, and conservatives think that democrats are voting for their own benefit for the same reason. In my experience, both are completely wrong, and projecting this onto our neighbors is deeply harmful and divisive. I grew up and live in an overwhelmingly conservative community, and I don’t know a single conservative who actually thinks this way- On-the-ground conservative ethics are neither greedy nor self-serving the way non-conservatives seem to think they are. Right or wrong, conservatives believe that lower taxes and less government will benefit everyone, and they believe that conservative politicians will deliver those things.  Conversely, despite all the Fox-news rhetoric about how LGBTQ, People of Color, Women, poor people- basically everyone except rich white straight men- are somehow “special interest groups” who are voting purely in their own interests at the expense of everyone else- I don’t know a single democrat or leftist who thinks this way, either. On the ground, liberals and leftists believe that restricting pollution and giving people more personal freedoms will benefit their communities. So from both sides, that rhetoric is complete BS. It’s divisive hate-mongering propaganda that far too many of us, all across the political spectrum, fall prey to- and it’s not for any of our benefit. 

Speaking of, there is one group of people who do act entirely from this first, purely selfish scale of political thought, though, and they’re noteworthy- it’s corporations, who are legally people in this country, and the rich. There’s very good research suggesting that multi-millionaires and up are all diagnosable as narcissistic psychopaths- whether that’s cause or effect I couldn’t say, but as a group, they certainly act that way. They will and do joyfully crush workers, ecosystems, and futures for the sake of lining their own pockets as much as possible, and never bat an eye. They’re noteworthy because speaking of research, there is very good research that shows that the will of the ultra-rich is what shapes US legislation. There has been an ever-widening gap between public opinion and legislation in the US for many decades, while the gap between what the billionaires want and legislation has shrunk to essentially zero. So we live in a world where the will of the only demographic of truly selfish people determines the shape of our political reality. 

Second Scale: Local/Communal

This leads me to the second scale of political thought, which is by far the most common, and it’s the scale of one’s own community and lifetime. Most people tend to vote from this scale, which is entirely understandable, because as a species we evolved in small, close communities. So as a species, we tend to vote for what we think will make our communities the healthiest and best within our own lifetime. For example, if someone thinks that there should be regulations on how much industries can pollute our local aquifer, that people should be allowed to marry whatever consenting adult they please, that teachers are valuable and should be paid a living salary, and that women have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies- and that person still thinks that democrats are able, or more likely, to deliver those things- then they’re likely to vote democrat. Conversely, if someone thinks that their community is better off with as little government as possible, that taxes should be as low as possible, that the second amendment is the most important personal freedom upon which the rest are founded, and that one set of religious beliefs should be imposed by force and law on the entire population at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy and people’s right to marry – and they still believe the republicans are able, or more likely, to deliver those things- they’re likely to vote republican. 

There is some empathy in the second scale, but it is highly selective, and almost always regional. The second scale is the heart of centrism, people’s primary concern here is with the tiny subset of their community with which they identify. As such, this is where you find white liberals who think that BLM is going too far, because their empathy doesn’t extend to Black people. If their children were being hunted for sport by unaccountable, trigger-happy police, then they would support and engage in the exact types of protests that BLM practices- but because their children are not, then they view those actions as “too much” or “extreme.” This is where you find conservatives who think that refugees and immigrants are the problem, without ever considering what they would do to try and create a better life for their families under the circumstances that many refugees and immigrants are fleeing. This is also where we find most fascist thought. Fascists think that their lives will be better under fascism, and they do not care that by definition, it will cause millions of “Other” people to suffer or expire. So whether it’s liberal or conservative, the second scale of thought prioritizes people in my community who look and think like me, at the expense of everything and everyone else. It tries to buy stability at the cost of other’s suffering. People at this scale are either incapable or unwilling to actually put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. 

Third Scale: Liberalism

These first two scales of political thought are pretty easy to describe. The third is a lot more nebulous, but it’s important that we understand it, because it’s on the rise today. To be clear, I think that’s a good thing, because I think we should be considering the impacts of our actions as broadly as possible, but it is currently muddy. This scale thinks a little longer term, and a little broader. It’s informed by global politics and impacts beyond our lifetime, but it’s still kind of tied to the second scale, in that it tries to incorporate those things while still holding onto the greatest net gains for our communities and our own lifetimes. Part of this is that most people would rather choose the devil they know than a rolling dice, which leads even people who are displeased with the current system and state of affairs to have a strong preference towards reform. So the third scale of political thought tends to support incremental change, better support for global human rights, minimization of war, minimization of environmental damage. It’s trying to create a better world for the future, while preserving the stability that it’s proponents either know and love, or know and hate, but either way, while it’s almost never said outright, stability is a core value of this third scale. Stability is prioritized over meaningful change. Whether conservative or liberal, this third scale of political thought can pretty accurately be called Liberalism. The US has been an inherently liberal society for most of it’s existence, there has been slow but steady progress on most domestic human rights violations, and it prides it’s self on being a free society, in that you can say whatever you want, travel freely, etc. This is noteworthy, in contrast with countries like Qatar, where you can be imprisoned for writing the wrong kind of poem, or Guatemala, where if you publish the wrong thing your offices will be burned down. So it’s very noteworthy that I can safely publish this video, including where it’s going to go. People operating in the third scale of political thought are aware of the failures of the system, but still believe that the system it’s self is the best avenue to create change, and that we need to get more involved in the system we have in order to make it meet our needs and goals. There’s a lot of performative, self-excusing hand-wringing and complaining at the third scale. In reality, people at this scale of political thought won’t change their behavior due to things like wars that don’t affect them, human rights violations to people outside their community, climate change, or anything else outside their immediate sphere, but they do feel a lot of emotions about those things. There’s a lot of guilt and shame and often donations to political candidates or non-profits, but nothing like actual organizing, unionization, boycotts- nothing that would endanger their stability, because that remains the core value of this scale. 

People at the third scale are also often aware of the risks of other realities, such as fascism. So when Trump, as sitting president, gave orders for the US military to deploy against US citizens, and the only reason that didn’t happen was that the Pentagon refused to follow his direct orders, when Trump brags about how he’s gonna make huge camps, and threatens to put political opponents in them, when he talks about wanting to be a dictator, when he shapes the Supreme Court for his own unqualified immunity- all those things concern people at the third scale, and motivates them to vote for Kamala Harris, whether or not they like her very much, in order to avoid the outright fascism that Trump is promising. And make no mistake- Trump is a fascist, and if elected will do everything in his power to make the US a fascist country, which would be very, very hard to recover from, and might well precipitate the end of a habitable world, through unmitigated climate change, global war, or more likely some combination of those two. So while the conservatives operating at the second scale of political thought, the community/our lifetime scale, think that Trump will benefit them and their communities, no one I know operating at the third scale, of global/longer timelines, supports Trump. This means that all the conservatives I know who think at this scale are, generally very quietly, voting for Kamala Harris- and I know many conservatives who are doing exactly that, because their eyes are open and they’re not fascists.

But in reality, there’s not a lot of conservatism at the third scale. Conservatism tends to have it’s base in the second scale, and it’s leadership in the fourth scale- but there’s not much conservatism in the third scale. 

It is at this third scale of political thought that all the arguments like: “We just need to defeat Trump, and then we can reconsider other tactics,” “If Trump wins, everyone will suffer and there will be no hope of any meaningful change” “Kamala sucks in these ways, but we need to vote for her to preserve any chance of democracy or a livable world” come from. For anyone in the third scale who believes in a livable world or human rights, the only possible ethical vote is for Kamala Harris. 

Notably, it is also in this third scale of political thought that you hear people talk about voting as harm reduction. From the third scale, the phrase “harm reduction” is often a way to pre-empt, de-value, or deflect the possibility of actions that might cost liberals anything, require them to risk anything. The concept of harm reduction is much broader than this, but from the third scale this is how it’s most often used. So in the general dialogue, “harm reduction” rhymes with “Sit down, shut up, and vote for the lesser of two evils again.” 

Fourth Scale: Global/Multi-Generational

The fourth scale of political though, though, is where it gets really interesting. However they get there, people at this scale of though are considering the holistic impacts of the system we exist within both globally and far beyond our lifetimes. People thinking here make decisions based on the impacts many generations out, and look at history in a way that none of the other scales do. For example, it takes into account the accelerating right-ward drift of US politics. In most ways that matter, such as foreign policy and corporate regulation, Kamala Harris is further to the right than George W Bush was, and Trump is an outright fascist, the extreme of the right-wing. Any conservative politician fifty years ago would have rightfully condemned Trump as an outright fascist, and he would not have been allowed within ten miles of the RNC. While people at the third scale might tip their hat to this fact, they don’t actually face it, or let it inform their decisions. So when people say that we just need to focus on this election, the thing they’re missing, which this fourth scale of thought takes into account, is that we’ve already had this election. We’ve actually been through this exact election like ten times, now. Kamala Harris is politically identical to Hillary Clinton. She’s politically identical to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and John Kerry. All of these candidates were corporate-owned liberals with a few breadcrumbs of social justice mixed in. So we know exactly how this plays out- if the corporate liberal candidate wins, we’ll see the exact same massive cash giveaways to corporations, the same unspeakable crimes against humanity, the same stagnating wages, and the same performative hand-wringing impotence as they pretend to be incapable of doing anything other than exactly what their corporate owners tell and pay them to do. Maybe, along the way, they’ll throw us the bone of not actively funding the harassment and dehumanization of LGBTQ folks as they normally do, and we’ll all celebrate that as a win. If Trump wins, then it’s an all-out race to corporate fascism, he’ll do exactly what he did last time, which is put a bunch of corporate scum bags in as his cabinet so that they can shovel taxpayer money to their bosses as quickly as possible while allowing the most horrifying forms of environmental destruction possible. Remember when his first week in office, the cover image on the EPA website was an open-pit coal mine? That’s Trump. But at this scale of political thought, we remember that the corporate liberal candidates do the exact same thing, they just don’t change the EPA cover photo, and pretend to be working against it. We remember that Obama sicced dogs on Indigenous people defending their water for the sake of massive corrupt oil pipelines, that Biden broke the railway strike and forced rail workers to use unsafe practices which immediately led to the worst rail environmental accident of the last century, impacting the entire Mississippi watershed- that’s Biden’s environmental legacy. Put simply, the fourth scale of political thought faces the fact that this entire system is geared towards exploitation of people and destruction of land, and that the system it’s self must be torn down in order for there to be any possible hope of a livable world. It takes the step of being willing to sacrifice personal and community stability for the sake of a better world. So that definitive, but often unstated characteristic of prioritizing stability that defines liberalism, and really the first three scales of political thought? The fourth scale exists beyond that. This is where we find the people capable of self-sacrifice. It’s also where we find the quality of solidarity. While liberalism prioritizes stability while working and hoping for change that can never come while the system lasts, the fourth scale of political thought prioritizes global harm reduction over time. This is where we find people who are truly working for a better world, no matter the cost. If you want true heroism, this is where you’ll find it. 

Right-wing thinkers at the fourth scale of political thought believe that there will always be winners and losers, and they work to make sure their people are the winners. So there are fascists who think at this scale, and it’s not that they don’t think about the suffering fascism causes- they’re just so deeply traumatized that they believe it’s inevitable somewhere. They cannot conceive of a world that isn’t built on suffering, so they view the human and ecological costs of capitalism/fascism as collateral damage in making sure they don’t suffer. They’re not trying to make a better world, they’re trying to make sure that they’re on top in the terrible world. 

Leftists at this fourth scale of political thought recognize that capitalism, as a whole, is a race-to-the-bottom in terms of pay scales, services, human rights, and ecological stability. By this, I mean that the less a company can pay it’s employees, the more money they make. The fewer services an insurance provider pays for, the more money they make. The more damage a company does to the environment, the more money they make. So the more harm a given company can cause to people and the environment, the more profit they make. Capitalism incentivises harm. In the face of the global monopolies that these massive multi-national corporations hold, the conservative arguments that people can just work for another company that pays better, or buy products from companies that cause less harm, that the free market can ever be anything other than a mad race-to-the-worst-possible-world, sound like a child insisting that if the flap hard enough they can fly. 

Obviously, because of the sea of propaganda that we all live in, the people coming to this fourth scale of political thought from the right wouldn’t say any of that about capitalism. Many from the right with structural critiques still hail capitalism, and blame the government alone for all the system’s woes, exactly as the corporations teach us all to. So there are political differences in the fourth scale just like every other, but the tone of the conversations is very, very different, and typically much less antagonistic. 

There’s another thing you’ll find in the fourth scale of political thought, which we’re all terribly familiar with now, and it’s the experience of having everyone in the first three scales of political though, especially the liberals, act in wildly patronizing ways to us all the time. For example, people at the third scale love to point out how Kamala said what she had to say in support of the fossil fuel industry in order to win swing voters, and therefore give herself better odds of winning the election, as though that’s a new thought for those of us critiquing her, like we’d never thought that she might be acting tactically. At the fourth scale, we are fully aware of that tactic, we’re just also looking at how that exact tactic has driven the right-ward drift of the Democratic party, to the point where Kamala is further right than Bush. The fourth scale sees the broader strategy that those tactics are a part of, which the third scale ignores. So the third scale can’t see that the fact that she has to pander to oil and gas in order to win the election is a damnation of the entire system it’s self, and treat those of us who point that out like morons. Their argument might have merit- if we hadn’t been through it every election cycle for the last three decades. Everyone in the third scale “hoping that Kamala does better once she’s in office” is blindly ignoring the fact that every other corporate liberal we’ve been through this with, who were further left than Kamala, has immediately sold out to their corporate handlers. The rhetoric around Bush was identical, he was the existential threat that we simply could not allow, so we had to vote for Clinton and then think about our options. They were right about Bush, and wrong about Clinton. How many times do we have to see this exact conversation and result play out before we learn? That’s a question that is only asked in this fourth scale of political awareness, the third scale can’t even allow it to be asked, let alone consider any meaningful answer. 

When I was younger, I found this particular flavor of patronizing, New York Times and CNN-informed liberal condescension blindingly infuriating. I was like: “I’ve actually read everyone from Friedman to Chomky, Rand to Marx, and what I’m saying has foundations in both theory and practice that liberalism 100% does not. Liberalism is a failed and failing strategy which is making the world unlivable, so how close to uninhabitable do you think your liberalism should let the corporations bring the world before we consider shifting gears? I think maybe we should do that while we can still breathe outside, what do you think?” Now I understand that people in that scale of thought aren’t ready for that question either, they’ve been terrified into thinking that anyone asking those kinds of questions is working against the Only Hope. People simply cannot think beyond the scale of political awareness that they’re at, so they are only capable of interpreting other people’s words in the way that it would be meant at their scale of awareness. This is why there will be people in the comments of this exact video saying: “So you support Trump, then?” Those comments are the epitome of the third scale. Now I mostly find it heartbreaking, and on my bitter days, funny. It’s a sign of a bad day when I think: “Oh, please, tell me more about how she’s just saying what she has to in order to win.” This seems like a fitting place to mention that the third scale of political thought, as well as the overarching model of propaganda behind it, is always appropriating ideas and language as fast as it can from the fourth scale of political thought. As soon as some idea emerges, out beyond the status quo, liberalism in particular is drawn to it’s sparkle like a moth to a flame, and they take it and reduce it down to something that still perpetuates the status quo. What’s happening right now to the concept of harm reduction is a great example of this; the idea comes from addiction treatment, and it’s super radical. Safe use sites are an incredible, radical idea- so watching liberals use the idea to silence radical thought, to sever the concept from it’s roots and implications and reduce it down to some little pet sound byte that makes it a liberal argument instead of a radical one, is painful to watch. The same liberals who are telling us to just vote for Kamala as Harm Reduction would absolutely hate the idea of a supervised injection site in their town, and that’s some high-test white liberal hypocrisy and appropriation, right there. 

Anyway, the world gets much wider in the fourth scale of political thought, because people from all over the political spectrum are realizing that this entire system is geared against us, is destroying the world we live in, and is entirely unsustainable. It’s out here where we find out that the political fractures and divides which look so unbridgeable and vast in the first three scales of political thought are actually nowhere near as large as they look. It’s out here where conversations become fruitful, because I’ve never met a single person in my community who I don’t share big-picture goals and intentions with, like I also want the smallest government possible. Once we agree about that, then we can talk about how well, the fire department is pretty solid, works well, so that’s something we can all support together. In my experience, conservatives hate corporate control of the government, which I also hate. Conservatives hate how liberals talk to them like they’re slow 5 year olds, which is something I also hate. So once we’re in this territory, I’m on the same team as my neighbors. Much as people in the third scale will think this is terrifying, it’s out here where I find solid agreement with many people who supported the actions of January 6th. (That’s another statement that people stuck in the third scale will be terrified at- they’ll think I’m a closet right-winger or something, because from their framework, that’s the only way to interpret that sentence, even though it’s the opposite of the truth.) The propaganda model of capitalism works very hard to funnel everyone willing to risk their lives and stability into the right wing, where their radical zeal will serve the corporations rather than threaten them. But my neighbors who are willing to risk their lives to change the world are not my enemies, and I will never treat them as such, unless they are actively acting against the wellness of my community the way that not-see was in my town last year. But conservatives talking about how much they hate the government and how they’re willing to throw down for change? They’re much closer to me politically than liberals are, and they’re often very willing to hear what I have to say about how corporations are the problem. Our interests are so clearly aligned, we’re so tangibly allies and on the same team, that they can hear me. I’m genuinely not a democrat liberal who just hates trump on principle- I hate the same corporations and systems they hate. 

Fourth Scale Voting Tactics

Once we’re all together there, then we can have a conversation about tactics, and this is actually the heart of this video. I want you to imagine that you’re part of a small band of rebels going up against a massive empire. Let’s say you have 10,000 troops, and the empire has 100 million. There’s a vocal minority that’s saying: “The Empire is Evil and must be overthrown, so we need to get all our troops together and charge straight at them, and we can defeat them with force!” What would you say to that group of people? I might ask something like: “What will that gain us? We can see that we won’t win through that approach, so what does that massive sacrifice buy us?” If they don’t have a meaningful answer as to how giving all our lives in a performative sacrifice with no possibility of victory, then I would decline to endorse that action, or undertake it. My goal in that situation would be strategic victories, not performative failure. The work of opposing that empire would be lifelong. Odds of us achieving it in our lifetime would be low, and even if we did, the work of undoing the harm of that empire would take many, many more lifetimes, so this would be our lives, as rebels. 

Now imagine that the Empire, as part of their marketing campaign, gave everyone the chance to vote for it’s leader every few years. As a rebel who understands that the entire system is completely unsalvageable and must be destroyed for the good of all life everywhere, should I refuse to vote? Would that have any effect, whatsoever, on the Empire? Of course not. Refusing to vote as a way to “protest the system” is about as effective as stabbing yourself in the foot to protest the fossil fuel industry. They do. Not. Care, and it only benefits the system you’re protesting. 

So who should a rebel vote for? This question is way more complicated than most people think it is. Months ago, I posted a video titled “A suggestion for the 2024 Election” which was a plan to create grass-roots ranked choice voting nationally, which would have created pathways to victory for third-party candidates. If any plan like that had manifested, if there was any actual pathway to victory for a third party candidate, I would be screaming it from the rooftops. But from the example of being unwilling to sacrifice our small force in a performative way with no hope of victory, you can see that voting for a candidate without any pathway to victory would violate my ethics. As people who can see how categorically evil the empire is, and how much harm it’s causing to us and everyone we love, and how much more grievous harm it’s causing to other people- this stings. It means that we’re going to be voting for someone committed to harm that we categorically oppose. Some people will be unable to stomach this, which I totally understand. If, in our small band of rebels, some felt that they had to charge the empire’s army directly, I would understand that, too. But performative failure is not strategic, so I wouldn’t use my vote or my life that way, and I wouldn’t suggest it, because we need every single one of you. But I would understand people who needed some short-term action, gratification so desperately, that they threw their bodies in front of the empire’s weapons- even though I’d still think it was a bad strategy. So the question isn’t complicated in terms of voting third-party- from a rebel’s perspective that’s clearly a bad choice. 

Let me tell you a story that will seem unrelated at first- I promise it’s not. Since 1948, the Blue and White has been illegally stealing land and committing unspeakable crimes against humanity. But it was only last october when they began escalating and “accelerating” their unspeakable acts that the world, as a whole, began to notice or pay attention. There were fringe groups opposing them before then, now the overwhelming majority, even in the US, categorically opposes their actions, and movement is building to stop them. It took things getting really, really horrible for people to notice, let alone demand change. 

When I talk to many of my conservative neighbors who think, as I do, that the whole system is corrupt and geared against them, about trump- this is what they say: “Yeah, I know he’s an evil scum bag who I wouldn’t trust alone with anyone I love- I just want him to burn it all down.” This is a vernacular expression of a political ideology called Accellerationism. Accellerationism is the belief that capitalism will continue it’s slow-burn of the entire globe until it destroys the world and makes the planet uninhabitable. Unless. Accellerationists believe that the only chance of interrupting this pattern is to actively make it so bad that people are shaken awake, look up, and see how terrible it is and always has been. So they intentionally try to enable the very worst parts of capitalism to reach people directly, to precipitate a global revolution. The argument here is that people don’t notice harm until it’s harming them, that people won’t take action until their lives are being impacted, so the quicker everyone’s lives are overtly impacted, the quicker enough of us can get to this fourth scale of political awareness to collectively shake this entire corrupt system down, compost it, and grow something healthier. 

So a leftist who is a true accelerationist would vote for Trump, because Trump will make things so much worse. The argument is harm reduction over time. If we let capitalism continue this path towards destruction slowly, then over the next ten generations a lot more people will be harmed than if we just intentionally reveal it’s true face now so that people can’t ignore it and have to act. It’s the logic of someone who has a small house fire that they can’t get anyone to help with and can’t put out deciding to intentionally make it bigger to get some kind of attention before the whole building slowly burns. It’s a terrifying position, largely because the people most impacted are always guaranteed to be those most historically marginalized. Put simply, Accellerationism sacrifices the most oppressed people in a population for the possibility of a broader awakening. 

This makes the bravery of the large number of intersectionality oppressed people who advocate for accellerationism all the more inspiring to me. Marginalized people who are openly advocating and working for the collapse of this system are consciously showing the same bravery that Union members show when they face the clubs of the Pinkertons on Pickett lines. They know the club is much worse for them in the short term, and they’re working for a better world. 

One reason it is important to understand accellerationism is because there there is a huge bloc of corporate interests and billionaires who fear it. They fear accellerationsim for the same reason many leftists support it- they think that if they take too much too fast, it will give away the game, and the population their wealth is stolen from will take real action to change the system. So these people, who are committed to harming the environment and exploiting people for as long as possible, do actively oppose Trump and the fascist movement in the US- but it’s not for our benefit. They think Trump’s fascists are risking the whole scam, and they’d rather play the longer game. This is why there are so many Republican leaders voting for Kamala. They and the fascists have the same goal- as much wealth and power as they can extract at the expense of most of the population and the future of the planet- they just think that keeping that concealed is a more effective strategy, while the fascists think that barrels in our faces and boots on our necks are the way to go. 

Despite appearances, I’m not actually trying to tell anyone how to vote. Especially for people in the third scale of political thought who are seeing for the first time the global scale of evil that this system is built on and exists by perpetrating, the idea of voting for Harris given what she’s doing in the middle east is gut-wrenching. Many of those people can’t stomach the idea of checking a box next to that war criminal’s name. I understand, and I’d never shame someone for voting third party- I just want to share this language about what that is, because in reality, voting third party today is an accellerationist perspective. Since no third party candidates have anything like a pathway to victory, then in reality a vote third party makes it more likely that Trump will take the White House and make this into a fascist country. I understand why my neighbors are voting for trump to, as they say, burn it all down. While I won’t tell anyone how to vote, I will ask you to be honest with yourself. If you’re actually an accelerationist who’s willing to trade the lives of the most marginalized people in the world for the chance that the horrors they suffer will awaken the masses and lead to a large enough movement to create real change- own that. It’s a valid perspective, held by many people, and it deserves honest dialogue and engagement on it’s own terms, but couched behind anything else. I just ask that you notice that from an accellerationist perspective, as an honest political stance, then voting third party still doesn’t make any sense. If you truly believe in accellerationism, then have the courage to name that, and vote for Trump. But for an accellerationsit to vote third party, knowing that in the system that we’re in it absolutely does makes a trump victory more likely, looks like an act of willful ignorance to me. 

I’m not an accelerationist. I can’t get there. Part of the reason is that trading the lives of the most oppressed people for a dice roll is just not a tactic that I can get behind. I don’t believe we can buy a better world with the increased suffering of the most oppressed. Another factor is that accellerationism typically has no strategy beyond overthrowing the government. Like- imagine my neighbors got what they want- Trump wins, he’s such a selfish inept mess that the entire government collapses. Have they considered what happens next, from a population as propagandized and traumatized as ours, with the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of the ultra-rich? It would immediately be a corporate-controlled hellscape. The government, horrible and evil as it is, is literally the only check against corporate pollution and exploitation. Trump burns it down, and we don’t have established community systems and practices in place to meet our needs and mitigate corporate exploitation- things are guaranteed to be much, much worse. 

But the larger part of the reason I’m not an accellerationist is that my political elders, the people far, far wiser than I am, think it’s a bad and dangerous strategy. As someone trained in the sciences, I’m intimately familiar with The Dunning Kruger Effect, or Mt. Stupid, where people who know a little about something act with incredible, unwarranted, misplaced confidence. I watch Matt Walsh and other scientifically illiterate people do this all the time with my field of study, biology, and it drives me nuts. I’m not a political scientist. I’m a feral redneck biology teacher who reads a lot. For me to think I know political strategy better than Stacy Abrams, adrienne maree brown, Noam Chomsky, or a million other actually qualified people would be absurd past my tolerances. So I follow their lead, and Chomsky doesn’t mince words about this. He says that in serious leftist spaces, which are leftists operating in the fourth scale of political thought, voting is seen as a little break from the actual work. If there’s someone notably worth voting against, you take the time to go vote against them, and then get back to the actual work. 

If you dig into the industry behind literally any single thing in the world produced under capitalism, you will find a series of environmental and human rights violations that will make any healthy person physically ill. The phone you’re watching this on cost children their hands, and locked them into lives of slavery and torture. Almost every calorie we eat comes from GMO corn which is weaponized to destroy heirloom, ecologically stable corn and destroy healthy villages. Every time we get in our car or ride the bus, we are complicit in the largest ecological damage to this planet ever caused by a single species, and contributing to every horror that climate change is giving rise to. That’s not our fault- the very concept of a carbon footprint was invented by Exxon Mobile as propaganda to try and make climate change an individual issue. The problem is systemic, and it is that entire system that must be overthrown- my point is that we’re all already part of that system. So as a radical who sees that this entire system as wholly irredeemable and incompatible with human rights or a livable world- voting for a war criminal is just another tuesday. Choosing to performatively fail in a third party vote while continuing to engage in the million other ways that enable the system more doesn’t look like solidarity to me. It looks like purity politics and a way to excuse one’s self from the responsibility of action that we all have, regardless of who we vote for. It looks like a hyperfixation on one tiny way that we are all both victims of and complicit in the system that needs to be destroyed at the ignorance of all the rest, and like very bad tactics. It’s not actually an act of bravery to do something you know will fail and make the world worse when there are other options available. Pretending that third-party candidates do have a path to victory when they absolutely don’t isn’t a radical act- it’s just self-delusion. If you’re an accellerationist- own it, but don’t dress a poorly-thought-out kind of nihilistic accellerationism in the language of hope.

On this note, I want to point out that someone simply living in the Empire and criticizing it while continuing to tacitly support it is not working for a better world, and they’re not any kind of rebel. They’re just complicit. In fact, by dedicating all their energy to getting the empire to put up a pride flag a month a year instead of structurally opposing it, they’re actually supporting the empire. They’re making it more palatable, which draws energy and people away from the necessary work of toppling it. One way to think of liberalism is as successful conditioning of standards far lower than anyone should accept. So if someone thinks of gay marriage being legalized as a big win and evidence that the system can meaningfully change, they’re likely a liberal. If someone views gay marriage being legalized as the system being dragged kicking and screaming against it’s will towards the bare minimum of respecting individual sovereignty, and the fact that it took as long as it did as evidence of how incompatible the system is with human health and wellness- that person’s probably a radical. This isn’t to say that engaging within the system is necessarily bad- it’s just got to be viewed the same way we view voting. Is our engagement with the system intentionally working towards it’s destruction, and guiding it’s collapse in ways that cause the least harm possible, or is our engagement masking it’s true nature and giving it more power and authority? 

Within this fourth scale of political thought, there’s room for a lot of powerful tactics, including third-party candidates. By running, they shape the narrative and can minimize harm by influencing the platform of the empire, and by loudly insisting that we’re all going to vote for them, we can drag the platform of the empire towards humanity. Both those things have great value, and they’re super effective and worthwhile. They’re also not at all the same thing as voting tactics. We can loudly insist that we won’t vote for a war criminal and support third-party candidates, and then tactically vote against the greater evil for the candidate who has a pathway to victory. 

I live and vote in Maine. Because of hard work, we have Ranked Choice Voting, so I can vote my conscience and preference, which is Claudia De la Cruz, Cornell West, Jill Stein, and then Kamala Harris. I could mark Trump last or not at all, it amounts to the same thing. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats support Ranked Choice, because they know that with Ranked choice, especially the republicans would never win another election again, they’re only in the race because of wild gerrymandering. My point is that the work of getting ranked choice was all on-the-ground people, tirelessly working for years to give Maine this systemic change. Politicians of any color will never do it.

The word “Radical” just means: “Of or having to do with the Roots.” So a radical is just someone who addresses problems at their roots. By this definition, I am a radical. Note that this doesn’t mean I’m right, I hope we all notice that these scales are not the same as a linear spectrum of rationality, coherence, or accuracy. People can and do engage in wild logical fallacies and mistakes at every scale- they’re just about how holistic our thinking is.  That said, patterns become a lot more apparent at the fourth scale, and I can see that colonization, capitalism, fascism, racism, and patriarchy are all the same thing, they are one system, and it’s a system which is leading to the end of our species. So as a man working on being healthier, I must also act in solidarity with decolonization, with anti-fascism, with anti-racism, with anti-capitalism. I understand that many, perhaps most, people don’t see those five things as the same- we’re taught to see them as separate, so most of us do. But when you track the roots, they’re the same plant. It’s a plant of dehumanization and exploitation, and while the fruits it bears may look superficially different, they’re all strange. 

It is very difficult to see this before the fourth scale. It’s really only once we’re at this fourth scale of political thought and dialogue that we can discuss reality. Once we’ve set down our internalized prioritization of stability, only then can we see how terrifyingly unstable the system we currently have is. How rather than being a slow force of good in the world, liberalism is a set of blinders put on the beneficiaries of colonization to prevent us from ever facing the actual costs of our privilege. We can see that right-wing nationalism is the same thing. Neither my liberal nor my conservative neighbor’s worldviews would survive the combination of knowing the history of the US’s crimes in Latin America with their own daughter needing to hike the Darian Gap. Those two things alone would force their eyes open to the point where they could never support Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. So we can see the At the fourth scale, we can look at the propaganda that we have been fed clearly, and track what systems it comes from. We can look at history and see that not only is fascism terrible for everyone outside of it’s nation, it’s actually terrible for the people of that nation as well, not to mention being the nail in the coffin of a livable world. We can look at systems beyond our own experiences, like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which covered much of the US and Canada and held two millennia of ecologically stable, egalitarian, multinational peace. We can see that everything appealing about the US constitution was lifted directly from the Haudenosaunee confederacy. That’s not just proximity- the Founding Fathers literally spent months talking to the Haudenosaunee and saying that they wanted to make a contract just like the Haudenosaunee had. So the Haudenosaunee helped them- but then the founding fathers took out all the parts that made it democratic and matriarchal. That group of twenty-year-old slave owners didn’t just make up the constitution- they plagiarized an indigenous document and twisted it to their capitalist benefit. But that conversation, and the possibility of very different worlds than we live in now, are impossible to have until we’re out in this fourth scale. Once we’re out here, though, they become the only meaningful conversations, and the emergent strategy towards them becomes the only conceivable action. 

From this fourth scale of political thought, I understand that Kamala Harris is my enemy, that she is working for the destruction of everything I love and for a world which I would not wish on my worst enemies. So my vote for Kamala would be a little break, doing exactly what Chomsky said and showing up to vote against the person who would cause an even greater level of harm. I won’t pretend that De la Cruz or Jill Stein are going to win- even De la Cruz doesn’t pretend she’s going to win, because she has more than enough political consciousness to exist in this fourth scale, and navigate it with integrity and skill. But for someone in the third scale of political consciousness to vote for Kamala is a hope, it’s an affirmation of the system that’s destroying the world. It excuses them from meaningful action, from risking their tightly-clutched stability for the sake of any real change. It excuses both the republicans, by implying that this is just what they are, and it excuses the democrats, by pretending that this is the best we can do. It pretends that all this is normal, when it is very much not. A liberal vote for Harris is, in my opinion, an act of great cowardice and willful ignorance. 

A fourth-scale, radical vote for Kamala is a promise that we make to ourselves. It’s us saying, I will vote for this despicable war criminal because I am committing my life to tearing down the entire system which empowered her and which she is perpetrating. This woman, as a representative of this anti-life system which is destroying everything I love and hold holy, is receiving my vote as a promise. I don’t even have to hold my nose to vote for her, because my consistent, committed, lifelong, holistic work for a healthier world scrubs my conscience clean- I sleep like a baby after voting for my enemy, because my heart is clear with how this is an act of strategy against her and everything she represents. So part of the point of this video is that my vote for Kamala is qualitatively different than a liberal vote for Kamala.

To me, it looks like the people who feel torn about this are often in the transition from the second or third scale into the fourth, and it’s the blurriness of their tactics and ethics that make this question feel existentially challenging. They understand how a liberal vote for Kamala is active ignorance and complicity, and a deeply unethical act- but no one has explained how from the fourth scale, from a truly radical perspective, a vote for Kamala is profoundly ethical. To me, it seems like a lot of people who are voting third party aren’t doing it because they believe it will have any actual benefit, or as part of any actual strategy- it looks like the act of someone who doesn’t believe that meaningful change is possible. To me, it looks like the desperate act of someone who has no plan at all, so they’re just trying to do as little harm as they can, but they can’t see that, as Zinn put it, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. And not voting, or voting third party with zero chance of victory, looks like someone giving up because they can’t imagine another world. From the fourth scale, to vote for our enemy is an act of great responsibility. It holds the possibility of a better world, not because Kamala Harris will help get us there, but because we know that she won’t, and we believe that we can. 

If I lived somewhere without ranked choice, I would vote for Kamala, knowing that I would wake up the next day and get back to the real work of creating healthier systems that can draw energy away from the horrors of capitalism as it eats it’s self, creating alternative systems that supplant and overgrow the exploitative systems that Kamala represents, creating alternative systems that help accelerate and guide the crumbling of capitalism, through a diversity of tactics. 

But this isn’t binary, and every election cycle, a bunch of people use these ethics to vote for the lesser evil, and then drift away in the wind. I did this, when I voted for Obama. In my opinion, that’s an even greater act of cowardice and self-excusal than just being an honest liberal. To flirt with radical politics, to use them to deny our own complicity, and then not to engage with the actual work of changing the world? That’s the act of a cowardly traitor, and I have no respect for it. So if the arguments I laid out here resonate for you, I ask you- what will you do, on november 5th? What will you do with the rest of your life? Who are you? 

I ask this because for a radical, the answer should be the same regardless of who wins. On foreign policy, corporate regulation, economic regulation, and most everything else- Trump and Harris are identical, and the work necessary to change the world is identical. Who you are will be determined by your actions over time, not who you vote for. But you’re also responsible for your vote, and it has real impacts. In terms of the impacts on marganlized communities, the context in which our work must take place, and the threats that our families face as we undertake the work of creating a healthier world, Kamala and Trump are very, very different candidates. 

It’s also important to recognize that while people do tend to live their lives on one scale at a time, it’s not wholly linear. When people feel threatened, we tend to revert, sometimes all the way down to the first scale. This is why corporate interests spend so much time trying to get people to feel threatened- it benefits them when we don’t act in our collective interests. 

Fourth Scale Educational Tactics

This framework has a lot of value in understanding who we’re talking to. As a teacher, I find this to be super helpful, and I think anyone working on creating change would benefit from understanding these scales in real time. For example, fascist leadership comes from the fourth scale. These are people committed to a world of brutal violence and oppression. They don’t see that it is their beliefs and actions which are creating the exact circumstances that they seek to stay above. We’re talking about people like William F Buckley, Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney. These three men have caused incalculable harm in the world, and done so consciously and willingly. Unlike my neighbors, these people understand perfectly that undocumented immigrant labor provides the backbone of most of the US economy, and contribute far more in taxes and profits to their bosses than they could ever receive- they know all that and intentionally spread the lie that immigrants are a drain on our economy in order to maintain a class system that puts them on top. They understand that the US is a predatory bully that feeds on exploited countries and work forces around the globe, and they intentionally shape military and economic policies in order to create and maintain that imbalance. That is such a different scale of thought than my conservative neighbors who, through no fault of their own, have been entirely raised in the second scale of thought, and are likely to honestly believe that immigrants are a drain on the economy. My neighbors are likely to parrot talking points from fascist leadership these days, but if I respond to them as though they’re Henry Kissinger, I’m actively causing harm and contributing to political fissions. They’re not Kissinger- they’re just people who can see that the system is not working for them and want a better world, quoting the only people they’ve ever heard speak to their concerns. So my work is helping them look up a little, into the next scale. I’m likely to do that in terms that resonate with them, validating their very real concerns that I share. And in my experience, more conservatives at the second scale are ready to jump to the fourth than liberals at the third scale. Third-scale liberals tend to be entrenched and wholly committed to the beliefs that excuse their complicity and validate their stability. Conservatives at the second scale today tend to be already thinking into the fourth scale, and very open to much broader conversations. 

I experience many Trump-loving conservatives today as very open to hearing about the crimes of the US. The fact that their current lens puts that entirely on the government rather than corporations and billionaires is less entrenched than one might think- they’re mad at corporations as well, and when you talk about the revolving door between corporations and the government, they’re just as mad about it as I am, and not in the self-excusing, hand-wringing way that liberals tend to be. They want change and action now, as do I- and they’re not actually fascists, even if their words have some of those dog whistles in it these days, even if they’ve taken a step or two down that ideological path.

I share this because the future of the world is spinning on the edge of a knife right now. Things are in motion, things are up in a way that they haven’t been in a long time. People’s minds are spinning with it, my neighbors and mine included. None of us are immune to propaganda, and unless we speak together and intentionally shift all our consciousness into this fourth scale of thought, and then support one another in ethical action from that place, than the future looks very grim. Canceling my neighbors because they say some racist dog whistle that their entire world screams at them all day long would be just as effective as voting third party. 

Once we understand this, then we can much more accurately break down the education work that needs to be done. Third-scale liberals need help getting to the fourth scale. Their information and ethics are often pretty good, they’re just not able or willing to see in a way that’s wide enough to show them realities that would ask anything real of them, beyond pearl-clutching and guilt. And in the fourth scale, where a bunch of conservatives already are, or are one quick conversation away from being, then there’s a need for helping them see the humanity of people they’ve been aggressively conditioned not to see as human at all. If that sounds hard, remember this: while liberals tend to be far, far better at collective empathy, such as empathizing with immigrants, as a theoretical demographic, and voting based on that empathy- conservatives tend to be far, far better at individual empathy. Conservatives tend to be far better at individual forgiveness, and are often deeply generous people- to other specific people. They’re just terrible at collective empathy, in the same way that liberals- and leftists- tend to be terrible at individual empathy. Conservatives might empty a mag into a case of bud light in hilarious ways, but it is leftists and liberals who will straight-up crucify our own friends, family, and community members, and think we’re being allies while we do it. This is a huge factor in why conservative spaces tend to be far more ideologically diverse than liberal or leftist spaces, and a major reason that conservatives, while only being like a third of the population, out-organize everyone else, all the time. They organically function in a coalition model in a way that the left really, really struggles with. One of the heads of the Proud Boys is a Latino guy, which is just wild, but my point is that the right is already practiced and familiar with welcoming people they’ve been taught to dehumanize- if they perceive those people as being their allies. So expanding their sense of who their allies are, helping them see that fascism isn’t actually going to help them and that we all need to oppose corporate rule, and then helping them humanize people they’ve been taught to hate- that’s all sitting right there. I don’t mean we should start with the freaking proud boys, we should start with our neighbors and families. And- there are people doing this exact work within the most extreme right wing groups, and having serious success with it. Daryl Davis, the Black dude who spent decades intentionally befriending pointy white hats, has had a massive impact on the country’s politics- and that’s just him, alone. He has impact because he’s willing to act, and he’s willing to strategically risk himself. These are necessary qualities, that liberals lack, and conservatives tend to have in spades. Every time some new horror comes out, like the governor of missouri taking the life of a man known to be innocent, the liberal response is hand-wringing and guilt, while the conservative response – not from the pundits, from my neighbors and the conservatives in my comments sections- is lets fking go. They have courage and will that is necessary medicine today, and right now the only people speaking to their concerns are Trump and the Proud Boys, who are appropriating their healthy courage and will back into service of the exact systems that they oppose. It’s hard to watch, but can you see how precarious it is? How as soon as my neighbors understand who their actual enemies are, a very different world is possible? I know that I’m not perfect, I don’t think I have all the answers- but I also know that if people like me stay silent, we’re effectively abandoning our neighbors, communities, and futures to the system we all suffer under, including their pundits, both right and left wing. 

This is why I say that the world is balanced on a knife’s edge right now, and it’s far more precarious than we think, in both directions. Purity leftists drive me nuts, because they pretend that they’ve always operated with all the information and perspective that they have now. I was a conservative, I hand-painted a sign for Bush, and wanted to join the Marine Corps. Then Bush was a moron, and watching him say things like: “they just hate our freedom” was so absurd that I became a liberal,  and proudly cast a liberal vote for Obama. Then Obama began extrajudicial unaliving of US citizens with flying robots, and I was like: “Oh. This dude’s not on my side either.” It was through those experiences that I began to realize that the entire system was geared against human rights or a livable world. It wasn’t one watershed moment- it was a series of things. And the fact that a series of events can radicalize someone is the largest reason I’m not an accellerationist. I know that people are capable of seeing patterns without being personally hit in the head. This is the tactic that I think has power with getting third scale liberals to the fourth scale. I think we’re seeing it right now, with what the governor just did to Marcellus Williams. That’s shaking a lot of liberals worlds. It will shake some of their eyes open. Others will return to the third scale, but it will be less stable, and the next time the state does something terrible, or the next time they learn about something the state already did, like Salvador Allende or MK Ultra, maybe that will shake them up to seeing more of reality. I think this is why they’re crushing TikTok- the nature of that app exposes liberals to so much that doesn’t fit a liberal worldview that it’s inherently radacilizing. Regardless of that app’s future- I think that continuing to show liberals the parts of reality that they don’t want to face is good pedagogy. Madeline Pendelton is a great resource for this, in my opinion. Her presentation style is much more accessible than mine, and she’s much funnier, which makes her able to cut through liberal defenses that my doom-and-gloom baritone could never touch. 

There will be people who reduce this entire perspective down to just: “Jack says to vote for Kamala, Jack sold out, Jack endorsed Kamala” Count on it. If you understand what I said in this video, you understand why that reduction of this video is a lie. This is the exact opposite of an endorsement, it is an utter and complete condemnation of Kamala Harris and the entire system she represents. When I imagine people voting for Kamala as liberals, there’s a huge part of me that would rather us both vote for Trump, as accellerationists, because we simply do not have time for liberal self-excusal. If your vote for Kamala makes you think you can catch your breath, or leads you to engage less at all, the way I voted for Obama- than it’s actively harmful, to the entire world you think you’re voting for. We need you to show up. Show up to yourself, to your union, to your community, to your planet- we need to actively build systems of community support and mutual aid which supplant and overgrow the systems of capitalism. 

There’s a lot more that this framework links to, I’m sure. There’s meaningful conversations to be had about the relationship between somatic healing and capacity to scale up in political thought, about the intersections of identity and proximity with capacity to see beyond our own communities, about the funnels that the propaganda model of the system we exist within create to neutralize emergent awarenesses, like the poor-working-class into right-wing proto-fascist funnel, and the left-wing-emergent-critical-intersectional-analysis into purity-politics-and-isolation-leading-to-erosion-of-community-organizing-efficacy funnel. Those are necessary and meaningful conversations. But I think I’ve wrapped up the salient subject of this piece, so I’m going to set those down for now, and end with this:  

May we all see with ever-clearer eyes and hearts.

You know the word Alpha. You’ve likely heard people identify as Alpha Males, and you’ve likely heard critiques of that identity. Maybe you’ve heard wildlife biologists use the phrase, and wondered about whether humans have Alphas. I studied Biology, and taught it for many years. Beyond that, I’ve been researching, engaging in, and working in the field of masculinities for fifteen years, so I thought I would take a moment to try and shed some light on this sometimes murky subject. Given that one of the most prominent and influential self-described Alpha Males in the public sphere, Andrew Tate, was recently arrested, it seems like a good time to take a deeper dive. 

We can track the phrase one of two ways; chronologically or scientifically. Let’s start with scientifically, and circle back around to the chronology. In the sciences, the term gained prominence in the study of primates. Frans de Waal’s 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes” used and popularized it, and the term is still used by many serious primate scholars, especially with regards to Chimpanzees and Gorillas. Within these species, there is an apparent social hierarchy with a single male at the top. That male is referred to as the Alpha male, and carries some of the characteristics that we associate with the pop-psychology of Alphas from Men’s magazines- most notably he is often the sole arbiter of reproductive rights, meaning that it is only with his permission that other Chimps or Gorillas can mate.

That said, Alpha status is not won by combat alone, or by having what might be described as a “dominant mindset.” Alpha status is social, and without the support of the group, especially the Elders, it cannot be attained or maintained. So Alpha males must maintain right relationships with their group in order to maintain their Alpha status, meaning they have to be nice. It is, in effect, an elected position; not at all how we are taught to think of Violent Alphas, clawing their way to the top over the bloody bodies of their competitors. Males who want to be Alpha become more pro-social, not less. They often begin tending children more, being kinder to everyone around them, and sharing food.  They court respected Elders for their support, and demonstrate that they are not selfish or violent, but community-oriented. So while the word Alpha is still used by scientists in describing some primates, the reality is not at all what we have come to conceive of it as in regards to male psychology. Picture a group of male gorillas “competing” by seeing who can be nicest and most respectful to babies, Elders, and female gorillas. Now you’re imaging a much more accurate, scientifically grounded framework of what an Alpha gorilla is like.

While discussing primates, though, it is also noteworthy that while we are closely related to Chimps and more distantly related to Gorillas, our closest relative is the Bonobo. Bonobos, by any interpretation, have no Alpha males. Bonobos have Matriarchal societies which have some of the most nuanced, egalitarian, and loving relationship structures we’ve ever witnessed in nature. While this paragraph is brief, the importance of this cannot be overstated. Like humans, bonobos are a community-oriented, pro-social species. As such, if we are looking for non-human analogies to learn from, our bonobo cousins are by far the best teacher, and they practice everything from midwifery to intentional, somatic community conflict-resolution. I invite you to hold the egalitarian, non-violent, profoundly loving bonobos in mind as we continue to look at canine and human “alphas.”  

Regardless of Chimps, Gorillas, and Bonobos, the term Alpha did not migrate from the study of primates into human pop psychology. Rather, it migrated from the study of Wolves. In 1947, Rudolph Schenkel wrote a paper on the behavior of wolves. In this paper, he observed competitive violence and dominance in a wolf pack, with multiple male wolves fighting for authority, and one usually on top of the social hierarchy. He dubbed this wolf the Alpha. This research was the foundation for Dr. David Mech’s wildly popular 1970 book: “The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species”. In this book, Dr. Mech further explores the idea of the dominant Alpha wolf, maintaining his Top-Dog status by beating everyone else in fierce combat, and radiating his Dominant energy so powerfully that most never dared challenge him. It was a captivating picture, and one that was very quickly picked up by pop psychology. 

The rest of this history on the human side you already know. The concept of Alpha vs Beta Males, (or Sigma, or Omega, or however deep into the complex, fictional nonsense you want to get,) the idea of dominance, all of these concepts spread like wildfire over the subsequent 50 years. In my work with youth in recovery, it is the norm today for 12-18 year old men to, when meeting each other, all puff out their chests and declare that they are Alpha Males, staring into each other’s eyes aggressively. Articles and self-described “Coaches” and “Experts” on Alpha energy spend millions of hours working to dress this concept well. On the healthier side, they argue that it is about “dominance over the self first”. On the more direct side, they brag about domestic and sexual violence with a gleaming pride in their eyes; knowing that they are backed by science, and know exactly what masculinity is. The following quote is from Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed “Alpha Male” whose videos have more than 12 billion views. Strong content warning for both domestic and sexual violence:

“…bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck, you go ‘SHUT UP BITCH’ she’s shaking on the floor, panties are all wet, and you go fuck her. that’s how it goes. slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.” 

Tate is more than just words. After years of publicly posting videos of himself domestically abusing dozens of women who he enslaved in his home, he was finally caught and arrested on sex trafficking, enslavement, and assault charges last week. It is noteworthy that to the Alpha Male psyche, Tate enslaving and abusing women is not a bug- it is a fantasy. Following the release of the evidence of his crimes, this self-proclaimed “King of Toxic Masculinity” gained over half a million followers.

Let’s return to Dr. Mech, the person widely credited with bringing the term Alpha out of the sciences and into common parlance. Dr. Mech is a good scientist, which means that he continues to learn from reality and can adjust his positions to fit facts. Immediately following the publication of his book, he learned that Schenkel’s ‘47 paper which much of his book was based on was faulty, in many ways. The wolves Schenkel was observing were not in the wild. They were in a 30×60 ft cage in a zoo. Of equal importance, they were not a natural pack. Humans had captured a bunch of individuals from all over the place who had no prior contact and put them in a zoo together. Their resulting competition and violence was then interpreted as the nature of Wolves, and provided the foundation for the concept of Alpha dominance. 

It was the equivalent of kidnapping ten random humans from all over the world, locking them in a room, and then interpreting the fact that some of these traumatized, stressed humans were kind of ass holes as representative of healthy human nature. 

Wolves in the wild simply do not behave the same way. They do not demonstrate the qualities of Alpha described in Schenkel’s observations or Mech’s subsequent book. What they do have is extended family groups with parents. Serious wolf researchers and aficionados today, including Dr. Mech, use the much more scientifically accurate term “parents”. Front and center in Dr. Mech’s personal website is an explanation and series of interviews on this subject, in which he describes his decades of work to get his own very successful book removed from print due to it’s glaring inaccuracies and contribution to such caustic and popular misconceptions. He writes: “We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years than in all of previous history. One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. ‘Alpha’ implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack.” 

The dedicated followers of the Alpha myth will no doubt insist that the only way to become a successful parent wolf, or to breed, is through competition and violence. It is no accident that this is the exact same mindset and reproductive strategy of Andrew Tate, the gentleman with such an endearing earlier quote about how to treat women. 

One can track Dr. Mech’s progression of perspective when comparing that current quote, in which he outright states that the whole concept of “alpha” is outdated and erroneous, to this quote from a 2013 paper of his, titled: “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs.”

“Labeling a high-ranking wolf alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominance hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none. Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so “alpha” adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal’s ‘dominant’ status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.”

In this paper from a decade ago he was still using the term, but one can feel his growing skepticism. As he recounts 13 years of personal observations of wild wolf packs with zero dominance contests, he clearly began to wonder whether the whole ‘Dominant Alpha maintaining position by combat and strength’ narrative made any sense at all. Dr. Mech, at 85 years old with half a century of wolf study under his belt, has grown. Conversely, one can hear Mr. Tate screaming from the prison he is currently rotting in for sex trafficking and abuse that when an Alpha is SO ALPHA, they never need to engage in contests, because the sheer force of their Alpha energy is so powerful that no other wolf would ever dare challenge them for this sacred and revered position. Hyperbole aside, this is a serious argument made by the Alpha adherents; they genuinely believe that if one simply becomes dominant enough, that dominance will negate the need for violence. It is the same logic as someone saying that sure, their car frame is rusty, but if they just make it even rustier- then it will become safe and whole again.

Both Tate and the other adherents to the Alpha Male myth maintain their dogmatic dedication to violence by ignoring actual wolves and actual humans. In actual wolf packs, successful mating is usually the result of pro-social behavior, not anti-social. Recent studies are showing that wolves are more prosocial than dogs, suggesting that altruism and social support are foundational qualities for canines. This same pattern is well-documented in humans; we select mates based on pro-social behavior. As we covered earlier, even Chimps and gorillas seeking higher social status don’t go around trying to “dominate” others, behavior which would be guaranteed to make their community hate them, in exactly the same way that we all feel when some dude starts trying to “dominate” people in the bar.

So it begins to look like the whole idea of an Alpha male, in the way that it has become an everyday concept being sold to and bought by men, only exists in one place, and that is the fantasies of wounded men seeking to paint their wounds as “natural.” Their fictional “Alpha males” have virtually no relationship to the Alpha male gorillas and chimps, who are specifically pro-social, easily playfully with babies, and cooperative with other males. Their fantasy “Alpha male”dominates everyone around them, either through violence or through their sheer Alpha vibes that no one dares threaten. Beyond that, this fantastic Alpha male is quintessentially and forever alone. Like they said in the equally fictional Highlander movies; “There can be only one!” This begins to get to the heart of the appeal of the fantastic Alpha mythos. 

Men in our society feel alone. Our emotional vocabulary, vibrant and rich in childhood, is stripped from us in the socialization of puberty, leaving us emotionally stunted and hobbled. Our socially-sanctioned avenues for peer relationships are emotional wastelands of mindless loyalty to sports teams or arbitrary forms of productivity. (This is absolutely not to say that work is not a meaningful avenue for peer relationships; but work without emotional vulnerability and connection cannot fill the void.) Most men lack emotionally connective friendships or connection of any kind. Male friendship in our society is often a shared loneliness, not a connection or bond that facilitates genuine sharing, vulnerability, or growth. We may enjoy each other’s company, and may feel better when we hang out and watch a game or drink a beer, but we’re not sharing about what makes us sad, or how our fears are impacting our relationship the way that women can and do. So we are alone. Many of us only have close emotional intimacy with our romantic partner. While the fact that we can be real with our partner, if we can, is excellent, it is the exception that proves the rule. Beyond that, this means that our relationship is also effectively alone; we are not in a supported network of relationships that contextualize and support our primary romantic partnership; we’re just alone with our partner. 

So men are used to being alone. In many ways, being alone is the heart of modern masculinity. Perhaps this is why we cling to the idea of Lone Wolves. But lone wolves are not a natural expression of how wolves exist either- we now know, in part from Dr. Mech’s ongoing research, that lone wolves are simple looking for a new family, or pack. One could call this a method of gene dispersal, or one could just call it how wolves like to live; traveling a little in search of new connections, as many humans do. But again- the stretch from the reality of wolves who travel a little for new connections to the myth of the Lone Wolf as isolated men use it to try and glorify their unhealthy isolation is problematic. Neither wolves nor men are meant to be alone for long. 

It begins to become clear why as the term has waned in scientific circles, so it has waxed in men’s pop psychology. In my work with both inmates and teens struggling with addiction, it was rare to meet any member of either population who did not vociferously self-identify as an Alpha in front of their peers, often while literally hitting their chests. Contrary to all science and actual psychology, more and more men insist on identifying as Dominant, or Alphas, or Monsters, or Warriors. 

Concurrently, two other things are happening. The first is that as our society has become safer, women need men less. Within my mother’s lifetime, she gained the legal right to hold a credit card in her own name, the pay gap lessened, and acceptance of LGBTQ has risen. So women need men less today than they ever have in western civilization; they can hold a job, date another woman or no one, and be completely fine. The second is that simultaneously, fewer and fewer young men can find women willing to date them; to the point where they are literally traveling overseas to try and find victims – ahem – I mean partners. 

Looking at all these variables together, it begins to seem as though the deeply patriarchal, dominant, violent form of masculinity which so quickly snatched up the misconception of Alphas and remains completely committed to that myth having some validity is not, in fact, what women want at all. In fact, it begins to seem as though maybe, violent, dominant, insecure men are not what women have ever wanted. It seems that when women have actual freedom and consent, they simply do not want what we were all taught to think of as “Traditionally masculine” men, in the sense of being dominant, emotionally-stunted, dissociated, explosive kegs of unaddressed trauma. All these guys trying to be aloof, dominant alphas are just dodging their own wounds and healing in ways that makes them profoundly unappealing partners. What men think of as being Alpha is not human nature

Humans are an evolutionarily communal species, meaning that our survival strategy is to rely on one another in community. As a communal species, we’re inherently pro-social; we’re neurologically wired almost entirely for communication, sympathy, and connection. Thus, Anti-social behaviors such as dominance or violence have never been central to the identities or relationships of any healthy human community.  What men think of as being Alpha is nothing to do with human nature; it’s just a coping mechanism to try and make us feel better about the traumas we’ve both suffered and often perpetrated. 

So not only do alphas not exist in wolves or humans, the bizarrely resilient myth of Alpha Males is proving to be an actual threat to the continuation of the human race, as statistically significant numbers of young men can’t find anyone willing to date them because of their harmful, nonsensical ideologies about gender and masculinity. Jordan Peterson’s response to this crisis to is argue, as he did last month, that women should be legally considered property again and that women should sexually give themselves to violent men in order to decrease male violence. Ok, that’s one proposal, Dr Peterson- we go full-on, no-holds-barred structural sexual assault and dehumanization of women for the sake of maintaining your fragile little Alpha/Monster mythology about what masculinity is. 

We all know that there is another option. We see it in our cousins the bonobos, and I hope we all carried their lessons as we looked at all these other pieces. Together, let us undertake the difficult, world-healing path of healing masculinity and again wholly becoming the pro-social, community-minded species that we are.