Whoever you are, wherever you live, life right now probably feels a bit uncertain. We spent the past year launched out of all normalcy: our roles and routines thrown to the wind, our lives newly centered on avoiding a plague that stalked around every corner, watching in helplessness as loved ones and strangers got sick and died across the world.

From our own backyards to the other side of the globe, so many of our once-stable institutions have been struggling for survival too. …

The root of all suffering is addiction. We can end suffering by healing from all addictions. Simple, right? Ha. This is a work of logic, not psychological or medical science, and I am writing it in the order it came to me:

Truth One: Desire rules. All other rules are made up.

All morality is unscientific. Every moral judgment you have is based on an assumption you can’t prove is correct. If you think something is morally wrong, you can keep asking “Why is that wrong?” again and again. Eventually you’ll hit a question you can’t answer, and realize that you actually don’t know. …

Call me naïve, but I truly believe the United States, as an entity, is on a path of transformative healing. That entity is different from the sum total of all the human beings who live in the country, in that the character of “the United States” is still determined by power hierarchies within its society and culture. Because our institutions are still dominated by upper- and middle-class white people, the “needle” of America’s spiritual progress is still pinned to its dominant white mainstream. …

A few weeks ago, I was coming back from a long road trip and stopped for gas at a small town in eastern Montana. The man at the pump front of us clocked my Washington license plates and started chatting to me. It was an odd conversation from the get-go. He started by telling me how much his sister hated living in Washington. I shrugged and agreed that the rain was pretty depressing. Then he vented about the Covid restrictions in Washington, how not-free it is there, how much better life is in Montana. …

The other day, a teacher friend of mine told me her opinion of Ragnarök had recently changed. She’d always hated teaching it — so much violence and destruction and helplessness, it wasn’t the kind of story children already traumatized by modernity needed any more of. But these days, amid apocalyptic levels of personal and collective destruction, she’d changed her tune. At the end of Ragnarök, the world is reborn anew, though no one enduring the destruction of the planet would know that ahead of time. Maybe that lesson is what we need.

This is the way the world turns: light…

As a formerly die-hard anarchist revolutionary, I find myself with a new outlook these days: I think the revolutionaries are right about everything but the revolution.

We certainly need revolution-level systemic change, but I believe the notion that it’s going to come quickly or cathartically is a fantasy. To what do I owe this shift in my thinking? Well, I’d chalk it up to just not being twenty-two anymore. It’s not that I’ve gotten less radical, far from it; it’s that in growing more mature myself, I’m more aware of how maturation happens.

If you’re lucky in this life, then…

While I understand the social, cultural and economic reasons why the American Right is, well, like this, there’s one aspect of its behavior that hasn’t really made sense to me: why do they care so much what other people do?

We all have a stake in what our rulers do to us, and some of our decisions have reverberating impacts, but what doesn’t make sense to me is why ordinary Conservatives care so much whether an ordinary not-Conservative uses “they” pronouns or drives a Hybrid. If you believe Covid-19 is a hoax, it makes sense that being forced to stay…

Preceding chapters: Introduction, Belief, Need, Will, Self, Responsibility, Form, Mutual Aid

This series is called “liberation”, and it is an owner’s manual. It is a guide for using tools you already possess. It is nothing like a map, and more like instructions for how to use a compass.

We asked at the beginning what we can build on thin air. Though I am no carpenter, what I know about building is that when you have the right tools, it’s easier to get the job done. You find there is wisdom in the tools themselves. There’s a reason you don’t use…