They Gave Up the Game in 2004

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

—Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004

Reality Is Created

Few people would argue that Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza isn’t real. It exists, you can visit it, you can climb on the blocks, you can take photos of it, and you can find some uncountable number of people scattered across the planet who have visited it, climbed it, photographed it, and will claim, with full conviction and certainty, that it’s 100% real.

But the pyramid didn’t exist until it did—it wasn’t “real” until it was.

Even in ancient Egypt, devoid as it was of heavy machinery, it was possible to build a structure more than 40 stories high out of more than 2 million massive stone blocks that collectively weigh nearly six million tons. Who would have thought such a thing was possible before it was proved that it was?

Only its existence proved its existence is possible.

For centuries since, the pyramid has been explored, documented, studied, and gawped at. And even after all these centuries, that one pyramid has never been fully understood or explained. No matter how long we look at it, we will never fully see its entirety.

Humans flock to the pyramid because it exists; if it didn’t exist, there would be no flocking.

And if we want people to flock to a vision of the world we want to create, we must create things—real things in the real world—worth flocking to.

Reality Will Forever Outpace Understanding

Studying reality will never achieve a full or inerrant understanding of reality.

People with the most expertise in a subject area—let’s say, I don’t know, politics—are always dumping a dog’s breakfast of conflicting opinions on us and making a continuous stream of predictions that turn out to be wrong.

It appears that the people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying and practicing politics can’t accurately explain or predict political outcomes, and they certainly can’t reliably engineer the outcomes they want, no matter how really, really hard they try to convince themselves and others they can. It should be obvious by now that the smartest and most educated among us can lose to the dumbest and most ignorant. And yet our progressive intelligentsia appears largely blind to this readily observable fact, as demonstrated by all the losing happening everywhere.

Not only is reality too vast and complicated and baffling and mysterious and elusory, but reality is forever changing. Democracy didn’t exist until it did, and it can—as we are now seeing—die a quick and merciless death.

Understanding Reality Does Not Create Reality

Progressives must recognize the distinction between “studying reality” and “creating reality.”

Studying reality rests on the tacit, unexamined belief that there’s a fixed reality to study, and that by studying this reality, we will naturally obtain the information we need to understand what is real. And once we are equipped with this understanding, we will then be able to change the world.

But what happens when the world changes before we understand it?

Can our pursuit of understanding ever keep up with the pace of change?

If it doesn’t, can we ever understand anything?

And if we can’t ever fully understand anything (and we can’t), what’s preventing us from taking bolder and more assertive action right now?

I also like to study reality. And I like to study what people have learned about reality when they’ve studied it. Studying reality is great. It’s fun. It’s important and necessary. We need to study reality and try to understand it.

The problem with this unconscious and unquestioned belief—that there is a fixed reality that can be studied—is that it ignores a few readily observable and demonstrable truths: imagined things can become real, real things can cease to exist, and the reality we inhabit is governed by a host of made-up things—things that didn’t exist in the past but now do.

Twenty-five years ago, no one was walking around with a supercomputer in their pockets; today, you need a pocket supercomputer to read a menu in many restaurants.

Reality is made, then studied—and no amount of studying reality will create the reality we want.

If we want it, we must build it.

Build and Win First, Study Later

If we don’t audaciously and tenaciously build the reality we want to inhabit while also studying and trying to understand it—especially when authoritarian regimes are bulldozing new realities into existence across the globe—we could end up living in a reality in which studying reality no longer matters.

If we have $10 to spend and one hour to spend it, we need to invest $9.75 and 58.5 minutes on worldbuilding, and the remainder on research, until American democracy is once again functionally democratic and safeguarded by functional institutions

Consider, for example, that we could end up, right here in America, living in a country in which things like legitimate universities, research grants, longitudinal studies, and professors no longer exist. Or perhaps “universities” may still exist, but exist only as ideological factories pumping out hardcore indoctrinates who then turn their preferred pseudo-realities into the reality we must all then suffer.

If we don’t relentlessly and unstoppably build and buttress and rebuild a world in which things like credible universities exist, we’ll end up living in a world in which they don’t. And when universities are vaporized, and all the research they have or would have generated is vaporized along with them, we’ll also lose access to the understanding of reality that research could have conferred upon us, which will then make understanding the world that much harder.

In 2024, I suspect there were perhaps a handful of people who believed it would be possible, in only a few months, to undermine and rattle the foundations of the American system of higher education, a system that, of course, took centuries to build. I also suspect the people who are employed in higher-education systems were the least likely to have believed that the American system of higher education could be so grievously undermined and rattled so quickly. I wonder what they might say now.

It’s often the case that those who have the most to gain and protect—such as celebrated professors who are paid $50,000 to speak at a conference for a few hours—can be those who are slowest to realize they will lose what they’ve gained if they fail to protect it.

The Abdication of Creation

People in the reality-based community who believe that solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality will lose the battle that’s currently underway, all around us, for the future and soul of America.

While we’re murmuring things about enlightenment principles and empiricism, and studying reality so assiduously, judiciously, and expensively, regimes of unprincipled, iron-willed fanatics will act, creating the reality that all of us will then inhabit.

And then they’ll act again, creating other new realities, which the reality-based community will continue to study, and that’s how things will sort out.

They will be history’s actors—if we let them—and all of us will be left to study what they’ve done.

Provided, of course, that things like modern liberal universities with grants, research programs, and professors still exist.

And increasingly, it looks possible they might not.

If we abdicate our power to build the world we want—right now, all together, as fast as possible, and in the most unyielding, hard-driving, all-in way we can collectively muster—the great pyramidal institutions of American democracy will be turned upside down, totter on at their pinnacle, and collapse into a ruinous pile of broken blocks to be weathered away by the sands of time.

~SEA

Last revised 3.23.26

What to Expect

• Multigenerational poverty and wealth inequality is and has been causing massive amounts of harm to American families and children for generations, with adverse ripple effects throughout the economy that are only accelerating and worsening with each passing year.

• Many of us feel powerless to do anything about it. But together, we can have a life-changing impact on people in our community, especially children and young people—but the strategies need to be feasible and effective.

• Below I propose a practical strategy that nearly every community in America can implement—right now—to begin disrupting wealth inequality.

• I also describe how the strategy works and provide a customizable program outline to help communities get started.

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The Observable, Demonstrable, Known Thing

I’m not going to belabor this point with an extended list of linked references, statistics, and research—just google some things because the evidence is abundant and observable everywhere you look:

Economic inequality is bad.

Now moving on…

Change What You Can

You don’t have to be an economist to take economic action to counteract inequality.

Most of us believe we cannot do much of anything to solve our massive macroeconomic problems, such as unstoppable national indebtedness, rampaging capitalist pillaging, absurdly ballooning healthcare costs, mountainous piles student-loan debt, swirling storms of unaffordability spiraling in fractals all around.

Consequently many of us feel helpless, often most of the time, particularly lately.

But we can have a microeconomic impact, particularly on individuals, and especially on children and young people, people who then become the adult contributors to our economy.

And if enough children and young people are positively impacted, starting as early prekindergarten, positive macroeconomic impacts will follow, even if they take years or decades to manifest.

And when solutions take years or decades to manifest, the best approach is to get started immediately.

One of my operative principles:

If you can’t change something, change something you can.

A Community-Based Disruption Strategy

In these times of overwhelm and learned helplessness, we need practical, feasible strategies that a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people can enact in their sphere of influence with the knowledge, skills, resources, and money they have.

This community-based strategy will never solve everything, and it won’t have an immediate impact on large-scale problems, but it can be an invaluable contribution to the solution, a contribution that millions of people could make right now, and it will have a direct, lasting, and possibly even life-altering impact on some proportion of the young people and families involved.

Here’s the strategy that nearly every community in America can implement—starting right now—to begin disrupting wealth inequality:

• Step 1. Start with these three facts: Nearly half of households in America have no retirement savings, more than 30% have less than $25,000 saved, and more than 20% have zero savings. Specific data sources and statistics vary a bit, but who cares? The situation is demonstrably very not good at all, and the fallout is observably obvious everywhere.

• Step 2: Identify the mechanisms of change. Disrupting multigenerational poverty and wealth inequality begins with (a) some financial knowledge, (b) some amount of financial guidance and mentoring, and (c) some money. And the earlier this support is provided in someone’s life, the greater the potential impact will be over the course of their lives.

• Step 3. Establish a clear, feasible, unambiguous objective. In this case: If we give as many 18-year-olds as we can (a) some financial knowledge, (b) some amount of financial guidance and mentoring, and (c) some money to invest in a retirement account, particularly young people in our poorest households, it will increase rates of retirement investment by more young adults in our country, by some amount, in direct proportion to the number of young adults who receive the support, dramatically increasing their net worth and retirement security over time. My recommendation is to provide a+b+c in the community where they live, while they are still a captive, reachable, co-located audience—i.e., when they’re in high school.

• Step 4. Design the program. You don’t need to start from scratch! I’ve provided a customizable program outline below to help communities get started.

• Step 5. Recruit a team of coordinators, fundraisers, funders, educators, and volunteers. The amount of funding required to operate the program will be proportional to the number of young people supported, but the program can be implemented with a relatively small team of people and a relatively small amount of locally raised funding. Ideally, the program will be managed by at least one person who is being paid for their time—it could be a teacher, a nonprofit or municipal employee, or a loaned employee from a bank or other local business. It could also be coordinated by an education foundation or PTO volunteer, or a retired person with relevant skills. Other volunteers will be needed, but their overall time investment will likely be relatively minimal, manageable, and short-term.

• Step 5. Secure donations to fund starter Roth IRA accounts. This step is vital. In fact, it’s essential to the strategy’s success: Give young people money to invest in an individual Roth IRA retirement account. The strategy encompasses three primary tactics: (1) provide retirement education, (2) open retirement accounts, and (3) fund retirement accounts with seed money. This is the linchpin of the strategy, and what sets this strategy apart from other strategies. Helping young people open a retirement account (not just telling them to do it) and giving them some money to invest (not just telling them to invest on their own) will dramatically increase both participation rates and long-term impact. Relative to the number of students involved, the seed money required to open and fund an individual Roth IRA will, of course, increase proportionally. Some major brokerage firms allow investors to open an online retirement account in minutes with $0—i.e., a lack of money is not a barrier to opening an account, and some firms allow investors to start with as little as $1. While it would be amazing if a community could give every high school graduate $500 or $1,000 to invest, any amount of funding will be better than nothing. If the graduating high school class is 350 students, it will require $35,000 to deposit $100 in each account, $17,500 to deposit $50, and $3,500 to deposit $10. One donor, philanthropy, local education foundation, or modest fundraising campaign could raise $35,000 in most communities that produce 350 high school graduates each year. A few banks could easily contribute this amount, many of them already have philanthropic community programs, and this strategy dovetails with their business model, their employees’ skill sets, and their charitable missions. Many communities give out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships each year to a small number of graduates (who often need the money the least), and one mid-sized philanthropic foundation could give $50,000 or $100,000 to the program. Giving every graduate a “Roth IRA scholarship” might not help them pay for college, but it will capitalize a retirement account that could be worth hundreds of thousands decades from now. Raise as much money as you can, divide it up equally, and dump it in there.

• Step 5. Encourage young people and their families to match the investment. Some families have more than they need, and some don’t have enough. All participating young people should be offered the same amount of seed funding, regardless of household wealth or income, but families with greater financial means can be given the option to donate extra money to the cause and/or redistribute their child’s portion to other young people who need it more—and their children can still benefit from other elements of the program (financial education, assistance opening an account). Some young people might have money to contribute from a part-time job, and they should be encouraged to contribute something, even if it’s only a small amount. Their parents can also make a matching contribution at whatever level they are able. Parents in the community will also know many of the young people who will benefit, and parents of means who donate to the program will be giving money to kids they know. People are more inclined to give money to individuals, especially people they know, particularly when those people will directly benefit, in visible ways, from their financial support. Local news coverage, an article in the schools newsletter, or a celebratory public event at the conclusion of the program will elevate visibility and awareness, and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the program in subsequent years by attracting more attention, volunteers, and donations.

• Step 6. Invite and involve parents. Multigenerational poverty and inequality is multigenerational—the adverse effects get passed on from one generation to the next. In many cases, the families of participating young people will have received no financial education, mentoring, or support at any point in their lives. If the program is already going to be educating their children, why not invite them along for the ride? Communities could also run an adult program in tandem with the youth program, and even hold it in the same location at the same time. The parents can attend the educational experiences alongside their children, and they can be there when a volunteer helps their child open their Roth IRA account. If the child is under the age of 18, parents or guardians should be there anyway. If some proportion of participating parents also decide to open retirement accounts, you’re slathering gravy on top. The positive effect will be doubled without requiring twice the investment.

• Step 7. Explore options for cross-program integration. In many communities, programs may already exist that dovetail with the strategy. Operationally, the program could be integrated with another program to streamline coordination, leverage existing volunteers, and increase fundraising and impact. For example, the AARP and United Way offer free community-based programs that help people file their taxes. Taxes are filed in the spring, and the program can be implemented in the spring semester of senior year. The people volunteering their time to a tax-preparation program have financial expertise, and they have already demonstrated their desire to volunteer their time to help people out financially in their community. If a community-based, tax-preparation program already exists, the existing programmatic infrastructure—compensated coordinators, organized volunteers, suitable locations—could be leveraged to reduce the overall investment required to design and run the program.

• Step 8. Build out and refine the program over time. Once the program model has been built and implemented once, operating the program in each subsequent year will require less investment than it did the previous year, particularly if the model worked well and adult volunteers keep returning year after year. If a virtuous cycle takes hold, the result will be more volunteers, more support and mentoring for young people, and more money year over year, and it will take less time and energy to manage the program.

A Starter Program Design

Objective

Provide all high school seniors with a financial education and mentoring experience, help them open a retirement account, and give them a modest monetary gift to fund their new account.

Programmatic Components

• Provide an accessible educational experience. The learning experience could take place during school, after school, or on a weekend. It could be offered as an extension of an existing high school course or community program, or it could be offered as a standalone program. It could be one session or multiple sessions, but it doesn’t need to be an intensive weeklong course. For example, participating young people could receive 3-4 hours of group instruction, and 1-2 hours of support to open their account at a different time by a team of volunteers. People are busy and distracted, so shrink it down to the most important essentials to make it more feasible, increase participation, and get it done.

• Keep it simple and executable. Focus the experience on the highest-priority basic financial knowledge. Don’t overbuild the curriculum or overthink the process. Don’t make the planning, organization, and coordination needlessly complex and cumbersome. Don’t give young people or volunteers reasons to not show up and participate. Getting people there and getting it done matters far more than getting it perfect.

• Find at least one program coordinator. The program can be coordinated by the school, a nonprofit, an education foundation, a PTO, or a for-profit partner. If you keep it simple, one person working on the program for 10–15 hours a week over a month or two could organize the entire soup to nuts. Pick an organization that’s mission-aligned and already knows how to manage community-based programs.

• Develop a simple, easy-to-execute curriculum. For the curriculum, I recommend something like this:

  • Give each young person a copy of I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi (usually purchasable for around $10–$15). Don’t buy copies from Amazon—work with a local bookstore to bulk-order copies at a significant discount. The book is breezy and easy to read, it provides a step-by-step program, it’s written for young people, and it’s formatted to be more approachable for those who are less inclined to read long-form books. It also conveys the practical, foundational financial information everyone should know—not blizzards of unimportant technical minutia.

  • Use the book to structure the curriculum and learning experience. Here’s a PDF of the table of contents and first chapter. Pick the most important lessons from each chapter, boil it down into a mini-course and presentation, and walk students through the lessons using engaging visuals and concrete, real-world examples. Give a stipend to a few teachers who know what they’re doing to design the curriculum and instructional strategy, and teach the mini-course.

  • Consider holding learning sessions in a central community space, particularly if some students have negative associations with the high school. Pick a nice and inviting location, such as somewhere that’s light-filled and beautiful. Host it at a bank, college, corporate headquarters, or other professional setting that brings young people into a space they would not get to experience otherwise. Communicate: You deserve good things, you belong here, you could work here one day, you have options and the personal agency to change the course of your life.

  • Keep the learning experience short, interesting, and fun. Don’t drone on. Be energetic and funny. Keep it zippy and light, but also convey the enormous importance of making sound money decisions, and how unsound financial decisions can adversely impact their lives in profound ways. Keep it real—no economic abstractions or financial jargon. Connect the lessons to their interests, their aspirations, and their actual lives. Have the adults in the room share their personal experiences with money, particularly the mistakes they made, and why and how they changed course. Bring in a charismatic speaker who will resonate with them, such as an alum who became a noteworthy person or someone like them who built some wealth from nothing. Share specific examples of non-rich people making good decisions that put them on the path to wealth-building.

  • Above all, educate them about compound interest. Show them the numbers—i.e., the wealth they could end up with in 40 years if they follow a few simple rules, invest X annually, and keep contributing as much as they can every month, even if some months it’s only $10 because that’s all they can manage that month.

• Enlist relevant parties. Teachers know how to teach. Nonprofits and philanthropies know how to run programs. Accountants and bankers know about money and how to open online accounts. Retired people who worked in the finance sector may be sitting around on their large nest eggs looking for something to do.

• Help the students open a Roth IRA account. Don’t just tell them how to do it—show them how to do it by doing it with them. Sit down next to them, open the browser, walk them through the process, transfer the money in, and then hand them a lollipop before they walk out the door. Volunteers can help the young people set up the account, then hand off the process to someone who will transfer in the seed money.

• Find banks to work with. I suspect the most efficient way to manage the money is to put all the donations into a bank account (or multiple accounts if multiple banks are involved). From that account, individual contributions can be transferred out. If bank employees manage the transfer, the bank can oversee the process to ensure that mistakes are not made. This part of the process will require some troubleshooting, conditions will vary from community to community, and legal issues might be involved (e.g., if the young person is a minor), so figure out what works.

• Fund the accounts with seed money. I do not recommend handing young people or families a check and letting them take it from there. If this is the only way to get it done, move forward, see what happens, and try something else the following year if it doesn’t work. With that said, I strongly recommend transferring funds directly into the retirement accounts because young people are still young, and for some the temptation will be irresistible to spend that money on something other than the abstract prospect of a larger amount of money decades in the future (particularly for those young people who are not accustomed to having money to spend). One option might work like this: The young person is given a check on the condition that it is invested in a retirement account, a local bank works with them to open a savings account (if they don’t already have one), and the money is transferred from that account into the retirement account and invested a fund at the time it’s opened. Make sure the money is actually invested, not just sitting there uninvested in a brokerage account—this is another reason why someone should help the young people involved open and fund the account.

• Only invest in low-cost index funds—no exception. Avoid all high-fee funds and invest donated funds exclusively in diversified, low-cost, passively managed index funds that hold thousands of diversified U.S. stocks across all sectors and market capitalizations, such as a total stock market fund. I specifically recommend Vanguard’s target date funds. Target date index funds are “set-it-and-forget-it” retirement investment vehicles that automatically adjust their “asset allocation”—as investors approach a specific retirement year, the portfolio gradually shifts from a higher percentage of high-growth stocks (more risky, higher potential returns) to a higher percentage of conservative bonds (less risky, lower return). Vanguard’s fees are extremely low, the target-date portfolio is self-managing (no stock-market knowledge required), and the funds perform as well as or far better than the best investment vehicles out there. It’s a simple one-decision, one-vendor strategy, and if participating young people did nothing else over the course of their adult life but invest consistently in a Vanguard target date fund, they would likely be sitting pretty at retirement (barring a global financial crash, of course).

• Beware of financial advisors. Many financial advisors are not legitimate advisors—they are salespeople selling the financial products they are paid to sell. And the “products” they sell are often high-priced funds that perform horribly compared to low-cost, broad-market index funds. A huge proportion of financial advising activity in the United States is a scam—so do not let scammers scam young people in your community, period. It would be unethical and irresponsible to expose young people and families to self-dealing financial advisors with ulterior motives. The business model is predicated on bringing in new clients who don’t realize (1) they can do it themselves for free and get better results; (2) the management fees charged by the advisor or brokerage firm are exorbitant; (3) even small annual fees, negatively compounded over 40 years, could potentially drain off hundreds of thousands from a retirement account; and/or (4) the financial products they sell nearly always underform the diversified, low-cost index funds that track the market. Even financial advisors who are “fiduciaries” will sell garbage and hand out bad, self-serving advice without disclosing conflicts of interest. I have friends and family who have personally experienced the consequences of unethical financial advising, with devastating financial consequences). If some financial advisors want to volunteer, that’s great—but do not let them sell anything to anyone involved. No exceptions. Do not ask them to recommend investment vehicles; do not involve them in the coordination if they are unable to abide by the rules. If they attempt to sell themselves or their products to anyone involved, at any time, ask them to leave immediately and don’t welcome them back.

• Spread the word and help out other communities. If you come up with tactics that work—how to recruit young people and their families, how to manage elements of the program, how to design an effective learning experience—share your model with other communities and help them get their own program off the ground. Present the program at professional conferences and offer webinars. Schools are often risk-adverse, and for good reason—whenever they make a mistake, even a small one, they get hammered by everyone. This is why many districts and schools often wait until other districts and schools in other communities do something that works.

• Consult a lawyer. To make sure the programmatic details are legal, and particularly as they relate to legal minors, consult a lawyer. You may want to require parents or guardians to be present during the account set-up process. I don’t know if there are any potential legal concerns entailed in anything I’ve described above, so ask a local law firm to review the program (ideally pro bono).

• Don’t let a small amount of risk torpedo a life-changing opportunity for young people. Accept that every new venture entails some amount of risk. If money is involved and adults are helping young people set up investment accounts, parents will want to know that the people involved can be trusted. That’s why I recommended working with trusted institutions like banks, and operating the program in partnership with a high school or credible, well-known local nonprofit.

I’m hoping to get one of these projects off the ground as I write these words. If you want some help, or if you are a foundation interested in funding the work in your community or region, send me an email.

~SEA

Last revised 2.17.26

The Lesson That Hasn’t Been Learned

Among the many lessons the internet should have taught us by now, here’s one of the most important:

You can’t take down publicity monsters with more publicity.

Publicity monsters are like Hydras—trying to lop off a head only sprouts more heads, each one more hideous than the last.

For publicity monsters…

1. Every mention is a gift.

2. Every criticism is a tribute.

3. Every scandal is a coronation.

4. Every ounce of hate is a ton of cash.

And who’s the most massively voluminous, multitudinously snake-headed, radiatingly globe-spanning publicity Hydra terrorizing the world’s inhabitants right now: President 45-47.

He’s a supermax prison of cracked funhouse mirrors.

He’s a million-car pileup with 8 billion rubberneckers.

He’s a muddle, wrapped in a snarl, inside a bungle.

He’s a vapid vacuous void of vacantness in the universe.

He’s a bottomless enshittifying swamp of brain-slurping slop.

He’s an empty, garish, plastic Cup of Piss Christ on clearance everywhere.

He’s endless turtleheads turtleheading all the way down.

He is a vertiginously spiraling Hitchcockian Vertigo spiral.

He’s a colossal, mouth-breathing Humongous Fungus.

He’s a bloated, blubbery, babbling amoeboidal Blob.

He’s a zooming fractal Romanesco broccoli head.

President 45-47 is a lot of things.

But above all, he’s a tenacious, invasive, fast-spreading weed with an acquired resistance to traditional democratic herbicides. Spraying around more and more weed killer in the vain effort to stop the bewildering bloom only kills off everything else. The competition shrivels and dies; the mutant weed proliferates. Into every absence, his presence grows.

And what was once a lush, vibrant, fertile, life-giving pluralistic American democratic ecosystem is fast becoming a poisoned, dying monomaniacal crapland.

The only way to stop its spread is to blot out the sun that feeds it.

The Real Derangement

TDS is not real.

Our profoundly alarmed response is understandable, appropriate, spot-on, and unequivocally, urgently necessary.

The real derangement is all of us thinking that this one man—a single person on a planet teeming with 8 billion persons—is somehow doing all these thousands of things everyone’s telling us he’s doing, when in fact all he’s actually doing is yelling at people, lobbing out insults, ordering people around, watching television, accepting bribes, talking about himself unendingly, and gibbering nonstop nonsense.

It’s letting one shuffling, out-of-it, hunched-over 79-year-old blowhard browbeat, bully, bludgeon, and bulldoze an entire country into submission.

It’s tens of millions of intelligent, competent, passionate, hard-working people wasting millions upon millions of hours, and billions upon billions of dollars, during a time when we need every dollar we can get, repeating his name, amplifying his chintzy brand, implanting his bovine spongiform encephalopathic hormone into our skulls, and stoking the whole vulgar, insidious mess into a global conflagration of vanity without realizing he’s only doing what he’s doing because…the dude is seriously mentally ill.

It’s letting this loopy, loop-do-looping loophole in human psychology make us think we’re all living in the stark-raving madhouse of his sweaty delirium.

It’s thinking that he’s a pathogen, when he’s only its carrier.

It’s us giving him exactly what he wants, all day long, every day.

Consider this one set of data points:

Over the past several months, I picked five random days and counted the number of times President 45-47’s name and likeness appeared on the online homepage of the New York Times. I didn’t even click a link.

The results:

1. Day One: 15 mentions, three photos, including the large central photo at the top of the page.

2. Day Two: 18 mentions, three photos, including the large central photo at the top of the page.

3. Day Three: 20 mentions, two photos.

4. Day Four: 16 mentions, one large central photo at the top of the homepage.

5. Day Five: 26 mentions, one illustration.

And right now on the NYT homepage, as I live and breathe and type these words, there are 19 appearances of his name, one illustration of him (as, I kid you not, Julius Caesar), two photos (one of which is a giant banner of his face hanging from a building), one video on repeat with multiple clips (of him preening and ranting on the world stage), and an article-preview blurb of that propagandistic pseudo-documentary of his wife.

But wait, there’s more…

In the two videos, President 45-47’s name is verbally mentioned 6 six times; the autoplay captions translate those mentions into another 6 instances of his name appearing on the homepage (total = 25); two pictures of him appear in one video; and the other video features four clips of him speaking at the World Economic Forum.

That’s just six days snapshotted at one time in one publication among who knows how many thousands. And how many times has this single person been named and represented in the most influential, liberal-learning, all-the-news-that’s-fit-to-print publication in the United States? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

And how many times is this happening every day across the planet? Billions? And how many people are hearing or seeing his name, and/or seeing one or more photos of him, and/or watching or more videos of him?

And what’s the total global production of articles, videos, photographs, interviews, commentary, conversations, prognostications, prayers, outbursts, and groveling genuflections, fealty-pledges, and kickbacks, payoffs, and payola fixated on and flowing into into the coffers and spreading corruption of this one man over the past decade alone?

The incidence: uncountable.

The vastness: inconceivable.

The consequences: all too predictable.

President 45-47 is not an administration—he’s a man.

He’s not a movement—he’s unimpeded inertia.

He’s not powerful—he’s the cancerous outgrowth of the voluntary mass concession of our collective power.

I’m not immune to the derangement. I’ve been addled by it. I’ve been complicit. Look: I’m writing these words right now.

But lately I can’t stop facepalming when I look around at all this face-planting.

President 45-47 is not only the Most Photographed Barn in America, he’s almost certainly the most named and recognized person in all of human history.

And if this insanity doesn’t end, if we don’t somehow figure out how to end it, it could be the end.

What We Can Do

We’ve already let the barbarian through the gates. I suggest we begin by limiting the rampage in progress.

President 45-47 has only four talents: (1) self-glorification through free-publicity generation, (2) the raw autonomic animalistic instincts of a natural-born bully, (3) absolute superhuman shamelessness, and (4) a world-historical case of malignant narcissistic personality disorder. If we don’t stop amplifying #1, he’ll only escalate #2, because of #3, and we’ll all drown in the tsunami of #4.

I don’t know everything that can be done—no one does. I don’t expect progressives to marshal the collective will and defenses they could—and still can—marshal. I don’t think gelatinized conservatives will voluntarily self-reinstall their spines. I certainly don’t think most people out there will do any of these things I’m proposing.

But I’m going to say them anyway.

The Proposal

There are millions of options, many of them unexploited, for neutralizing this guy (and I will be proposing as many as I can). The problem is not insufficient options—it’s our manifold insufficiencies in enacting them.

We should be trying and iterating them all, but we need to pick a few (not 100,000) that work most effectively at scale, and then we to nationally mobilize around those strategies—and we need to do it right now as quickly as we can, all at once and all together, or we will lose the future.

If it takes a lot of courage to stand up and do something now, in February 2026, it will take tens times more a year from now. And ten times more than that the following year. And a hundred times more if he’s still America’s Kim Jong Un come January 2029.

And do not be deceived—he just might be.

Here’s a suggested strategy: Doing something that requires courage is always hard, particularly in times of turbulence, instability, threat, and fear—but not doing something is usually easier.

So let’s all not do something together.

The proposal:

1. Blot out the sun. If you are the owner or leader of a media organization, outlet, or operation, this is the most important strategy on the list: In every source of media you control, completely eliminate every reference and representation of the man. A total occlusion. A full blackout. A zero-mention policy. More feasibly: Because hardly anyone in our sprawling media empire is likely to willingly do this, please at least try to cut it down by 90 percent or more. Accept that you have been part of the problem, that you birthed the monster from your many wombs, that you have fueled his ascendancy (at no cost to him, and great cost to us), and that you, above all others, have the power to blot out the sun upon which he feasts. Do it everywhere and anywhere you can, as often and consistently as you can. Do it as an act of patriotism. As your civic duty as an American. As a grandparent, as a father, as a mother, as a fellow human. But above all, do it right now. Hit delete, delete, delete, delete, delete and don’t stop. I beg you. We all beg you. Swallow your pride, humble yourselves, and do the hard thing that needs to be done.
   
   *This actually happened: A few days after this article was posted, the NYT published this article. One wonders how the owners, editors, and journalists can read this report in their own paper, even laced as it is with downplaying euphemism and politeness, but somehow not see their own amplifying complicity in the global inundation of his megalomania.
   

2. Have a strategy. This is the second most important strategy on the list: The New York Times may be biased, but Fox News and its spawn are rabidly, mouth-foamingly prejudiced. While the NYT is still trying to operate in accordance with longstanding ethical journalistic principles and demonstrate its supposed neutrality and objectivity (all commendable practices in times of stability and peace), Fox News and its brethren are echoing every talking point from on high, platforming chauvinists and extremists, luxuriating in the most obvious lies, calling for homeless American citizens to be mass-euthanized, and vilifying and dehumanizing every progressive individual, group, or organization that achieves any level of sufficient visibility, influence, or power anywhere in America. Progressives like to parade their principles—conservatives form up into military parades. Progressives want to maintain civility—today’s conservatives want to unleash civil war. And neither side seems capable of stopping. If progressives keep parading around their principles without a strategy, conservatives will goose-step our asses into the ground. We need every ethical independent American journalistic operation to start operating strategically right now, or the state of ethical independent American journalism could soon look like the state of ethical independent journalism in Hungary. If you are a media owner, editorial leader, news reporter, or member of the commentariat, and you somehow don’t know yet that these people are coming for you, your business, your livelihoods, and perhaps even your freedom—because people like these always, without fail, come for the media—at least try to operate more strategically. Get together, come up with a plan, and execute it with discipline, ideally as a coordinated, industry-wide power block. Again, I beg you.

3. Exert pressure on the media. If you don’t work in the media, but you’re a subscriber to a newspaper, magazine, podcast, or anything similar, forward them this article. Take anything that’s useful and put it into your own words. Write to the editors, journalists, and podcasters and tell them to stop feeding the monster with your money. Beseech them on your bent and swollen knees to stop talking about President 45-47. Recruit as many readers, watchers, and listeners as you can, and tell them to do the exact same thing. If they won’t listen or change, if they sing you the same old song, consider unsubscribing—but tell them exactly why you’re doing it. Tell them to write or talk about everything else, anything else, including all the harm being caused and all the havoc being wreaked, but stop talking about him. We all need to be supporting ethical independent commentary and reporting to the fullest extent we can in this hour of national emergency. But most podcasters, particularly the most influential ones, aren’t going to stop casting unless people stop subscribing—and tell them exactly why they’re doing so. Leverage audience capture against them. The same goes for news outlets. Right now, they will not stop donating billions of dollars worth of free publicity to this guy. Unless the outcry reverberates to the heavens and the money spigots are squeezed off, they may never wake up. They think they are on the side of angels (and they often are). They think they are crusaders for truth and justice (and they often are). They think we need them (and we absolutely do). But they’re also doing the same things over and over in the same ways that newspapers and journalists have done them for the past 100 years. Point your eyeballs somewhere else and walk away with your money, or your voice will not be heard.

4. Practice near-total abstinence. Do not say his name. Do not talk about him. Refuse to engage in a conversation about him. Erase him from your browser. Do not think about him to the fullest extent you are able. Reclaim your life, energy, motivation, hope, and brainspace. You’ve already seen and heard enough of him to last a millennium, and he’s only going to continue to do the same old shit in slightly different ways. You’ve already surpassed all you need to know about him years ago, and every second spent on him is another second that’s bankrolling his run on the bank.

5. Erect no monuments. The thing President 45-47 wants above all is his name and likeness in polished gold on every single last thing on planet Earth that he can manage to slap them on. This is a man whose likeness is literally being sculpted into graven gilded idols worshiped by Christians in direct contravention of Biblical edict. And yet this is a typical progressive response (which is totally nutso and backasswards, in my opinion). Putting his name and face on everything has not only not worked so far, but it’s propelled his rise to power every step of the way. Why does anyone think putting his name and face on more and more stuff will somehow wake people up and neutralize his power? All the evidence suggests otherwise. Why does anyone think that continually broadcasting his name across the planet, and calling for statues of him to be even bigger, will work when probably every dictator since the beginning of recorded human history has erected the biggest possible monuments to their self-perceived glory and scrawled their names on anything that will take a scrawl? Why the hell would continuing to give him exactly what he wants somehow magically deny him what he wants? In the internet age, publicity is the monument builder. President 45-47 is a steroidal Mr. Beast, and if we don’t stop, we’ll all end up his Feastables.

6. Stop the metonymy and never personify. Never, for any reason, say or write: “The Tr___ administration,” “Tr___ White House,” “Tr____ foreign policy,” or any of their related permutations. Ascribing personal ownership and control of the mechanisms of American government and policy, or of conservative thinking and operating, or anything else, to this one man hides the fact that (a) he’s just spouting whatever nonsense happens to burp up from his befouled soul, which only matters because (b) armies of disciples, sycophants, and worshipers take it seriously as a call to action, which only matters because (c) millions of people are rolling over and letting him do it. President 45-47 does almost nothing. He just rants and bullshits. Instead, talk about what’s actually happening and the people doing that stuff.

7. Shine the spotlight on the servants. Which brings us to the third most important strategy on this list, which could quite possibly be one of the detonations that could bring the building down. People are always going on about President 45-47’s unpredictability. What? He’s the most predictable human being I have ever observed. And here’s one of his most predictable, reliable, non-eradicable behaviors: he will turn on anyone, at any moment, instantly, for any act of disloyalty, real or perceived, or when he believes they are outshining their master. He’s never not done it. He can’t stop. It’s an obsessive compulsion. It’s as formulaic as a fill-out form. As predictable as dawn. As inevitable as the grave. If you want to drive him berserk, sow unstoppable dissension in the ranks, watch the nest of vipers to eat their own, topple the house of cards, and line the road back to democracy with his toppled underlings, say over and over, in every way you can: the President is a just limp puppet—the real muscle and brains behind the operation are this guy, this evil creeper, this gal, this guy, this worm, this guy, this plastic-looking person, and all the other minions he perceives to be the biological manifestation of his will. One by one, over and over again, ignore the don and turn the spotlight on the henchmen.

Unless strategically indicated, I’ll be taking my own advice after I hit publish on this thing.

~SEA

Last revised: 2.26.26

Here’s one of the central ideas motivating Progressive Worldbuilding:

The unconscious shrinking of the imaginative aperture of political possibility is, in itself, a major contributing factor to the current political pandemonium that now whirls all around us.

Thinking that politics is only about the small number of things we’ve labeled “politics” (voting, donating, protesting, yelling at the television) deceives us into thinking that political action is restricted to a minuscule, circumscribed subset of activities within the vast cosmology of human activity that’s forever tumbling headlong, ass over teakettle, into our unknown future.

But “politics” is not just politics and has never been just politics.

Politics is worldbuilding.

If all we’re doing is farming out important work to politicians and politicos playing “politics”—that infuriating game of Calvinball unfolding in a given political system in a given place at a given time in history—I believe we will lose the very consequential game of worldbuilding that so many of us don’t even realize we’re always playing.

We typically don’t think our exertions at work or in our community, or the choices we make about how to use our money or our time, or how we raise our children, or interact with the people in our lives are always and inextricably political—but they are.

Beyond 2025

Nearly every week in 2025, someone I know told me they had no idea what to do. They expressed overwhelm, shock, anxiety, fear, anger, outrage, disgust, dread, despair. This suffusion of helplessness and paralysis is both imagined and learned—it’s not real. It is not inescapable. It exists in our heads, not in reality, and we are never as helpless as we might think we are. And yet an engulfing helplessness has been spreading like a creeping rot throughout the body politic of American progressivism.

Hammering everyone into a gutted, panicky, demoralized, exhausted, directionless state of blitzed despair and hopelessness is the strategy. If we succumb, they have won. And to fight back, we must reclaim our agency—not just in the political arena, but in everything we do.

Not all of us can run for political office. Not all of us are being paid to organize campaigns or mobilize voters. We may not have money to donate. We may not have the inclination or ability to protest. We may have hard lives. We may have limited disposable time. We may be working all day long just to keep our heads above the perilously rising sea levels of American life.

But we must recognize and remember: None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something. Exploring, discussing, and proposing what, specifically, we can do is the primary purpose of Progressive Worldbuilding.

Because everything is politics and all politics is a worldbuilding enterprise in a world in which time only moves in one direction, we are either progressively building the world we actually want to live in, or we’re building a world in which we don’t. This is the fundamental project that governs all others, including our political disputations and wranglings.

Politics is a ceaseless million-fold tug-of-war over the future of our civilization. We are always moving toward something or away from it, and we are always building something or tearing it down, and we can either do things like throw up our hands, sulk, complain, squabble amongst ourselves, throw stones at glass houses, buy some more plastic junk, build shoddy strip malls of the soul, or tune out and stop giving a fuck, or we can stand up, get out there, and get to work.

Our Invisible Army

Millions upon millions of progressives are doing this very thing every day in every nook, cranny, corner, and cavity of America, even though—depressingly—most people seem to be unaware that all this great stuff is happening beyond their knowledge or awareness, often right down the street from where they live, or that all this effort and investment directly benefits them and their children and their family and their friends. Everywhere all around us, invisible armies of unsung people are working really hard to solve really hard problems. They are the ones keeping our society running.

I’ve worked in progressive spaces for more than two decades now, and I continue to be surprised anew whenever I stumble across yet another person or organization I didn’t even know existed doing something impressive, important, and urgently needed. But how we go about the business of doing all this stuff can undermine everything we’re doing. If 2025 America taught us anything, it should have taught us that centuries of hard-won progress can be undone in months, weeks, or even days.

All of us are now tottering atop a wobbly Babylonian Tower of fracturing democracy.

If we cede our agency, if we waste all our time and money squabbling amongst ourselves like pissy little Hobbits, if we fall into one obvious trap after another, if we continue to fly off every which way in all possible directions trying to do everything at once, if we don’t unify and mass-mobilize every organization in every sector to achieve the highest-priority objectives right now, if we sleepwalk into yet another foreseeable nightmare the world has seen too many times before, the world we want to build, the world we all want to live in, will crumble into rubble—and it could take generations to rebuild.

If the only people who know anything about politics are politicians, politicos, and political-science professors—and many of them very much appear to think they are the only ones who do—progressives wouldn’t be losing so much right now.

We need to ask ourselves: If all of these smart people are so smart, why are we losing to a bunch of losers?

We need to stop thinking that only politics is politics, and everything else is something else. All politics is worldbuilding, and worldbuilding is politics.

But we must build that world together, in our every action, every day, with whatever we’ve got.

Are you with me?

~SEA

Last revised 1.25.26

Fuzzy, Dopey, Fishy, Squishy, Squirrely Concepts

First, I would like to point out a fact that should be fairly obvious, but that most people, most of the time, don’t seem to pause long enough to consider and reflect on:

“Liberal” and “conservative” are fuzzy, dopey, fishy, squishy, squirrely concepts that will never accurately reflect or convey the tempestuously nuanced values, beliefs, views, or lived experiences of those so labeled.

If you asked a hundred self-identified liberals and a hundred self-identified conservatives to describe what these terms mean, you would get 400 messy, vague, contradictory, all-over-the-place answers.

When someone says “liberal” or “conservative,” the terms trigger an avalanche of ideas, reactions, abstractions, representations, associations, vagaries, subjectivities, distortions, oversimplifications, biases, stereotypes, caricatures, and tired old chestnuts in our minds—and every avalanche occurring in one of our minds is wildly different from all the other avalanches in everyone else’s minds.

Second, the concepts themselves, due to their very existence, ineluctably contort the values, beliefs, and views of those so labeled to conform to the artificial categorizations these labels generate in the minds of the labeled—categorizations, mind you, that change all the time, as evidenced by centuries of historical evidence.

What was considered “liberal” or “conservative” in ancient Egypt or Endo-period Japan was radically different from what is considered “liberal” or “conservative” in Saudi Arabia or the United States today. Because there are no fixed definitions, what’s deemed to be liberal or conservative in any given place or time is whatever people who label themselves with terms like liberal or conservative imagine them to be.

Third, these categories can be manipulated by authoritarian regimes to ram through undemocratic actions in pursuit of political domination. Despite the what-should-be-obvious-but-definitely-isn’t fact that human brains, instincts, and behaviors are far more alike than they are different, and suffused with distortions, political leaders and parties try to hammer conformity into the minds of their imagined in-group while fomenting oppositional hostility toward imagined out-groups. It’s important to remind ourselves that humans are humans just going around being humans, and all of our social, cultural, and political categories are arbitrary, made-up things that don’t actually exist in reality until we start acting as if they do.

A Simplifying Model

If we want to create a unified understanding of liberal and conservative differences around which progressives can mobilize unified understanding, tactics, and action, we need simple, accessible, and understandable descriptions of those real and assumed differences, while also recognizing that those real differences only exist because we assume they do.

To create the world we’re trying to create, progressives cannot continue to generate a continually erupting atomizing geyser of research reports, academic articles, polling data, endless pontifications and debate, and squabbling fields of endeavor lousy with scattered ideas, competing theories, inbred jargon, and a whole lot of navel-gazing.

Why?

1. A handful of shared goals collectively pursued by millions will drive progressive progress and political victories.

2. But a million goals held by millions of people pursuing different agendas in thousands upon thousands of siloed organizations, coalitions, campaigns, initiatives, and projects will undermine large-scale progress, multiply political defeats, and pave the way to losing everything we care about because we can’t agree on much of anything.

To illustrate how a simplifying model of liberal and conservative differences could work, I’ve developed the comparative side-by-side framework below. The objective is not perfection, but distillation. The tables don’t address every difference, reflect everything we know, or answer every question—and that’s the point.

Importantly, the model articulates differences in thinking, values, tendencies, preferences, and motivations, not differences in support for the transitory political issues that arise from liberal and conservative orientations, imaginings, and fixations that change all the time.

If we don’t understand the deep, durable social-psychological forces and patterns that give rise to liberal and conservative thinking and beliefs, the other side will always appear to be insane, wrong, immoral, an enemy, a threat to our preferred way of life. And as history has clearly shown, endless warring among factions solves nothing, sows suffering and misery, creates multigenerational trauma and hostilities, and makes our world a far shittier place to live in—a place that literally no one actually wants to live in, despite the fact that we can’t stop compulsively manufacturing living conditions all over the place that totally resoundingly massively suck.

The Progressive and the Reactionary

The terms “progressive” and “reactionary” are used below to discuss the real or assumed differences between “liberal” and “conservative” beliefs and thinking in the United States. I believe these two terms are more useful because:

1. Their historical origins are the root of current political thinking.

2. They are more descriptively accurate.

3. They are comparatively less culturally and politically polluted.

4. They are somewhat less likely to trigger the kinds of learned and rutted emotional reactions that cause Americans to double-down on preexisting beliefs and confirmation bias.

Origins

For those who are interested:

1. The origin of the term progressive can be found HERE.

2. The origin of the term reactionary can be found HERE.

Definitions

Without simple, clarifying definitions, descriptions, and explanations, mobilizing large-scale human understanding and action in the modern world becomes, in my view, functionally impossible.

To simplify our differences, I propose the following working definitions:

Progressive / Reactionary

1. Progressive = a future-oriented movement toward the creation of new social conditions imagined to be preferable to past and current conditions.

2. Reactionary = a past-oriented movement to maintain former social conditions imagined to be preferable to current and potential future conditions.

Progressivism / Reactionarism

1. Progressivism begins with the recognition that the social conditions of the past were, in many ways, unfair, unjust, oppressive, or inhumane—in other words, conditions that progressives/liberals believe should be changed.

2. Reactionaryism begins with the recognition that the social conditions of the past were, in many ways, stabilizing, workable, time-honored, or valuable—in other words, conditions that reactionaries/conservatives believe should be maintained.

Progressive / Reactionary Impulses + Thinking

1. Progressives tend to think that revolutionary ideas and actions, faster-paced social and cultural change, major overhauls in social systems and policy, and more audacious and experimental approaches informed by science, research, data, evidence, and reason are required to solve ongoing problems that were caused by people in the past, problems that are seen as direct and ongoing threats to things like security, rights, and wellbeing.

2. Reactionaries tend to think that revolutionary resistance and obstruction, slower-paced social and cultural change, small tweaks in social systems and policy, and more cautious and conservative approaches to solving problems, especially approaches that respect the methods and traditions of the past, are required to maintain things like security, rights, and wellbeing.

Progressive / Reactionary Values + Priorities

1. Progressives prioritize the security, safety, and wellbeing of people from other groups as much as, and sometimes even more than, the people in their group, which makes a lot of sense: When more people enjoy security, safety, and wellbeing, conflicts between groups deescalate and everyone benefits, and therefore failing to protect other people in other groups, or other parts of the country or the world, is seen as immoral and irresponsible because it endangers everyone, especially the most vulnerable, powerless, and exploited populations.

2. Reactionaries prioritize the security, safety, and wellbeing of people in their group more than those of people in other groups, which makes a lot of sense: You can’t easily control the beliefs and intentions of people in other groups, and conflicts between groups happen everywhere all the time, and therefore not prioritizing the security, safety, and wellbeing of people in their group, which includes the proactive marshalling of defenses to prepare for potential future attacks by other groups, is seen as immoral and irresponsible, particularly when their group feels or is threatened.

Progressive / Reactionary Authorities

1. Progressives typically value and respect authority figures such as academics, researchers, scientists, technocrats, government officials, and other people they perceive to be “experts” (people who American reactionaries often call “elites”). They typically get their information and guidance from people who study and understand the complexities of a given topic or field of endeavor. They want their leaders to demonstrate compassion and articulate a vision of an idealized future in which the problems of the past have been solved, and values such as progress, fairness, diplomacy, equality, and justice rein.

2. Reactionaries typically value and respect authority figures such as religious leaders, generals, police officers, populists, and other people they perceive to value their preferred traditions and customs. They typically get their information and guidance from people who radically simplify complexity into a handful of moral principles, behavioral edicts, and punitive rules. They want their leaders to demonstrate strength, aggressively protect the flock, and articulate a vision of an idealized past that’s grounded in values such as faith, tradition, family, discipline, and punishment for transgressions against their preferred moral order.

Progressive / Reactionary Social Structures

1. Progressives tend to prefer non-hierarchical, pluralistic, bottom-up social structures (representative democracy, NGOs, public schools, grassroots organizations, advocacy groups, labor unions, cooperatives), a relatively equitable distribution of political power throughout society, and consensus-based decision-making processes that are inclusive, deliberative, and diplomatic. For progressives, freedom only exists when social conditions are conducive, political systems are egalitarian, wealth is equitably shared, healthcare is universal, or judicial systems are principled and fair.

2. Reactionaries tend to prefer hierarchical, top-down social structures (authoritarian-style regimes, churches, parochial schools, military organizations, law-enforcement agencies, corporations), the consolidation and centralization of political power, and unilateral decision-making processes in which authority figures give marching orders to followers. For reactionaries, freedom exists when other groups don’t interfere with their lives, judge their beliefs, condemn their behavior, try to take their stuff, or transgress against their preferred moral order.

A Side-by-Side Comparison of Cultural Tendencies

“Liberals” were not born liberal, of course, and “conservatives” were not born conservative—we were all born into and live within liberal and conservative cultural contexts abuzz with cacophonous noise: politicized divisions, moral posturing, specific incompatible beliefs, mutual animosity, bad-faith arguments, fallacious assumptions, widespread incoherence, rank bigotry.

To better understand where the noise originates, and why our political spaces are so raucous and inharmonious, I believe we should focus on patterns, such as tendencies or deep motivations, that are consistent and ever-present over time.

For example:

A Side-by-Side Comparison of Why We Need Each Other

In my view, progressivism and reactionaryism are both right and wrong, rightful and wrongful, and rightheaded and wrongheaded about many, many fundamental aspects of life, politics, the nation state, and other important things.

Yet one of the most depressing and nonsensical features of American life right now is that Americans with natural or acquired inclinations can’t see that they need other Americans with different inclinations—because everyone having the same inclinations is profoundly self-harming and self-sabotaging in a massively complex society that requires people of all inclinations, particularly those with interdependent lives and interests, to get along and figure it out together or else we’re all going to suffer.

For example…

A lot more discussion about the topics above coming soon.

Tune in to stay tuned…

Last revised 2/5/2026

Progressive Worldbuilding Defined

Progressive worldbuilding is the enactment of hopeful ideas, creative problem-solving, and concerted mobilized actions that drive human progress toward the creation of conditions that humans actually want to live in, which encompasses improvements to the current conditions that tend to make humans miserable.*

The term “worldbuilding” has been borrowed from the culture and practices of fantasy fiction. In fiction, worldbuilding is the process of creating imaginary, immersive, and believable worlds that include recognizable elements of our own and in which characters like ourselves live out a story. Imagined geographies, histories, mythologies, religions, traditions, technologies, economies, politics, cultures, and social dynamics make up the constituent elements of built fictional worlds.

Progressive worldbuilding works similarly:

It’s the process of applying our creative faculties in the real world to build a progressively better version of our world, one that respects, aids, and advances the dignity and flourishing of humans, animals, and all the other life forms we coexist with and depend on.

Progressive worldbuilding can also constitute an intentional counteractive strategy that can be collectively engineered to challenge the regressive human instincts, beliefs, ideas, behaviors, and movements that erect hierarchies of abusiveness and exploitation, empower all manner of immoral monsters, erode human dignity, bring about environmental spoliation, and cause widespread but avoidable suffering.

While progressive worldbuilding exists outside of political identification or affiliation, and anyone of any background or persuasion can hold and pursue progressive ideas and ends, the principles of liberalism, democracy, pluralism, and related ideals and ideologies form its foundations.

Progressive worldbuilding is also the infusion of pro-social activism into every moment and dimension of our lives. Everything we do is a vote, contribution, or protest. Everything we do is either an embrace of responsibility or an abdication of it. Everything we do is an investment in the construction of a better, safer, saner, and more resilient world, or a succumbing to the forces of pointless crackbrained destruction.

TheCan you please provide me with access to this document?eatures and frameworks of progressive worldbuilding are multitudinous, which is why I will (hopefully? maybe?) be writing about them for years to come.

To radically simplify matters and facilitate remembrance, here is a basic progressive worldbuilding formula:

A brutally honest analysis of human-caused dysfunction and harm + rapid-iteration problem-solving that counteracts that dysfunction and harm = progressive worldbuilding.

One of the many arguments I will be making in Progressive Worldbuilding is that progressives need to spend less time and money on “studying reality” and more time and money on “creating reality.” For example, what’s more important: Studying the life-destroying consequences of our rapidly metastasizing global climatological emergency? Or changing the world as rapidly as possible before that life-destroying emergency destroys us all? If, hypothetically, we were able to achieve a perfect understanding of the emergency, would that understanding be useful if the world has already been irreversibly destroyed?

If we don’t invest everything we have in building the world we want to live in, right now, we will end up living in a world that other people have built while we were studying how they built it.

Our Perilous Pandemonium

In these perilous times riven by political, social, cultural, and technological mayhem, people are understandably questioning their ability to have any positive impact on anything at all.

This fatalism is not only demoralizing, demotivating, and self-sabotaging, but it’s also something many humans, including this one, are clearly prone to wallow in. The contributions we make to the salvation of ourselves, along with our dangerously fragile and precarious democracies, are not limited to voting, protesting, and giving money to all those campaigns begging for money all the time—in fact, this view, in itself, is, in my view, antithetical to the animating spirit of democracy, liberalism, equality, justice, and other important things.

Throughout this publication, I will argue that counteracting the growing number of colossally complex problems threatening us all demands an everything everywhere all-at-once progressive project that every one of us can and should, without cease and all due haste, commit to right now, regardless of one’s ability, affiliation, or material circumstances.

Here’s why:

• Many of us in America these days are freezing, fleeing, flailing, or flapping around like disoriented birds.

• Others are burrowing their heads into the slurping, sucking quicksand of wishful, magical, and delusional thinking.

• Some of us are pointlessly taking petty potshots at would-be allies with pea shooters for no productive purpose whatsoever.

• Some are spinning around in maypoles of circular logic while entirely losing all the threads and blaming everyone but themselves for all the things they demonstrably don’t understand but obstinately think they do.

• Some are so worshipfully bent over before the altars of unhinged greed, status acquisition, empty materialism, and shopping addiction that they barely notice much of anything anymore, except all those sparkly, seductive things they think they want because they think they will make them happy and whole, even though everyone should know by now they won’t because they never have and never will.

• Some are clicking away their lives in front of phantasmal screens projecting ghostly simulacrums onto their retinas, much like the person I was watching out of my window this morning walking a dog down the street and ignoring all the beauty and interesting stuff in the world while holding his phone 10 inches in front of his nose.

• Some are uploading deceptively curated photos of their lives and children to corporate data-mining operations that are busily monetizing all that time people spend uploading photos of their lives, instead of spending that uploaded time with the real living children they are photographing to, presumably, convince other people they are loving, attentive parents with amazing lives unfolding in the real world beyond the digitized world they are clearly spending way too much time in, which we all know they’re doing, of course, because the abundant photographic evidence they’ve supplied over years demonstrably shows that they have spent far too much of their lives not living their lives.

• And some are just nihilistically wrecking everything good and holy while pathologically lying about all of it, building multimillion-dollar underground bunkers in far-flung locales, lusting perversely after the end times, and working really hard to bring about the zombie-apocalypse-like apocalypse they’re really convinced other people, who are not them, are trying to bring about.

Forestalling the Descent Into Hopelessness

Amidst all this senselessness, there is an alternative path: Going about the business of building, right now and every day, the world we want to live in.

Countless people across the planet have been doing this very thing for thousands of years, and their examples and legacies can be found everywhere, offering both hope and urgent lessons to us all.

But here’s perhaps a surprising perspective:

Humans do not need a single new idea to start getting this job done right now. There are already so many good ideas strewn about the world that we could spend the next several hundred years doing nothing but implementing them, and we probably wouldn’t come anywhere close to enacting even 10% of them.

One of the central theories motivating Progressive Worldbuilding is that the unconscious shrinking of the imaginative aperture of political possibility and consequent action is, in itself, a major contributing factor to the current pandemonium that now encircles the globe.

My personal view is that we can only forestall a descent into hopelessness, misery, and self-annihilation by (1) peeling ourselves off the couch, going out into the world, and getting important stuff done so that we can (2) experience the resulting rejuvenating and restorative tonic effects that then (3) motivate us get out there, again and again, day after day to get even more important shit done.

In summary, the purpose of this publication, and the system of progressive worldbuilding I will share, discuss, and propose, is to provide as many actionable answers as I can to the question that so many of us are asking ourselves these days:

What the fuck can I do?

~SEA

*NOTE: Progressive worldbuilding is a term of my own creation. Given that I’m the one who made it up, this publication constitutes the entire corpus of original source material on the topic.

Last revised 1.19.26