The environmental factors are where we most easily and deeply affect one another. There is very little we do as people that does not affect someone, somewhere as either a toxin or a tonic.
The quadrants are named for the tonic aspect, because that’s what I hope we aim for. In the diagram, the red internal donut is what seems to be the quadrant’s most likely toxin aspect. The red exterior labels are what I think are the pressure points our current culture is most likely to reach for.
- Instead of safety, we have fear pushed by aggression.
- Instead of health, we have disease and scarcity pushed by avarice.
- Instead of expression, we have repression pushed by control.
- Instead of a flow state, we have tedium pushed by efficiency and outcomes.
I believe our bad actors are just as creative as the rest of us. My hypothesis is that they demand specificity of denied actions because they want something to work around. If we learn to focus more on sensing unusual pressures and looking for effects, I think we’ll be able to spot the toxins more easily.
A behavioral example is eye contact. In Boston, looking at a stranger too squarely in the eye can be taken as an aggression. In Des Moines, looking someone in the eye – even if only for a few seconds – is the expectation, regardless of level of acquaintance; the lack of it is a red flag.
Is eye contact a toxin or tonic? It depends. It’s not a universal binary.
A physical example is medicine. Digitalis can save someone from a heart attack in progress. Digitalis can kill someone with a healthy heart.
On a social scale this toxin/tonic tipping point is everywhere; yet, we’ve been convinced that it’s only really relevant if blood is spilled – the more blood, the more definitive the harm. One person may be resorting to force to ensure their product safely gets to market, like with the avocado farmers hiring militia in Mexico in 2021. But the town is no longer safe for the non-owners and smaller farmers. One person’s tonic is a town’s toxin.
I’d like to think that, when harm is systemic, its mostly because we’re focused on our own paths, and not paying attention to how our decisions affect others. It’s a cognitive bias, a just-world hypothesis. So while I’d like to believe that, too often it’s clear that the harm is intentional, and many of our narratives are designed to offset systemic harm, and blame individual error/stupidity/calumny/weakness/etc. What they’ll reach for will depend on what worked well in the past. There are a few too many who are gleeful-in and/or profiting-from the suffering happening to others. There has been too much time that has passed without any corrections. There are too many instances where titles of governing documents obscure the content, or even describe the opposite of what the outcome would be considering the systemic shifts it puts into place.
I have also spent so much time just walking around areas and getting a feel for them. I’ve gone to poor communities and rich. I’ve lived in small towns, big cities, and many sizes between. I visit areas where the primary language I hear as I walk down the street is not English, and areas where language is filled with pop culture references, or jargon, or erudite vocabularies. In all of these places, as I walk I stay comfortable in my own body. People rarely stare; usually when they do, I look around and I’m a head higher than everyone. I am convinced that the just world exists. I am convinced that most people don’t care enough to get aggressive, and often care enough to give a quick smile. The just world isn’t all of us; but it is the majority of us.
The only way to course correct between the active minority who want suffering, and the silent majority who generally like people and just want to keep living their lives, is to talk about it. Talking about it becomes butting heads. Our butting heads isn’t an easy thing to understand or manage. Again, there are cognitive biases and narratives in place that mask the intentions, arguments, and outcomes. It all comes back to people; it all leverages information that people are pushing as being more relevant, or trying to pull out of the conversation. There is no easy solution to this. It requires learning, agency, and caring. All three have significant pressure to skip, coming from multiple sources and multiple societal and cultural pressures.
When it comes to people, we have this narrative (especially in the US) that it’s more common that someone is whinging and making spurious accusations than it is that someone is being a bully. The longer I wander through the world, the more I think that there are more people remaining quiet under abuse than there are wrongfully accused abusers. Ask anyone who has ever lived with abuse how often their abuser urged them to say everything was good, or how often their abuser pre-empted initial contact with something that diminished the abused’s general credibility.
Where a situation becomes clearer is in the balance, and considering all four quadrants. A sweeping binary won’t always be right, for the simple reason that people aren’t binary. We have to look for suffering, and be willing to see it. We have to be willing to balance one very vocal person wailing that they need profit against the (sometimes forced) silent suffering of a group of people. We also have to be willing to see the early indicators – who can come off as belligerent and self-focused – before an entire populace suffers. It’s not simple, it’s not binary, and you can’t figure it out from the surface and 5-second soundbites from key opposing factions.
Take, for instance, the avocado militias. The primary argument used is safety; we know the real lynchpin is the safety-pusher’s focus on profit, and they are focused on getting that product to market. The safety protocols they put in place pushed people’s health, expression, and flow state into toxic areas. The militias hurt people and stressed the community. Their presence instigated fear and reduced expression; for getting caught in crossfire, for reprisal, and for trying to avoid becoming one of the silenced people. And people had to change their lives drastically to accommodate the militias’ presence, to no discernable benefit to them and much added stress and work.
By looking at the context, by considering more than the tiny slice of logic the safety-pusher wants us to focus on (tacit: everyone needs to earn money in capitalism; explicit: violence of the thieves must be thwarted) and understanding that the safety-pusher doesn’t live alone in the world, we can see the bigger picture.
The model acts as a reminder that some people try to diminish scope to herd the argument into a simpler agreement. They’ll use dismissal, shame, gaslighting and more to behaviorally urge that information isn’t worth considering, often focusing on just one quadrant – it’s one of the reasons this model has been working for my personal analysis. The structure isn’t a checklist, but a way of making sure we are considering the whole human experience.
Springboards
Burchell, H. B. (1983). Digitalis poisoning: historical and forensic aspects. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 1(2 Pt 1), 506–516.
Digitalis toxicity. Medlineplus.gov.
Kennedy, L. (2019, October 4). The Avocado War episode, Rotten. Netflix.
McCarthy A, Lee K, Itakura S, Muir DW. Cultural Display Rules Drive Eye Gaze During Thinking. J Cross Cult Psychol. 2006 Nov;37(6):717-722. doi: 10.1177/0022022106292079. PMID: 19122788; PMCID: PMC2613330.
Raeburn, A. (2018, September 12). 11 places where eye-contact is not recommended (11 places where the locals are friendly). TheTravel.
Sammon, A. (2024, June 11). Inside Mexico’s anti-avocado militias. The Guardian.
Shortell, D. (2024, July 13). As cartels take a stake in ‘green gold,’ US and Mexico rethink how avocados reach American kitchens. CNN.
The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. (2025). digitalis. In Encyclopedia Britannica.