Shift priorities for a thought revolution

Jul 15, 2025

Sea of people moving into a seared distance. Image by the author, 2025.

It’s a 5:38 minute read, with the rest being links to current events

Social isn’t a dirty concept. Hell, it’s the reason social media is the human catnip it is. Socialism is only a dirty word because it’s had a big, generational marketing and behavioral campaign.

Whatabout capitalism?! Freedom to profit! Freedom to fail!

It’s not anti-capitalistic to think that the whole of society should be supported.

For capitalism to work broadly — to actually allow any individual to create value, and be able to try again if they fail — we need a society that is broadly beneficial. We need a society that doesn’t make failure a state of disgrace and shame; make that disgrace a reason to take more and make someone work harder still; and doesn’t reward those who set people up for failure.

Money is not a physical, irrefutable thing like a rock, that’s going to exist with or without Schrodinger, with or without the quantum effect of a subatomic event on life. Money’s physical form is symbolic. It’s function is abstract. It’s understanding is conceptual. It’s a shared agreement about value. It’s an answer to, “how do people barter without 1:1 specific wants to fulfill, across time and space?”

People is the only reason money exists. Money is the basis of profit.

No people, no money, no profit.

The root dissonance is that in a broadly beneficial society, value is the only reason profits exist.

It is anti-profiteering to focus on the whole of society. You can’t gouge everyone to within an inch of their survivability if holistic economic health is understood to the nuance of every individual. You can’t create and maintain monopolies, with ever-restructured and diminished value provided for the money exchanged, if holistic economic health is understood to the nuance of every individual.

Societal health is antithetical to the free market concept, where the more necessary a commodity is to continued life, the more profitable it should be. Friedman would applaud air being bottled and budgeted for maximum profitability. The ‘free market’ (it is truly a manipulative taxonomy) is already well on it’s way to defining profit-optimizing frameworks for water, healthcare, and shelter.

Focusing on economic pure control, societal health is also antithetical to slavery, where a few people’s wealth and ease are propped up with a broad acceptance of pain and loss of agency as “just the way it is”. While modern slavery, as in the case of cocoa farmers, at-hand survivability can be the tipping point, there are still people in the system who profit; the difference is that they are indirect and thus narratively “clean”.

We get on a visceral level that it’s really not ok to trade ease for one person with the pain of others. People generally don’t like abusers. Slavery taught/teaches us how many aspects need to be managed to subjugate many for one. The manipulations are deep: lack of access to money, controlling basic factors of survivability like food/water/shelter, information manipulation, media control, requiring an interlocutor for any information access, religion so your transgressions never end, oversight/surveillance, policing, who gets to ‘decide’ sex availability, fecundity, sundering and weaponizing human connection, healthcare, bars set for expected physical ability, documents manufactured to control/contain specific sub-populations, ‘legal right’ to dismiss controlling documents and systems on an ad hoc basis, who gets to decide what-is work/schedule/value, and then (finally) state-approved physical abuse and death.

When you’re ready, look at what current events expose around each of the aspects listed. I’ve provided a springboard at the bottom of this piece.

It’s all about information; then the controlling entity knowing exactly where individuals are; then removing those who won’t support or comply with the narrative. It is building myth that obfuscates reality and supplants a perceptual framework that retains their control. Control people, translate that control directly into profit (i.e., comparative ease), then use money outside the at-hand system.

No people, no money, no profits. Or, fundamentally accept that we are not a broadly beneficial society — not “for the people” — and are aiming at further limiting how many people the economic system is intended to benefit. Slavery (or it’s near-cousin) is a shift to the process, but still uses the same ingredients: people, profit, money. How far it goes is the question.

Every economic system can be manipulated to limit the breadth of people its intended to benefit.

Socialism is not a dirty word. It’s not an economic model, but a policy model. It continuously looks beyond the immediate fulcrum, and asks what a policy does to the entire system.

Getting back to a broadly beneficial society

First, we have to find our way out of our current mess. It’s…really not good. Information is being holistically manipulated and moderated with a generational eye; this is a multipronged effort of DOGE, HR1, and [genAI](/information-pollution-poisoning-and-literacy/. Our congress has passed an Act (HR1) that funds a federal police state, which in turn is aggressively hunting the first layers of othering. The act also funds surveillance so the next layers of othering (and the next, and next, etc.) will be super quick to hunt down and extract. That same Act sets policies that, along with Trump’s tariffs, will make us a two class system very quickly: impoverished, or megawealthy.

There are, I think, seven things needed to get us back on track to a broadly beneficial society:

Congress retake control over tariffs, and stabilize them. Probably to lower than they were prior to Trump’s shenanigans, because we’ve lost the world’s trust.
functionally a reset
Defund the federal police (starting with ICE and including anything rebranded to step into a federal-level policing structure), fund what’s broadly useful (like libraries, education, healthcare, scientific research, meteorology, climate impact, social justice, etc.).
the immediate step is functionally a reset: repeal the entirety of HR1
Individual privacy, institutional transparency.
functionally a rollback of about 10 years
Tax the wealthy. We are fast approaching an inflection point where the only other options are accepting a limited-benefit society or revolution. I’d personally prefer to survive some more decades, so my vote is to tax the wealthy. It’s still a revolution of thought.
Deeper and shared understanding about the nature of truth and epistemology, the binary function of our now-primary information tool (computers), and working towards a general acceptance that people do not function as binaries.
Shared understanding about our bad actors, and specifically their effect on our shared systems and information and the how/why of limiting centralized control points specifically to limit their impact.
Remove the ability to enact lawful hypocrisy (ok for me, fuck thee), starting with economic factors. Think along the lines of Alaska’s carve out for Medicare impacts in HR1. It’s going to be a brain bender.

Late stage capitalism sucks. I get it. I’m here, too. It sucks because we’ve been gaslit that society — as broadly beneficial to everyone — does not follow profit metrics, and thus shouldn’t be invested in.

The simplest thing to do, the way we change the system without burning it down, is to realize on a mass level that we have (at least) three models affecting our society: economic, policy, and political. If we continue to confabulate that the current economic model is the policy and political model, the ultimate heightened state is mass slavery.

Stop hoping that there’s some magical economic model that is immune to manipulation. Stop confabulating that (policy) socialism will necessarily repeat the (political) authoritarianism of the (economic) communism of the nascent USSR. Or that we are still under the thumb of McCarthyism.

Socialism is not a dirty word. It simply a policy model that assumes we’re all created equal and explicitly checks for it constantly. It’s a policy standard that no one needs to control others, not for wealth, success, power, to fill the insatiable void of insecurity, or any other narrative that might be cobbled together.

We are not heading towards a comfy space

my foundations for understanding many-by-few control is primarily from studying slavery and cults

Stamped from the Beginning

1619 Project

Exterminate All the Brutes

And other search terms: colonialism, imperialism, hegemony

Scientology: Going Clear and Scientology and the Aftermath

NVXM: Timeline, The Vow

And other cults: Jonestown, Children of God, Escaping Twin Flames, Wild Wild Country to start with.

And authoritarian regimes: Beyond Utopia, Requiem for the American Dream

lack of access to money

What Americans Think about Poverty, Wealth, and Work

Wealth inequality

Trends in income and wealth inequality

Even Sky-High Income Tax Rates Won’t Stop the Relentless Rise of the Richest

What if most of our beliefs about poverty are wrong?

People living in poverty face three times more discrimination than any other groups

Most middle-class Americans say they can’t support their cost of living, survey finds

basic factors of survivability like food/water/shelter

food

How Trump’s Tariffs Will Impact The Foods And Beverage Industry

Prices are now starting to rise because of tariffs. Economists say this is just the beginning

Expect to Pay More for These Groceries Because of Tariffs

How Trump’s latest tariffs could affect your wallet

Washington cherry growers struggle to find pickers

WA cherry harvest under threat as immigration fears keep workers away

Trump’s ‘big beautiful bill’ cuts food stamps for millions — the average family may lose $146 per month, report finds

Wilonsky: In Dallas, food banks have reason to worry that politics will empty pantries: Washington’s budget bill and Abbott’s veto disprove the long-held notion that hunger isn’t partisan.

Immigration raids leave crops unharvested, California farms at risk

Local Journalist Index 2025: … stunning collapse in local reporting

water

US EPA Rollback of Dozens of Air, Water and Chemical Pollution Regulations Threatens America’s Health, Experts Warn

US Supreme Court ruling weakens EPA’s power over water pollution rules

About half of US water ‘too polluted’ for swimming, fishing or drinking, report finds

Drinking water of millions of Americans contaminated with ‘forever chemicals’

EPA employees sign ‘declaration of dissent’ over agency moves under Trump

EPA Suspends Over 140 Employees for Signing Letter of Dissent

shelter

One Year Since Grants Pass: Tracking the Criminalization of Homelessness

The Ghosts of Housing Discrimination Reach Beyond Redlining

Minimum wage workers cannot afford rent in any U.S. state

More of America’s homeless are clocking into jobs each day

information manipulation

disinformation

How disinformation defined the 2024 election narrative

How AI-generated disinformation might impact this year’s elections and how journalists should report on it

Disinformation campaigns are undermining democracy. Here’s how we can fight back

Misinformation is eroding the public’s confidence in democracy

Disinformation and conspiracy theories cloud Helene recovery efforts in hard-hit areas

Conspiracy Theories About the Texas Floods Lead to Death Threats

No, Democrats Aren’t Controlling the Weather. Neither Is Anyone Else.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The scandal and the fallout so far

A golden age for scammers

Misinformation lends itself to social contagion — here’s how to recognize and combat it

ScamGPT — How AI Supercharges Fraud

Grok Is Spewing Antisemitic Garbage on X

Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats

Under Trump, the government mobilizes in response to fringe theories

removing information from public

Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push

Recipients of a U.S. Climate Science Fellowship Are Put on Unpaid Leave

‘It’s a nightmare.’ U.S. funding cuts threaten academic science jobs at all levels

“ended my ability to even apply to medical school”

sundering and weaponizing human connection

breaking family structures

DHS Cancels Extreme Weather Comms Grant While Bodies Still Being Recovered in Texas

ICE deported 3 children who are U.S. citizens, their families’ lawyers say

Three-Year-Old Arrested By ICE Agents in California

ICE Agents Targeting Children — What We Know

ICE Separates 18-Month-Old From Mother for Months

The Impact of Family Separation on Children

political polarization

Political tribalism and the prisoner’s dilemma

Tribalism: How to Be Part of the Solution, Not the Problem

The Political Divide in America Goes Beyond Polarization and Tribalism

The Myth of Tribalism

Political Polarization in the United States

Political Polarization in the American Public

Polarization harms democracy and society

How tech platforms fuel U.S. political polarization and what government can do about it

Some good news about political polarization: It can change

community

Try to not see it as individual choices and “checking out”, but as systems set up to make it easier to sit alone than to spend the time and effort to form community.

Tracking the decline of social mobility in the U.S. — and how to reverse the trend

Americans are less likely than others around the world to feel close to people in their country or community

Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out

Is America suffering a ‘social recession’?

weaponizing connections

Some see Trump weaponizing government in targeting of judge and Democratic fundraising site

Democratic Minnesota politician fatally shot, another injured in ‘politically motivated assassination’

Minnesota Suspect Traveled to 4 Lawmakers’ Homes on Night of Attacks

Political Violence Is Part of the American Story. It Is Also Changing.

What we know about the arson at Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence

Paul Pelosi recounts San Francisco home invasion, hammer attack at trial