Better Strangers

This article is part of a series on the ideas and philosophy of Alan Moore. To read the other articles, click here.

Let me tell you a story, and you tell me if it sounds familiar:

After several years of gains for the progressive and labor movements, there was a conservative backlash, and the country elected a far-right leader who had links to rejuvenated fascist movements. Naturally, with the leader’s support, the fascists began targeting minorities as the country saw an uptick in hate crimes. The leader put an enormous amount of energy into damaging organized labor, and handed out massive paychecks to the already-rich through lowering taxes and deregulating industry, and distracted lower class whites by stoking culture wars. LGBTQ+ people were increasingly demonized in the press, which led to a spate of laws targeting them for persecution. The press looked the other way when it came to the leader’s chumminess with known pedophiles and brutal dictators. Military funding soared, social services were slashed, mass surveillance and crackdowns on dissent spiked, millions slipped into poverty, and the cultural tenor of the country shifted from one of hope and possibility to one of doom and despair.

This was, of course, Margaret Thatcher’s England in the 1980s, but you might know someone now in a similar situation. Alan Moore, who in the early 80s was a lesser-known but up-and-coming comics writer, hated Margaret Thatcher. For part of the decade, he lived in a polyamorous throuple with his wife and another woman, making him part of the targeted LGBTQ+ community. Even worse, he began to feel that a nuclear apocalypse had become increasingly likely, and found that he had to explain the horrors of the bomb to his two young daughters, whom he feared might not make it to adulthood.

This was the political backdrop for Moore’s breakout work V for Vendetta. It’s unfortunate that it is still politically relevant, but it is fortunate for us that we can learn from it, 40 years on.

Anarchism vs. Fascism

V for Vendetta was Moore’s first real stab at a longform comic, and its reception is what put him on the radar of many comics fans in the 80s. In it, an anarchist terrorist who goes by “V” and wears a Guy Fawkes mask attempts to topple the fascist police state that arose in the wake of the chaos that followed a nuclear war. It was Moore’s attempt to grapple with — and warn against — the potential trajectory of the Thatcher era’s creeping fascism.

It is not, it needs to be said, a work that is steeped in a lot of coherent political theory. Moore is a lifelong anarchist, but he does not appear to be the type of guy who reads The Conquest of Bread and quibbles over theoretical details with other radicals. This means the story’s got a lot of things that most anarchists wouldn’t really love (such as a single hero that takes down the government instead of a mass movement). But because he doesn’t dwell on theory, it allows him to get at what he sees as the deeper underlying issues. As he explained in one video:

“Anarchy is and always has been a romance. It is clearly the best way and the only morally sensible way to run the world: that everybody should be the master of their own destiny, everybody should be their own leader.”

V for Vendetta was in part a response to the polarization of the Cold War, with the capitalist West fighting the communist East. But to Moore, they both employed similarly repressive tactics when it came to dissent, and both meddled in the private lives of their citizens. He explained it a 2009 interview with the American anarchist Margaret Killjoy:

“It struck me that simple capitalism and communism were not the two poles around which the whole of political thinking revolved. It struck me that two much more representative extremes were to be found in fascism and anarchy.”

Interestingly, he frames the two poles in the usually-conservative language of personal responsibility:

Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism represented by the original Roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs. Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: “In unity there is strength.” But inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and shape, that there aren’t any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are disturbing the bundle. So it goes from “in unity there is strength” to “in uniformity there is strength” and from there it proceeds to the excesses of fascism as we’ve seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

Now anarchy, on the other hand, is almost starting from the principle that “in diversity, there is strength,” which makes much more sense from the point of view of looking at the natural world.

…if you apply that on a social level, then you get something like anarchy. Everybody is recognized as having their own abilities, their own particular agendas, and everybody has their own need to work cooperatively with other people. So it’s conceivable that the same kind of circumstances that obtain in a small human grouping, like a family or like a collection of friends, could be made to obtain in a wider human grouping like a civilization.

V for Vendetta is framed around this understanding, that people acquiesce to being ruled because they simply do not want the responsibility of taking control of their own lives.

If we were to take out all the leaders tomorrow, and put them up against a wall and shoot them — and it’s a lovely thought, so let me just dwell on that for a moment before I dismiss it — but if we were to do that, society would probably collapse, because the majority of people have had thousands of years of being conditioned to depend upon leadership from a source outside themselves. That has become a crutch to an awful lot of people, and if you were to simply kick it away, then those people would simply fall over and take society with them. In order for any workable and realistic state of anarchy to be achieved, you will obviously have to educate people — and educate them massively — towards a state where they could actually take responsibility for their own actions and simultaneously be aware that they are acting in a wider group: that they must allow other people within that group to take responsibility for their own actions.

Moore had originally planned for V for Vendetta to end on a more utopian note, in which the fascist government was overthrown and anarchy took its place. But by the time he finished V for Vendetta — nearly 8 years after he started it — he grew uncertain that such a dramatic change was possible. Living under autocracy stifles us and deforms us, but it is less terrifying than being in charge of our own lives.

Spiritual fascism and “The Last Inch”

Interestingly, Moore equates the fascist tendency of submitting our own thoughts and desires to the powerful with the religious impulse:

Now if you move that into the spiritual domain, then in religion, I find very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. The word “religion” comes from the root word ligare, which is the same root word as ligature, and ligament, and basically means “bound together in one belief.” It’s basically the same as the idea behind fascism; there’s not even necessarily a spiritual component it. Everything from the Republican Party to the Girl Guides could be seen as a religion, in that they are bound together in one belief.

This is something I only very recently came to realize myself. I grew up Catholic and left the church when I was in my teens, declaring myself an atheist. A few months ago, after taking a particularly strong edible, I rediscovered an old feeling that, as a kid, I identified as the presence of “god.” It’s an incredibly pleasant, serene feeling, but I was surprised that it was still there. I had, after all, rejected the concept of God along with the Catholic Church in my teens.

I realized, almost instantly, that the experience itself was real, but that the religious leaders in my life had attempted to tell me what it was, what it meant, and how I should behave towards it. Because the stuff they were telling me was batshit insane and sometimes openly evil (you should be ashamed of your body, you are a broken sinner, your only way back towards this feeling is obedience to our rules), I rejected the feeling itself along with the church, and it lay dormant in me for over 20 years.

It is a delightful feeling to have back in my life, but I am taking it slow and am exploring it without any labels. The feeling is mine, and I get to explore my relationship with the feeling in private. I don’t want to even call it “god” or “spirituality,” because I have the sense, to steal from the first line of the Tao Te Ching, that the god that can be named is not the true god.

Along with the feeling of intense relief that comes with finding this feeling still buried inside me after all these years, I have found myself incredibly angry that the feeling was co-opted and taken from me by the religious leaders in my life.

This sense, that there’s something inside us that cannot and should not be touched by others, that should remain our own, makes up the most famous moment in V for Vendetta and its film adaptation, the “Last Inch” scene. In the scene, Evey Hammond, a character allied with V, has been arrested and thrown into a prison cell. While there, she discovers a roll of toilet paper on which one of her fellow inmates, a woman named Valerie, wrote her autobiography, which I reproduce in part here:

In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later, I moved to London, enrolling at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart.

But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.

…I imagine I’ll die quite soon. It is strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologised to nobody. I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish… except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Protecting our “last inch” is not easy. The capitalist society we live in treats humans like expendable machines that exist only for generating profits for the rich. It tells us that we are garbage, that humans are a disease, a stain on the face of the earth, and that we should rent our bodies and our souls out to the rich and powerful so that they can make better use of them. They are happy to take everything from us until there’s nothing left.

You do not have to be an anarchist to accept the alternative: that you matter, and there are some parts of you that are just yours, and that you’re allowed to live with dignity and integrity. This sounds simple, but the implications of doing this, of taking responsibility for your life, are immense. There are consequences to being your own person, and those consequences could end up costing you everything.

But wouldn’t all that responsibility be worth it? If you could be your own person and hold yourself in high enough esteem to not sell every last bit of yourself to others, no matter how high the price?

Isn’t responsibility a small price to play for liberation?

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

This is part of an ongoing series on the ideas of Alan Moore. Read the rest of the series here. Also, I took the paywall down from last week’s article, as it makes up the basis of a lot of the philosophical stuff I’m gonna be talking about on here. Read it here.

Among adults, magic is a degraded art. Most of us loved magic when we were kids — we saw a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or guess our card, and, little dummies that we were, we weren’t able to see through the trick and wondered if perhaps the magic was real. But sometime in our teenage years, the tricks behind the illusions were revealed to us, and we left magic in the past, along with Sesame Street and bedwetting.

Within our modern lexicon, even the term magic is usually employed in a vaguely derogatory manner: consider the term “magical thinking,” which refers to the modern superstition that our thoughts and feelings can exert unnatural influence on the world around us, that they can perhaps curve the ball through the goal posts if we want it badly enough and are wearing the right pair of socks. Our other primary understanding of “magic” exists within the context of modern New Age belief systems. It’s the magic of burned sage and star charts, and smacks of the desperate adult desire to force order upon the overwhelming chaos.

This is unfortunate — even though our rational brain may scoff at magic’s illusions and thinly-veiled con artistry, the feeling we got when we were kids and the rabbit appeared out of the hat is something that we are left desperately wanting in adulthood. Wonder is in short supply for grown-ups.

But it doesn’t need to be. Last week, we discussed Alan Moore’s insight that Gods do not need to exist anywhere outside the human mind for them to still retain all their power, terror, and majesty (read that article for free below). From this epiphany, Moore developed a system for thinking about and navigating human consciousness. He calls this system “magic,” and while it has its roots in the same occult practices as much of the New Age movement, there is nothing inherently pseudoscientific about it. We can dip our feet in its waters and still keep our “rational adult” cards.

The Art of Magic

Put at its simplest, Moore’s understanding of magic is that it is basically the same thing as art. He explains in The Mindscape of Alan Moore:

Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.

When asked, Moore puts forward a theory as to how art and magic began as a human activity: he suspects that the earliest artists were, in fact, shamans or holy people. They were the keepers of their societies stories and rituals, and when performing these rituals, they would have learned tricks to pull their audience in and hold their attention.

These tricks — mnemomic devices, rhyme, rhythm, repetition, etc. — are the same tricks used by talented storytellers and rhetoricians today. He believes that over time, the broad field of magic got split into separate disciplines: early alchemy morphed into what would now be recognized as “science,”; storytelling, painting, singing, and performing all were categorized as “art”; the spiritual aspects of magic were consigned to “religion”; the use of stories to influence the organization and goals of the tribe were developed into “politics.”

In the modern age, we are inured to the magic of storytelling because we consume so much of it that we forget just how strange it is. A viral meme that has been making the rounds lately puts it nicely:

But consider the effect, thousands of years ago, of a shaman telling a tale around a fire: perhaps they have some understanding of pyrotechnics, and can make the fire rise and fall, seemingly at their command, as they speak. Imagine they pull you into a tale where you can see it, you can see the story in your minds eye, or perhaps dancing among the flames, to the point that you feel like you are in the story yourself. Imagine if in that story you feel as if you can fly, that you can slay a dragon, or build something immense.

What could you call the experience of becoming totally immersed in a story, if not magic?

While storytelling and art’s magical trappings have been siphoned off and picked apart in modern society, Moore suggests that the connections between the two are still apparent in the words we use to describe them. From The Mindscape of Alan Moore:

The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire, for example, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying grammar.

Likewise, we “curse” people we wish to hurt in both language and magic. Stories that are particularly immersive are called “enchanting.” People or characters who are charismatic or appealing are “charming.” When that charm is illusory and there is something darker underneath, we might call it “glamor.” Moore again:

Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness.

This ability to change people’s consciousness, to influence them, to put images and ideas in their mind, is an immense power, perhaps the most immense power. Because of this, Moore views writing and art as a far more elevated craft than most. From Mindscape:

In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society.

Is it perhaps unsurprising that a writer would come up with a theory that puts writers at the center of society? Sure. But the tricks of art and magic are available to all: we can all learn these techniques, both in order to not be manipulated, or to use them towards our own ends.

Where science and imagination meet

The curious thing about humans is that when we truly believe a story, it changes our behavior: a soldier or athlete heading into a hopeless situation can be steeled by a rousing speech, and can then go out and turn hopelessness into victory. Conversely, if we believe stories that tell us we are worthless, we begin to act like we are worthless. The stories we tell ourselves are our primary motivating factors, they are what guide our actions and give our lives meaning.

But our imaginations don’t just give us the stories we tell. We get everything we’ve ever created or built from them. Every single piece of manmade technology that you use every single day had to exist inside someone’s imagination before it could exist in the real world. The chair you are sitting in, the phone you are holding, the burrito you’re shoving into your mouth, all of these things had to be conceptualized before they could exist.

This puts “magical thinking” into a new light: sure, turning our cap around backwards won’t necessarily change the momentum of the basketball game we are watching. But it’s an understandable fallacy, because we regularly take stuff that’s in our brains and make it into real stuff in the real world, whenever we write a letter or draw a picture or make a meal or knit a scarf or do a funny little dance. The boundary between imagination and reality is, in a very real sense, porous.

So it’s unsurprising that we sometimes overestimate how much our internal state affects the external world. But we do not need magic to explain the laws of nature — science does that just fine. It just needn’t not be our only exploratory tool. From Magic Words:

Moore is committed to the scientific worldview. He believes that magicians and occultists have tended to make a fundamental mistake in seeing magic as a rival scientific system with strict ‘laws’. Magic, for Moore, is an art, albeit a ‘meta-art’ akin to psychology or linguistics, and in his view, virtually all great art has been created by artists with magical beliefs of one kind or another. Science, however, has at least one serious limitation: it ‘cannot discuss or explore consciousness itself, since scientific reality is based entirely upon empirical phenomena.’

For exploring the realm of consciousness, Moore turns to magic.

How do you explore the magical realm?

Of course, since magic is an art rather than a science, the methods of exploring it are a lot more fast and loose than the scientific method is. Any time you make art, any time you engage in any act of creation, you are in effect exploring the contours of your interior world, and are engaging in what Moore would call “magic.”

Most people who work as “creatives” don’t spend too much time examining their creative process. The worry among many creative people is if you look at your processes too closely, they’ll lose their magic and won’t work anymore. This, obviously, is not the case for Moore, who was heavily inspired by the musician Brian Eno. Eno’s approach to art is curious and experimental — in the 70s, he created a widely-used deck of cards called “Oblique Strategies” which was designed to help jar you out of a creative block by offering aphorisms that could be pulled at random, like:

* “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.”

* “Work at a different speed.”

* “Try faking it!!”

Creativity and art, in this sense, is basically a playground. We play with ideas, experiment with new methods, and just generally fuck about until something cool happens.

Moore took Eno’s ethos and ran with it, swiping occult tools like Tarot and Kabbalah as creative tools that can be used to explore the imagination and come up with solutions to creative problems. Occultists have long used Tarot cards as a method of divining the future, and this, scientifically speaking, is nonsense. But the Tarot is a set of heavily symbolic images, and this sort of tool is really useful if you’re trying to turn off your rational brain and access your intuition.

Say you’ve got to make a tough choice. You’re considering taking a new job, or getting engaged, or having kids. You’ve thought it all through, you’ve made lists of pros and cons for each of your choices, but you find that there’s no clear rational answer. The only thing left to do is go with your gut instinct, but this is hard to do because you’ve been all rational and reasonable, so your brain is in problem-solving mode, not “trust your intuition” mode. So what do you do? You pull out a Tarot deck and ask it what you should do.

The answer the Tarot deck gives is not the universe communicating with you — it is you communicating with you. Because in trying to decode all of the symbols, you may find yourself drawn to a specific interpretation, born of seemingly nonsensical associations and vague feelings, that nonetheless feels right. This is your correct answer, arrived at through magical, irrational processes. This doesn’t mean that rationality is a bad tool — much of the time, it gives us the right answer — it’s just a tool that, like literally all tools, is not useful in every situation.

This is, of course, just scratching the surface of what Moore calls “magic.” Moore’s biographer Lance Parkin wrote that “it is possible to break Moore’s [magical belief system] down into three components: psychogeography, snake worship, and ideaspace.” We’ve already covered the worship of snakes, and followers of this newsletter will likely already be familiar with psychogeography (though we will certainly come back to it). But next week, we will explore the third component, which attempts to map out the imagination: ideaspace.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

In 1968, Kurt Vonnegut quipped, “a sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” A few years earlier, in his acclaimed book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, the philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what we view as insanity is often a social construction. He was coming at this from a place of deep personal knowledge — Foucault was a homosexual in a time when it was still deeply taboo and treated in many places as a mental illness.

From this vantage point, Foucault critically reviewed the history of mental illness, and found that in some cultures, afflictions that today are seen as something that needs to be “cured” were instead viewed as prophetic gifts. Epileptic seizures were seen by the Greeks and other cultures as an instance of spiritual possession, or as communications with the gods. The visions that epileptics would sometimes emerge with were often seen as being divine messages, which is why epileptics were often employed as oracles and shamans. Shamans or spiritual figures who weren’t epileptic would often find a way to simulate the altered states that epileptic seizures brought on, this madness that brought wisdom, through the ingestion of psychedelic substances.

One of the most famous philosophers in history was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in a giant ceramic tub in the marketplace, made friends with the local street dogs, and shouted at people walking by. When Alexander the Great visited him and offered to do the great philosopher a favor, Diogenes said, “You’re blocking my light. Move.”

It is virtually impossible to imagine a modern leader consulting an unhoused eccentric, let alone putting up with an open insult, but Diogenes’ legacy is clear: the philosophical school he helped found, cynicism, remains influential to this day, and Diogenes himself is an enormous figure in philosophy.

I am making a point of this because we’re about to spend several weeks looking at the ideas of Alan Moore, and Alan Moore famously worships a sock puppet. So I feel that the nuances of “madness” are perhaps something we ought to understand.

The madness of Alan Moore

If you have only heard a little bit about Alan Moore, then it is likely this: In the 1980s, comics, long derided as a childish or illiterate art form, grew up and went through a period of intense creative flourishing, spearheaded by underground “comix” creators like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame), as well as newcomers like Frank Miller (Sin City, 300, The Dark Knight Returns), Neil Gaiman (Sandman), and, at the top of the heap, Alan Moore.

Moore’s most famous work was Watchmen, the subversive superhero yarn that would be the only comic included on Time Magazine’s 100 Best Novels. But that was far from his only acclaimed work: he became renowned in the same time period for his dystopian anarchist comic, V for Vendetta, for his engagement with environmentalism, ecology, and psychedelia on Swamp Thing, and for his legendary Batman story, The Killing Joke, which would become a key influence on Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie as well as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, and in turn every single “dark and gritty” superhero that’s been churned out since the 80s. Moore’s works were noted for being adult-oriented, elaborately structured, and minutely detailed.

For many comics fans, this is the only period of Moore’s work worth paying any attention to, because in the late 80s and early 90s, Moore appeared to go completely off the rails. He regularly got into extremely public fights with his publishers, eventually refusing to work with both Marvel and DC (the two dominant comics companies), disowning his most acclaimed stories, and insisting that his name be taken off any movie adaptation of his work. This last move has cost him, in his own estimation, millions upon millions of dollars.

Weirder, on his 40th birthday in 1993, he declared that he was dedicating his life to the pursuit of “magic,” and, a few months later, he began telling interviewers about his preferred deity: a snake god named “Glycon,” who was at the center of a popular cult in 2nd Century Rome. The satirist Lucian unmasked Glycon as actually being a hand puppet manipulated by the false prophet who led the cult. None of this seemed to dissuade Moore.

After these announcements, Moore’s work began getting increasingly esoteric and niche: he produced a comic that served as a guide to his occult beliefs called Promethea, he created a series of one-off, in-person “magical” performances, and a pornographic comic set in the opening days of World War I and featuring the sexual awakenings of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Wonderland, and Wendy from Peter Pan.

For a certain set of comic book fan, Moore has largely squandered the good will he built with his gritty 1980s masterpieces with all of the esoterica, magic, and infighting with his publishers and collaborators. The fact that he frequently takes jabs at adult fans of superheroes for being infantile proto-fascists, the fact that every time someone tries to adapt his comics he publicly berates them in the press, and the fact that some of these adaptations, like V for Vendetta or the Watchmen TV show, are quite critically acclaimed, has served to marginalize him from the mainstream as a possibly insane crank and recluse.

The work he’s produced since then — such as an old school, low-circulation zine that financially tanked quite quickly, a sexually violent deconstruction of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, and an experimental novel that’s longer than the Bible — has only seemed to further relegate him to the margins of the comics world.

The sock puppet snake god

The problem is that Alan Moore is only insane from a distance. Look at him any closer, listen to him in his own words, and he starts to make sense. I am not kidding when I say this is a problem, because when Alan Moore makes sense, you have to shift your entire worldview to accommodate what he’s said, and when you do that, you inevitably fall down a rabbit hole and end up worshipping strange gods.

Let’s take the sock puppet god: In the early 90s, Moore was coming off of a rough few years. He and his wife had expanded their relationship to include another woman, and the throuple, which lasted for several years, collapsed with the two women leaving Moore and taking his daughters with them. At the same time, Moore was beginning to realize that DC Comics had successfully swindled him out of his rights to the characters he’d created for Watchmen. He got bogged down in battles over free speech and censorship, threw his weight into fighting against an AIDS-panic homophobia campaign spearheaded by Britain’s then-leader, the far-right shitheel Margaret Thatcher. It was, per his account, a generally bad time.

So he had a proper mid-life crisis and declared to his friends and family that he was now a magician. (“He wasn’t of course,” his daughter Leah once quipped, “he couldn’t even do balloon animals.”)

While he’d always been interested in the occult, the thing that piqued his interest in magic was his own writing: In the early 90’s, Moore was deep into the production of his acclaimed Jack the Ripper comic From Hell. While working on it, he wrote the following line:

The line, which had slipped out of his brain seemingly of its own accord, made him think: “Having written that and been unable to find an angle from which it wasn’t true,” he said later, “I was forced to either ignore its implications or change most of my thinking to fit around this new information.”

He chose, characteristically, to change most of his thinking, and the method he chose was the study of magic. This is not magic in the “pick a card” balloon animal sense, nor does it mean Moore believes he can “manifest” his destiny by beheading a chicken or putting pictures on a vision board.

In at least one sense, Moore still to this day could be said to be an atheist — his From Hell epiphany was that one does not need to believe in the material reality of gods to believe in them. One simply needs to divide the world in two: there is the objective material world, which can be measured and explored with science, and the subjective world of imagination, which can be explored with what Moore calls magic. (His understanding of magic is the subject of next week’s article, but for now, it’s worth noting that he does not see any serious difference between what he calls “magic” and what most people call “art.”)

In the realm of imagination, Gods inarguably exist, but can be seen not as physical forces so much as agglomerations of ideas, symbols, stories, and myths. One could choose a god to worship based on how one identifies with its stories, with its symbols, and with its values. It also occurred to Moore that if he wanted to explore the imaginary realm, it would be helpful to have a guide.

His friend and mentor, Steve Moore (no relation) had helped Alan get into the field of comics, and now helped get him into magic. Steve Moore worshipped Selene, the Greek personification of the moon, and in his explorations of the world of the subconscious, she served as his guide, the Virgil to his Dante. Alan Moore wanted a similar guide, and while Steve was showing him photos of his moon goddess, Moore’s eye was drawn to a photo of a statue of a snake with a fabulous head of hair. He thought the snake would be an excellent guide, and, with some research, found that its name was Glycon. He arranged to meet with his god in person so as to devote himself to it.

It is worth noting here: Alan Moore has been a user of psychedelic drugs since his teenage years. He was in fact expelled from school at age 17 for dealing acid: “The problem with being an LSD dealer, if you’re sampling your own product, is your view of reality will probably become horribly distorted… and you may believe you have supernatural powers and you are completely immune to any form of retaliation and prosecution, which is not the case.”

In order to meet Glycon and explore his new understanding of magic, Moore underwent a number of magical rituals with Steve Moore and other friends that involved ingesting a fair amount of psilocybin mushrooms.

Here’s the explanation Moore gave to BBC Radio 4:

I worship a second century human headed snake god called Glycon, who was exposed as a ventriloquist’s dummy nearly 2000 years ago. Famed throughout the Roman Empire, Glycon was the creation of an entrepreneur known as Alexander the False Prophet, which is a terrible name to go into business under.

… I’m interested in the snake god purely as a symbol, indeed one of humanity’s oldest symbols, which can stand for wisdom, for healing, or, according to ethno-botanist Jeremy Narby, for our spiraling and snake-like DNA itself.

But I’m also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist’s dummy. After all, isn’t this the way we use most of our deities? We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.

The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them back in the box. And you know, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go back in the box: they have to go back in the box.

Atheistic worship

On a personal level, I was thunderstruck the first time I read Moore’s take on Gods. I have been an atheist since I was about 15, and I feel pretty comfortable about my decision to leave behind the repressive, regressive Catholic Church. But I also felt that, by leaving behind religion, there was a whole realm of the human experience — particularly things like communal singing or the comfort of prayer — that I was abandoning.

What’s more is that I have, occasionally, enjoyed partaking in psychedelic drugs, and used to come out of those trips with experiences that could only be expressed through the language of religion. I didn’t think I’d “seen God” while high on mushrooms — it struck me as more probable that what I’d experienced was a hallucination brought on by the copious amount of hallucinogens I’d just ingested — but I’d had an experience that was worth trying to understand.

Moore’s “Gods” distinction is extremely simple (some might even say self-evident) but it solved all of the major problems that I had with religion:

* It doesn’t make any supernatural claims about material reality: in this conception, science is still the best way to explore the laws of the universe and of nature. This means we can remain skeptics when it comes to some of the more wild claims that religions and spiritual movements make. But unlike the dry, objective version of reality put forward by people like the New Atheists, it still leaves space for religious experiences. We can still have intense feelings like awe, wonder, or cosmic oneness, but we don’t need to cast about the material world for an explanation.

* It does away with the need for priests or gurus — while there are people I can learn from (like Moore), none of them have any real authority over what I choose to believe and do. This means spirituality can be truly personal in a way that’s tricky within the context of organized religion.

* Because it places God and spirituality within the mind and not out in some other realm (whether that’s blowing in the breeze or judging us from on high), it frees us up to not take our beliefs so seriously. It allows a sort of playfulness that most religion, with its doctrines and hard rules, totally forecloses. The day our gods stop being helpful we can, as Moore suggests, put them “back in the box.” This feature, I would argue, also makes it less easy for us to talk ourselves into doing heinous shit in the name of our God.

This approach has allowed me, for the first time since I was 15, to have what most people would call a “spiritual” life. For my part, I do not like the word “spirituality,” because I do not believe in a “spirit” that is separate from the human body. Instead, I, like Moore, prefer the word “magic.”

But more on that next week.

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In 2020, Chelle King moved to her current house in Sacramento, California, and began cooking a lot. “It was just me and my husband and our kids, so we were ending up with tons of food waste because it was really fun to cook it and then nobody would eat the leftovers.”

The solution came in the form of a community fridge. Community fridges (sometimes called “freedges”) are an increasingly common mutual aid project that are exactly what they sound like: fridges placed in public spaces that anyone can drop food in, and that anyone can take food out of. They are godsends in a time of rising food insecurity for a number of reasons:

* First, Americans waste 80 million tons of food each year (this is equivalent to 38% of all food, and roughly 149 billion meals). While 46% of this waste comes from the food industry itself, much of it comes from private households, and as you likely know yourself, the food that’s most likely to end up in the garbage is fresh produce. This is at a time where 49 million Americans rely on food assistance each year. For food kitchens, most of the food donated is nonperishable, which means that for the food insecure, it’s harder to get access to fresh produce. Community fridges cut out all the middlemen — you have some apples you’re not gonna get around to eating before they go bad, you put them in the community fridge. Boom — fresh food for someone in your neighborhood who needs it.

* Second, unlike food kitchens, community fridges are rooted in mutual aid, not charity. This means there aren’t any barriers to entry for a community fridge — if you are, say, a trans person dealing with food insecurity, you don’t need to worry about what might be facing you if you enter a food kitchen that’s held in a conservative church. It also means that you don’t need to prove or quantify your need.

Building her own fridge

For King, though, the community fridge closest to her was still a trek. After schlepping a wagonload of food to the fridge, she started talking to the host of the fridge and asking whether there was a need for one in her part of town. They said, “Absolutely.”

With advice from the hosts of the other fridge, the help of a handyman, and a grant provided by the Freedge Network King installed a fridge on her own property.

King said she wanted the fridge to have a glass door “because I really wanted people to be able to see inside. I feel like it’s like super sketchy to like open a closed refrigerator door.” She also reached out to a local activist who goes by the Instagram handle “The Awkward Gardener”, who has built relationships with groceries and restaurants, collects their leftover food, and distributes it to local community fridges.

In February of 2023, she finally got it up and running, and the initial response was great. “People were super excited.” King would tell people walking by about the fridge and answer questions to spread the word, and the fridge quickly became popular. “One of the most common questions I got,” King told me, “was ‘what do you do if the food goes bad or if it expires?’” She said, “That won’t happen. The food is gone in an hour.”

And the amount of food going through it went well beyond her and her family: she said she felt “really inconsequential” putting in her “piddly little leftovers” because “they last like two minutes and then everything's gone.” Even when she made stuff in bulk specifically for the fridge, it went out fast: “I had a whole bunch of dried pasta and a whole bunch of jars of pasta sauce and I was like I’m just gonna make a whole bunch of pasta and put it in there. It was the most I probably had ever put in because I wasn’t cooking for myself, I was just cooking for the fridge. It was still gone in like 10 minutes.”

It helped that she lives a block off of a restaurant street: as people found out about the fridge, they would drop their leftovers from the restaurant into the fridge. And in the summer, as people began having outdoor barbecues, they’d put their leftovers into the fridge as well. And some in her neighborhood were simply doing what she’d done before the project began: dropping off their own excess food.

As a rule, King tried not to pay too close of attention to who was taking food out of the fridge — people were appreciative, but she said “I try not to look at the people who are picking up food and put them in a bucket.” But because of what happened next, King ran an online survey, and has since gotten a better sense of the demographics that use the fridge: while the unhoused use the fridge regularly, many are housed people in the neighborhood who are dealing with food insecurity.

In the spirit of the community fridge, King is not picky about who uses it: you don’t need to be in need. “If there's a parent whose kid is going apeshit because they’re hungry, and if there’s something in there [they can] take it!” She added, “You don't have to be destitute. You could have money for something but sometimes it’s the convenience. I was super stoned one night and somebody had stocked the whole fridge with Lunchables and I was like ‘Oh my god, I’ve died and gone to heaven.’”

But as of my interview with King back in December, the fridge was not in operation — she’d unplugged it and was using it in the interim as a little free library. So what happened?

Attack of the NIMBYs

Unfortunately, the community fridge has drawn the ire of that classic feature of middle class neighborhoods: the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) crowd. At some point, someone came to the fridge, found it empty, and attacked the door, shattering one of the layers of glass on the front. After this happened, King started receiving citations from the City of Sacramento.

She has “I think a total of five of them at this point,” and “most of them are closed.” King’s job involves regularly dealing with state regulations, so she’s used to reading code, and was quickly able to prove that most of the citations were spurious. It was clear that the code violations were the result of complaints from some of her neighbors. In order to make the fridge work better, King circulated a survey online to get a sense of what the problems were and how she could address them.

“I seem to have about 10 neighbors who really, really, really, hate this refrigerator,” she told me, “and about 100 neighbors who either really like it or at least think it’s okay. So it’s a vocal majority. The City of Sacramento doesn’t actually have any regulations governing community fridges, so the citation that has stuck at this point is a violation of my setback.”

Sacramento regulations require that any constructions be setback at least three feet from the property line. The problem is that she lives in a very old house, so the property lines aren’t clearly drawn on any document for her. She’s asked the city to come and show her where they’re measuring from so she can follow the regulation, but so far, they’ve ignored her. “I have walked around the neighborhood and found many, many presumably setback violations. So yeah: they’re just trying to get rid of it.”

In the survey King circulated, she got to the bottom of what really upset people: In a Facebook post breaking down the results, she wrote:

Most of the complaints about the I St Fridge fall into three buckets:

1. The fridge brings unhoused people to the neighborhood and, though we want to help unhoused people, we want to do it somewhere else.

2. The fridge is unsanitary.

3. Having the fridge resulted in an increase in trash.

The problem, she points out, is that the City is not actually allowed to tell unhoused people which neighborhoods they’re allowed to enter. They also don’t regulate community fridges, so they can’t really enforce anything on the basis of trash or sanitation. They only offer “best practices.” But she believes she understands the real problem: “My neighborhood is nicer than I would say any other neighborhood in Sacramento that has had or does have a community fridge. So they do have best practices but I think one of the unspoken best practices is: Don’t put it in a nice neighborhood.”

It frustrates her, she says: “I mean our neighborhood is such a liberal enclave. You can’t walk a block without seeing something about how Black Lives Matter, or ‘in this house we believe…’ like they're everywhere. But that is the extent of how the neighborhood wants to engage. They want to give money to food banks, which I think is great — like food banks really need money — but that’s kind of the boundary that I’m recognizing that my neighborhood sort of has.”

Lessons learned in feeding your neighbors

King suspects that the source of most of the trouble comes down to one man: “For the most part all of my interactions with people have been super pleasant. People are really kind people are really grateful. There is one man who is not kind nor grateful. He is clearly very emotionally distressed all the time. He is the only person who has ever done anything I would say that’s like, negative. He threw food at me and my older daughter while he was laying on the sidewalk in front of the fridge. I was like, okay, please don’t do that, but it wasn't dangerous.” She adds, “He is an incredibly disturbed man, and he was here before the fridge was here. And he's still here. This is his neighborhood. I don't really like him but I do think that he should get to eat.”

King suspects that this man is the one who broke the door of the fridge, and also caused the main source of the “unsanitary” complaints: he found figs in the fridge, didn’t like them, and threw them all over the sidewalk in the summer, attracting flies. “It got gross for sure. I had to get the pressure washer out and pressure wash the sidewalk.”

As part of her plan going forward, King wants to schedule more regular cleanings and pressure washings, and when they move the fridge to fit the setback regulations, she plans to put a bench, better signage, a trash can, and a phone charging station next to it, so people can sit and eat.

But the existence of a difficult person in her neighborhood does not outweigh the good the fridge does in her view, and she thinks the response from some of her neighbors is exaggerated. “I have two small kids right? Like I am not like an insane person who’s just gonna like put my kids in danger so I can feed people. The fridge is right downstairs from my front door.”

She also noted that all of the people who claimed the fridge was “unsanitary” had never actually used the fridge, per the survey. “The problem has solved itself,” she posted on Facebook: “Continue to not use the fridge.”

She adds, “Some of the comments I’ve gotten are like, why don’t you box up specific meals and then take them to a place and then give them to people. And I’m like, well, because maybe they want to choose their own food. We wouldn’t think for a second that we would take that agency away from anybody else but if you’re a poor, food insecure, unhoused drug user, they were very quick to be like ‘well you don’t get to make any choices anymore.’ And I disagree.”

King’s struggle with her neighbors appears to have been a productive one, though — as of publication, while she’s had to eat the fines (locals who support the project have chipped in to cover the costs), she’s also been offered free help by UC Davis’s Humanitarian Legal Aid Organization, and her case may result in the city putting together a legal pathway for community fridges to acquire permits, thus making them less susceptible to hostile neighbors weaponizing city code against these sorts of projects.

King admits that building her own community fridge is “not a low barrier to entry” for anyone looking to get into mutual aid — she first became familiar with the concept by volunteering with harm reduction groups for drug users — but if all goes well, it looks like her project will make life a lot easier for future Sacramentonians who wish to feed their neighbors.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here.

Last week we discussed “disaster utopias,” the phenomenon in which, when something really terrible happens, people on the whole respond with kindness, selflessness, and bravery.

This phenomenon is well-documented, even though the media in moments of crisis tends to amplify (often exaggerated or entirely false) stories of crime and violence. The phenomenon could also be described as “spontaneous mutual aid,” and it seems to confirm what the anarchists have long been saying about human nature: we are fundamentally cooperative creatures at our core. When the social constructs of our capitalist society fall away, we revert to our normal state: members of a community, working for the common good.

There’s a fly in this argument’s ointment, though: the COVID-19 pandemic. Whereas catastrophes like hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornados send people into the streets, seeking connection, solace, and safety among their neighbors, early COVID was by necessity an isolating disaster. Babies were born without their wider families present, funerals had to be unattended, and trauma was borne in solitude.

Worse — it seemed that people got worse after the pandemic hit. All of the sudden, previously normal people were shouting at store clerks who asked them to put on a mask, all of the sudden, your cousin was railing against 5G towers and COVID vaccines as part of some deep state ploy. I do not think any of us look back on 2020 as a year we came together as a country.

But the early COVID-19 pandemic did have elements of disaster utopias, and there was a massive surge in mutual aid projects in the wake of the viruses spread. Our decision to see COVID-19 as an example of how people are terrible is just that: a decision. And it’s a decision that has largely been made for us.

Mutual Aid (and general human decency) in the pandemic

Let’s get this out of the way up top: millions of people were fucking great during COVID. Setting aside the people who did dangerous and vital work (nurses, doctors, teachers, grocery store workers, librarians, and anyone else given the title of “essential worker”), on a day to day basis, most of us sacrificed something huge to keep people safe.

We sacrificed personal connection, we sacrificed childcare, we sacrificed emotional and physical support, we sacrificed our basic well-being to keep the more vulnerable people in our lives healthy and safe. And we did all of this while dropping off rolls of homemade sourdough at friends’ places, while checking in with nightly Zooms and remote game nights, while giving money and resources to the people who suddenly found themselves without a job. When things started opening back up, millions of us wore masks, got vaccinated, made tough decisions about family gatherings and holidays, and marched against police brutality to boot.

If this — and not QAnon conspiracy theorist psychopathy — was your reality during the pandemic, then you need to ask yourself why you’re preferring the awful narrative to that of your own experience.

But all of that low-hanging goodness aside, there were some excellent instances of mutual aid during the pandemic. My personal favorite is ASS.

ASS — the Auntie Sewing Squad — is a mutual aid mask-making operation organized by the performer Kristina Wong in the early days of the pandemic. Wong began making cloth masks before it was officially recommended by the CDC (who waited until April of 2020 to make that particularly big decision), and realized there was a huge unmet need for the life-saving face coverings. She began to organize a group of mostly Asian women, whom she affectionately dubbed the “Aunties,” and they worked together to sew masks and distribute them to marginalized communities.

Wong recognized the irony of her situation, and told the LAist in an interview, “I'm ordering a bunch of Asian women to do this labor that our grandparents or parents never wanted to do ever again because this country, which is the most powerful country in the world, has failed to provide us with masks.” She leaned into the concept, and dubbed herself the “Sweatshop Overlord.” There was a massive elastic shortage in those early days of the pandemic, so the Aunties snipped elastic out of old bras and fitted bedsheets.

Such mask-sewing groups were common during early COVID: my earliest and best cloth mask came from a coworker who belonged to one of these groups. Some of these groups fell away after the CDC recommendation, which turned masks into a commodity to be sold on Etsy or in local shops. ASS remained steadfast in its commitment to mutual aid, refusing to charge for its masks and making sure it got to marginalized communities, whether that was to Indigenous reservations or to undocumented immigrants.

But the mutual aid of that era went beyond masks: The Trump Administration predictably blocked immigrants out of any of the protections offered in the early bailouts, and as a result many immigrant families lost housing and experienced food insecurity. Immigrant advocacy groups like Movimiento Cosecha started mutual aid funds to support immigrant families who were struggling in that period, raising over a million dollars.

Food insecurity in general ballooned during COVID (and recently shot up again because of expiring COVID-era programs), and since the government seemed largely uninterested in whether or not its subjects starved, the gaps had to be filled in, hodgepodge, by wide-ranging mutual aid programs. The most popular of these are community fridges or pantries, which offer a place for people to drop their leftover food so that others can take it. In my town alone, I saw these pantries spring up in daycare centers, libraries, and churches.

Anecdotes aside, the numbers are there: during the pandemic, more Americans engaged in mutual aid than ever before, and since the peak of the pandemic, more are willing to engage in mutual aid.

So what’s happening here?

Obviously, this isn’t all good news: mutual aid tends to exist where it has to exist among marginalized people, when society as a whole fails a specific group. If COVID did anything, it just made those margins a lot bigger. COVID was also an abnormally long catastrophe: most of the disasters we’re comparing it to, whether they are earthquakes, tornados, or terrorist attacks last minutes or even seconds. COVID lingered. And that has real consequences: while studies have thoroughly demonstrated the rise in social cohesion post-disaster, they’ve also shown that the cohesion only lasts for about a month on average before the old ways of doing things reassert themselves.

Participation in mutual aid efforts also dipped after the peak of the pandemic, when vaccines finally arrived and we collectively decided the still-with-us pandemic was “over.” Since then, many of the meager protections doled out in the early COVID bailouts have expired, and homelessness and food insecurity has, as a result, exploded. Unless the US Government starts caring about its people a whole lot more, these lingering problems will continue to be addressed by a patchwork of nonprofits and mutual aid networks. The good news is that many nonprofits are now looking to the mutual aid model as an engaging alternative to traditional hierarchical charity. One nonprofit, Ioby (short for “In Our Backyards”) has built a crowdfunding platform and offers coaching to help hyperlocal mutual aid groups become more sustainable.

It is obviously not ideal that our government has neglected so many corners of our society that we need to do all of the work ourselves, but if we truly want wide-reaching (even revolutionary) changes in our society, this is the type of work that needs to be done first.

So in short: none of this is good, but it all has the potential to be great.

The Anti-Good Bias

So why isn’t everyone doing this? Why doesn’t everyone find mutual aid projects to engage in? Why don’t we just start building the society we’d like to live in within the wreckage of the one we currently live in?

One major stumbling block is the negativity bias. This is just one of our brains’ inherent biases which make it hard for us to adequately process information.

Our brains evolved to understand the world in order to protect us: by enabling us to learn, to find patterns, and to predict what might happen in a given situation, it was enabling us to keep ourselves safe.

In order to do this, it had to prioritize certain data. While it’s lovely to spend our time feeling the breeze through our hair and the sand beneath our toes, those stimuli do not necessarily keep us safe. Early animal brains evolved to understand that nice data required less attention than negative data. The reason is obvious: The wind through your hair is nice, but it is more important to pay attention to the alligator that’s trying to sneak up behind you while you sunbathe.

Unfortunately, this bias has been thoroughly and consciously hijacked by modern media outlets, which understand that you’ll pay more attention if they flood you with an onslaught of terrible news. Conservative outlets in particular understand that scared people vote more conservative or don’t vote at all, and the best way to make people feel scared is to make them feel as if there is crime and violence around every corner. This is why they will report on a grisly murder, but not on an overall decline in the number of local murders.

This sense that we are under constant attack — from criminals, from immigrants, from refugees, from terrorists, from gangs — makes us less likely to trust a random person on the street who may be in need of help. And that trust is the core ethic of mutual aid.

COVID put us inside and it filtered our entire understanding of the world out there through modern media — and this, perhaps more than anything, has done the most to erode our sense of trust in others.

How do we rebuild trust?

Next week, we’ll be looking at how we can dip our toe into mutual aid and community engagement without having to spend a bunch of money or put ourselves in situations that go too far outside our comfort zones. We’re going to do that by spending the week squarely within my personal comfort zone: the local library.

Most of next week’s article will be paywalled, but reminder! I will be offering the whole course in ebook form, and, of course, I offer 7-day free trials.

As always, leave comments and questions below! I try to respond to all of them.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here.

If you want to have an honest discussion about mutual aid, you have to be willing to discuss radical political ideologies like anarchism and communism, and you have to look at the history of controversial groups like the Black Panther Party or the Young Lords. Many of the groups that advocate for mutual aid also advocate for the overthrow of capitalism and, by extension, the United States government.

This begs the question: is mutual aid inherently radical? Does engaging in mutual aid make you a revolutionary, someone intent on subverting and even overthrowing the existing system?

While mutual aid’s most prominent historical advocate, Pyotr Kropotkin, was indeed an anarchist, the argument he was making about mutual aid was that it was a natural part of evolution, something that all humans and many animals engaged in as a pragmatic means for survival. It seems strange to categorize something many human beings do instinctively as “radical.”

Furthermore, historically many mutual aid societies have not been politically left-wing, and instead have operating under the umbrella of otherwise conservative churches, or through organizations founded around a common heritage. The closest mutual aid society to me personally is the Amerigo Vespucci Society, built for and by Italian-American men who were trying to build a space where they could escape prejudice. Now, it’s main function is in offering scholarships and promoting Italian-Americans in the media while fighting negative stereotypes (which is a big job, here on the Jersey Shore). It is not a radical left-wing organization.

So: what’s happening here? Is mutual aid inherently radical, or is it just something everyone does that radicals try to co-opt?

Revolutionary mutual aid

In America — and in much of the rest of the world — mutual aid happens the most at the margins. One of my old political science professors once let us in on the nasty secret about the so-called “Scandinavian model” of social welfare that is advocated for by democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders: the reason those countries were able to pass such robust social safety nets is that, when they were passing the legislation, they were remarkably homogenous countries. Just white Swedes, Danes, Poles, and Norwegians, all over the place. This made it much harder for conservatives to fight the legislation because there was no “out” group that they could use as a way to race-bait everyday people into voting against it.

The United States, as a country founded on slavery and immigration, has always had a far more diverse electorate, which has made it exponentially harder for the country to pass social safety net legislation, what with all of the racism and prejudice. Because of this, large groups of people have been systematically excluded from the paltry safety net that the United States offers its citizens.

The people left at the margins have as such been forced to fend for themselves. Many of the street gangs and mafias in the United States got their start within ethnic communities that were not offered the same protections and opportunities as the “true Americans” were. So they built their own systems. These systems may have been funded through criminal activity, but they provided services that the more legitimate public institutions did not extend to certain groups of people.

Yes, in case you are wondering, this is exactly what the first scene of The Godfather is about.

Not all of these systems were as sinister as street gangs (though in cases like the Young Lords, street gangs sometimes morphed over time into mutual aid and civil rights organizations). In many cases, these ad hoc, unofficial social safety nets simply consisted of mutual aid societies.

As we discussed last week, Black Americans have been engaging in systematic mutual aid since at least the late 18th century, effectively practicing what Kropotkin preached over a hundred years before he preached it. In the late 1800s, activist and writer W.E.B. DuBois reported, 15% of Black men and 52% of Black women in New York City belonged to a mutual aid society.

But if you have to band together for your survival, and if other people in your society do not need to do the same, then you may start asking the obvious questions. Questions like: why the fuck do we need to do this?

When you start asking questions like that, you start getting answers like “capitalism,” like “racism,” like “colonialism,” like “homophobia.” Problems that are firmly embedded in institutionalized systems, and that require massive, sweeping changes to fix. Radicalism is an easy jump from there.

Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis and the Next makes the case that mutual aid is inherently revolutionary, because it shines a light on the injustices of a system and offers an alternative that could take the system’s place. The way you must engage in mutual aid — as if you’re not above anybody, as if listening matters, which is rooted in trust and compassion — puts you at odds with a system that ranks some people higher than others, which doesn’t listen to the “lower” people, and which is rooted in violence and control.

Spade is the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal aid program that serves low-income and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender-nonconforming. The project is founded on mutual aid principles in that it offers free legal advice and assistance to the people it serves, but also works to empower those same people to advocate and fight for themselves and their broader movement. This means if you’re a trans youth who just came in for some legal help, you may learn enough about the injustice of your situation to become politically active and start lobbying for policy changes in your home, school, workplace, or community. If you engage in this work as a white trans kid, you will quickly realize that the systems that oppress you oppress BIPOC trans kids, undocumented trans kids, and HIV-positive trans kids much worse. This will force you to not just ask how you can make things better for trans people, but how you can confront systemic racism, police brutality, awful immigration laws, and criminally expensive healthcare systems as well. Through this one issue, you build solidarity with other groups. Through this one issue, you become a revolutionary.

Mutual aid may not seem like a particularly radical idea to you, but for many people it is absolutely a radicalizing idea. Etymologically speaking, the root of the word radical is, radix, which is Latin for, well, root (the word “radish” comes from the same place). In America, radical politics are usually depicted as fringe beliefs. But from the radical perspective, they are merely getting to the root of the problem.

Mutual aid without revolution: The New Deal and the Mondragon

The revolutionary perspective on mutual aid is not, however, the only one. The other perspective — which for our purposes we’ll call mutualism — argues that progressive forces like unions and mutual aid societies can work together to rebuild a social safety net and a more equitable society within the ruins of modern capitalism. This model does not necessarily involve revolution, but instead models itself off the Basque cooperative corporation known as the Mondragon (which we’ll get to in a minute) and on the politics of the New Deal Era, where socialists, union workers, and progressives were able to build enough power to effectively pressure the government to enact massive, wide-ranging programs that created jobs, protected workers, and invested in the working and middle classes.

The credit for this massive expansion of the social safety net in America is usually given to the President at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But in his seminal work A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn convincingly argues that FDR was not the Working Class Hero his supporters have made him out to be in retrospect, but instead was a savvy politician who understood that if he didn’t make large concessions to the working class, then the country, which was in the darkest depths of the Great Depression, risked falling into a Russian-style communist revolution.

To curb this possibility, FDR worked with unions leaders and less radical socialists to implement the New Deal, which gave enough concessions to take the steam out of the revolutionaries sails.

While this approach sounds a lot more conservative, it doesn’t have to be: much of the progress that was made in the decades before the New Deal was made by trade unions, which often operated on the principles of mutual aid. Unions didn’t just organize strikes, they also provided a social life, access to medical care, support for struggling members, and some even opened banks that offered favorable, non-predatory terms to their members. These union priorities helped dictate the direction and scope of the massive social safety net which was built in the New Deal era. Because of decades of work on the part of the unions and the radicals, the left was able to build up enough power to force the US government’s hand.

So what would this look like today? First, we’d need bigger and more powerful unions. Fortunately, this seems to be the direction we’re headed in. The summer of 2023 was dubbed “Hot Labor Summer” by union workers and journalists because of all of the high profile, successful strikes. But it won’t just be unions. For people who aren’t protected by unions, there are still ways they can start building something better on principles of cooperation and mutual care. The historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz details many of these in his excellent books What Then Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism.

Alperovitz saw how it can be done first hand: In 1978, a steel manufacturer in Youngstown, Ohio was shut down by its owners for not turning the profits they wanted. They laid off 4,000 employees, and outsourced the work overseas. These layoffs were devastating to the local community, so the workers did something radical — they went back to work, and called in Alperovitz to help them develop the now-empty factory into a worker and community-run institution. The workers argued the plant was still capable of being profitable, but the corporate owners had hobbled it because they didn’t want to cut into their profits by investing in more modern machinery. The workers argued that they had more of a stake than the owners in modernizing and improving the plant, and that they could run the factory better, because they wouldn’t cut corners that would harm their local community, they would have more of a stake in keeping the factory viable, and they wouldn’t sacrifice their neighbor’s livelihoods for a cheap buck.

This experiment failed when the Carter Administration, which had promised loans to the workers, reneged after they made it through the midterm elections. But the failure was an instructive one, and Alperovitz has spent the decades since detailing the many ways in which people have built communities and workplaces that are mutually beneficial to all, not just the rich. He points to worker-owned cooperatives, Employee Stock Ownership Programs, B Corporations, public banking, and community land trusts as all being ways that we can start redirecting our society’s wealth away from the rich and towards the people who actually create that wealth, the workers, and which set their core value as cooperation, not competition.

Importantly, these methods are popular across the political spectrum: public banking, to use just one example, has had its greatest successes in the deeply conservative state of North Dakota.

Critics of the type of companies and institutions Alperovitz advocates for will argue that it’s impossible for them to scale up and fit into today’s globalized world. Fortunately, there’s already a large-scale model of a cooperative economy in the Basque region of Spain. It is centered around the Mondragon Corporation. It employs 80,000 people and earns more than €11 billion a year. The New Yorker’s Nick Romeo explains:

The Mondragon Corporation… is a voluntary association of ninety-five autonomous coöperatives that differs radically from a conventional company. Each co-op’s highest-paid executive makes at most six times the salary of its lowest-paid employee. There are no outside shareholders; instead, after a temporary contract, new workers who have proved themselves may become member-owners of their co-ops. A managing director acts as a kind of C.E.O. within each co-op, but the members themselves vote on many vital decisions about strategy, salaries, and policy, and the votes of all members, whether they are senior management or blue-collar, count equally.

The Mondragon has existed since 1956, and it managed to grow and flourish in the extremely hostile environment of a separatist region in Franco’s Spain, where the anarchists were systematically hunted down, imprisoned, and murdered. If this model can make it there, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, it can make it anywhere.

So: which is better?

It is worth noting that the more conservative mutualist approach to mutual aid — one that seeks to build more just structures within the current system — is reliant on the radical approach. If you didn’t have scary revolutionaries clamoring to overthrow the government and institute a communist utopia, you wouldn’t get more conservative liberals like FDR cooperating with socialists and leftists. And even if the radicals do get their revolution, they would end up building it on the work that’s already been done by the mutualists.

You can choose your side according to your politics and your personality, but both viewpoints rely heavily on each other, and their disagreements have a tendency to be extremely productive for everyone.

Next week, we’re going to discuss the phenomenon of disaster utopias, spontaneous mutual aid societies that spring up in the wake of a catastrophe. That article will be mostly paywalled, but reminder, I have a free year subscription to give away! Respond to the email or leave a comment, I’ll give it to the first person to ask.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

If there was one silver lining to the dumpster-fire pandemic year of 2020, it was the resurgence in the public eye of mutual aid. Mutual aid hadn’t gone anywhere, of course: it is something that the vast majority of humans engage in every day, and its proponents convincingly argue that it is older than the human race itself. Anyone who has lived through a catastrophe of some sort — a terrorist attack, a war, a wildfire, a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane — is also familiar with the concept, even if they can’t put a name to it. This is because humans spontaneously reinvent mutual aid every time shit goes off the rails: the concept is encoded in our DNA.

What was special about 2020 was the scale of the catastrophe. There has not been a time in most people’s living memory when the disruption to everyday life was so abrupt and so ubiquitous. Suddenly, billions of people were in dire need of some form of help or assistance, and in all but the richest neighborhoods, the victims of the catastrophe were impossible to escape.

In America, COVID-19 strained the country’s already-abysmal social safety net to a breaking point. During the pandemic 60 million people turned to charities for food. Charities and government programs couldn’t help everyone, though, and into those gaps stepped mutual aid programs like community fridges and Food Not Bombs-style hot meal giveaways. While the government dragged its heels on suggesting masking to protect against the virus and redirected depleted stocks of PPE masks to hospitals, spontaneous communities of seamstresses and knitters produced thousands of homemade masks, which they gave to anyone in need.

In much of the retrospective lore of COVID-19, the pandemic is depicted as an event that proved to many that humans can’t be trusted, focusing on the spread of misinformation, vaccine conspiracy theories, and needless public opposition to masks. The resurgence of mutual aid tells a quieter story, but if listened to carefully, it teaches the opposite: in moments of awfulness, humans are kind to one another, and we don’t have to rely on uncaring elites to take care of ourselves.

Let’s give a definition of mutual aid, and let’s refer to the great arbiter of modern knowledge, Wikipedia:

Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs. This can include resources like food, clothing, to medicine and services like breakfast programs to education. These groups are often built for the daily needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found throughout relief efforts, such as in natural disasters to pandemics like COVID-19.

For the next several weeks, Better Strangers will be focusing on the concept of mutual aid, particularly on how it’s a useful tool for those struggling with political despair, and how its core ethic provides a new path forward for a better future. Articles will include:

* What mutual aid looks like in real life

* “Disaster utopias,” and how they work

* How COVID can be seen as a high point for humanity, not a low

* An interview with the creator of a community fridge in Sacramento, and her struggle to keep the project afloat in a NIMBY neighborhood

* Mutual aid in libraries

* How non-profits are leaning into mutual aid in the 2020s

But for today, we’re going to discuss origins of the term, starting with the coiner of the phrase, Pyotr Kropotkin.

Pyotr Kropotkin and the battle against “Survival of the Fittest”

Within a couple decades of the publication of On the Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin’s ideas about biology and evolution were being coopted by regressive social movements to support racist and colonial policies. What Darwin had described as “natural selection” was morphed into “survival of the fittest,” and this phrase was not just applied to biological systems, but to societies and races as well. Darwin’s ideas were revolutionary and exciting, and presented in the context of “survival of the fittest,” they seemed to offer a natural justification for some humans dominating others. Britain’s upper class were no longer brutal classists and racists, but were forward-thinking men of science, dedicated to the advancement of the species.

This strain of thought developed in all sorts of horrific directions — it offered justifications for colonialism, for racism, and for draconian attitudes towards the poor and destitute. It also led to the development of eugenics, which was fundamental to Nazi and American right-wing ideology in the early 20th century.

Some progressives — like the American William Jennings Bryan — used this right-wing tendency among Darwinists as a basis for arguing in favor of creationism. But European radicals found their opposition in the far more coherent work of Pyotr Kropotkin.

Kropotkin had been born into an aristocratic family, but after his mother’s death at age three, he was raised by the servants and serfs of the household, giving him a lifelong preference for the underclass. In his 20’s, he was stationed in Siberia for a military posting. While there, he established himself as a talented geographer, and also became politically radicalized. This was in part because Siberia was where dissidents and free thinkers were sent into exile, but also because while mapping the Siberian terrain, Kropotkin regularly interacted with the local peasant farmers, whose decentralized and cooperative form of social organization he held in great esteem.

For extra income, Kropotkin translated the works of Herbert Spencer, the coiner of the term “survival of the fittest,” and he began to develop a counter-theory. He wrote, in the first paragraph of the resulting work:

Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys which I made in my youth in Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria. One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies; and the consequent paucity of life over the vast territory which fell under my observation. And the other was, that even in those few spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find — although I was eagerly looking for it — that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.

Instead, what he saw nearly everywhere was cooperation. He wrote a series of essays that were compiled into his seminal book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. His core argument wasn’t all that controversial: it was that while competition was indeed an important driver of evolution, cooperation within species was at least as important to that species survival.

This was a radical departure from how cooperation and altruism had been thought of by political theorists before him. The 18th century writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau had argued that what motivated altruism and cooperation was “universal love.” Kropotkin didn’t believe in anything so intangible. Cooperation persisted among species because it was practical, because it actively aided in a species survival. Indeed, in places like Siberia, where resources like food and shelter were scarce, cooperation seemed like a better way to survive than competition. This cooperation, or “mutual aid,” it seemed to him, was the main reason that species managed to thrive.

Kropotkin extended his argument further: in human societies, spontaneous mutual aid was the rule rather than the exception. He examined cultural studies of the indigenous peoples of the world and found countless examples of groups working together to survive and thrive. He tracked mutual aid through history, from the guilds of the medieval era to the (then contemporary) Paris Commune, and found that no matter how competitive and unjust our societies, human beings can’t seem to stop cooperating and working together for mutual benefit.

Kropotkin titled his work modestly: Mutual aid was A factor in evolution, not The factor. But the implications to the reader were obvious: humankind, indeed all animals, were not just competitive, they were cooperative, and much of the time, cooperation was the more effective means of survival than competition.

If Kropotkin was right — and in the 122 years since the publication of his book, it’s safe to say he was — then we do not need to accept right-wing arguments that competition, cruelty, and domination are what we must build our societies on. We could choose kindness and cooperation instead, and not just because that’s the morally right thing to do, but because it’s the smart and practical thing to do.

Coming next week

Next week’s article will be on what mutual aid looks like in the real world. I’ll go into some of the basic principles, how it looks different from charity and philanthropy, and through some examples of how people make mutual aid work in real life.

I hate doing this, but I’m going to paywall every other article in this series, because I want to be able to put a lot of time into these mini-courses, and I can’t justify doing that unless it’s making me money. The good news is that there are 7-day free trials enabled on my subscription page (linked below), and it’s only $5 a month. If you wanna be super cool, you can also donate a subscription to someone who can’t afford it. Everything I’m talking about, full disclosure, is also free on the internet — the Anarchist Library has a massive back catalogue of free radical texts, and you can find everything I’m talking about and more on that site.

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Merry Christmas! I’ve got a special one-off article for you today. May your holiday and New Year be full of people you love, fun, and kindness.

Last week, thanks to Thomas Klaffke’s excellent newsletter Creative Destruction, I learned that the Santa Claus myth may have roots in the ritual use of psychedelic mushrooms.

The story goes like this: The Sami, a tribe of nomadic reindeer herders that live at the northern edges of Scandinavia, would hunker down in their homes during the cold winter months, and await the arrival of a shaman. The shaman dressed like the psychoactive mushroom he consumed, the amanita muscaria, which looks like this:

He also arrived, as was common with the Sami, on a sled driven by reindeer, who also happened to love the amanita muscaria mushroom. Amanita muscaria, incidentally, gives one the sense of flying, which may be the origin of the flying reindeer myth.

Of course, many of the people would be hunkered down because of Arctic snowstorms, meaning that the shaman could hardly enter through the front door: he had to come down the chimney. They would pay him with gifts of food, and then he’d eat a mushroom, go on a trip, and return with advice for the awaiting people. It must’ve seemed like he was omniscient.

Digging into this myth, I realized just how diverse Santa’s origins are — there is some evidence that he is designed after Odin, the Norse god who wanders the earth with a long beard and bestows gifts upon those who treat him with kindness. The pagan celebration of Yule is connected to the myth of the Wild Hunt, in which Odin and an army of supernatural riders race through the night sky.

The Wild Hunt in turn influenced the Dutch tradition of Sinterklaas, who kept Odin’s look and horse, but was based on the historical Christian figure Saint Nicholas, who had a reputation for gift-giving and generosity. Another influence was the English legend of Father Christmas, who until the Victorian Era was less about giving gifts to kids, and was instead more about partying and merry-making. His most culturally prominent avatar is the Ghost of Christmas Present in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

During the reformation, Martin Luther, in his attempt to de-center the Catholic Church and its emphasis on Saints such as Nicholas, proposed that gifts should be given to children directly by the Christ Child himself, or Christkindl in German. He failed at supplanting St. Nick, but through his attempts, he gave the jolly elf yet another nickname through the bastardization of Christkindl, Kris Kringle.

The modern Santa Claus, though, is distinctly American. Because American settlers hailed from all corners of the European continent, they smushed all of these traditions together, adding the poem The Night Before Christmas to the canon, and giving Santa his modern image in that most American of things, a Coca-Cola advertisement.

Santa Claus for atheists

I haven’t been a Christian for over 20 years, but I still love Christmas and I still love Santa Claus. My love of Christmas is complicated — I have an extremely difficult time with the religious and commercial aspects, but I adore Christmas carols (especially of The Muppets variety), eating big meals with friends and family, and hunkering down under a big cozy blanket with my wife and kids to watch Christmas movies.

But my love of Santa is pure. I owe the man, and I hold no grudge against him for being fictional.

This is because if there is one person I can thank for pushing me to leave the Catholic Church behind, it is Santa Claus. Santa was my gateway drug to agnosticism. When 10-year-old me found out that Santa wasn’t real, he began asking other questions:

“Is the tooth fairy real?”

“No.”

“The Easter Bunny?”

“Nope.”

“Is God real?”

“What? Oh yes. Yes, God is definitely still real.”

But the revelation was already out: authorities had lied to me, and I, with my beginnings of a rational brain, had discovered their ruse not by them telling me so, but by thinking it through myself. His reindeer can fly? I thought, not yet having had magic mushrooms myself, Ridiculous.

It was a short jump from there to questioning basic Catholic teachings, and a short jump from there to questioning adults moral and political decisions. This must’ve been difficult for the authorities in my life, but I think that it was across the board good for me, and for any kid who manages it. It’s important, especially at that age, to begin to question authority and think for yourself, and in a culture that is shamefully bereft of coming-of-age rituals, Santa remains a lone holdout.

What really makes me love the tradition, though, is the lesson it taught me after I learned that Santa wasn’t real. My parents told me that now I was the keeper of the Santa Claus myth, that it was up to me to try and make Christmas a little more magical for my little sister. The lesson here was that stories have power, as do the people that tell them. Stories can make lives brighter, they can make lives darker, they can be used to enlighten, and they can be used to control.

Lying to kids (and other objections to Santa)

The main objection I hear to teaching kids about Santa Claus is that it constitutes “lying” to kids, which undermines their trust in you. I do not fully agree with this — parents play make believe with their kids all the time, and being the parent of young kids is a constant exercise in incrementally exposing them to hard truths.

(It is worth noting that I got internet famous for accidentally revealing to my five-year-old the existence of Nazis, so I am not claiming to be a pro at this particular parenting skill.)

But Santa Claus can be handled in a way that it constitutes pretending and not lying:

“Mom, is Santa real?”

“Do you think he is?”

And then discuss!

For our part, the hardest part of the Santa Claus myth has been battling some of the creepier American elements, like “he sees you when you’re sleeping,” mass consumption, and the new surveillance state trend, Elf on the Shelf. The way we present Santa to our kids is as someone who brings all kids who celebrate presents, as there are no bad kids. This also gives us a reason to donate to toy drives, and to explain why Santa doesn’t bring EVERYTHING our kids want — because all kids deserve something nice.

The discomfort around all of the icky parts of Santa Claus isn’t enough to dissuade me from inviting him into my home, though. This is because Santa Claus is magic when you’re a kid, but he’s even more magic when you learn about the kaleidoscopic cross-cultural influences that contributed to his myth. He is a delightful example of the thing that we humans just can’t stop doing with stories — we steal them, we change them to suit our purposes and our times, and we contort them to the moral lessons we want to convey.

To me, experiencing a story as real, and then later learning to examine it, dissect it, research its complex history, and then put it back together in a way that better reflects your own values and times, is a vital human experience, and is something I wouldn’t deny my kids for all the world.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! For Auld Lang Syne!

Better Strangers is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

Editor’s Note: All of the books on this list are affiliate linked to Bookshop.org. If you buy through the link, I get a small kickback, which would be a lovely Christmas gift if you’ve been enjoying my work! The fact that I get paid does not influence my choices.

2023 was a hard one for me! I quit a job to start a new writing business in a year where most pundits seemed to agree that writing was over because of AI. I had to manage the ongoing mental health fallout from COVID, I had to try and do a not-terrible job raising my two kids, and I had to face some pretty rough truths about myself and my past. My understanding, just talking to friends and family, is that everyone seems to be at some stage of mental health crisis, so it’s nice, at least, to know I haven’t been alone.

The really good news was that in spite of how hard this year was, I began to start building a decent-sized community here at Better Strangers, thanks to all of you here at Substack and on TikTok. My bread and butter with this project has been books — I’ve focused on interesting ideas, brilliant stories, insightful visions of the future, and strange ways of seeing things that have helped me pull through one of the rougher times in my life. It feels like all of you — and the list of books that follow — have made a better future seem possible after all this difficulty and sadness.

I’d like to thank you all for that — I’ve got some really exciting stuff planned for next year, and I hope you’ll stick around. In the meantime, if you or someone you know had a rough year too, here are the books that helped me get through mine.

Book of the Year

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

For parents who are scared for their kids

Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night is the best book of the year in large part because it spoke to something that has been worrying me for the entirety of my children’s lives: namely, their future, and what this world might do to them. That anxiety did not get easier as the year went on, as climate change worsened, as the former President continued to remain a contender for future president, and as a US-backed government began to wage a brutal genocidal war that has disproportionately killed innocent children.

Our Share of Night is not set in our time or place, but during Argentina’s brutal (also US-backed) “Dirty War” in which thousands were tortured and “disappeared” in the 70s and 80s. The main character is Juan, a medium who is under the brutal control of a powerful supernatural Order. Juan’s son, Gaspar, may have some of his fathers powers, and as such is a target of the Order. Juan wants to take steps to protect him.

While the book is objectively great horror, what makes it most effective is in showing how, to a child, what a parent means as protection can look a lot like abuse and cruelty. It’s a powerful statement on intergenerational trauma, how love can turn into hate, and how totalitarian governments are only marginally less scary than the eldritch forces that hunger for us just beyond the veil of our reality.

Nonfiction

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

For people who want to heal

Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score serves as a weirdly good chaser to Our Share of Night. It is a handbook explaining the new science of how trauma and abuse can warp our minds and bodies, and the even newer science of how people can recover.

Van der Kolk is one of the nation’s leading experts in the psychiatry of trauma, and to make a very fascinating book extremely short, he explains how after emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and trauma, our bodies activate mechanisms that are designed to protect us, but which have side effects like depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

The therapies that appear to be having a major impact on recovery from trauma are diverse and wide ranging: they include yoga, taking courses in drama, psychedelic therapies, and much more. If you want to get better, this is the book to start with.

An Immense World by Ed Yong

For people who need more wonder in their lives

The book that most shifted my worldview was Ed Yong’s spectacular An Immense World. It is a study of how animals’ sensory experience of the world makes their worldview (or umwelt, as scientists call it) fundamentally different to our own.

Some of them can see colors we can’t, they can smell things we’d never imagine, they can hear better and with more complexity than we ever could, and some of the smallest — certain bats — can make sounds that are as loud as our jet engines (but which they mercifully make at frequencies beyond our hearing).

If your life needs more wonder and awe in it, this is your book.

Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown

For people who want to be the change

One of the most interesting “ideas” books I’ve read in recent years is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. At the core of the novel is a religion Butler invented called Earthseed, which pushes the compelling concept of God as change. From Parable of the Sower:

All that you touchYou Change.All that you ChangeChanges you.The only lasting truthis Change.Godis Change.

Emergent Strategy takes Earthseed — which, ultimately, is just one element in Butler’s novel — and expands on its ideas, providing the beginnings of a philosophy that could help us map and influence the chaos of our times. The author, adrienne maree brown, is a renowned activist and facilitator, heavily involved in left-wing causes, and a true believer in the “be the change you wish to see in the world” approach to living.

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

For people who are exhausted by modern life

Modern technology has reduced our attention spans to an almost incapacitating extent. Constantly being online is a major contributor to the anxiety, depression, and overall mental health epidemics that we are facing. It is keeping us from engaging more meaningfully with the people around us, it’s giving our kids ADHD, and it’s ruining our ability to engage with the world in meaningful ways.

Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus is an extremely compelling look into how this loss of our collective attention came to be, what feeds into it, and how we can begin to go about solving it. Hari’s got some slightly messianic tendencies — he hasn’t always behaved the most ethically — but this is a great book in spite of his personal flaws, and is vital to anyone who wants to fight the attention capture machine.

The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott

For people who want tips on escaping society and moving to the mountains

There is a mountainous region in Asia known as Zomia that is nearly the size of Europe. In this region, for centuries, the “hill people” that live there have managed to avoid becoming incorporated into the totalitarian states that sprung up in the valleys beneath them.

In The Art of Not Being Governed, renowned anthropologist James C. Scott investigates how the many tribes of “hill people” managed to keep the state at arms length for so long, and the results are absolutely fascinating.

We are living in the first time in human history where it’s more or less impossible to avoid living under some form of government, but Scott gives us tips on what freedom truly looks like, and how communities can learn to be resilient in the face of oppressive power.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

For people who want to heal the world

When ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer first went to learn about botany in school, her professor mocked her for asking questions about why certain flowers looked so beautiful together. That was not, her professor informed her, what science was about.

Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi tribe, grew up in the woods of upstate New York, and connected to plants not only through science, but through the stories her family would tell her about the earth. As she grew into an acclaimed ecologist, she realized that, contrary to what her professor had told her, things like myth and beauty are vital to understanding the science of complex systems. She now incorporates these stories into her teachings about botany, biology, and ecology.

For anyone looking for an alternative to the predominant capitalist worldview that the earth is here for our exploitation and destruction, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s astounding Braiding Sweetgrass should be book number one. It is so full of ideas that I could write 700 articles about her philosophy, and to be honest, I just might.

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

For psychonauts

Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind is a catalogue of the recent scientific progress made in the field of psychedelic therapy. The science is frankly astounding — the extent to which psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, ketamine, and other psychotropics can, when employed properly, help people struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and impending doom is frankly breathtaking, and it’s exciting to realize that we may be on the brink of a major psychological revolution.

The book has its flaws — as my friend Amy Grenier put it on her Goodreads review, “Do I want that much information about old white men tripping?” — so if you, like basically every other person on earth, can’t stand hearing another person describe their trips, then there are parts of the book worth skipping. But the science is cool.

Best Fiction

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

For people who spend too much time on the internet

Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This is the funniest book I’ve read in years. It also happens to be very good, which is not a guarantee for Very Funny books. It is a perfect read for anyone who has let vast chunks of their lives be absorbed by the internet.

I do not want to describe much of the plot, it is best experienced going in blind, but I will drop in a quote from the book that will give you a sense of whether you’d like the book or not. This quote is on the third page, so there are no spoilers here.

What had the beautiful thought been, the bright profundity she had roused herself to write down? She opened her notebook with the sense of anticipation she always felt on such occasions — perhaps this would finally be it, the one they would chisel on her gravestone. It read:

chuck e cheese can munch a hole in my you-know-what

A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

For people who need to go easier on themselves

I talk a lot about utopias both on this newsletter and on TikTok, and the main complaint that I hear is that utopias are “boring” because there’s no conflict in a perfect world.

These two short books — together, the Monk and Robot duology — are my answer to that. The books imagine a society where humanity decided to stop destroying the planet and instead sought sustainability and harmony. It’s also a book where the conflicts seem pretty low stakes — the main characters need a break, or are too hard on themselves.

If that sounds boring, it’s not: these are absolutely entrancing reads, you can finish each of them on a rainy weekend afternoon with a cup of tea. They have important things to say about what a sustainable future could look like, while also reading like a cozy hug from a good friend. It is proof that even low-conflict utopias are enthralling in the hands of a talented writer.

Ducks by Kate Beaton

For people trying to make art in the age of late capitalism

Kate Beaton made a name for herself as the artist behind the delightfully whimsical Hark! A Vagrant. But like most of us in the creative fields, she graduated with student loan debt that her prospective career in art was likely to ever pay down.

So Beaton decided to tough it out for two years making big money in Alberta’s oil sands. Ducks chronicles her times in Alberta, and the impact it had on her mental and physical health. It is sometimes a tough read — Beaton was sexually harassed more or less constantly and was assaulted twice — but it will ring familiar to any Millennial or Zoomer who has made the choice to sell a bit of themselves to the capitalists in order to earn at least some financial security.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

For people who want to burn it all down and start something new

Every radical I know has an impulse to burn everything to the goddamn ground and start anew. Some keep this impulse in check better than others, but the temptation is always there.

Tim Maughan’s excellent Infinite Detail looks at what would happen if we did burn it all to the ground (spoiler: it would be bad!). But he also examines how radicals and artists can start to build a better future right in the middle of a violent and oppressive present.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit betterstrangers.substack.com

The TikTok algorithm has me figured out, because sometime last year, it started showing me videos by Britt Hartley, an expert in secular spirituality. When I first heard her introduce herself this way, I was intrigued at the phrase, as “secular” and “spirituality” are not words that are normally put together. But Britt’s story is, I think, a fairly common one: much like me, while getting her masters (hers was in theology, mine was in human rights), Britt deconstructed a bit more of her worldview than she’d meant to, lost her faith, and fell into nihilism. Through her business, No Nonsense Spirituality, she now uses the tools she learned studying religion and faith to help the newly faithless work through nihilism and recover from religious trauma.

After stitching and tagging each other in videos on TikTok, Britt interviewed me last year for her podcast, Almost Awakened, and she has now graciously agreed to return the favor as we discuss recovering from nihilism on Better Strangers this month.

If you’re on TikTok, I highly recommend giving Britt a follow — her stuff is always thoughtful and enlightening. With me, she discussed the tools she gives people to help fight nihilism, why she thinks people get stuck in nihilistic loops, and some of her favorite movies for restoring meaning to life.

Matt Hershberger: First, could you describe what your work is and how you came to it?

Britt Hartley: I work now as an atheist spiritual director. This title is confusing and paradoxical I realize, but it speaks to my approach in finding and applying spiritual tools that improve our lives without requiring faith or belief in anything you find unbelievable. A lot of the work I do is in helping those who are on the path of religious deconstruction, but my specialty is helping those who keep deconstructing after they deconstruct their religion.

I have a Masters degree in theology with an emphasis in the Future of American Religion from a Christian Seminary, but along the way I lost my faith in religion and God. Not only that, I kept deconstructing until I was breaking down the concept of the self, free will, our ability to interact with ultimate reality, politics, gender, etc. until it felt like there was nothing left and I was in the void.

I use secular spirituality as one of the tools that helped me in that place. I also use it to help others because it contains so many resources for improving the quality of life, without requiring interaction with an organized religion or belief in the unbelievable. Secular spirituality, or science-driven spirituality, helped me to build community, find a contemplative practice, live by a moral code, raise children, create meaning and purpose, develop rituals for my individual and family life, experience states of awe and transcendence, and essentially rebuild my life after deconstruction. 

MH: Can you tell me more about the community-building part of secular spirituality? In my experience, working through nihilism is intensely lonely, and my attempts at finding community (through atheist or humanist societies) were false starts. It seemed to be a lot of people who were really angry at religion (in the Hitchens/Dawkins/New Atheist vein), and I wanted to move past that. I've found a limited community online by talking about my struggles with nihilism publicly, but that has the risk of exposing you to people on the internet who really don't like what you're saying. What do you suggest for people trying to find a community when they're in these dark places?

BH:: Community building is often the hardest part of nihilism, because communities require myths and nihilism is a myth destroyer. For me, I created a community of seekers who were post-religious like me simply by being more vulnerable and open and honest in my interactions. Something that you feel in nihilism is that you're the only one with existential dread thoughts and that is an illusion itself.

When I began to take a step into vulnerability, taking social risks and using my nihilism as a super power to allow me to take more risks than I had in the past, my community started with just one other couple who were asking the questions I like the ask. From that, as we kept talking, others found their way in until now there's a community in Boise of people who were all looking for a place where they could be more honest and talk about life.

There's nothing special about me, or Boise, to create that. All it took was leading with vulnerability. Once I started to, I now have more friends than I have time for because the reality is we're all struggling, just waiting for someone to take off the mask. 

MH: In your experience, what causes people to fall into nihilism?

BH: There are many paths to nihilism but the two that I see the most often in my work is nihilism after religion and nihilism due to being a deep thinker and deep feeler.

For the first group, if you are raised with an external sense of morality, meaning, purpose, and community, and you lose your foundation due to a change of faith, it can feel like you've lost everything. For many, it’s like being a newborn baby with no coping skills and no tools because everything about their life was built on certain truth claims around faith. It can often be especially hard for this group to shift into life at the level of experience and being, if they were outwardly focused on hustling for their work for God's approval.

The other group that I see are those who have the combination of being a deep thinker and deep feeler. Add in a touch of neuroticism and you've got the trifecta. What these means is that if you want to feel the deepest feelings of human suffering and think the deepest thoughts about the meaning of life, all roads lead to the void. Because eventually, if you ask enough questions, you realize that things that you thought were true weren't, you realize how biased we all are, how fallible we are as humans when it comes to truth, and the world becomes more mysterious than it seemed at first. There are many rabbit holes of the mind to get caught in, and thought loops that are difficult to get out of.

While there are many paths to nihilism, such as trauma, postmodernism, not being able to afford to live, etc. I find that if you're a deep feeler, deep thinker, and deconstructed from religion, nihilism is almost certainly a waystation stop on your journey.  

MH: How do you help people make it through these dark nights of the soul?

BH: I really focus on tools, especially tools in secular spirituality that help improve the nature of life itself. If life is just an absurd video game, then you can use the radical freedom from deconstruction to create the game you most want to play just for the joy of playing it. This is what all the philosophers who thought about this question end up saying. For Nietzsche it was the overman, for Camus it was Sisyphus choosing to push a rock up a hill, for Simone De Beauvoir it was an authentic life, for Sartre it was radical freedom, and for Viktor Frankl it was finding meaning even in the hardest of circumstances. But they all whisper the same message: can you improve the experience of living by building an authentic life that only you could live? A life so infused with projects and people you care about that it no longer matters that one day it ends? That's the life that I help people build.

Those tools include using psychedelics to reset the nervous system and remind you of how you played as a child, building community, finding a contemplative practice, doing inner child work, doing thought work to get your brain working for you rather than against you, rewriting your story, tapping into states of awe and transcendence, remembering how to play and take joy in experience and being, and improving intimacy in relationships.

With a few small shifts I've seen in my own life and in the life of others that nihilism or rock bottom can become the place you become honest about what a life worth living looks life for you, and it can give you the courage to create that life because all pretenses and ego die in that place of the void. 

MH: Are there any things you caution people against doing when they're in a dark place?

BH: I do caution against doing things with your body that statistically make life harder. This was hard advice to follow because in my nihilism I was spending zero time taking care of my body because I didn't give a shit about anything. But if you want to try to do things to improve the nature of your experience, your body has a role to play in that. Give your brain your best shot at creating a better life by, at the same time of these other tools, taking care of your body.

Eating foods that make a brain happier, going on walks, getting sunshine, not doomscrolling too long, etc. For me I found that there were certain things I was doing, like sugar consumption, that was making it harder for me to find joy in being-ness, or harder for me to get out of depressive thought loops. Your body is a machine that is part of this equation, not just ideas of the mind. Sometimes it is better to use the body to change the mind rather than use the mind to change how it feels in our bodies. 

MH: Are there specific books, movies, music or TV shows you recommend to the recovering nihilist?BH: My four favorite movies on this shift towards life are Everything Everywhere All At Once, Groundhog Day, Wit, and Les Miserables.

Editor’s note: light spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Groundhog Day, and Les Mis below. I broke them all up with trailer videos so you can skip past the sections if you haven’t seen them yet and intend to.

EEAAO represents nihilism with the everything bagel. And the shift that illustrates the beauty of life is when Evelyn puts a googly eye on her third eye, symbolizing her acceptance of the absurd, and she starts using the absurd to her advantage. For play and connection with her daughter. That shift saves her daughter’s life from being sucked into the void.

Groundhog Day is an incredibly underrated movie on the meaning of life. Bill Murray gets stuck in a time loop where life becomes meaningless and consequences no longer matter. At first, he replaces meaning with pleasure. He spends his days filling up on donuts and trying to have sex with beautiful women. But the pleasure train isn't enough, so he tries to kill himself in a myraid of ways. Only then, does he shift into life as experience. He gives the old homeless man one hot meal before he dies, and even though he dies every day, he keeps doing it because the man deserves one last hot meal. He learns how to play the piano just for the joy of it. He dances, ice skates, ice scupts, and lives a life of service to others. He falls in love in a way that is genuine, where he enjoys trying to throw cards into a hat with a woman rather than trying to sleep with her. This love and service shift brings him out of his time loop and he enters life again, excited for a new day with someone he loves. It’s a beautiful story.

Wit is not a well-known film but its especially poignant for those who get lost, like me, in their own heads and forget that life is in your body and in connection. It is with Emma Thomson and speaks to how at the end of the day, our titles and even education don't matter. What matters is human connection.

Lastly, I love the end of the musical Les Mis. It makes me cry every time. In it Valjean, who could have chosen resentment for the life that was stolen from him, shifts into a life of love for his adopted daughter and service for his town. At the end of his life as he dies, the biological mom thanks him for loving her child, and his voice joins the voices of all the dead, voices that cry out from the dust towards freedom and love and against tyranny. Those 4 movies can always snap me back into the meaning of life. 

In the words of Les Miserables, for those who are still in it: “even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”

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