Reid Walker’s recent New York Times essay, “I’m Native American. Land Acknowledgments Are Infuriating,” leaves us with an important and necessary discomfort.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/opinion/native-american-land-acknowledgment.html?smid=em-share

Land acknowledgments can become hollow rituals. They may name an injustice without requiring anyone to relinquish power, honor a treaty, restore land, repair harm, or enter a genuine relationship with the Indigenous peoples whose histories they invoke.

But the answer to an inadequate acknowledgment cannot be enforced silence.

We are being offered a false choice: either participate in ceremonial recognition without material repair or abandon acknowledgment and allow the history itself to disappear.

A mature democracy must refuse both.

A Necessary Acknowledgment of My Own Position

I write this as a white American whose life has been shaped, protected, and advantaged by institutions formed within the history I am attempting to examine.

I cannot simply “check my whiteness at the door” as though it were a coat I can remove before entering this conversation. Whiteness and privilege affect what I have been taught to see, what I have been permitted not to see, whose knowledge I instinctively trust, and whether I assume that my voice should lead.

The task is not to pretend that I can become innocent of that inheritance. The task is to bring it into conscious scrutiny.

I must watch closely for the “shadow of privilege” within my own desire to help.

The wish to help can easily become another form of control. It can reinforce the assumption that white people remain the central actors: the ones who define the injury, determine the remedy, organize the process, speak for those who were harmed, and congratulate themselves for their concern.

Even allyship can reenact colonization when it takes leadership away from the people it claims to support.

I therefore have an obligation to listen to and accept direction from Indigenous brothers and sisters, elders, communities, and sovereign Tribal Nations. This does not mean imagining that there is one Indigenous perspective or appointing a single person to speak for hundreds of distinct peoples. It means recognizing that those most affected by dispossession must have the authority to define what acknowledgment, repair, sovereignty, and right relationship require.

As much as I may study, listen, grieve, or attempt to understand, I will never know this history as an Indigenous person knows it through family, community, culture, land, memory, and lived consequence.

That limitation does not release me from responsibility.

It changes the form that responsibility must take.

My task is not to become the authority on Indigenous suffering. It is to become more accountable for how I listen, where I stand, what I support, when I speak, when I step back, and whether my actions contribute to Indigenous self-determination rather than reproducing white guardianship.

Allyship is difficult because it asks for more than sympathy. It asks those of us accustomed to occupying the center to surrender the assumption that we should remain there.

The Double Bind of Historical Memory

This is a public and political double bind.

When institutions say nothing about the Indigenous history of the land they occupy, dispossession disappears into the familiar mythology of an empty continent waiting to be discovered, settled, improved, and owned.

When institutions offer acknowledgments without meaningful action, history can become moral theater—a ritual of institutional innocence rather than an invitation to responsibility.

And when someone attempts to speak honestly about conquest, removal, broken treaties, forced assimilation, or cultural destruction, the telling itself may be condemned as divisive, ideological, or anti-American.

Under these conditions, one is wrong for remaining silent, wrong for speaking inadequately, and wrong for speaking too truthfully.

The way out of this bind is not silence.

It is accountable action.

When Acknowledgment Becomes Appropriation

The example Walker describes is especially disturbing. At the conclusion of a land acknowledgment at the Rockefeller family’s church in the Hudson Valley, a guide reportedly said:

“We’d like to think they are looking down on us, pleased with what we have done with the land.”

The statement reveals the danger of acknowledgment becoming appropriation.

The displaced are summoned from the dead to bless what replaced them.

Their imagined voices are used to reassure the descendants and beneficiaries of the social order created through their displacement. The acknowledgment does not merely fail to confront history. It invents Indigenous approval for the outcome of that history.

This is absolution without confession.

It is reconciliation without consent.

It is forgiveness without accountability.

The statement does not ask what the Munsee Lenape or the Weckquaesgeek might say. It tells us what the institution would “like to think” they would say.

That is not listening.

It is ventriloquism.

Walker’s broader argument is that institutional land acknowledgments can absorb the history they supposedly reveal. Dispossession is named, briefly mourned, and then incorporated into a reassuring story about the present.

Two Ways of Avoiding Responsibility

A hollow acknowledgment and an enforced silence may appear to be opposites, but ethically they can perform the same function.

One substitutes ceremony for responsibility.

The other substitutes erasure for truth.

The first says: We have spoken the words; therefore, we have done our part.

The second says: The words make us uncomfortable; therefore, they should no longer be spoken.

Neither position requires a nation to examine its continuing obligations.

Land acknowledgments should not be treated as sufficient. But neither should they be prohibited, mocked, or erased simply because they expose a history some would prefer not to confront.

The alternative to a bad acknowledgment is not no acknowledgment.

It is a more truthful acknowledgment joined to action.

Governance Includes the Stewardship of Memory

This is larger than a debate about statements made before conferences, public meetings, or museum tours.

It is a question of governance.

Who has the authority to determine which parts of American history may be remembered?

What happens when political leaders decide that public history must be sufficiently “uplifting”?

What happens when museums, parks, schools, and cultural institutions are pressured to present national greatness without equally examining the human cost through which the nation was formed?

The current administration has directed federal historical institutions toward narratives intended to inspire national pride and has expanded its review of how the Smithsonian presents American history. The policy permits acknowledgment of injustice, but it places that acknowledgment within an explicitly prescribed narrative of national greatness.

This is precisely why public memory cannot be treated as political decoration.

History does not become false because it is painful.

Truth does not become divisive merely because it disrupts innocence.

And patriotism does not require us to protect the nation from knowledge of what the nation has done.

A democracy must be able to hold achievement and atrocity, aspiration and betrayal, courage and cruelty within the same historical consciousness.

Anything less is not history.

It is mythology administered by the state.

Irreparable Does Not Mean Irresponsible

The United States enacted policies of removal, confinement, allotment, cultural suppression, family separation, religious coercion, and forced assimilation.

The Department of the Interior’s investigation of the federal Indian boarding-school system described the intentional targeting and removal of Native children for forced assimilation as traumatic and violent. The investigation documented hundreds of schools and identified burial sites associated with many of them.

Some of what was destroyed cannot be restored.

Lives cannot be returned. Childhoods cannot be recreated. Sacred places cannot always be recovered. Languages, traditions, family bonds, and ecological relationships may be damaged beyond complete repair.

These harms may be, in part, irreparable.

But irreparable must never be allowed to mean irresponsible.

When complete restoration is impossible, ethical responsibility does not disappear. It becomes more enduring.

The question is not whether the past can be undone.

It cannot.

The question is whether the United States will continue to benefit from the consequences of that history while refusing to tell the truth, honor its obligations, or repair what still can be repaired.

From Acknowledgment to the Four R’s

What is needed is a national commitment to Reckoning, Reconciliation, Reparations, and Right Relationship.

These commitments cannot be designed and imposed solely by non-Indigenous institutions. Their meaning, priorities, and implementation must be developed through sustained engagement with Indigenous peoples and sovereign Tribal Nations.

Otherwise, even the language of repair may become another exercise of colonial authority.

Reckoning

Reckoning begins with an honest public record.

It requires teaching the history of treaties made and broken, lands taken, communities removed, children separated, cultures suppressed, resources extracted, and promises left unfulfilled.

This history belongs in schools, museums, national parks, memorials, churches, universities, and government institutions.

Reckoning is not collective self-hatred.

It is collective moral adulthood.

Reconciliation

Reconciliation cannot be declared unilaterally by the party that caused the harm.

It requires sustained government-to-government engagement with Tribal Nations. It must be shaped with Indigenous communities, not merely constructed about them.

Tribal Nations are not simply racial or cultural interest groups. They possess inherent sovereignty and maintain a distinctive political and legal relationship with the United States. The federal government acknowledges that it has a legally enforceable responsibility to protect Tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources.

Reconciliation must therefore be more than interpersonal goodwill. It must include law, governance, sovereignty, and the fulfillment of existing obligations.

It must also involve a willingness among non-Indigenous people to follow rather than assume that we should lead.

Reparations

Reparations means material action.

It may include honoring treaty commitments, restoring appropriate lands and sacred sites, protecting water and natural resources, supporting language and cultural revitalization, correcting chronic underfunding, addressing environmental damage, and returning authority or access where justice requires it.

Reparations are not simply payments for historical suffering.

They are efforts to change present arrangements that continue to carry the consequences of historical injustice.

What constitutes meaningful repair cannot be determined solely by those offering it. Repair must be shaped by the priorities, sovereignty, consent, and leadership of the peoples to whom obligations are owed.

Right Relationship

Right relationship requires something deeper than transferring ownership from one party to another.

It asks us to reconsider the belief that land exists primarily as property, commodity, or resource.

Indigenous traditions are diverse and should never be romanticized into a single worldview. Yet many carry understandings of land rooted in reciprocity, kinship, stewardship, responsibility, and obligation to future generations.

Right relationship asks not only, Who owns this land?

It also asks:

Who belongs to this land?

What responsibilities arise from living here?

What must be protected rather than possessed?

What do we owe those who came before us and those who will come after us?

For white Americans, right relationship also requires examining our habitual relationship to authority. Are we willing to enter a process whose direction we do not control? Are we willing to listen without immediately interpreting, managing, correcting, or translating what we hear into terms more comfortable to us?

Relationship cannot be repaired while one party continues to reserve the exclusive right to define what repair means.

A National Day of Reckoning

The United States should consider establishing a National Day of Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship with Indigenous Peoples.

But one day cannot become another symbolic substitute for change.

Such a day should be part of a continuing national process. It could include the public reading and examination of treaties, testimony from boarding-school survivors and descendants, acknowledgment of specific federal and state policies, educational programming, Tribal-led ceremonies where invited, and public accounting of obligations that remain unmet.

Any such process must be developed under Indigenous leadership and in genuine partnership with sovereign Tribal Nations. It cannot become another occasion on which the federal government speaks about Indigenous peoples without transferring voice, authority, or decision-making power.

The purpose would not be to assign inherited personal guilt to every living American.

The purpose would be to recognize inherited responsibility.

We did not individually create every historical injustice. But we live within institutions, boundaries, property systems, legal arrangements, economic structures, and distributions of power shaped by what occurred before us.

We inherit both the nation’s achievements and its unfinished obligations.

What a Credible Land Acknowledgment Should Require

A land acknowledgment worthy of the name should do more than identify who lived in a place before the present institution arrived.

It should tell us who lives there now; which treaties or agreements govern the relationship; what obligations remain unmet; what relationship the institution maintains with the relevant Tribal Nations; and what specific action, resource, authority, access, or accountability will follow the words.

The answers to these questions should not be invented by the institution alone. They should emerge from relationships with the Indigenous peoples being acknowledged.

An acknowledgment should not ask Indigenous peoples to bless the present.

It should ask the institution to account for its own conduct.

Without action, acknowledgment risks becoming self-congratulation.

Without acknowledgment, injustice risks becoming invisible.

We must refuse both outcomes.

Truth Is Not an Attack on America

The United States does not need signs warning visitors that history is merely an interpretation whenever the facts become morally uncomfortable.

It needs the courage to tell the whole story.

Truthful history is not an attack upon the nation. It is a requirement of ethical governance.

A nation becomes trustworthy not by insisting upon its innocence, but by developing the capacity to face what it has done, honor what it has promised, repair what it still can, and transform the relationships that continue to reproduce harm.

For those of us who are white, this also means accepting that we cannot lead every process of repair merely because we have finally become willing to participate in it.

We must learn to listen without disappearing, to take responsibility without centering ourselves, to act without assuming control, and to follow without demanding recognition for doing so.

That is part of the difficult discipline of allyship.

Land acknowledgment should never be mistaken for the completion of that work.

But neither should it be silenced.

It should become the doorway through which we enter the far more difficult work of reckoning, reconciliation, reparations, and right relationship.

Hillman’s argument is not an endorsement of war. It is a warning against our innocence about it. If we only say “war is bad,” we may remain blind to the psychic seduction that makes war return again and again. War gives the wounded ego a story. It gives fear an enemy. It gives humiliation a target. It gives grief a weapon. It gives shame a battlefield.

This is why Hillman’s title matters: A Terrible Love of War. The phrase itself is almost unbearable. How can love and war belong in the same sentence? Yet perhaps this is precisely the point. Human beings do not only wage war because we must. We wage war because, under certain psychic and collective conditions, war can become intoxicating. It can organize chaos. It can simplify complexity. It can divide the world into the righteous and the condemned. It can make us feel alive when we are inwardly deadened, powerful when we are frightened, and certain when we are overwhelmed by ambiguity.

This is where I find myself reflecting on war not only as an outer historical event, but as an inner psychological pattern.

In my clinical work and teaching, I have often described four patterns as ego traps: the need to control, the need to win, the need to look good, and the need to be right. These are not evil in themselves. In ordinary human development, they may begin as attempts to feel safe, competent, respected, and coherent. But when we become over-attached to them, they harden into defensive structures. When challenged, they can quickly become blame, shame, punishment, retaliation, and attack.

The same pattern appears in war.

War is the inflated ego armed with a flag, a grievance, a wound, a weapon, and a story about why violence is necessary. It says: I must control the narrative. I must defeat the other. I must prove my innocence. I must prove my righteousness. I must not be humiliated. I must not appear weak. I must make the other carry what I cannot bear in myself.

This is the movement from wound to weapon.

At the personal level, we see this in intimate relationships, families, communities, and institutions. Someone feels injured, exposed, shamed, or powerless. Rather than metabolizing that vulnerability through grief, reflection, accountability, and repair, the psyche organizes itself defensively. The other becomes the problem. The other becomes the threat. The other becomes the carrier of everything I cannot face within myself.

At the collective level, nations can do the same thing.

A nation can become possessed by its wound. A people can become organized around humiliation, fear, exceptionalism, grievance, or revenge. The nation-state, like the wounded individual, can project its disowned shadow onto an “enemy” and then feel morally entitled to dominate, expel, punish, occupy, silence, or annihilate. The language changes. The scale changes. The weapons change. But the psychic pattern remains recognizable.

The knife becomes the sword.
The sword becomes the spear.
The spear becomes the musket.
The musket becomes the cannon.
The cannon becomes the rifle.
The rifle becomes the bomb.
The bomb becomes chemical fire.
The bomb becomes atomic light.

And still the ancient wound remains.

We call this winning. But is it?

Domination can seize territory. It can control a narrative. It can silence dissent. It can punish an enemy. It can force submission. But domination does not heal the wound. It does not restore the soul. It does not create peace. It only pushes the unresolved violence forward into another body, another family, another people, another generation.

Winning is not the same as healing.

This is one of the great illusions of war consciousness: the belief that if I defeat the other, I will be free of what haunts me. Captain Ahab gives us one of the great literary images of this possession. He does not simply hunt the whale; he is hunted by his own wound. Moby Dick becomes the screen upon which Ahab projects his injury, rage, and metaphysical grievance. He cannot grieve. He cannot surrender. He cannot turn toward the deeper meaning of his suffering. He can only pursue, accuse, and destroy.

His wound becomes his worldview.

This is what happens when trauma is not transformed. It becomes identity. It becomes ideology. It becomes entitlement. It becomes destiny. The one who has been injured may come to feel authorized to injure. The one who has been humiliated may seek restoration through humiliating another. The one who has suffered domination may seek safety through domination.

Victim becomes perpetrator.
Perpetrator becomes victim.
Attack becomes defense.
Defense becomes attack.

And the cycle continues.

The question, then, is not only how do we stop war in the outer world, although that question is urgent and unavoidable. The deeper question is: how do we interrupt the war-making structure of consciousness itself?

How do we think beyond the terrible love of war?

We call it Independence Day. We celebrate liberty, freedom, and the birth of a nation. And rightly so. Something extraordinary did happen here. A people challenged the authority of a king and declared that government derives its just power from the consent of the governed. The Declaration of Independence gave language to an ideal that still judges us: that all people are created equal, and that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not gifts from rulers, but rights grounded in human dignity.

But from a psychological perspective, the American Revolution was also something more intimate and more troubling.

It was not only a war of independence. It was also a civil conflict among British subjects. The Library of Congress notes that, “in many respects,” the Revolutionary War was a civil war, with an estimated 20–30 percent of the colonial population remaining loyal to the Crown. Families were divided. Communities were divided. Loyalties were divided. The people we call Founders — Washington, Franklin, Adams, Rush, Jefferson, and others — were not born as citizens of the United States. The United States did not yet exist. They were British subjects who came to believe that their relationship with the Crown had become irreconcilable.

That matters.

It means the United States was born not only from ideals, but from unresolved grievance. The Revolution grew out of a breakdown in relationship: between colonists and Parliament, between local self-government and imperial authority, between frontier desire and imperial restraint, between loyalty and rebellion, between fear and hope.

The Declaration itself is, in part, a grievance document. The National Archives describes its list of complaints against King George III as the “proof of the right to rebellion.” The grievances were political, economic, legal, military, and psychological. The colonists objected to taxation without representation, interference with colonial legislatures, royal governors, courts, standing armies, trade restrictions, and the sense that their appeals for repair had been ignored.

One of those grievances also involved land. After the French and Indian War, Britain attempted to limit colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains through the Royal Proclamation of 1763. For Indigenous peoples, this policy was one partial attempt to slow settler expansion. For many colonists, including land speculators and veterans, it felt like betrayal. George Washington himself had expected western lands as compensation for military service, and Mount Vernon notes that the proclamation blocked colonial settlement and fueled his struggle to claim those lands.

This is one of the great moral complications of the American founding.

The colonists sought liberty from Britain, but not all were seeking liberty for everyone. Enslaved Africans, Indigenous nations, women, and many poor men were not fully included in the promise. The Revolution opened a door, but it did not walk all the way through it. It declared a moral vision, then immediately revealed the nation’s inability to fully embody that vision.

So perhaps we need to distinguish between independence as separation and freedom as moral maturity.

Independence meant separation from Britain.

Freedom requires something deeper.

Freedom requires accountability. It requires self-restraint. It requires truth. It requires the capacity to live in relationship with others without domination, revenge, or endless grievance. Liberty without accountability becomes entitlement. Independence without interdependence becomes isolation. Rights without responsibility become grievance. Power without humility becomes domination.

This is where the psychological lens becomes useful.

When grievances are not heard, they do not disappear. They harden. They become identity. They become inherited stories. They become suspicion, resentment, and eventually violence. A grievance that cannot be spoken becomes a wound. A wound that cannot be tended becomes a weapon.

The American Revolution did not resolve the contradiction at the heart of the new nation. It declared equality while preserving slavery. It spoke of liberty while expanding into Indigenous homelands. It resisted imperial domination while recreating other hierarchies of domination. Less than a century later, those unresolved contradictions erupted into the Civil War.

And today, as we approach 250 years as a nation, many people feel another fracture in the American psyche.

Some call it polarization. Some call it culture war. Some fear civil war. Some feel it has already begun, though the weapons are no longer only muskets, cannons, rifles, or armies in the field. Today the weapons are also words, screens, humiliation, propaganda, conspiracy, social isolation, moral contempt, and the daily activation of fear.

Underneath the language is something older: unresolved grievance, fear, humiliation, displacement, moral injury, and the collapse of trusted channels for repair.

This does not mean the American experiment has failed.

It means the American experiment remains unfinished.

My mother, a teacher and parent to 2 sons, understood something about this at the level of children. She knew that playing war was easy. Children can pick up sticks, throw stones, shout words, form sides, and pretend to destroy an enemy. But playing peace is harder. Playing peace requires imagination. It requires rules. It requires listening. It requires repair. It requires shared agreements, mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity.

That may be one of the simplest and deepest civic lessons we can recover:

War is easy to imitate. Peace must be learned.

John F. Kennedy understood this in his 1963 American University speech. He did not speak of peace as fantasy. He spoke of peace as practical necessity — “not merely peace for Americans” and “not merely peace in our time,” but a more durable peace grounded in human survival, restraint, and moral imagination.

That is where we are again.

Peaceful coexistence cannot be treated as sentimental language. It has to become a national discipline. It has to become a teleology — a direction, a purpose, an end toward which we consciously move. Not because conflict will disappear, but because conflict can be held differently. Conflict can become dialogue instead of dehumanization. Grievance can become truth-telling instead of vengeance. Fear can become humility instead of aggression.

To begin, we may have to acknowledge fear itself.

Fear of being replaced.
Fear of being erased.
Fear of losing status.
Fear of government.
Fear of chaos.
Fear of the other.
Fear of truth.
Fear of history.
Fear that if someone else gains dignity, I will lose mine.

A mature democracy must create places where fear can be spoken without being exploited. It must create structures where grievance can be heard without becoming violence. It must teach citizens not merely how to win arguments, but how to remain in relationship when arguments cannot be easily resolved.

Recently, I have been paying attention to Brandon Peele’s work, especially Bison Medicine and the National Pilgrimage and Assembly. Brandon is an author, purpose guide, and ManKind Project brother, and his recent conversation with MKP USA explores belonging, responsibility, freedom, mature adulthood, good mind, rites of passage, and what kind of people a healthy democracy requires.

In my reading of Bison Medicine, his work resonates deeply with this moment. Peele frames America’s crisis not as merely political, technological, or material, but as moral, cultural, spiritual, and psychological. He names a three-part national purpose: that all are created equal, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be secured, and that E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — must become a lived spiritual practice, not just a motto.

That language matters.

It moves the conversation away from shallow patriotism and toward moral repair. It asks whether America can become mature enough to embody the ideals it has so often betrayed.

Whether one agrees with every word, method, or metaphor, the impulse matters.

We need spaces that are not merely partisan.
We need spaces that are not merely performative.
We need spaces where Americans can ask: What do we owe each other? What do we owe future generations? What values must guide the next 250 years?

That question is very close to my own lifelong inquiry.

How do we move from unresolved grievance to repair?
How do we move from independence to interdependence?
How do we move from liberty as personal entitlement to liberty as relational responsibility?
How do we move from playing war to practicing peace?

This is not weakness.

Peace is not passivity. Peace is not avoidance. Peace is not silence in the face of injustice. Peace requires courage. It requires boundaries. It requires truth-telling. It requires accountability. It requires the willingness to confront harm without becoming possessed by hatred.

Perhaps this is the work of America’s next 250 years.

The first 250 years gave us a nation born from rebellion, grievance, vision, contradiction, courage, conquest, slavery, emancipation, expansion, invention, violence, sacrifice, and hope. The next 250 years will ask whether we can become morally mature enough to live the promise we inherited but have not yet fulfilled.

The task is not to abandon liberty.

The task is to mature liberty into relational ethics.

The American Revolution gave birth to a nation. The Civil War forced the nation to confront the lie it had carried from birth. Our time may be asking whether we can confront the remaining grievances without requiring another catastrophe to awaken us.

The Next 250 Years as a Seven-Generation Covenant

This is where the next 250 years of America may be understood through the Indigenous wisdom of the Haudenosaunee and the principle often called the Seventh Generation.

I offer this with humility. This teaching does not belong to me. It is not a slogan to borrow lightly or a decorative metaphor for American renewal. It comes from a people whose wisdom long predates the United States, and whose lands, governance, and moral imagination have much to teach a nation still struggling to understand freedom, peace, and responsibility.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy describes the Seventh Generation as a core value that considers those “not yet born” who will inherit the world. It is a way of thinking beyond the immediate self, beyond the present generation, and beyond short-term gain. It asks whether our decisions today will protect the lives, dignity, and wellbeing of those who will come after us.

That is a profound corrective to the American confusion about liberty.

Liberty cannot mean, “I get to do whatever I want, whenever I want, without consequence.” That is not freedom. That is immaturity. Freedom without responsibility becomes entitlement. Freedom without memory becomes repetition. Freedom without reciprocity becomes domination.

The Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace offers another imagination. The Onondaga Nation describes the Peacemaker’s message as a plan of peace, teaching that one nation standing alone can be broken like a single arrow, but nations bound together with one heart, one mind, and one law become strong. The Onondaga Nation also describes Haudenosaunee chiefs as advocates of peace who hold the future welfare of the people in their hands.

This is not merely political structure. It is psychological and ethical maturity.

It asks leaders to think beyond ego.
It asks communities to think beyond grievance.
It asks citizens to think beyond winning.
It asks a people to remember the unborn.

Seen in this light, America’s 250th anniversary is not only a birthday. It is a council fire. It is a question placed before us:

What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

The first 250 years of the United States were marked by brilliance and brutality, courage and contradiction, liberty and conquest, democracy and exclusion, invention and violence, emancipation and backlash. We inherited a promise we have not yet fulfilled.

The next 250 years ask something different of us.

They ask whether we can mature from independence into interdependence.
They ask whether we can transform grievance into truth-telling.
They ask whether we can transform fear into humility.
They ask whether we can transform liberty into relational ethics.
They ask whether we can become responsible to children whose faces are not yet visible.

That is why Brandon Peele’s Bison Medicine and the National Pilgrimage feel timely. Peele’s work frames America’s crisis as moral, cultural, spiritual, and psychological, not merely political. His National Pilgrimage and Assembly invite Americans to ask what values should guide us and what kind of country we want to leave to future generations. The Assembly is scheduled online July 6–7, 2026, with storytellers carrying the emerging covenant to Chicago on July 9, the anniversary of the Fourteenth Amendment.

That question — what kind of country do we want to leave? — is a seven-generation question.

The work now is beyond celebrating independence, it is to learn how to play peace.

And playing peace is hard work.

It requires shared vision.
It requires mutual respect.
It requires cooperation.
It requires agreements.
It requires reciprocity.
It requires sacrifice.
It requires a willingness to listen before the fists form, before the stones fly, before the words become weapons, before fear becomes violence.

If America is to become not merely great, but good, perhaps this is where we begin.

Not with another declaration against an enemy.

But with a covenant among neighbors.

Not merely independence from.

But responsibility to.

Not merely liberty for me.

But dignity for all of us.

Not merely a nation celebrating its first 250 years.

But a people becoming accountable to the next seven generations.

For more Information on Brandon Peele, Bison Medicine, and the National Assembly

Brandon Peele. “Bison Medicine: About the Book.”
https://www.bisonmedicine.com/about-the-book.html

National Pilgrimage. “National Assembly.”
https://www.nationalpilgrimage.us/national-assembly.html

National Pilgrimage. “Home.” https://www.nationalpilgrimage.us/

ManKind Project USA. “Bison Medicine and the National Pilgrimage Back to Belonging with Brandon Peele.”
https://mkpusa.org/253-bisonmedicine/

It is where anxiety, depression, repression, oppression, sadness, and sorrow rise from beneath the surface and ask to be faced. It is a dark night in the soul. Not necessarily the place where we are lost, but the place where we no longer know where we are. Familiar rooms feel unfamiliar. The old maps no longer orient us. Something in us feels awkward, displaced, not quite right in the places where we once knew how to belong.

And yet this darkness is not only despair.

It is also initiation.

If we open to the journey, we begin to learn to stop fleeing from pain and sorrow. We gather in community. We tell the truth about loss. We give sorrow words. Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak / Whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.”

That is grief work.

Not fixing sorrow.
Not bypassing sorrow.
Not pretending everything is fine.
But giving sorrow a place to speak before it breaks the heart from within.

The Long Dark is a place of mud, muck, and mire. It is the wet ground of becoming. It is where we are stripped of our illusions of control and asked to meet life as it is. But somewhere in that mud there is also honey. Somewhere in the muck there is sweetness. Somewhere in the mire there is beauty, joy, and the simple astonishment of being alive.

There are moments in the Long Dark when all we can do is stop, look, listen, and feel. To place a hand on the heart, breathe, and remember:

Ah, I am alive.

And because I am alive, I refuse to quit.

When I was sixteen years old, in 1972, I attended an Outward Bound program in Minnesota. It was designed to build resilience. The motto was: To serve, to strive, and not to yield.

At sixteen, I understood yielding as giving up. Quitting. Abandoning oneself. It meant surrendering the will to live.

The wilderness became my teacher.

Each day brought a new challenge. There were lakes, canoes, packs, paddles, food, clothing, gear, weather, hunger, exhaustion, and the unspoken question: What will you do when you reach the edge of yourself?

I remember PoohBah Lake.

And I remember the PoohBah Portage.

The day was long. It began with an uphill trek, followed by swamp, muck, mire, sweat, heat, and sun. We carried heavy packs, canoes, paddles, food, clothing, gear, and ourselves. We pulled, pushed, yanked, lifted, shoved, and slogged our way through.

We started at eight in the morning and did not finish until late in the afternoon.

We screamed. We yelled. We swore. We cried. We quit, and then we kept going. We became angry, frustrated, exhausted, and determined. At some point, we realized there were no real choices. To quit meant death. There was no one coming to rescue us. No one could do it for us. Each of us had to carry the weight and responsibility of ourselves and our own stuff.

Together, each of us was alone.

That may sound contradictory, but it was true. We were together, yet each of us had to meet our own limit. Helping another person meant giving energy that we desperately needed for ourselves. Yet abandoning one another was not an option either. We were bound together by necessity, but each of us had to find the will to keep moving from within.

That was the PoohBah Portage.

Three other students had already quit the twenty-eight-day adventure a week earlier. I could not quit. Part of me loved it. Not because it was easy, and not because I was unafraid, but because some deeper part of me recognized that this was an initiation.

Later, I learned that Outward Bound grew out of a wartime concern during World War II. Young sailors whose ships had been sunk were sometimes unable to bear the agony of waiting, the terror of helplessness, and the loss of control. Older sailors, who had lived longer, suffered longer, and perhaps knew more about endurance, were more likely to stay with the boats and survive.

I think I understand that now.

The point of Outward Bound was all contained in that one day. It was not simply to become physically stronger. It was to encounter the place inside oneself that must be found before despair takes over. It was to learn how to survive harsh and difficult circumstances without giving up on one’s life.

That is what I carried away from PoohBah.

I learned that I have to take care of myself. I learned that I can give others what I can give, but I cannot abandon my own life force. I learned that I may scream, swear, cry, rage, and suffer, but I do not quit. I do not give up.

This feels profoundly important now, as we face the Long Dark.

The Long Dark is not only a personal dark night of the soul. It is a collective wilderness portage. We are in the middle of something painful, uncertain, and anxiety-producing. The culture around us may try to continue business as usual, but something in us knows that things are not usual.

We are in the middle of the portage.

We are in the middle of the initiation.

Civilizational collapse, systemic collapse, ecological grief, political fragmentation, and cultural disintegration may turn into whatever comes next. I do not know what that will be. None of us knows. I may not make it. I am seventy years old. Death is inevitable for me, as it is for all of us. Whether humankind survives in any recognizable form, the jury is still out.

But the work remains.

The Long Dark asks us not to yield to despair. It asks us not to give in to the dark side of the dark: numbness, cynicism, cruelty, hatred, dissociation, nihilism, or collapse of the heart. It asks us to keep moving, not blindly, not frantically, but faithfully.

One step.
One breath.
One honest act.
One necessary kindness.
One burden carried.
One truth spoken.
One day completed.

Pema Chödrön writes about becoming comfortable with uncertainty. That does not mean we enjoy uncertainty. It means we stop demanding guarantees before we agree to live. It means we learn to stay present inside groundlessness. We learn to feel fear without letting fear become our god.

That is acceptance.

Acceptance does not mean giving up. Acceptance means telling the truth. It means yielding denial but not yielding the soul. It means surrendering the fantasy that we are in control while refusing to surrender our capacity to love.

At the end of that day on the PoohBah Portage, we celebrated.

We had made it.

We had not given up. We had pushed, shoved, swore, cried, and suffered our way through, but we had made it. There was something holy in that survival. Something ecstatic. Something that felt like accomplishment, but also more than accomplishment. It was the first time I remember knowing, in my body, that I could get through something terribly hard.

That knowledge has never left me. In fact, as James Hollis describes in Swamplands of the Soul, this would not be my last journey through the swamplands of my soul.

The Long Dark is like that. It is being in a wilderness portage where we are not exactly lost, but we do not know where we are. The old maps are gone. The trail is mud. The sun is hot. The canoe is heavy. The pack cuts into the shoulders. We are tired, frightened, and uncertain.

Yet the only way through is through.

This is not heroic fantasy.

This is grief work.

Grief teaches us to stop fleeing the pain. Acceptance teaches us to stop arguing with reality. Resilience teaches us to keep moving without abandoning the heart. Community teaches us that while each of us must carry our own weight, none of us should have to suffer unseen.

The Long Dark is the portage of the soul.

It is the place where we are asked to serve, to strive, and not to yield — not to yield to despair, not to yield to hatred, not to yield to numbness, not to yield to the temptation to abandon ourselves or one another.

We may not know what comes next.

But we can keep moving.

We can give sorrow words.

We can carry what is ours to carry.

We can rest when we must.

We can help when we can.

We can receive help when it is offered.

We can remember:

Ah, I am alive.

And while I am alive, I refuse to quit.

For more information check out:

Resilience and Acceptance in the Face of Collapse

As I listened to part of her story, I found myself reflecting not only on her journey, but on our shared humanity.

Her book, More Than a Crime: One Survivor’s Mission of Hope in the Shadow of Domestic Violence, is at one level a memoir. It is the story of one woman’s survival through abuse, betrayal, fear, and loss.

But it is also much more than that.

It is a testimony.

It is a witness.

It is a light directed toward a shadow that has followed humanity for generations.

Domestic violence is often hidden in silence, shame, secrecy, and denial. It thrives in darkness. It depends upon the willingness of families, communities, and institutions to look away.

Survivors know this reality intimately.

They know what it means to be unseen.

They know what it means to question their own perceptions.

They know what it means to lose trust in themselves and in others.

And yet, somehow, many find the strength to continue.

My friend chose the thistle as a symbol throughout her story.

I found myself contemplating that image long after the evening ended.

Most people see a thistle as something undesirable—a weed, prickly and difficult. Yet the thistle survives harsh environments. It grows where other plants struggle. It protects itself. It roots deeply. Despite its defenses, it flowers.

The thistle became, for me, a symbol not only of survival but of transformation.

A survivor is often misunderstood in much the same way.

People see the defenses but not the wounds.

They see the caution but not the betrayals that created it.

They see the resilience but not the suffering required to build it.

The thistle teaches us that what appears hardened on the outside may conceal extraordinary beauty and life.

As I listened to her speak, I could not help but recognize parallels between her journey and my own.

Not because our stories are identical.

They are not.

But because suffering leaves recognizable footprints.

Pain.

Loss.

Shame.

Abandonment.

Betrayal.

The struggle to find one’s voice.

The struggle to find one’s place.

The struggle to determine whether life’s wounds will become prisons or pathways.

These are universal human questions.

This is why her book matters.

It is not simply about domestic violence.

It is about what happens when a human being refuses to collapse.

It is about the movement from survivor to thriver.

It is about reclaiming agency.

It is about discovering that one’s story can become medicine for others.

In my own work I often explore what I call Unividuation—the movement beyond healing oneself toward becoming a steward of healing in the wider world.

That is what I witnessed last evening.

I witnessed a woman transforming suffering into service.

A private wound becoming a public gift.

A personal story becoming a lantern for others still navigating darkness.

Domestic violence is not only a legal problem.

It is not only a social problem.

It is not only a psychological problem.

It is also a spiritual problem.

It emerges wherever domination replaces relationship, where power replaces reciprocity, where control replaces love.

Many traditions have given names to this force.

Jung called it the shadow.

Some Indigenous traditions describe it as Wetiko.

Others simply call it evil.

Whatever name we use, its effects are unmistakable: the dehumanization of another person for the gratification, comfort, power, or relief of oneself.

The antidote is equally ancient.

Truth.

Accountability.

Compassion.

Dignity.

Relationship.

Love.

This book stands firmly on the side of those values.

It reminds us that survival is possible.

Healing is possible.

Finding one’s voice is possible.

Most importantly, it reminds us that hope is possible.

As I left the gathering, one image remained with me.

Not the shadow.

Not the violence.

Not even the suffering.

What remained was the thistle.

Rooted.

Resilient.

Flowering despite everything.

Thistle Rising.

May her story encourage others to rise as well.

For more information or to order the book visit: https://ripples.media/books/more-than-a-crime/

Recently, I found myself wondering whether the hinge pin holding together both capitalism and liberal democracy is not economics, politics, or technology.

Perhaps it is relational ethics.

We spend enormous amounts of time debating systems. We argue about capitalism versus socialism, liberalism versus conservatism, regulation versus free markets. Yet beneath all these debates lies a more fundamental question:

How do human beings choose to live together?

Neither capitalism nor democracy can answer that question by themselves.

Capitalism is a system of exchange. Democracy is a system of governance. Both are mechanisms. Neither provides a moral compass.

Without an ethical foundation, capitalism can drift toward extraction, concentration of wealth, and monopoly. Democracy can drift toward polarization, manipulation, and the concentration of power. In both cases, the system itself remains intact while the spirit that once animated it slowly erodes.

The founders of the American experiment understood something that we often forget. Institutions alone are not enough. A free society requires citizens capable of self-governance. It requires virtues.

Truthfulness.

Accountability.

Reciprocity.

Service.

Stewardship.

Respect for the dignity of others.

These are not merely personal virtues. They are civic virtues.

They are relational virtues.

Without them, markets become predatory and politics becomes tribal.

With them, both become instruments of the common good.

From Monopoly to Polypoly

The language of economics often focuses on monopoly as the enemy of competition. But monopoly may represent something even deeper than an economic failure.

It is a relational failure.

Monopoly concentrates voice, influence, wealth, and power into fewer and fewer hands. It weakens reciprocity. It diminishes participation. It narrows the diversity of perspectives that healthy systems require.

What if the alternative is not simply competition but what we might call polypoly—a living ecology of many participants contributing to a shared whole?

In nature, healthy ecosystems are rarely dominated by a single species. Diversity creates resilience. Multiple pathways create adaptability. Countless relationships generate vitality.

A forest thrives not because one tree becomes dominant, but because countless organisms participate in an intricate web of exchange.

The same may be true of human societies.

Healthy democracies depend upon many voices.

Healthy economies depend upon many contributors.

Healthy communities depend upon many relationships.

Perhaps the future belongs not to monopoly, but to polypoly.

Not to domination, but to participation.

The Ethical Turn

For the past few years, I have been exploring an idea I call Unividuation—the movement beyond the isolated self toward a deeper awareness of our participation in larger systems of relationship.

Individuation teaches us to become ourselves.

Unividuation asks what happens next.

What happens when we discover that our lives are inseparable from the communities, ecosystems, ancestors, and future generations that sustain us?

The question shifts.

No longer:

“What can I get?”

But:

“How do I participate?”

No longer:

“How do I win?”

But:

“How do we flourish?”

This is not an argument against individuality. It is an invitation to place individuality in relationship with something larger.

Freedom matters.

But freedom without responsibility becomes entitlement.

Rights matter.

But rights without reciprocity become demands.

Prosperity matters.

But prosperity without stewardship becomes extraction.

The challenge before us may not be primarily economic or political.

It may be developmental.

We are being asked to mature.

Virtue, Contradiction, and the American Experiment

The idea that freedom requires virtue is not new.

Many of the founders of the American republic understood that self-government could not survive without citizens capable of governing themselves. They believed that liberty depended upon character, responsibility, and participation in civic life.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

He also understood that a nation is more than a collection of individuals pursuing private interests. It is a moral community whose fate depends upon the actions and character of its members.

Yet Jefferson’s life also reveals one of the deepest contradictions in American history.

While articulating principles of liberty and human dignity, he lived within and benefited from the institution of slavery. He recognized the contradiction, writing:

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

The American experiment has always carried this tension. Its highest ideals pointed toward liberty, equality, and self-governance, while its realities often fell short of those aspirations.

Rather than dismissing the founders for their contradictions, or idealizing them beyond criticism, perhaps we can learn from both their wisdom and their limitations.

They understood that democracy requires virtue.

Our task may be to expand that vision.

The story of American democracy can be understood as a gradual widening of the moral circle—from liberty for some, to liberty for all; from rights held by the few, to rights recognized more broadly; from individual freedom alone, toward a deeper understanding of mutual responsibility.

Today, as we confront political polarization, economic inequality, ecological degradation, and widespread social distrust, the question remains remarkably similar to the one faced at the nation’s founding:

What kind of people must we become if freedom is to endure?

The answer may not lie in new ideologies or stronger institutions alone.

It may lie in recovering and deepening the virtues that make self-government possible: truthfulness, accountability, reciprocity, service, stewardship, and respect for the dignity of every person.

In this sense, democracy itself is not merely a political system.

It is a relational practice.

And perhaps the next chapter of the American experiment requires not only individuated citizens capable of freedom, but what I have come to call Unividuated citizens—people who recognize that freedom and responsibility, individuality and community, rights and obligations, are inseparable parts of a larger whole.

The Common Good as a Living Relationship

The common good is often spoken of as an abstract ideal.

I am increasingly convinced that it is something much simpler.

The common good is what emerges when enough people commit themselves to relationships grounded in dignity, respect, accountability, service, and care.

It is not a policy.

It is not a slogan.

It is a practice.

A democracy is only as healthy as the relationships among its citizens.

An economy is only as healthy as the relationships among its participants.

A culture is only as healthy as the relationships it nurtures and protects.

Perhaps the future of capitalism and liberal democracy depends less on finding new systems and more on recovering ancient wisdom.

The wisdom that we belong to one another.

The wisdom that freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

The wisdom that the measure of a society is not merely what it produces, but how it treats its people.

And perhaps the next stage of our collective development begins when we recognize that the deepest form of wealth is not money, power, or status.

It is relationship.

Because in the end, every economy, every democracy, and every civilization rests upon the same foundation:

How well we learn to live together.

“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
— Bruce Springsteen

There are moments in the life of a nation when something deeper than politics begins to break open.

Not an election.
Not a party.
Not a news cycle.

Something in the soul.

I have spent more than four decades working with trauma, addiction, grief, violence, and healing. Over the years, I learned something simple but difficult:

Human beings cannot heal what they refuse to face.

The same may be true for nations.

America carries extraordinary beauty:
the dream of liberty,
the belief in human dignity,
the courage to challenge kings,
the hope that ordinary people could govern themselves.

Yet alongside that dream lives another reality:
slavery,
racial violence,
broken treaties,
the destruction and displacement of Indigenous peoples,
economic systems that often benefited the powerful over the vulnerable,
and generations of unresolved grief passed silently from one era to the next.

We inherited both.

And somewhere along the way, many Americans were taught that acknowledging these contradictions somehow weakens the country.

I believe the opposite.

Truth is not what destroys a democracy.
The inability to face truth does.

Throughout American history, truth-tellers have often been mocked, attacked, silenced, or dismissed:
abolitionists,
civil rights leaders,
journalists,
historians,
comedians,
artists,
spiritual leaders,
and ordinary citizens willing to say,
“This is not who we are supposed to be.”

Today, voices like Heather Cox Richardson and Stephen Colbert continue a long American tradition:
speaking truth to power with a mixture of courage, grief, scholarship, humor, and moral concern.

Not because America is beyond saving,
but because it is worth saving.

One of the deepest contradictions in American history lies in what became known as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a series of 15th-century Christian legal and theological claims used by European powers to justify conquest and colonization.

Think about that contradiction for a moment.

A faith centered on compassion and human dignity became intertwined with domination, land seizure, and the dehumanization of entire peoples.

That moral contradiction did not disappear.
It entered the bloodstream of history.

And unresolved contradictions do not vanish.
They become wounds.

As a psychotherapist, I spent years working with individuals trapped in addiction, narcissism, violence, and trauma. Certain patterns appeared again and again:
denial,
minimization,
blame-shifting,
attacking critics,
rewriting reality,
and silencing those who spoke uncomfortable truths.

Sometimes I wonder if nations can fall into similar patterns.

When truth becomes threatening,
people who tell the truth often become the enemy.

But democracy cannot survive without shared reality.

A free society depends upon the ability to disagree honestly while remaining committed to truth, dignity, accountability, and the common good.

What worries many Americans right now is not simply political disagreement.
It is the growing sense that truth itself has become negotiable.

And when truth collapses,
trust collapses soon after.

Yet I still believe there is another path.

The United States has much to learn — and much to thank — from the Indigenous nations who practiced forms of participatory governance and confederated democracy long before the Constitution was written. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, guided by the Great Law of Peace, offered a vision of balance, deliberation, distributed power, and responsibility to future generations.

“No kings” was not merely a slogan.
It was a moral principle.

Power must be accountable.
Freedom must be reciprocal.
Liberty without responsibility becomes domination.

That wisdom matters now more than ever.

Because America is not simply facing a political crisis.

We are facing a crisis of relationship:
relationship to truth,
relationship to history,
relationship to one another,
relationship to the Earth,
and relationship to the moral agreements that hold a democracy together.

I believe we are living inside what I would call a national wake.

A wake is what follows behind a great moving force.
It is also the gathering held after a death.
And sometimes, a wake is an awakening.

Perhaps America is entering all three at once.

Before we can move forward, we may need to grieve honestly:
the lives lost,
the injustices denied,
the promises broken,
the histories erased,
and the ways fear, power, greed, and domination have wounded both victims and perpetrators alike.

Grief is not weakness.

Grief is what allows truth to become human again.

Without grief, societies harden into ideology.
With grief, compassion becomes possible.

This is not about hating America.
It is about loving it enough to tell the truth.

Not to destroy the dream,
but to mature it.

Not to erase the past,
but to learn from it.

Not to shame one another,
but to recover the possibility of integrity.

The future of democracy may depend less on who wins the next argument and more on whether we can reclaim the courage to live inside shared truth again.

If we can,
there may still be hope for peaceful coexistence.

And perhaps that is the unfinished American promise:
not perfection,
but the willingness to keep becoming more fully human together.

PS - If you think this has value, please pass it forward.

Thank you for your interest and attention.

“Democracy itself is an act of service.”

I was fourteen years old when four students were killed and nine wounded at Kent State on May 4, 1970. The Ohio National Guard fired for thirteen seconds. Sixty-seven rounds. Four dead. Nine wounded. A nation watching itself in the mirror.

Before anything else, I want to acknowledge the students who were killed, those who were wounded, and all who lived through that terrible day carrying memories, grief, fear, anger, confusion, and trauma into the rest of their lives. The wake of Kent State did not end in thirteen seconds. It entered families, friendships, communities, and the soul of the nation itself.

And I also acknowledge the young National Guardsmen who fired those weapons. Human beings can become trapped inside fear, obedience, ideology, confusion, group psychology, authority, and historical forces larger than themselves. There is often a very thin and tragic line between perpetrator and victim. Some carried those moments for the rest of their lives as well.

This does not erase accountability. But it reminds us that violence wounds the human soul on all sides.

I remember the horror. I remember the debate. I remember not understanding how the country that taught me honesty, democracy, liberty, and freedom of expression could answer protest with bullets.

What I believed then, I still believe now: freedom and democracy are not merely political arrangements. They are moral agreements. They require truth, justice, human dignity, accountability, and care for all people—not only Americans, but all people.

I know history is complex. No political system, ideology, party, nation, or generation is without shadow. I have lived long enough to understand that human beings are capable of both extraordinary compassion and extraordinary cruelty. Yet some truths still feel morally clear.

America is not made great by domination, greed, cruelty, or the worship of wealth. Financial accumulation has never been a virtue. Democracy cannot survive a hoarding disorder of money, power, and materialism.

Capitalism works best when wealth circulates in service of the common good, not when it is guarded as proof of superiority or divine favor.

The spiritual crisis is equally clear. A Christianity stripped of compassion, humility, mercy, and love of neighbor has lost its path. When care for the poor, the stranger, the vulnerable, and the wounded is replaced by grievance, exclusion, and greed, the soul of the nation is in danger.

For me, the lesson of Kent State was never only about war. It was about whether a nation can remain faithful to its deepest promises: life, liberty, dignity, justice, and the pursuit of happiness.

And perhaps what I understand more clearly now, as an elder, is that democracy itself is an act of service.

Voting is service.

Protecting the vulnerable is service.

Listening is service.

Telling the truth is service.

Caring for elders, children, veterans, neighbors, the sick, and the grieving is service.

Service is reciprocity made visible.

At some point in every human life, we will all need care. We will need someone to help us stand, feed us, comfort us, defend us, teach us, heal us, or simply remain beside us in difficult times.

If we expect care for ourselves, yet never learn how to care for others, democracy slowly collapses into entitlement, isolation, resentment, and fear.

Peaceful coexistence depends upon reciprocity.

Service must mean more than military service alone. We should honor those who serve in every part of civic life: teachers, bus drivers, sanitation workers, nurses, social workers, laborers, first responders, caregivers, and those entrusted with governance itself.

Gratitude for service reminds us that none of us survive alone.

That is how America moves from merely “great” to something far more difficult and beautiful: a society grounded in dignity, reciprocity, accountability, compassion, and shared responsibility for one another and for the Earth itself.

Looking back now at the years between 1963 and 1970—the assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the protests, the fear, the hope, and the contradictions—what an education it was for a young American mind.

Those years taught me that democracy is not guaranteed, morality is not automatic, and freedom survives only when ordinary people are willing to protect the dignity and humanity of one another.

Resist. Protest. Vote. Serve.

I recently attended a talk by Robin Wall Kimmerer, followed by a guided visit to the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center. Our guide, Frieda, did more than share information—she carried something. A steadiness. A clarity. A presence shaped not by theory, but by continuity.

What became clear to me was not simply the truth of history—but the unfinished nature of relationship.

Kimmerer reminds us, “All flourishing is mutual.” In her work, reciprocity is not a metaphor—it is a living ethic. The land is not property. It is teacher, relative, and source of obligation. Listening to her, and then walking through Skä•noñh, I felt the quiet but unmistakable contrast between two worldviews:

One rooted in extraction, ownership, and expansion.
The other rooted in relationship, responsibility, and balance.

Embedded within the Haudenosaunee worldview is a principle both simple and profound: decisions are to be made with consideration for the Seventh Generation to come. Not the next election cycle. Not the next quarter. But those yet unborn, whose lives will be shaped by what we choose now.

This is not just a cultural teaching. It is an ethical horizon.

The United States did not begin in a vacuum. It encountered—and learned from—the governance systems of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Ideas of participatory governance, balance of power, and confederation informed early colonial thinkers, including Benjamin Franklin. And yet, while these ideas were selectively adopted, the people who embodied them were systematically displaced, their treaties broken, their ways of life disrupted.

This is not just history.

This is an unresolved moral field.

Walking through the exhibits, listening to Frieda, I was struck not by anger—but by something more complex. A form of clarity that carries grief without collapsing into it. A grounded invitation: to see, to acknowledge, and to choose differently.

This is where awareness becomes something more than cognition. It becomes responsibility.

Awareness → Allyship → Reconciliation → Right Relationship

These are not slogans. They are stages of maturation.

Awareness asks us to confront what has been obscured or denied. Not as an intellectual exercise, but as an encounter with reality.

Allyship asks something more difficult: to step out of abstraction and into relationship. To listen. To follow. To support without centering oneself.

Reconciliation is often misunderstood as closure. It is not. It is an ongoing process of truth-telling, accountability, and repair—without guarantee of resolution.

And then there is Right Relationship.

This is the deeper call.

Not charity.
Not guilt.
Not symbolic gestures.

But a reorientation of how we understand land, power, history, and one another.

Right relationship asks:

• What does it mean to live on land that carries memory?

• What does it mean to benefit from systems built on broken agreements?

• What does it mean to act today in ways that those seven generations from now would recognize as honorable?

A Unividuation Lens

In the language I have been developing—Unividuation—this moment reflects a threshold.

Individuation, as Carl Jung described it, is the process of becoming whole as an individual. But Unividuation asks: what happens when that wholeness extends beyond the self?

What happens when the psyche recognizes its embeddedness in history, land, and collective life?

A nation, like a person, can remain defended—denying its shadow, protecting its identity, repeating its patterns.

Or it can begin to metabolize what it has inherited.

To live with the Seventh Generation in mind is, in many ways, to step into Unividuation: to move beyond the isolated self and into ethical relationship with the future, with the unseen, with the more-than-human world.

The United States stands at such a threshold.

The question is not whether harm occurred. That is established.

The question is whether we are willing to move toward right relationship—not as ideology, but as practice.

What I Carried Home

What stayed with me from that day was not a single idea, but a feeling:

A sense that dignity is not something we grant—it is something we recognize.

A sense that reconciliation is not a destination, but a discipline.

And a sense that allyship, if it is to mean anything, must be rooted in humility and sustained attention.

Frieda did not ask us to agree with anything.

She invited us to see.

And in that seeing, something shifts.

Toward a Covenant of the Common Good

If this country is to mature beyond its founding contradictions, it will not be through domination or denial.

It will be through covenant.

Not a covenant of control—but a covenant of relationship.

A commitment to shared dignity, mutual responsibility, and long-term stewardship.

In this sense, the call for “no kings” is not merely political—it is ethical. It is a refusal of domination in favor of shared governance, accountability, and balance. It echoes, whether consciously or not, the principles embedded in the Great Law of Peace: that power must be held in relationship, not imposed through force.

To move toward right relationship is to move toward a future where governance itself becomes an expression of wholeness.

Acknowledgment

I offer gratitude to Robin Wall Kimmerer for her teaching on reciprocity and right relationship, and to the Skä•noñh Great Law of Peace Center for preserving and sharing the living wisdom of the Haudenosaunee people.

I am especially grateful to our guide, Frieda, whose presence and voice carried not only knowledge, but continuity—a reminder that these teachings are not historical artifacts, but living traditions.

May this reflection be received in the spirit of respect, humility, and ongoing learning.

In the face of ecological collapse, extractive economies, and the hoarding of wealth and power, a troubling conclusion has taken root in contemporary discourse: that human beings themselves are the problem—that we are a “cancer” upon the Earth.

This conclusion, while born of anguish and moral clarity about real harm, ultimately distorts the deeper truth. It confuses human nature with human conditioning. It mistakes the outcomes of particular ideologies for the essence of the species.

Against this, a different argument must be made:

It is not humanity that is inherently destructive, but the systems of belief—extraction, entitlement, domination—that have shaped our relationship to the Earth and to one another.

Here, the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a vital corrective. Rooted in both Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, her writing reorients us away from alienation and toward reciprocity, gratitude, and belonging.

The Crisis Beneath the Crisis

The visible crises of our time—climate disruption, biodiversity loss, economic inequality—are not merely technical or political problems. They are expressions of a deeper rupture:

• A rupture between humans and the natural world

• A rupture between self and community

• A rupture within the human psyche itself

Kimmerer names this rupture as a failure of reciprocity. In works such as Braiding Sweetgrass, she contrasts the “gift economy” of the natural world—where life is sustained through mutual exchange—with the extractive logic of modern capitalism, where taking is decoupled from giving.

This insight aligns directly with the concerns of Unividuation. What is at stake is not simply environmental policy, but the ethical orientation of consciousness.

The Danger of Self-Condemnation

As awareness of this rupture grows, many experience a profound moral and emotional burden. The recognition of harm—particularly harm in which one is implicated—can give rise to guilt, shame, and moral injury.

In this context, the idea that “humans are the problem” can function as a kind of psychological collapse. It resolves the tension by condemning the whole rather than engaging the parts.

Yet this move is ultimately disabling. It forecloses the possibility of transformation by denying the very capacities that make transformation possible.

From a depth psychological perspective, this reflects what Carl Jung described as an identification with the shadow (Jung, CW 9ii). Rather than integrating the destructive aspects of the psyche, the individual—or the culture—becomes overwhelmed by them, losing access to the generative and relational dimensions of the self.

Kimmerer offers a different path. She does not deny the reality of harm. But neither does she abandon humanity. Instead, she asks:

What would it mean to remember ourselves as participants in a living world, rather than as its masters or its destroyers?

Reciprocity as Ethical Reorientation

At the heart of Kimmerer’s work is the concept of reciprocity—the understanding that life is sustained through cycles of giving and receiving.

This is not merely an ecological principle; it is an ethical and spiritual one. It reframes the human role from consumer to participant, from owner to caretaker, from isolated self to relational being.

In this light, the problem is not that humans take from the Earth, but that we have forgotten how to give back, or even offer a simple gratitude.

Unividuation resonates deeply with this orientation. If individuation involves the integration of the self, Unividuation extends this process into the realm of relationship, calling for a maturation in which the self recognizes its embeddedness within a larger whole.

Reciprocity, then, becomes a central practice of Unividuation:

• To take with awareness

• To give with intention

• To live in a way that sustains the web of life

Beyond Right and Wrong: Entering the Field

The Persian poet Rumi writes:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

This “field” is not a moral void, but a relational space in which the rigid binaries of good and evil give way to a deeper inquiry into what sustains life and connection.

Kimmerer’s work can be understood as an invitation into this field. Her stories—of plants, ecosystems, and human communities—reveal a world in which ethics is not imposed from above but arises from attentive participation.

Unividuation names this movement as a developmental shift:

• From judgment → to relationship

• From domination → to stewardship

• From separation → to interbeing

In this field, the question is no longer “Who is to blame?” but “How shall we live together?”

Holding the Tension: What Is and What Could Be

A central challenge of our time is learning to hold the tension between acceptance and imagination.

• To accept what is: the reality of ecological degradation, systemic inequality, and cultural fragmentation

• To imagine what could be: forms of life organized around reciprocity, shared governance, and ecological care

Kimmerer embodies this balance. She does not offer false hope or easy solutions. Instead, she cultivates a form of grounded imagination—one rooted in the actual practices of the natural world and the enduring wisdom of Indigenous traditions.

This stance aligns with Unividuation’s refusal of both despair and bypass. It calls for a presence that is:

• Emotionally honest

• Ethically engaged

• Imaginatively open

From Ideology to Practice

If the crises we face are rooted in ideology, then transformation must occur not only at the level of belief, but at the level of practice.

Kimmerer offers concrete gestures:

• Gratitude as daily orientation

• Harvesting with restraint and respect

• Giving back to the land

• Listening to the more-than-human world

These are not symbolic acts. They are forms of ethical embodiment—ways of living that reconfigure the relationship between human and Earth.

Unividuation extends this into broader social and civic life:

• Shared decision-making

• Redistribution of resources

• Accountability for harm

• Stewardship across generations

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Human Place

The narrative that humanity is inherently destructive is, at its core, a narrative of despair. It denies the possibility that human beings can learn, adapt, and participate in the restoration of the world.

The work of Robin Wall Kimmerer offers a counter-narrative—one grounded in relationship, reciprocity, and reverence. It reminds us that the human story is not fixed. It is still being written.

Unividuation provides a language for this unfolding. It names the developmental possibility that we might move beyond the ideologies of extraction and domination toward a more mature form of ethical life—one in which:

• Humanity is not separate from the Earth, but a participant within it

• Ethics is not imposed, but lived through relationship

• The future is not predetermined, but shaped through care

In this sense, the task is not to judge humanity, but to reclaim our place within the living world—not as conquerors or cancers, but as conscious participants in a shared and sacred field of life.

Acknowledgment

I want to acknowledge the profound influence of Robin Wall Kimmerer on this reflection. Her work—especially in Braiding Sweetgrass—has helped illuminate a path beyond extraction and alienation toward reciprocity, gratitude, and right relationship with the living world. The integration of Indigenous wisdom with scientific understanding in her writing offers not only insight, but a way of being that deeply resonates with the ethical vision of Unividuation.

With respect and gratitude, I recognize her teachings as part of the larger field of knowledge and relationship that makes this work possible.

For more information about her and her work visit: https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/

By Peter Navratil

“The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche

“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

There are moments in history when something shifts beneath our feet—not as an idea, but as a felt sense that the world we have known is no longer holding.

This is one of those moments.

We name it climate crisis. Political division. Ecological collapse. And all of that is true.

But something more intimate is unfolding beneath the surface.

Something closer to grief.

The Mother is Not a Metaphor

There is an old knowing—older than our institutions—that the Earth is not a thing but a presence. Not an object to be used, but a relationship that gives rise to us.

To call the Earth “Mother” is not sentimental. It is relational truth.

And if this is so, then what we are witnessing is not only environmental breakdown—it is the grief of a mother whose body has been wounded, whose rhythms have been disrupted, whose children are forgetting how to live with her.

This grief is visible—

in burning forests,
in rising seas,
in the quiet disappearance of life.

But it is also internal—

in anxiety that has no clear source,
in disconnection that feels almost normal,
in the subtle knowing that something is out of balance.

The Long Imbalance

For millennia, human systems, especially from a Western World View, have leaned heavily toward control, hierarchy, and dominance—what we call patriarchal structures.

This is not a condemnation of men, nor of the masculine itself. The masculine principle—clarity, structure, protection—is necessary.

But without relationship to the feminine—without receptivity, attunement, and reverence—it distorts.

It becomes extractive.

In the language of Carl Jung, the psyche seeks wholeness through the integration of opposites. When one side dominates, life compensates—often through crisis.

We are living inside that compensation.

The ecological crisis and the psychological crisis are not separate events. They are expressions of the same fracture: a loss of relationship.

A Moment of Human Recognition

Recently, I sat in a room with men who had been convicted of driving while intoxicated. It was a Victim Impact Panel. My role was to tell the story of my mother—her life, her death, and the traumatic grief that followed.

I spoke of her not as a statistic, but as a person. A woman who loved, who struggled, who mattered.

Something shifted in the room.

You could feel it.

The defenses—minimization, justification, distance—began to soften. Not through argument, but through contact. Through the simple act of seeing her as human.

Afterward, one man approached me. He didn’t say much. Just, “I never thought about it that way before. Thank you for sharing your story”

It was not redemption. Not resolution.

But it was a moment of re-humanization.

A moment where grief became a bridge rather than a wall.

The Defenses Against Grief

What I witnessed in that room is what we are witnessing collectively.

When faced with overwhelming reality, the psyche defends:

We minimize.
We deny.
We blame.
We numb.

Not because we are indifferent—but because we are overwhelmed.

The same may be true in our relationship with the Earth.

To truly feel what is happening—to let it in—is to encounter a grief that challenges everything: our way of life, our assumptions about progress, even our sense of identity.

So we turn away.

But grief does not disappear when avoided.

It deepens.

The Return of the Feminine

And yet, something is returning.

Quietly.

The feminine—not as gender, but as a way of being—is re-emerging in the collective psyche.

It appears as:

a longing for connection,
a sensitivity to life,
a refusal to accept domination as normal.

It invites us not to conquer the world, but to belong to it.

Not to fix everything, but to enter into “right relationship”.

This is not regression.

It is maturation.

Grief as Initiation

Grief, when allowed, changes us.

It breaks something open.

In many traditions, grief is not only sorrow—it is initiation. A passage from one way of being to another.

What if this moment is asking that of us?

What if the Earth’s grief and our own are intertwined, calling us into a deeper form of consciousness?

This is where Unividuation becomes lived rather than conceptual.

It is the movement from “I” to “We”—not as an idea, but as an experience.

A recognition that we are not separate from the world we are impacting.

We are within it.

An Ethical Turning: The Wheel of Wholeness

If this is a revolution, it will not be sustained by insight alone.

It will require an ethical ground.

What I have named as the Ethics of Unividuation can be understood as a simple but demanding orientation:

• Truth – the willingness to see clearly, without distortion

• Compassion – the capacity to feel with, rather than turn away

• Accountability – the courage to take responsibility for our impact

• Service – the commitment to contribute beyond the self

At the center of these is Integrity—not perfection, but coherence. A life aligned with what we know to be true.

This is not abstract.

It is lived in small decisions, daily actions, quiet moments of choice.

From Extraction to Relationship

The shift before us is not primarily technological or political.

It is relational.

From control → to participation
From consumption → to reciprocity
From isolation → to belonging

This shift cannot be imposed.

It must be felt.

The Question Before Us

The Mother is calling.

Not in language, but in the conditions of life itself.

The question is not whether she is speaking.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

And if we listen—

Will we allow ourselves to feel what is being asked of us?

A Closing Practice

Step outside, if you can.

Feel the ground beneath your feet.

Place your hand on your heart.

And ask, quietly:

What does it mean to live in right relationship—here, now, in this life?

Let the question remain open.

Let it work on you.

That may be where the revolution begins.

In Loving Remembering of my Mother, Geri Navratil (1933 to 2002)

The myth is not simply in the words themselves. It lives in the assumption that leadership must be claimed through position, rather than revealed through relationship.

The Inheritance of the “Head of the Household”

The idea of the man as “head” has deep roots—legal, economic, religious. In earlier structures, it organized survival: someone had to be accountable for provision, protection, decision-making. In times of scarcity and danger, hierarchy simplified complexity.

But what once served survival can quietly become rigid long after its necessity has passed.

When “headship” becomes synonymous with authority rather than responsibility, something subtle begins to erode:

• Relationship becomes role-bound rather than alive

• Power becomes something to hold rather than something to steward

• Love becomes conditional upon order rather than grounded in mutual regard

In this form, the statement “I am the man of the house” shifts from I will carry responsibility to I must be in control.

And control, even when well-intended, narrows the field of human connection.

Where Dominance Harms

Dominance is not always loud. Sometimes it appears as quiet certainty that one’s voice carries more weight. Sometimes it lives in the assumption that leadership belongs to one, rather than emerges between.

The harm is not only to partners and families—it is also to the man himself.

When masculinity is bound to dominance:

• Vulnerability becomes a threat

• Uncertainty becomes shameful

• Emotional life becomes restricted

• Partnership becomes negotiation rather than communion

A man in this position must continually assert himself because his authority is never fully secure. It depends on being recognized, deferred to, affirmed.

The more it must be declared, the less it is actually felt.

Children sense this immediately. So do partners. Authority that requires reinforcement often carries a quiet fragility.

And beneath that fragility, often, is grief—unmet longing for respect, for ease, for belonging without performance.

Where Leadership Can Be Constructive

Yet there is something worth preserving in the instinct behind the phrase.

The desire to stand, to take responsibility, to protect and provide—these are not problems. They are expressions of a deep masculine current that, when grounded, becomes profoundly stabilizing.

Constructive leadership is not the absence of strength. It is strength that has been tempered by relationship.

It sounds less like:

“I am the head of this household.”

And more like:

“I am answerable for the well-being of this space, alongside you.”

In its healthy form, masculine leadership offers:

• Containment: the capacity to hold emotional intensity without collapsing or dominating

• Direction: the ability to help orient the family toward shared values and purpose

• Protection: not as control, but as guardianship of safety, dignity, and mutual respect

• Accountability: a willingness to repair harm and own impact

This is leadership not as position, but as presence.

And presence cannot be declared. It is felt.

The Shift from Dominance to Partnership

Partnership is not the loss of masculine identity. It is its maturation.

To move from dominance to partnership requires something more difficult than assertion: it requires relinquishment.

• Relinquishing the need to be right

• Relinquishing the illusion of control

• Relinquishing inherited scripts that equate authority with worth

What emerges is not passivity, but a different kind of strength—one that is relational rather than positional.

In partnership:

• Leadership becomes fluid

• Influence is shared

• Decisions are co-created

• Power circulates rather than concentrates

There are moments when one partner leads and the other follows—not out of hierarchy, but out of attunement.

The question is no longer “Who is in charge?” but “What does this moment ask of us?”

The Masculine and Vulnerability

Perhaps the deepest shift comes here.

For many men, vulnerability has been exiled from the definition of strength. To feel deeply, to admit uncertainty, to ask for support—these have been framed as diminishment.

But in lived experience, the opposite is true.

A man who can say:
“I don’t know, but I’m here.”
“I was wrong.”
“I need you.”
“I feel afraid.”

…does not lose authority.

He becomes trustworthy.

Vulnerability, in this sense, is not exposure for its own sake. It is the opening through which real relationship becomes possible.

Without it, partnership remains conceptual.

With it, something alive begins to form—a shared field of honesty, where both partners can stand fully human.

The Unspoken Measure of Strength

True strength in the masculine does not need to announce itself.

It is visible in:

• The steadiness with which a man listens

• The way he responds rather than reacts

• His capacity to stay present in conflict without escalating or withdrawing

• His willingness to repair when he has caused harm

• His devotion to something larger than his own ego

This kind of strength is quiet. It does not compete for recognition.

And because it does not demand submission, it invites respect.

Beyond the Myth

The myth of “man of the house” dissolves not by rejection, but by transformation.

What remains is something more demanding, and more beautiful:

A man who stands not above, but within relationship.
A man whose authority is not taken, but given—freely—by those who trust him.
A man who understands that leadership is not a right, but a responsibility continuously earned.

In this sense, the question shifts.

Not:
“Am I the head of this household?”

But:
“Am I living in a way that strengthens the life we are building together?”

And perhaps, more quietly still:

“Am I someone others can rest with, not because I hold power over them, but because I hold care with them?”

That is a different kind of leadership.

Not dominance.
Not disappearance.

But partnership—alive, mutual, and deeply human.

This reflection is offered in respect and gratitude to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the teachings of the Peacemaker, I engage this wisdom not as something to claim, but as a living example of relational governance that continues to guide the work of becoming a responsible “We.”

I write from the region of Rochester, New York, on lands shaped by the enduring presence of the Haudenosaunee, and with appreciation for the teachings shared at Ganondagan and in our local community. I am especially grateful to Patricia Corcoran of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, Bear Clan, whose recent teachings on Six Nations spirituality deepened my understanding of these traditions. I offer this reflection with humility, recognizing that this wisdom lives within ongoing communities, relationships, and responsibilities. These times have called me to share what I have learned.

Long before revolutions against kings in Europe and America, there arose in this land a different vision of governance.

The Peacemaker did not come to overthrow a king.

He came to end a cycle of violence.

He brought a message that power must be transformed, not seized.

That leadership must be rooted not in domination, but in peace, balance, and right relationship.

Through his teachings, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was formed under what is known as the Great Law of Peace—a system that replaced vengeance with council, coercion with consensus, and hierarchy with responsibility.

If we were to ask the Peacemaker what “No Kings” means today, the answer might not begin with rejection.

It would begin with a question:

How shall we live so that no one seeks to become a king?

Power as Responsibility, Not Domination

The Peacemaker did not simply remove tyrants.

He redefined power itself.

In the Great Law of Peace, leaders are not rulers.

They are servants of the people, chosen not for their ability to dominate, but for their capacity to listen, to deliberate, and to act with a good mind.

Authority is held in trust, not possessed.

And it can be removed when it no longer serves the people.

This is not “No Kings” as absence.

It is “No Kings” as transformation of power into stewardship.

The Good Mind

Central to the Peacemaker’s teaching is the cultivation of what is called the Good Mind—a state of consciousness grounded in clarity, balance, and care for the whole.

The Good Mind does not react from fear.

It does not seek victory over others.

It seeks harmony.

In times of crisis, when fear spreads and division intensifies, the temptation toward kingship grows stronger.

People begin to long for control, for certainty, for someone to impose order on chaos.

The Peacemaker’s response would be clear:

Heal the mind of the people, and the need for kings will fade.

The Seventh Generation

The Great Law of Peace teaches that decisions must be made with awareness of their impact on the Seventh Generation.

This principle expands the meaning of governance beyond immediate gain or political victory.

It asks:

Will this choice sustain life?

A society guided by this principle does not require kings.

It requires stewards—people capable of holding responsibility not only for themselves, but for those yet to come.

The Circle, Not the Throne

Where kings sit on thrones, the Peacemaker created circles.

In a circle, no one is above another.

Each voice matters.

Each perspective contributes to the whole.

The work of governance becomes not domination, but deliberation.

Not control, but relationship.

This is a radically different vision than the systems many modern societies have inherited.

It is slower.
It is more demanding.
It requires patience, humility, and trust.

But it is also more sustainable.

A Message for Our Time

If the Peacemaker were to speak into our present moment—a time marked by division, fear, and the re-emergence of authoritarian impulses—his message might sound something like this:

Do not ask who should rule.

Ask how you must relate to one another.

Do not seek power over others.

Seek balance within yourselves and your communities.

Do not wait for leaders to save you.

Become people capable of governing together.

No Kings, Only Right Relationship

“No Kings” from the perspective of the Peacemaker is not a slogan.

It is a way of life.

It is the refusal of domination not only in institutions, but in the human heart.

It is the cultivation of the Good Mind.

It is the practice of council, listening, and shared responsibility.

It is the commitment to live in such a way that no one needs to rise above others in order for order to be maintained.

From isolated individuals
to a people capable of holding the whole.

The Peacemaker did not teach “No Kings” , he taught a way of living in which kings are not necessary.

For more information visit:

• https://www.indigenouspeoplesdayrocny.org/

• https://www.ganondagan.org/

“In every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
— Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace

Every generation of a democracy eventually faces the same question:
Will we remain citizens, or will we begin searching again for kings?

The First Rejection of Kings

More than two millennia ago, a people rose up against a king.

According to Roman history, the last king of Rome—Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, known as Tarquin the Proud—ruled through arrogance, corruption, and violence. His reign ended when a moral outrage shook the city: the assault of a noblewoman named Lucretia, an event that ignited public fury and a revolt against royal power.

In 509 BCE the Roman people expelled their king.

They swore an oath that no monarch would ever rule Rome again.

Instead of a king, they created a republic—a system in which authority would be shared, limited, and accountable to the people.

For centuries Romans repeated a civic vow:

Never again shall Rome be ruled by a king.

The experiment was imperfect. Power remained concentrated among elites, and the republic would eventually collapse into empire. Yet the idea born in that moment changed political imagination forever.

A society could exist without kings.

Centuries later, that same principle would echo across the Atlantic.

When American colonists declared independence in 1776, they too rejected the authority of a monarch. The founders drew on Enlightenment philosophy, but they were also heirs to a much older tradition—the belief that power must not concentrate in the hands of a ruler.

The rejection of kings was not only a political act.

It was a statement about human dignity.

No person, the idea implied, was born to rule over others.

Authority must arise from the people themselves.

This idea was revolutionary not only politically, but psychologically.

It assumed ordinary people were capable of self-governance.

Yet the founding generation also carried deep contradictions. The early republic excluded women, enslaved Africans, Indigenous nations, and many poor citizens from participation.

The American experiment therefore began as both a breakthrough and an unfinished promise.

Over the centuries, democracy has expanded whenever the circle of dignity widened.

Abolitionists widened it.
The suffrage movement widened it.
Civil rights leaders widened it.

Each generation has been asked the same question:

Who counts as “We the People”?

The work of democracy is the continual expansion of that circle.

The Psychological Crisis Beneath the Political One

Our political crisis today is not only institutional.
It is psychological.

We are living through a period of systemic strain—economic inequality, ecological instability, technological disruption, and profound cultural fragmentation.

When systems destabilize, the human psyche looks for certainty.

Some seek it in ideology.
Some in tribal identity.
Some in authoritarian leaders.

But democracy asks something more demanding.

It asks citizens to grow psychologically.

The Three Temptations of Kingship in Modern Democracies

“No Kings” is not simply a constitutional principle.

It is a psychological discipline.

History shows that societies rarely lose democracy all at once.
More often, democracy erodes when citizens unconsciously surrender responsibility to figures who promise certainty, strength, and protection.

The temptation of kingship tends to appear in three forms.

1. The Temptation of the Strongman

In times of crisis, many people long for a leader who promises to “fix everything.”

The strongman offers clarity in the face of complexity.
He claims to stand above institutions, above debate, above the slow work of democratic deliberation.

Strongmen present themselves as the embodiment of the nation.

“I alone can solve it.”

The danger of this archetype is not only political—it is psychological.

When citizens project authority onto a single figure, they surrender their own civic responsibility.

Democracy weakens whenever citizens become spectators instead of participants.

2. The Temptation of Tribal Power

Kingship can also arise through group identity.

When political movements begin defining themselves primarily through opposition—us versus them—democracy begins to fracture into rival tribes.

At that point, power becomes more important than governance.

Victory becomes more important than the common good.

The language of citizens gradually shifts into the language of enemies.

History shows that tribal politics often prepares the ground for authoritarian rule, because people become willing to sacrifice democratic norms if it means defeating the opposing tribe.

Democracy survives only when citizens remember that political opponents are still members of the same civic community.

3. The Temptation of the Savior

The third temptation is subtler.

It is the belief that one extraordinary leader will redeem the system.

This temptation can appear on the left, the right, or anywhere in between.

The savior archetype promises moral purity, clarity, and heroic transformation.

But democracy was never meant to rely on heroes.

It was designed to rely on citizens.

Healthy democratic systems disperse power rather than concentrating it.

They depend on institutions, dialogue, accountability, and participation.

No individual—no matter how charismatic—can replace the ethical work of a population governing itself.

The Fourth Temptation: The King Within

The danger of kingship does not live only in palaces or political offices.

It lives in the human psyche.

Carl Jung observed that what we fail to recognize in ourselves we often project onto others. We imagine the danger resides “out there,” in leaders, institutions, or rival groups, while the deeper dynamics remain unconscious within us.

Democracy therefore requires something monarchies never demanded:

self-awareness.

Each citizen must confront a difficult truth.

Part of us longs to rule.

Part of us wants certainty, control, and the power to impose our will on the world. When that impulse remains unconscious, it easily attaches itself to leaders who promise domination, victory, or moral purity.

In this way the authoritarian impulse spreads not only through institutions but through psychological identification.

Citizens begin to see their leader as an extension of themselves.

The king outside mirrors the king within.

Jung warned that societies become dangerous when large numbers of people lose contact with their inner life and project their shadow onto others. Under these conditions, enemies multiply and power becomes justified in the name of righteousness.

Democracy, by contrast, depends on something far more demanding.

It requires citizens capable of recognizing their own shadow—their own capacity for domination, resentment, and certainty.

Without this inner work, the temptation of kingship simply returns in new forms.

Ten Signs a Society Is Sliding Back Toward Kings

History shows that democracies rarely collapse all at once.

More often, they erode slowly—through shifts in language, culture, and psychology that make domination appear normal again.

When these patterns appear, societies should pay attention.

1. Leaders begin portraying themselves as the only ones capable of saving the nation.
The language of shared responsibility disappears, replaced by the mythology of the singular strong leader.

2. Political opponents are no longer treated as rivals, but as enemies.
Once opponents become enemies, democratic compromise begins to look like betrayal.

3. Institutions are dismissed as obstacles rather than safeguards.
Courts, elections, and oversight bodies are framed as illegitimate when they constrain power.

4. Loyalty to leaders becomes more important than loyalty to principles.
Personal allegiance replaces constitutional responsibility.

5. Citizens begin seeking certainty instead of accountability.
The complexity of democracy feels exhausting, and the simplicity of authority becomes attractive.

6. Public discourse shifts from dialogue to domination.
Listening is replaced by humiliation, intimidation, and spectacle.

7. Minority groups become scapegoats for social anxiety.
Fear is redirected toward vulnerable populations rather than toward systemic solutions.

8. Truth itself becomes contested terrain.
Facts lose their shared authority, and political identity begins to determine what counts as reality.

9. Civic participation declines.
Citizens withdraw from public life, leaving institutions vulnerable to capture by concentrated power.

10. The idea of a king begins to feel normal again.
What once seemed unthinkable slowly becomes imaginable.

Democracy as Initiation: The Path Toward Unividuation

The crisis of democracy in our time is often described as political.

But at a deeper level it is developmental.

Democracy asks something historically unprecedented of human beings:
that we learn how to govern ourselves without domination.

For most of human history, societies organized themselves around hierarchy—kings, emperors, rulers who claimed authority over the lives of others. Stability was achieved through power concentrated at the top.

Democracy introduced a different experiment.

It assumed that ordinary people could participate in shaping the conditions of their shared life.

Yet this assumption requires something that cannot be legislated into existence.

It requires psychological maturity.

Citizens must develop the capacity to tolerate disagreement without violence.
They must hold multiple perspectives at once.
They must balance personal freedom with collective responsibility.

In psychological language, this reflects the movement Carl Jung described as individuation—the process of becoming a conscious and integrated self.

But the crises of the twenty-first century reveal that individuation alone is not sufficient.

Climate disruption, global interdependence, technological power, and ecological fragility have woven humanity into a single planetary system. Our decisions now shape the fate of generations yet unborn.

The deeper task before us is therefore not simply individual wholeness.

It is the emergence of a relational consciousness capable of stewarding the whole.

This developmental movement is what I have come to call Unividuation.

Individuation asks:

Who am I?

Unividuation asks:

How must we live together if life itself is to continue?

Seen in this light, democracy is more than a political system.

It is a collective initiation.

An initiation away from domination and toward relationship.
Away from hierarchy and toward responsibility.
Away from kings and toward citizens capable of caring for the common good.

This initiation is not guaranteed to succeed.

History shows that societies can regress toward authoritarian rule when fear overwhelms responsibility.

But the possibility remains open.

Every generation must decide whether it will retreat into domination—or grow into stewardship.

The future of democracy may therefore depend on something deeper than elections.

It may depend on whether human beings are willing to undergo the psychological transformation required to live together on a fragile planet.

The question before us is not simply who will govern.

The question is who we are becoming together.

The Democracy Maturity Ladder

From Subjects to Stewards

Democracy does not fail only because of bad leaders.
It fails when citizens stop developing.

Political systems reflect the psychological maturity of the people living within them.

The history of governance can therefore be understood as a developmental ladder.

1. Subjects

Subjects live under kings.

Power flows from the top down.
Citizenship does not exist.

Subjects obey authority in exchange for protection and order.
Responsibility for governance belongs entirely to rulers.

2. Followers

Followers appear in authoritarian movements and personality-driven politics.

Instead of kings by birth, societies rally around charismatic leaders.

Followers seek certainty, identity, and protection through loyalty to the leader or the tribe.

Responsibility is again projected upward.

3. Voters

Voters participate in democracy but often in a minimal way.

They choose leaders periodically but remain largely disengaged between elections.

Politics becomes a spectator activity—like a sporting event between opposing teams.

Responsibility remains limited.

4. Citizens

Citizens recognize democracy as a shared responsibility.

They engage in dialogue, civic participation, and ethical accountability.

Citizens understand that disagreement is not a threat to democracy—it is part of its health.

Power becomes something held collectively rather than projected onto leaders.

5. Stewards

Stewardship represents the next developmental step.

Stewards understand that governance is not only about human interests but about the long-term flourishing of life itself.

This perspective echoes the Haudenosaunee teaching of the Seventh Generation—to make decisions with awareness of their impact on those yet to come.

Stewards move beyond individual self-interest toward responsibility for the whole.

This is the horizon of what I call Unividuation—the maturation of consciousness from I to We.

The Citizen’s Vow: No Kings

In a time of uncertainty,
when fear tempts us to surrender responsibility,
we remember a simple truth:

No human being was meant to rule as a king over others.

Power does not descend from thrones.
Power rises from the people.

We therefore affirm:

We will not surrender our conscience to strongmen.
We will not reduce our neighbors to enemies.
We will not wait for saviors to do the work of citizens.

We accept the responsibility of self-governance.

We commit to listen across difference.
To defend the dignity of every human being.
To hold leaders accountable without abandoning the republic itself.

We remember that democracy is not inherited once and for all.

It must be renewed by each generation.

And so we pledge:

No kings.
No subjects.
Only citizens.

Citizens responsible to one another,
to the living earth,
and to the generations yet to come.

A Free Press and the Work of Citizens

I was recently reminded, in a conversation reflecting on an interview between historian Heather Cox Richardson and Senator Jon Ossoff, of something I have long believed: democracy rests not on three branches alone, but on a four-legged stool—the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and a free press. The free press serves as the eyes and ears of the people, making truth visible and holding power accountable. Without it, citizens cannot see clearly enough to act.

When this fourth pillar is weakened—through disinformation, corporate consolidation, or the erosion of trust—the entire structure becomes unstable. Power begins to concentrate. Accountability begins to erode.

In this light, the threat is not only institutional but systemic. The convergence of concentrated wealth, media influence, and political power creates what many have called a corporatocracy, where influence can be purchased and truth becomes contested terrain. The consequences are profound: citizens grow disoriented, exhausted, and increasingly vulnerable to fear.

And fear is the oldest ally of kings.

Authoritarian power does not prevail only through force. It prevails by wearing people down—by fostering confusion, amplifying division, and convincing citizens that participation no longer matters.

The antidote is not despair.

It is engagement.

Democracy requires citizens who are willing to show up, stand up, and refuse the pull toward resignation. It asks us to lift our eyes from the weight of doom and act with clarity, courage, and commitment.

Resilience, in a democratic society, is not passive endurance.

It is participation.

It is the refusal to give up on the shared project of self-governance.

It is the lived declaration:

No kings. Only citizens.

Seven Sentences for No Kings Day

1. Democracy begins the moment a people refuse to kneel before kings.

2. The greatest threat to democracy is not ambitious rulers, but citizens who forget their responsibility.

3. Strongmen rise when societies grow weary of the work of self-governance.

4. Democracy survives only when opponents remember they are still neighbors.

5. The refusal of kings outside requires confronting the king within.

6. Leadership in a democracy is not domination—it is stewardship.

7. The future of democracy depends on whether we can grow from isolated individuals into a responsible “We.”

The Romans swore never again to be ruled by kings.
The founders made the same declaration.

Our generation must go further—
and learn how to live together without domination at all.

The Long Arc of Self-Governance

Twenty-five centuries ago, the people of Rome expelled their king and swore that no monarch would ever rule them again.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, American colonists declared independence from the British crown, asserting that legitimate authority arises from the consent of the governed.

Yet the rejection of kings is older still.

Long before the United States existed, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy organized itself under the Great Law of Peace—a system of governance rooted not in domination but in relational responsibility. Leaders were expected to serve the people, and decisions were guided by the wisdom of the Seventh Generation: to consider the impact of our choices on those yet to come.

Across cultures and centuries, these traditions point toward a similar realization:

The future of human societies depends not on rulers, but on the maturity of the people themselves.

Democracy was never meant to eliminate leadership.

It was meant to transform the nature of power.

Leadership becomes stewardship.
Authority becomes accountability.
Citizens become participants in shaping the shared life of their community.

In a time of planetary crisis—ecological instability, technological power, and deep social fragmentation—the stakes of this experiment have never been higher.

The question facing our generation is not simply which leaders will govern.

The question is whether humanity can grow into the level of responsibility required for life on a fragile planet.

In psychological terms, this is the movement from individuation to something larger.

From the awakening of the individual self to the emergence of a relational consciousness capable of caring for the whole.

This is the horizon of what I call Unividuation.

The maturation of human awareness from I to We.

The refusal of kings is therefore not merely a political position.

It is a declaration about the future of human development.

A recognition that domination cannot guide us through the crises of our century.

Only responsibility can.

The Choice Before Us

Democracy survives not because these pressures disappear, but because citizens recognize them and refuse to surrender their responsibility.

The rejection of kings must be renewed in every generation.

It is not only a constitutional principle. Every generation of a democracy eventually faces the same question.

Will we remain citizens?

Or will we begin searching again for kings?

Author’s Note

This essay grows out of my ongoing work exploring the psychological and ethical foundations of governance in a time of systemic crisis. Drawing on Jungian depth psychology, Indigenous relational wisdom, and the long traditions of democratic thought, I have been developing the concept of Unividuation—the maturation of consciousness from isolated individuality toward relational responsibility.

If individuation asks the question “Who am I?”, Unividuation asks the deeper civic question of our time: “How must we live together if life itself is to continue?”

For the Seventh Generation.

That was my experience encountering a recent article on trauma and systems. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/healing-trauma-systems#

Not because the ideas were new, but because they were spoken with a clarity that signals a cultural threshold: what many of us have known for decades is now pressing into collective awareness.

As a clinical social worker and cultural worker, I have spent a lifetime accompanying people through trauma—and its inseparable partner, grief. Over time, one truth has become undeniable:

The personal is not separate from the collective.
It is an expression of it.

What we call anxiety, addiction, depression, and violence are not only individual conditions. They are symptoms of a deeper, unprocessed field—one that lives in families, institutions, and history itself.

We Are Living Inside Trauma—Not Just Treating It

The article names something essential:

Humanity is submerged in layers of individual, intergenerational, and collective trauma—but we don’t recognize it.

This is not metaphor. It is diagnosis.

We are living inside systems shaped by unprocessed trauma. And when trauma goes unmetabolized, it doesn’t disappear—it organizes.

It organizes how we:

• relate to power

• define safety

• create systems

• govern one another

From healthcare to education to criminal justice, we are not just seeing broken systems—we are seeing trauma-patterned systems.

And now, as ecological collapse accelerates, we are encountering the outer reflection of an inner condition:

A planet carrying what humanity has not yet learned to grieve.

The Most Dangerous Myth: “Other People Are Traumatized”

One of the most persistent defenses is the belief that trauma belongs to someone else.

That they are traumatized.
That they need help.
That we are fine.

But trauma is not an individual possession. It is a relational reality.

Judith Herman’s groundbreaking work in 1992 made clear that trauma is not peripheral—it is structural. Long before that, Freud and Jung encountered its edges. And long before them, Indigenous communities understood what we are only now remembering:

Healing is not an individual achievement.
It is a collective responsibility.

From “Me” to “We”: The Next Turn of Human Development

Jung gave us the concept of individuation—the process of becoming a whole self.

But we are now living in a moment that demands something more.

The question is no longer only:

Who am I?

The question has become:

How must we live together if life itself is to continue?

This is what I call Unividuation—the movement from personal wholeness into relational responsibility.

If individuation is the realization of the Self,
then Unividuation is the realization of the Universal We.

Stewardship Is the Missing Link

If trauma is everywhere, and healing is collective, then the real question is:

Who will hold the work?

This is the role of stewardship.

To be a steward of trauma and grief is to:

• stay present to what is difficult

• resist the urge to fix or bypass

• create spaces where truth can be spoken

• hold both personal pain and systemic reality at once

Without this capacity, systems will continue to reproduce harm.

Because systems that are not trauma-informed will recreate trauma.
And systems that are not grief-literate will remain emotionally immature.

The Great Turning Requires a New Kind of Human Response

Joanna Macy calls this moment The Great Turning—a shift toward a life-sustaining society.

But this turning will not come from policy alone.

It requires a transformation in how we show up as human beings:

• able to feel without collapsing

• able to witness without turning away

• able to act without dehumanizing

In other words:

It requires Unividuated humans.

The Work Ahead

We are entering a time where the healing professions must evolve.

Not just therapists—but educators, clergy, physicians, leaders.

We will need:

• trauma-informed systems

• grief-competent communities

• spaces for collective witnessing

• governance rooted in dignity and interdependence

We will need a culture of stewardship.

Closing

Paulo Coelho writes:

“You drown not by falling into a river but by staying submerged in it.”

Perhaps the task before us is not to eliminate the river.

But to learn—together—how to surface.

To help one another breathe.
To remember that none of us are outside the water.
And to recognize that healing is not a private act.

It is a collective emergence.

The Elder’s Line:
Individuation asks who I am.
Unividuation asks how we must live—
so that life itself may continue.

Where are the men?

Across politics, media, and everyday life, misogyny has become increasingly visible and normalized. Many women feel they have been fighting this battle largely alone, while too many men remain silent observers.

Katz has spent his career insisting on something that should have been obvious from the beginning:

Violence against women is not a women’s issue.

It is a men’s issue.

And more specifically, it is a men’s leadership issue.

The central question is not simply why some men commit violence.
The deeper question is why so many other men remain silent when they see it.

The Culture of Male Silence

When people think about violence against women, they often imagine individual perpetrators—abusive partners, sexual predators, or criminals.

But Katz has long pointed out that violence does not arise in isolation.

It grows in a culture of male silence.

It grows in locker rooms where sexist jokes are laughed at.
In workplaces where harassment is ignored.
In political spaces where misogyny is rewarded rather than condemned.

Violence thrives when good men remain quiet.

The problem is not only the men who commit acts of violence.
It is also the social field of men around them.

When men fail to challenge misogyny among other men, a message is transmitted:

This is acceptable here.

And that message becomes the cultural soil in which violence grows.

The Myth of the “Good Man”

One of the most common defenses men offer is simple:

“I’m not that kind of guy.”

Many men see themselves as decent people who would never harm a woman. And in many cases, that’s true.

But Katz challenges men to move beyond this narrow definition of responsibility.

The question is not simply:

Am I a good man?

The deeper question is:

What am I doing about the behavior of other men?

This shift changes everything.

It moves masculinity from a private identity to a public responsibility.

Stand Up Guys

In 2004, a colleague of mine, Jack Brennick, and I started a small initiative called Stand Up Guys. Our message was simple:

Stand Up Guys treat the women in their lives with dignity and respect.

We encouraged men to speak publicly about men’s violence against women—something that, even twenty years ago, many people still framed as a “women’s issue.”

The truth is that violence against women has always been a men’s issue.

Not because all men are violent.

But because men shape the cultural norms that determine how other men behave.

Jackson Katz has been one of the most influential voices helping men see this clearly.

Shame: The Hidden Engine of Violence

In my clinical work over many years, I’ve come to believe that one of the deepest drivers of violence is shame.

Many men are socialized to believe that vulnerability, fear, or emotional pain makes them weak. As a result, shame often becomes the emotional center of male identity.

Shame is one of the most destabilizing human emotions.

And when men lack the skills to face it, shame often transforms into:

• anger
• domination
• control
• violence

Violence is often a maladaptive attempt to escape humiliation.

This insight echoes the work of psychologists such as Alfred Adler, who over a 125 years ago, argued that aggression frequently emerges from feelings of inferiority and powerlessness.

But shame does not only operate at the individual level.

It also operates culturally.

Many men feel an unspoken pressure to conform to masculine norms that equate dominance with strength. Challenging misogyny can feel risky within male peer groups.

So men stay silent.

And silence protects the system.

The Grief Beneath the Violence

But beneath the shame, something deeper often exists.

Grief.

Men in our culture are rarely given permission to grieve—whether it is grief over loss, fear, inadequacy, or unmet longing.

Instead, men are taught to suppress vulnerability and replace it with control.

James Hillman once wrote that “spirit enters the soul through a wound.”

But if men are not allowed to acknowledge their wounds, the spirit has no place to enter.

The result is a masculinity that is emotionally armored, relationally disconnected, and spiritually impoverished.

Violence becomes one of the tragic ways that unprocessed pain expresses itself.

From Individuation to Unividuation

Carl Jung described individuation as the lifelong process of becoming psychologically whole.

But the crises we face today—gender violence, ecological collapse, political polarization—suggest that personal wholeness alone is not enough.

In my own work I’ve been exploring what I call Unividuation.

Unividuation suggests that the next developmental turn beyond individuation is a step into ethical responsibility within the web of relationships that make life possible.

It is the movement from:

I → We

From personal growth to relational accountability.

Seen through this lens, the challenge facing men today becomes clearer.

The task is not simply becoming psychologically aware.

The task is becoming responsible for the social field we participate in.

Masculinity at a Crossroads

We are living at a moment of profound cultural transition.

Old models of masculinity built on dominance and emotional suppression are breaking down. But new models have not yet fully emerged.

This transition creates anxiety—and sometimes backlash.

Some political and cultural leaders are attempting to restore older patriarchal narratives, presenting male dominance as strength and equality as a threat.

But history rarely moves backward for long.

The deeper movement of human consciousness tends toward greater dignity, equality, and mutual responsibility.

Jackson Katz’s work is part of this evolution.

Every Man Must Choose

The title of Katz’s book carries a profound message.

Ending violence against women is not the responsibility of a small group of activists.

It requires every man.

Every man participates in shaping the culture of masculinity.

Every man influences the behavior of other men.

Every man must decide whether he will remain silent—or step forward.

The transformation of masculinity will not happen through condemnation alone.

It will happen through men developing the courage to stand up and speak honestly with each other about dignity, respect, and accountability.

The Future of Masculinity

The deeper invitation behind Katz’s work is not simply about stopping violence.

It is about reimagining masculinity itself.

What if masculinity were defined not by dominance—but by stewardship?

Not by emotional suppression—but by relational courage?

Not by power over others—but by responsibility for the wellbeing of the whole?

This is the path of Unividuation.

It is the movement from isolated selfhood to what we might call the Universal We.

And it may be the most important psychological development of the twenty-first century.

An Open Invitation to All Men

Jackson Katz has spent decades helping men see what has long been hidden in plain sight:

The culture of masculinity is something men create together.

Which means men can also transform it together.

But transformation begins with a simple choice.

To stand up.
To speak out.
To challenge misogyny when it appears.
To support women not only privately but publicly.

The question facing men today is not whether we care about violence against women.

The real question is this:

Will we accept responsibility for ending it?

Because the future of our relationships, our communities, and perhaps even our democracy depends on how many men decide that the answer is yes.

Note: The book will be available March 19th.

Pre-order on Amazon: https://bit.ly/KatzEveryManUS

Order a discounted copy directly from the publisher here:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/every-man-9798765157138/

In the United States today, politics increasingly resembles a sporting event.

Citizens speak of “red teams” and “blue teams.”
Candidates are treated like athletes.
Victory matters more than wisdom.

Crowds cheer.
Opponents are booed.
Complex policy becomes simplified into slogans.

In a stadium, this makes sense.
In a democracy, it is dangerous.

When politics becomes a game, citizens become fans rather than participants, and governance becomes about defeating opponents rather than solving shared problems.

But the United States was never meant to be a contest between rival tribes.

It was meant to be a constitutional experiment in shared governance.

The phrase We the People does not say We the Parties.

It does not say We the Donors.

It says We the People.

Yet today many Americans experience politics as if they are members of opposing teams. Democrats and Republicans often speak about each other with the language of rivalry rather than citizenship. Social media amplifies this dynamic, rewarding outrage and tribal loyalty rather than thoughtful deliberation.

Political scientists call this phenomenon affective polarization: citizens not only disagree about policy but increasingly distrust and dislike one another.

When this occurs, democracy weakens.

Compromise becomes betrayal.
Dialogue becomes confrontation.
Governance becomes theater.

Ironically, the architects of the American republic warned precisely about this danger.

George Washington cautioned in his Farewell Address that political parties could become destructive factions, distracting public councils and weakening governance.

James Madison argued in Federalist No. 10 that factions driven by passion or economic interest could undermine the common good.

Thomas Jefferson worried that concentrated wealth would distort democracy and place power in the hands of elites rather than citizens.

Their concerns feel strikingly modern.

Money increasingly shapes political influence.
Partisan identity shapes perception of truth.
And many citizens feel that government serves powerful interests rather than the public good.

Yet the American experiment was never intended to function this way.

Democracy is not a sport.

It is a collective act of stewardship.

Its purpose is not to defeat fellow citizens but to deliberate together about how best to secure the promises articulated in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A healthy democracy requires leaders who behave not as partisan champions but as statesmen and stateswomen.

Such leaders understand that disagreement is inevitable in a diverse society, but they approach conflict with humility, ethical reflection, and a commitment to the whole.

America is not my America versus your America.

It is our America.

The flag does not belong to one party.
The Constitution does not belong to one ideology.
The nation itself is not a prize to be captured by whichever faction wins the next election.

It is a shared democratic inheritance.

And it is not for sale.

If the American experiment is to endure, citizens and leaders alike must rediscover an older civic ethic: governance grounded in dignity, accountability, and the common good.

The question before us is not which team wins.

The question is whether democracy itself will continue to function as a forum for the people, rather than a contest between factions.

More than a children’s tale, it was a psychological warning.

The great and terrible Wizard — booming voice, smoke, spectacle — is revealed to be a small, anxious man frantically pulling levers behind a curtain.

Baum understood something enduring:

Institutions can become organized defenses against shame.

And citizens can collude in the illusion.

From Personal Shame to Political Spectacle

When individuals cannot tolerate feelings of:

• Powerlessness

• Humiliation

• Inadequacy

• Shame

they may regulate through dominance or blame.

When cultures cannot tolerate collective anxiety — economic fragility, demographic change, moral uncertainty, ecological instability — they do something similar.

They create spectacle.

They amplify enemies.

They scapegoat.

They promise restoration of greatness.

Scapegoating is not strength.
It is anxiety regulation.

The Wizard Archetype

The Wizard represents inflated authority masking inner fragility.

He does not solve structural problems.
He distracts from them.

He assigns dramatic tasks.
He performs power.

When Toto pulls back the curtain, the Wizard cries:

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

That is the voice of exposed shame.

Why Democracies Are Psychologically Demanding

Democracy requires citizens who can:

• Tolerate ambiguity

• Admit error

• Share power

• Resist the seduction of certainty

When citizens cannot metabolize insecurity, they gravitate toward leaders who promise relief from complexity.

Authoritarian energy often arises not from strength —
but from collective fragility.

The Lesson of Oz

The Scarecrow already had intelligence.
The Tin Man already had heart.
The Lion already had courage.

Authority was projected outward.

Maturity required reclaiming it.

A democracy collapses into illusion when citizens outsource courage.

It stabilizes when citizens integrate it.

Looking Behind the Curtain

Looking behind the curtain is destabilizing.

It reveals:

• Human limitation

• Institutional fragility

• Corruption

• Ordinary motives

But this revelation is not catastrophe.

It is initiation.

The task of civic adulthood is not to destroy institutions.

It is to strip them of illusion and demand integrity.

The Ethical Invitation

The question is not whether Wizards exist.

The question is whether we need them to feel whole.

When we scapegoat, we are not solving problems.

We are regulating shame.

When we stand up — individually and collectively — we convert shame into responsibility.

The ability to respond with efficacy.

That is the work of civic maturation.

The curtain falls not when Wizards disappear.

It falls when citizens no longer need illusion.

But in the last 20 years, the story of Oz has expanded through the musical Wicked, inviting us into something deeper and more relational. Together, these stories show an important truth about becoming whole — not just as individuals, but as a community.

The Yellow Brick Road: Discovering the Self

Dorothy’s journey is a classic “individuation” story. She leaves home, meets new parts of herself (the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion), faces challenges, and returns wiser and more grounded. The Wizard — who turns out to be just a man behind a curtain — teaches her that real authority comes from within.

This is part of all our lives.

We spend years learning our strengths, healing old wounds, and becoming more fully ourselves. That inner work matters. It’s the foundation for a meaningful life.

The Green World of Wicked: Seeing the Whole

But Wicked offers a different lens. Instead of Dorothy’s view, we see Oz through the eyes of Elphaba — the so-called Wicked Witch. Suddenly the story becomes more complex. We’re asked to consider:

- How does society decide who is “good” and who is “wicked”?

- What stories do we inherit about each other — and who benefits from them?

- How do systems shape the destinies of individuals?

Elphaba isn’t evil; she’s misunderstood, marginalized, and blamed. Her story reminds us that suffering is often created not by personal failure but by systems, histories, and structures that divide us.

This shift from the individual to the collective is exactly the shift our world is calling for today.

Beyond the Hero: Toward Community and Connection

In Wicked, the Wizard is no longer a harmless trickster. He uses fear to control populations and silence dissent. Animals lose their voices. Propaganda becomes truth. And good-hearted people — like Glinda — get swept into the system without even realizing it.

This is not a villain we can defeat with a bucket of water.

This is the kind of challenge we face in real life:

- polarization

- mistrust

- scapegoating

- inequity

- ecological strain

- trauma passed down through generations

These problems can’t be solved by one hero. They require something larger — a shift in how we imagine ourselves in relation to one another.

The Move from Individuation to Unividuation

In my work — and in our community — I use the word Unividuation to describe this next step. If individuation is becoming whole within ourselves, unividuation is becoming whole with each other.

It means recognizing that:

- my healing is connected to your healing

- community shapes identity

- relationships are part of the psyche

- we rise and fall together

Seen this way, Wicked is a story about unividuation.

It shows us that we don’t become “good” alone — and we don’t become “wicked” alone either. We are shaped by the worlds we inhabit and the systems we uphold.

What These Stories Ask of Us Today

Oz invites us to ask two important questions:

1. Who am I?

(Dorothy’s question — the journey inward.)

2. Who are we?

(Elphaba’s question — the journey outward.)

Both matter.

But today, our world is asking us to lean into the second question:

How do we help each other become whole?

How do we build systems that support healing and dignity?

How do we show up in community?

Becoming the Whole Emerald City

The Emerald City — bright, shining, and green — becomes a symbol of what we might build together when personal growth meets collective responsibility.

Imagine a community where:

- people are seen in their complexity

- narratives are questioned instead of blindly repeated

- difference is met with curiosity, not fear

- systems evolve toward justice

- healing is shared

This is the invitation from Oz to Wicked, from individuation to unividuation:

to grow not only as individuals but as a relational, interconnected “we.”

In the end, Dorothy and Elphaba are on the same path — the path of awakening. One travels inward. One travels outward. Together they point the way toward a more compassionate world.

And perhaps that is the real magic of Oz:

not the Wizard, not the broomstick, not the ruby slippers —

but the reminder that we are already walking the road to wholeness,

and we walk it best when we walk it together.

In every decision, consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.

This was not poetic sentiment. It was structural foresight.

Today, most policy cycles revolve around the next election, the next news cycle, the next quarterly report. But ecological systems operate on centuries. Atmospheric carbon lingers for generations. Nuclear waste outlives empires. Artificial intelligence may reshape labor and warfare long after we are gone.

The question is no longer ideological.

It is civilizational:

Can we govern beyond our own lifespan?

Trauma Contracts Time

In my work on Unividuation, I have described trauma as a contraction of time and imagination. Under stress, individuals become reactive. So do nations.

Fear narrows vision.
Polarization fragments shared reality.
Urgency displaces foresight.

A traumatized society cannot easily think seven generations ahead.

It becomes preoccupied with immediate victory — political, economic, ideological. The long arc disappears.

And yet, without that arc, governance becomes extraction.

From Extraction to Stewardship

Modern nation-states emerged through expansion and industrial acceleration. Growth became synonymous with success. Fossil fuels became engines of power. Dominance became a measure of greatness.

But the planet has limits.

The Seventh Generation principle reframes sovereignty itself. Power is not possession. It is borrowed authority.

We do not own the land.
We hold it in trust.

To govern ethically in the 21st century requires shifting from extraction logic to stewardship logic.

That shift is not merely environmental. It touches:

• Climate policy

• Immigration and human dignity

• Artificial intelligence governance

• Nuclear restraint

• Economic inequality

• Democratic norms

Each decision either strengthens or weakens the world inherited by those not yet born.

The Nation as Ancestor

What if we evaluated leadership not by short-term dominance but by ancestral integrity?

What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

The Seventh Generation lens expands democracy from a contest of factions into a covenant across time.

It invites us to imagine children we will never meet asking:

Why did you not act when you knew?

Planetary Responsibility

In a globally interconnected world, ethical governance cannot stop at national borders.

Carbon crosses boundaries.
Oceans circulate globally.
Pandemics spread.
Technologies scale beyond jurisdiction.

The Seventh Generation principle now demands planetary thinking.

A mature nation must ask not only:

What benefits us?

But:

What stabilizes the biosphere?

What protects human dignity everywhere?

What reduces existential risk?

Unividuation as Civic Maturity

Unividuation names the movement from fragmentation to relational wholeness.

Applied civically, it means:

• Integrating ecological science with economic policy

• Embedding long-term impact assessments into law

• Treating climate stability as a constitutional responsibility

• Cultivating civic literacy and institutional trust

• Teaching young people not only how to compete, but how to steward

This is not utopianism. It is adaptive realism.

Short-term governance in a long-term crisis is structurally irresponsible.

A Closing Reflection

The Seventh Generation principle is not nostalgia. It is evolutionary necessity.

The republic’s future — and the planet’s — depends on our willingness to widen the moral container of governance.

The question before us is stark:

Will we govern as consumers of the present?
Or as ancestors of the future?

Unividuation suggests that ethical maturity — personal and collective — is measured by our capacity to integrate immediate need with long-term responsibility.

The children are already watching.

Even if they have not yet been born.

*Foot Note: Indigenous Influence and Federal Design

Scholars have noted that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, organized under the Great Law of Peace, predated the United States by centuries and embodied a federated model of governance in which distinct nations retained sovereignty while participating in collective deliberation. Benjamin Franklin and other colonial leaders were aware of this confederacy, and Franklin expressed admiration for its capacity to unite diverse polities. While historians debate the extent of direct constitutional borrowing, the structural resemblance between Haudenosaunee confederation and American federalism is philosophically significant. The United States emerged as a “United States” on a continent already familiar with unity-in-diversity as a political reality. The deeper ethical issue is not whether the Constitution is “derived from” the Great Law of Peace.

It is whether the United States can now consciously integrate the relational foresight — especially the Seventh Generation principle — into its evolving democratic framework.