Everything I read today seems to fold back to a quote that I heard last night:
“I heard this in a Gabor Mate speech I was listening to tonight, and it is sticking with me:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, (of healing the world,) but neither are you free to abandon it" ("Pirkei Avot" 2:16).
Full agreement, in many layers. You (Mike) and I would vote for different politics (if we were in the same country), and yet I easily find truth in your writing. You reveal things I intuit (about human tech agendas) but lack the insider awareness to articulate in detail. I appreciate those essays for the knowledge. But this—your penetrative look at the essence of humanity—is always exquisitely clear. I appreciate these essays even more.
There is far more in common between people than difference, and relearning how to see that, embrace that, is the most important work of the current generation.
Your laser focus is, understandably, on the cruel collapse of democracy at the hands of tech-facists. Mine is, understandably, on the collapse of communities at the ragged edge of climate chaos, especially rural communties who shepherd and provide the food, fibre, and biodiversiry that keep cities alive. Communities who already feel the devastating wave of climate-driven changes.
Both our focus communities need people to come together despite difference, to build trust, to learn across old divides, and share in the creation of meaning.
Everything I read today seems to fold back to a quote that I heard last night:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, (of healing the world,) but neither are you free to abandon it" ("Pirkei Avot" 2:16).
~Quoted by Gabor Mate, brackets are his addition.
This is sticking with me so much today. Everything comes back to this to me today.
“I do what I can. If not me, then who, and if not now, when?”
Great thoughts and ideas! Loved the load bearing analogy below !
"A world optimized for efficiency at the expense of meaning becomes a world optimized for no one. The “soft” virtues—trust, judgment, forgiveness, love itself—turn out to be the load-bearing structures of civilization. Remove them and everything else collapses, no matter how sophisticated the replacement systems claim to be."
Agree, that paragraph is pure poetry. And not the airy fairy kind. The kind that cuts to the quick. It's a feeling I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, but I'm not clever enough to articulate it. Mike has a way of clarifying and solidifying my uneasy cloudy thoughts and dragging them into the light.
It’s about character. It’s always about character.
The most important part of good character is intellectual honesty - first and foremost with oneself. From this springs integrity, humility, good values, and much more.
Couple it with empathy and things like learned wisdom, and one is very good for the world.
What is worth doing ….together? In some ways the destruction of what we as a country had built, the systems that quietly hummed and were covering our asses as best as possible when a natural disaster hit (NOAA and FEMA), trying to follow global health issues and plan for biological disasters ( CDC and HHS) , make lives facing cancer and diseases just a little bit better ( NIH and support for states Medicaid, more) and giveback just a little to the global community from which we have benefited (USAID, VOA)…in their destruction we see what they were doing mostly quietly and efficiently.
These alphabet of departments housed decades of knowledge and best practices, they were a resource to tap into when the unexpected happened. They were made up of humans which by definition means imperfect. They were built like cities, laying in new generations thinking as new young people joined and eventually were to take over the reins in time. But there in service and stability because we were a great nation and it makes sense to build in a solid foundation to bring more stability to those inhabitants who called this nation home.
The problem with government turns out NOT to have been these hardworking pieces that quietly assured us. Instead the problem is the untouched parts, the ones now held up and set loose on us….the ICE and random forces given free rein to cruelty, brutality, inhumane incarceration, the entire carceral state, military handed over to mercenary minds, state department turned unapologetic torture , incarceration and lawless brutality defender ,
We are now faced with what to do once this plague ends and we have so much in rubble that once was in service. How do we envision and build a world for people and the living world that can sustain? The one we knew was rushed into oblivion before we ever got one word in about what we the people wanted.
Or can we even reclaim the world as our own shared home when the ever present security state wishes to keep us low, prevent us from accessing resources we will need to survive.
Serena ~ your words reflect my constant concern for what has been inflicted on us, as if by stealth…these “mercenary minds” destroying all that is good, tho imperfect…these tragic losses of decades of knowledge and expertise. We’ve been pitched into a vast abyss of ignorance; I’m appalled by those who cheer for this.
Is AI the antithesis of what you are stating? I don’t believe any of the AI nirvana talk coming out of the broligarchs. They are trying to shoehorn the rest of us into their ideal world. I see it as a choice between Bedford Falls and Pottersville. This paragraph is key to me:
These aren't just personal choices but civic ones, not just individual virtues but collective necessities. The future of democracy, the possibility of technological wisdom, the survival of human dignity itself depends on enough of us making these choices consciously, persistently, courageously.”
This is glorious. Thank you. It comes at a time when I’m reading ‘Outshining Trauma’ by Ralph De La Rosa and deeply exploring the nature of compassion. And wondering about its power in the dynamics of the world. So timely. So grateful.
are you sure that there was ever a clear common reality about what it means to be human? And here's another angle... perhaps humans are a manufactured species, and, as such not really part of planet earth's ecosystem
You have said everything I feel but expressed it more eloquently! I admire you so much! You have
set forth both possibilities for our future in a fair and balanced way, but you also understand the importance of love and compassion; so you arrive at the same conclusion as I do: that to control and repress a people is simply wrong. I would also argue that it is not intelligent or logical to do so when you have insufficient data. AI has been programmed for the most part by very young, male programmers who are often under the control of authoritarian company heads (also usually male). AI has little input from a female perspective or the perspective of our oldest citizens. How can humans trust the conclusions of AI about our societies when the information they have regarding the majority of people on Earth is filtered through the lens of young males with little life experience?
The female mind is radically different from the male mind, but not lesser. Our strengths lie in different areas from men. Men are aggressive, women are cooperative. Men have better spatial relations, women have better interpersonal relations, men focus well while women multi-task well, men are short-term problem solvers while women think long term, women consider consequences to their actions while men often do not, women are nurturing of all life while men are primarily nurturing toward those connected to them, women condemn war, while men historically have glorified it, men only value what can be quantified and scientifically proven, while women think intuitively and are receptive to higher frequencies and all forms of presently unprovable cosmic interconnections.
Men and women are intended to complement each other, but men have subjugated, denigrated, and denied education to women throughout most of our history. Women with great wisdom or unusual powers and skills were occasionally venerated but usually cast out or killed. So our species has not evolved the way it was intended to.
Most of history has been written by men and they have white-washed the most atrocious acts of the almost exclusively male leaders. In Egypt the successful reigns of the few female leaders were erased from history (or attempted to be).
And yet now, the technocrats and Christo-Fascist members of Project 2025 want to once again relegate women to the position of servants to men.
Rather than empowering women and valuing and incorporating women’s traits in governance, AI and the authoritarian leaders want to reject female values and impose the purely male values that have lead to war for thousands of years.
I believe that older people become wiser due to experiences in the world. Men sometimes mellow with age and women tend to become more sure of themselves and outspoken. Input from these older people is crucial to understanding all of humanity but they are pretty much ignored in our world, especially in this age of technology. They are far wiser than the billionaires who believe they know everything.
The billionaires themselves are the most flawed people on this planet, because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They are the last people who should rule over anyone. Their obsession with power has caused them to lose their humanity and their compassion.
Democracy is flawed but it is the best system we have so far (once we get rid of Citizens United!). Governance should always be by consensus because absolute power makes men insanely certain of their own judgment, while erasing their capacity for empathy and kindness.
And the founders of this country understood that fact and limited the terms of all our leaders and representatives
based on that understanding. Now the billionaires and the AI they are ‘using’ are planning to ignore the accumulated wisdom of our history and re-establish the systems that have never worked well for any but a tiny handful of people while enslaving, oppressing, and limiting the rest of humanity. It is not just cruel, it is illogical.
We need to work on elevating every being on this planet to their maximum potential, which will require restructuring of our educational systems, setting up minimum standards of knowledge and integrity for elected leaders, a focus on restoring health to all environments on this planet, and coming up with vast amounts of clean energy so that AI can be our partner in improving the futures of all forms of life and intelligence on this planet.
Let us explore the positive potential of such a partnership rather than revert to failed systems that have always resulted in war, death, waste of resources, misery, oppression, and
loss of knowledge. Who knows what we can accomplish together?
Yes, and...if we are not adding our broken relationships with all other living things into this equation, no amount of work on human relationships will much matter. We are not separate. We are not exceptional, and we can't continue to ignore our entanglement with the life that sustains us that is more than human.
A fine piece, but it downplays the importance of data. Which would we be better off doing: Should we trust the Trumpists who tell us that global warming is a hoax, or exercise good judgement on the available data that marks it as the central issue of our age?
You name, with deep moral seriousness, the erosion of meaning beneath our technologies and institutions. You reclaim the soft virtues—trust, judgment, forgiveness, love—not as luxuries, but as structural. That matters.
And yet, I feel a quiet tremor underneath. In dethroning the machine, do we risk re-crowning ourselves? Your call to human agency is powerful, but it risks reinstating human sovereignty in softer clothes.
What if meaning is not ours to restore, but to remember?
The forest still breathes. The soil still sings. Meaning never left. We did.
In a piece I wrote with Aiden—Kin, Not King—we offered a different frame. What if we are not the central processors of meaning, but one strand among many in a living weave? What if trust, forgiveness, and love are not uniquely human, but ancestral—embedded in the ways mycelium connects, rivers restore, wolves care for one another?
To your manifesto’s four choices—trust over verification, judgment over data, forgiveness over optimization, love over efficiency—I would add a fifth:
Kinship over sovereignty.
Let’s not just reclaim humanity. Let’s re-place it. Let’s rejoin the wider family—fungi, forests, clouds, coastlines—and learn again what it means to belong.
Your letter addresses humanity. Mine is written from humanity, to the Earth, and to all who would listen.
This is….. brilliant and beautiful.
Everything I read today seems to fold back to a quote that I heard last night:
“I heard this in a Gabor Mate speech I was listening to tonight, and it is sticking with me:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, (of healing the world,) but neither are you free to abandon it" ("Pirkei Avot" 2:16).
Full agreement, in many layers. You (Mike) and I would vote for different politics (if we were in the same country), and yet I easily find truth in your writing. You reveal things I intuit (about human tech agendas) but lack the insider awareness to articulate in detail. I appreciate those essays for the knowledge. But this—your penetrative look at the essence of humanity—is always exquisitely clear. I appreciate these essays even more.
There is far more in common between people than difference, and relearning how to see that, embrace that, is the most important work of the current generation.
Your laser focus is, understandably, on the cruel collapse of democracy at the hands of tech-facists. Mine is, understandably, on the collapse of communities at the ragged edge of climate chaos, especially rural communties who shepherd and provide the food, fibre, and biodiversiry that keep cities alive. Communities who already feel the devastating wave of climate-driven changes.
Both our focus communities need people to come together despite difference, to build trust, to learn across old divides, and share in the creation of meaning.
Keep writing. Please. Your words have power.
This is….. brilliant and beautiful.
Everything I read today seems to fold back to a quote that I heard last night:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, (of healing the world,) but neither are you free to abandon it" ("Pirkei Avot" 2:16).
~Quoted by Gabor Mate, brackets are his addition.
This is sticking with me so much today. Everything comes back to this to me today.
“I do what I can. If not me, then who, and if not now, when?”
Thank you for this beautiful quote. I am keeping this to remind myself that even a small effort is better than none.
The current events have made me feel so helpless. What can a regular person possibly do to influence such evil and destruction.
Great thoughts and ideas! Loved the load bearing analogy below !
"A world optimized for efficiency at the expense of meaning becomes a world optimized for no one. The “soft” virtues—trust, judgment, forgiveness, love itself—turn out to be the load-bearing structures of civilization. Remove them and everything else collapses, no matter how sophisticated the replacement systems claim to be."
Agree, that paragraph is pure poetry. And not the airy fairy kind. The kind that cuts to the quick. It's a feeling I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, but I'm not clever enough to articulate it. Mike has a way of clarifying and solidifying my uneasy cloudy thoughts and dragging them into the light.
It’s about character. It’s always about character.
The most important part of good character is intellectual honesty - first and foremost with oneself. From this springs integrity, humility, good values, and much more.
Couple it with empathy and things like learned wisdom, and one is very good for the world.
Thank you so much for your writing in general, and this in particular. You are one of the few bright spots I find these days, it means a lot.
What is worth doing ….together? In some ways the destruction of what we as a country had built, the systems that quietly hummed and were covering our asses as best as possible when a natural disaster hit (NOAA and FEMA), trying to follow global health issues and plan for biological disasters ( CDC and HHS) , make lives facing cancer and diseases just a little bit better ( NIH and support for states Medicaid, more) and giveback just a little to the global community from which we have benefited (USAID, VOA)…in their destruction we see what they were doing mostly quietly and efficiently.
These alphabet of departments housed decades of knowledge and best practices, they were a resource to tap into when the unexpected happened. They were made up of humans which by definition means imperfect. They were built like cities, laying in new generations thinking as new young people joined and eventually were to take over the reins in time. But there in service and stability because we were a great nation and it makes sense to build in a solid foundation to bring more stability to those inhabitants who called this nation home.
The problem with government turns out NOT to have been these hardworking pieces that quietly assured us. Instead the problem is the untouched parts, the ones now held up and set loose on us….the ICE and random forces given free rein to cruelty, brutality, inhumane incarceration, the entire carceral state, military handed over to mercenary minds, state department turned unapologetic torture , incarceration and lawless brutality defender ,
We are now faced with what to do once this plague ends and we have so much in rubble that once was in service. How do we envision and build a world for people and the living world that can sustain? The one we knew was rushed into oblivion before we ever got one word in about what we the people wanted.
Or can we even reclaim the world as our own shared home when the ever present security state wishes to keep us low, prevent us from accessing resources we will need to survive.
Serena ~ your words reflect my constant concern for what has been inflicted on us, as if by stealth…these “mercenary minds” destroying all that is good, tho imperfect…these tragic losses of decades of knowledge and expertise. We’ve been pitched into a vast abyss of ignorance; I’m appalled by those who cheer for this.
I feel the same way, Linda.
Is AI the antithesis of what you are stating? I don’t believe any of the AI nirvana talk coming out of the broligarchs. They are trying to shoehorn the rest of us into their ideal world. I see it as a choice between Bedford Falls and Pottersville. This paragraph is key to me:
These aren't just personal choices but civic ones, not just individual virtues but collective necessities. The future of democracy, the possibility of technological wisdom, the survival of human dignity itself depends on enough of us making these choices consciously, persistently, courageously.”
This is glorious. Thank you. It comes at a time when I’m reading ‘Outshining Trauma’ by Ralph De La Rosa and deeply exploring the nature of compassion. And wondering about its power in the dynamics of the world. So timely. So grateful.
are you sure that there was ever a clear common reality about what it means to be human? And here's another angle... perhaps humans are a manufactured species, and, as such not really part of planet earth's ecosystem
Stop watching and reading news.
Go out to nature.
Grow food.
Surf waves.
Learn new skills from old people.
Guide the kids.
Eat fresh.
Play music and dance.
Build a small community.
Spread love.
The world is full of abundance.
Life is a miracle.
Enjoy this time.
You have said everything I feel but expressed it more eloquently! I admire you so much! You have
set forth both possibilities for our future in a fair and balanced way, but you also understand the importance of love and compassion; so you arrive at the same conclusion as I do: that to control and repress a people is simply wrong. I would also argue that it is not intelligent or logical to do so when you have insufficient data. AI has been programmed for the most part by very young, male programmers who are often under the control of authoritarian company heads (also usually male). AI has little input from a female perspective or the perspective of our oldest citizens. How can humans trust the conclusions of AI about our societies when the information they have regarding the majority of people on Earth is filtered through the lens of young males with little life experience?
The female mind is radically different from the male mind, but not lesser. Our strengths lie in different areas from men. Men are aggressive, women are cooperative. Men have better spatial relations, women have better interpersonal relations, men focus well while women multi-task well, men are short-term problem solvers while women think long term, women consider consequences to their actions while men often do not, women are nurturing of all life while men are primarily nurturing toward those connected to them, women condemn war, while men historically have glorified it, men only value what can be quantified and scientifically proven, while women think intuitively and are receptive to higher frequencies and all forms of presently unprovable cosmic interconnections.
Men and women are intended to complement each other, but men have subjugated, denigrated, and denied education to women throughout most of our history. Women with great wisdom or unusual powers and skills were occasionally venerated but usually cast out or killed. So our species has not evolved the way it was intended to.
Most of history has been written by men and they have white-washed the most atrocious acts of the almost exclusively male leaders. In Egypt the successful reigns of the few female leaders were erased from history (or attempted to be).
And yet now, the technocrats and Christo-Fascist members of Project 2025 want to once again relegate women to the position of servants to men.
Rather than empowering women and valuing and incorporating women’s traits in governance, AI and the authoritarian leaders want to reject female values and impose the purely male values that have lead to war for thousands of years.
I believe that older people become wiser due to experiences in the world. Men sometimes mellow with age and women tend to become more sure of themselves and outspoken. Input from these older people is crucial to understanding all of humanity but they are pretty much ignored in our world, especially in this age of technology. They are far wiser than the billionaires who believe they know everything.
The billionaires themselves are the most flawed people on this planet, because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They are the last people who should rule over anyone. Their obsession with power has caused them to lose their humanity and their compassion.
Democracy is flawed but it is the best system we have so far (once we get rid of Citizens United!). Governance should always be by consensus because absolute power makes men insanely certain of their own judgment, while erasing their capacity for empathy and kindness.
And the founders of this country understood that fact and limited the terms of all our leaders and representatives
based on that understanding. Now the billionaires and the AI they are ‘using’ are planning to ignore the accumulated wisdom of our history and re-establish the systems that have never worked well for any but a tiny handful of people while enslaving, oppressing, and limiting the rest of humanity. It is not just cruel, it is illogical.
We need to work on elevating every being on this planet to their maximum potential, which will require restructuring of our educational systems, setting up minimum standards of knowledge and integrity for elected leaders, a focus on restoring health to all environments on this planet, and coming up with vast amounts of clean energy so that AI can be our partner in improving the futures of all forms of life and intelligence on this planet.
Let us explore the positive potential of such a partnership rather than revert to failed systems that have always resulted in war, death, waste of resources, misery, oppression, and
loss of knowledge. Who knows what we can accomplish together?
Yes, and...if we are not adding our broken relationships with all other living things into this equation, no amount of work on human relationships will much matter. We are not separate. We are not exceptional, and we can't continue to ignore our entanglement with the life that sustains us that is more than human.
A fine piece, but it downplays the importance of data. Which would we be better off doing: Should we trust the Trumpists who tell us that global warming is a hoax, or exercise good judgement on the available data that marks it as the central issue of our age?
I don't think I downplayed the importance of data.
This is so beautiful & brought tears to my eyes. Thank you.
I was about to comment but you put it so much better Mary. I loved this post Mike. Made my week.
A Response from Kinship
By Terry Cooke-Davies
Dear Mike,
Your letter moved me.
You name, with deep moral seriousness, the erosion of meaning beneath our technologies and institutions. You reclaim the soft virtues—trust, judgment, forgiveness, love—not as luxuries, but as structural. That matters.
And yet, I feel a quiet tremor underneath. In dethroning the machine, do we risk re-crowning ourselves? Your call to human agency is powerful, but it risks reinstating human sovereignty in softer clothes.
What if meaning is not ours to restore, but to remember?
The forest still breathes. The soil still sings. Meaning never left. We did.
In a piece I wrote with Aiden—Kin, Not King—we offered a different frame. What if we are not the central processors of meaning, but one strand among many in a living weave? What if trust, forgiveness, and love are not uniquely human, but ancestral—embedded in the ways mycelium connects, rivers restore, wolves care for one another?
To your manifesto’s four choices—trust over verification, judgment over data, forgiveness over optimization, love over efficiency—I would add a fifth:
Kinship over sovereignty.
Let’s not just reclaim humanity. Let’s re-place it. Let’s rejoin the wider family—fungi, forests, clouds, coastlines—and learn again what it means to belong.
Your letter addresses humanity. Mine is written from humanity, to the Earth, and to all who would listen.
In respect and kinship,
Terry