Fighting For Reality, For Real

Our assumptions about how reality works define the outer boundaries of what we think is possible. If you think time has to be universal and not perspective-dependent, as dominant Euro-Western thought insisted before Einstein, then the black hole-proximate time dilation experienced by Matthew McConaughey's astronaut character in Christopher Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar seems less possible than it is. If you think humans or our food systems are basically separate and self-contained, rather than deeply entangled in complex and delicate multispecies ecologies we don't remotely understand, then successful Mars colonization seems more possible than it is. We all carry around and apply these kinds of reality assumptions all the time. And they're just as impactful for Earth-bound political imagination.

As I described in the prior post, the fascists currently in power at the top of all branches of the U.S. government have a simplifying (mis)understanding of reality that puts separateness, essentialism, and universal hierarchy at the core of how things work—and themselves at or near the top of the hierarchy, of course. That static, black-and-white, map-like metaphysics goes pretty far to explain why they see everything as zero-sum competition, and mutually regenerative coexistence as "unrealistic" and "irrational." The complexity-stripping view of people (and other entities) as isolated individuals and separate kinds, defined by determinate attributes and rankable by their conformity to immutable ideals, provides load-bearing support for all their bigotries and control fantasies as well as their many insecurities.

Luckily, most human beings are less committed to fascists' mistaken assumptions about existence. Even without awareness of how converging evidence firmly establishes the above view as empirically as well as morally wrong, most of us recognize how interdependence, contextuality, complexity, and open possibilities are just as fundamental to how things work, if not more so. Most of us value people, places, and things beyond dollars and dominance. Still, many of us still get our thinking about political possibilities somewhat stuck within the confined boundaries of their false reality. Sometimes they impose them by law or other force; sometimes simplifications are just seductive. But I maintain that one of the main barriers to uniting effectively against fascism is just our lack of shared recognition of the shape of the fight we're in. It is, at base, a fight over reality. They want to terraform it to fit their maps; we want to preserve its possibilities. And reality is favorable, high-ground terrain for those of us in the anti-fascist majority. Huzzah! The question is whether we can make reality matter politically in time to save what we love from unrecoverable systemic collapse, especially with respect to our climate and biosphere.

I started this blog to share tools for recognizing the reality fight that we're in, staying oriented toward the less-wrong and more reality-aligned side of that fight, and, ultimately, winning it. Most of these tools I didn't come up with, but they're not as well known as they should be. One cheesy little mnemonic tool I did come up with, and I'll save it for a future post after I've laid more groundwork. For the most part, these tools can be summed up as thinking of things as relational processes instead of separate, static entities. Things is used here in the broadest possible sense to include people, categories, abstractions, institutions, and so on, not intending to dehumanize us as "mere" things. This is like systems thinking, leveled up. People and events aren't just embedded in dynamical systems. They are dynamical systems.

I've used more bullet points than I'd like in these early blog posts. I just can't resist the temptation to preview the breadth of examples I'll eventually focus on in more depth. It's so powerful and fun that basic comparative metaphysics and its map-terrain gradient apply to literally every thing, by definition, without exception. Like a hammer for which everything actually is a nail. So, I'm going to continue that at least a little while longer, with a dozen examples of ways process-relational tools can help us in our fight for an anti-fascist, inclusive, regenerative future.

• Expanding imagination. More widespread understanding of the world as actually process-relational can shift the Overton Window in a regenerative direction, encompassing more alternative possibilities.
  • I've been playing around with the draft model below. It's based on the idea that map-metaphysics condemns us to on-your-own individualism without diverse individuality, while the process-relational terrain of reality offers the opposite, individuality without individualism. One could certainly add more political-economic labels than I had room for, but at the least, it shows that the ideas that capitalist forms have zero alternatives or one (Marxism) are too limiting. The United States' status quo is roughly represented by the dashed circle, and the fringe of our current debates by the dashed line in the top right quadrant. We can cross that line, though: first with imagination and interstitial experimentation, and then more widely in material reality and law. Moreover, there are many paths and ways of being that can exist side by side there. They're represented by the three top right arrows.

• Bolstering confidence. Anti-fascists are often well aware that fascists' policies are unrealistic as well as immoral, but I rarely see folks call out fascists' whole worldview as empirically false and irrational. However, relying only on morality to condemn fascism is wobbly. Not only is it easier for them to brush off as mere opinion or sour grapes, it also undermines our own conviction that the world we want is not just possible but already here underneath suppressive illusions.
  • More than a century ago, W.B. Yeats wrote that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," and I for one think it we ought to flip that.
• Orienting toward shared goals. Consistently applied process-relational thinking points as directly away from degenerate fascism as possible. It's an asset to have that directional guidance, like a magnetic compass or moss on the shaded side of trees, to keep us from getting turned around and lost. Life is pretty disorienting, after all. It's also a reminder and screening tool that we can't reach anti-fascist goals with fascist means. Top-down control, othering, narrow-minded reductionism, purity-seeking perfectionism, flattening homogenization, and straight-up authoritarianism show up on the left too, and asking "is this process-relational?" could keep us more on track.
• Bridging across difference. The compass guidance can help us see that we're already more aligned on our respective paths than we sometimes admit. Different non-fascist ideologies, inside-game and outside-game approaches, science and humanities disciplines, and cultural traditions all point the same direction at least in a very general way, and that very general way is enough to unite us against fascism and toward better shared futures if we operationalize it. That means, in part, we need to deescalate all conflict that is not with the enemy (credit to Margaret Killjoy for that nice turn of phrase). Uncomfortable solidarity is the only way forward. Prioritizing relationality doesn't mean erasing boundaries or lowering standards, but it does mean approaching difference (from people who aren't committed fascists) with a default of curiosity rather than condemnation.
• Understanding things as changeable. I don't mean just in the broader sense of expanding the Overton Window, but ourselves and other specific people and things. Understanding ourselves as relational processes is a good psychological hack anyway, basically amounting to a growth mindset without the capitalist baggage. Understanding other people as changeable has to come with understanding that we can't control their change, and sometimes they're just too far gone, but sometimes bridging efforts may be worth an attempt. And understanding public opinion, electoral rules, and institutions like the Democratic Party as changeable, rather than as givens, could really improve our collective thinking about paths out of our current mess.
• Being more process-savvy. Building on that last point, putting process at the top of our thinking helps find intervention points to create conditions to (create conditions to...) exploit windows of opportunity and durably succeed at transformative positive change. We can consider process elements like momentum spirals, tipping points, differentiated roles/lanes, multisolving, and orders of operations, which are of course different from order of importance; sometimes unsatisfying prerequisites have to be done on the way to larger wins.
• Leveraging all scales. We'll never have fascists' top-down, lockstep, vertically integrated megachurch model for disseminating information and power, but what we do have is ultimately better. Like an ecosystem, we can network horizontally, diagonally, and bottom-up, a much sturdier web of relational processes. Events at cellular, individual, community, subnational, national, systemic, and global scales all mutually impact one another: think Covid-19 mutation, agency decisions, global travel patterns... Likewise, past and future timespans from moments to multi-century trends (and even geological scales) all matter. Everything we do can make a difference. People think about time travel and worry about how stepping on a butterfly might change the future, but then fail to translate that to their own choice whether to help a stranger. Internalizing that reality is a dynamic, fractal-esque mesh of relational processes might help that.
• Getting facts less wrong. This does matter. While going through the world fact-free seems not to hurt fascists in the short run, it does make them underestimate their opposition in predictable ways that we can take advantage of. Being the reality-based community also should benefit our political strategizing. Process-relational tools like diverse perspective sourcing, error correction, and avoidance of decontextualizing oversimplifications can help validate truths and best practices and distinguish them from fiction and fallacy. (They all counsel getting rid of those creaky old Democratic Party consultants.)
• Integrating knowledges. Siloed knowledge is far less powerful than integrated knowledge. Fascists know this, which is why they divide and conquer their opposition while seeking to integrate our data for dangerous purposes of control. Our side should go further in our own way. With our unruly big tent and our reality-based strength in academia, we non-fascists have more and deeper interdisciplinary and cross-cultural knowledge at our disposal than they do. There's a backlog of democratic and regenerative solutions just waiting for willing implementers. Not to mention, our problems are intertwined, so our solutions have to be, too. Better integrating all that knowledge would be fabulously dangerous to oppressive power structures.
  • This also relates to epistemic humility and avoiding reification of concepts. Moderate liberalism, leftist Marxism, libertarianism, and classical conservatism are all prone to their own forms of reductionism and model reification, but the partial knowledge they've each developed can be read through rather than against one another. The world is complex enough that everyone can learn something from everyone. This more diffractive and less oppositional approach can let us glean patterns and higher understanding from both common ground and differences. My favorite social-ecological economics textbooks do this well, pulling from diverse directions inside and outside economics. And guess what? It turns out looking at what both Keynesianism and Marxism have to say doesn't make the result less radical. Less Euro-Western-based frameworks expand these integrative possibilities by orders of magnitude, and they should be at the forefront.
• Telling a shared story. The knowledges that point to process-relational reality are our hard-won inheritance as humans. Everyone deserves to know at least the gist. Uniting these knowledges around the shared theme of process-relationality makes them more accessible. I hope future posts here on quantum physics, immunology, cognitive science, plant biology, and a zillion other possible topics will illustrate this accessibility hook in action. The historic and ongoing takeover of much of the world by flattening and dominating map-metaphysics ideologies, and the ever-present and sometimes successful resistance, also present a grand narrative arc that everyone's already embedded within—with their choice of side.
• Preserving hope. It's already too late for lots of people, places and things, but in a world unshackled from map-metaphysics absolutes, there's never any once-and-for-all too late. The future's always indeterminate and unknowable (yes, even to the bestest AI imaginable), and it's always worth the fight.
• Maybe, at the margins, winning over some folks on the other side. Many fascism supporters and apologists are gone, for all practical purposes and relevant timeframes. And many will react extremely negatively to having the load-bearing assumptions of their extractive, supremacist worldviews kicked at. It can be counterproductive to try. But lots still have some lingering tethers to reality and the non-fascist values that have long endured in just about every religion and culture. That creates cognitive dissonance. That, in turn, at least occasionally creates opportunities for meeting people where they are and encouraging curiosity (maybe FOMO?) about better ways to support their values and emotional needs.
  • Substantively, process-relationality offers a world of inherent belonging and validity, with no expendable bottom rung of society to ground last-place aversion. It offers relief from existential gender anxieties, because it turns out sexes aren't defined by binary exclusion and there's no ideal to fall short of. (Phew!) It offers ways forward for the best of Euro-Western culture(s), from the Ancient Mediterranean to the Enlightenment to modern sciences and humanities, to carry forward and contribute to a shared future. It recognizes the need for deep change while rejecting "move fast and break things" hubris, since we do need to conserve a lot. It's more rational than rationalism. It even offers a sort of "they don't want you to know about this!" anti-elitist appeal, without all the conspiracy theorizing.
  • Procedurally, process-relationality is very accessible. There's always some connection between politics and someone's self-interest that can be used as an intro hook, like disabled loved ones threatened by RFK Jr.'s eugenics, or how Trump's zero-sum dominance games on tariffs interfered with availability of the Nintendo Switch 2. It's sort of a sneaky side-attack on bigotries that doesn't immediately raise defensive hackles, because there's obviously no fault in not already having been taught comparative metaphysics. And though it goes to foundational assumptions, in practice, process-relational thinking can be practiced gradually, without any rupture or (de)conversion.

That just scratches the surface of how useful I've found process-relational thinking in my own personal life, professional life, and political engagement. No matter how useful process-relational thinking may be, though, is it really correct? All my points sort of depend on that, yet so far I've only really asserted that it's been convergently established. Maybe that's been putting the cart before the horse. From here on out, there will be a lot more evidence-building.