Let’s start with a story

Ash is a person, someone a lot like you or me. Ash works hard, doing their best with the juggling act we are all faced with – responsibilities at work, keeping kids safe and healthy, maintaining a home, staying in touch with friends and family. Ash has a partner named Morgan. The two of them are tied together in many ways, and once things were good between them. Sometimes things are still good.

But very often Ash comes home, exhausted after a long day, to find that Morgan is upset. Maybe Ash said the wrong thing that morning; Morgan has mental health issues and small things can cause them to spiral easily. Maybe Ash – who does all the shopping – didn’t buy the right food. Maybe Morgan, who doesn’t work and has spent the whole day online, is upset about something that happened there. Maybe one of the kids (who Ash picked up from school) says something that Morgan takes the wrong way.

It doesn’t really matter: Morgan explodes. The details vary, but a few things remain constant in what happens next.

Thing 1: Ash – the person who is responsible, the one who is the adult¹ in the relationship, the one who brings in the money and solves the problems and takes care of the kids and keeps everything working – Ash is the one on the defensive. The discussion focuses on Morgan (who has the emotional control of a toddler) as the person who has been wronged. Morgan can’t go more than a few minutes without lying or insulting Ash, but the question is always: what did Ash do wrong? How can Ash make things better? How can Ash work harder to understand Morgan? How can Ash ensure that an explosion like this doesn’t happen again?

(You and I both know that it will happen again. It always does.)

Thing 2: If Ash tries to defend or stand up for themselves, it always makes it worse. After all, Ash should have known better because Morgan can’t help themselves. That’s just how Morgan is! Morgan can’t be blamed because Morgan doesn’t have all the advantages² Ash has. Ash is elitist³ and condescending; this is evident whenever they try to explain their side of things because they use words Morgan doesn’t know or back up their claims with things they’ve read or rely on logic that Morgan can’t follow. Usually these arguments turn into a fight about something Ash said in the course of defending themselves, and Ash ends up apologising.⁴ Morgan rarely if ever apologises.

(Despite being smart and articulate, Ash can never seem to avoid misspeaking in these conversations. Both of them believe this is because Ash actually does unconsciously look down on Morgan and therefore does unconsciously want to be cruel.)

Thing 3: The past never seems to matter, or is constantly rewritten. Morgan often refers to things that Ash could have sworn didn’t happen, or happened in the opposite way, or happened in a context that yields a completely different interpretation. Conversely, if Ash brings up something that Morgan did, Morgan usually just denies it outright; if the evidence is undeniable, Ash becomes the one at fault for being unable to move on from the past or bringing it up at a bad time. “Am I losing my mind?” Ash often wonders, because the two of them seem to be operating in such different realities. At one point Ash started maintaining records of what happened, only to be accused of “keeping score” and being more concerned about being right than being a good partner. After years of this, Ash no longer entirely trusts their own perceptions. It doesn’t matter anyway, because, regardless, Ash’s issues always end up getting dropped. Ash still hopes that there will be a time to bring them up later when Morgan is in the right frame of mind.

(There never is a “later”, because Morgan is never in the right frame of mind.)

Thing 4: A few times Ash has tried to talk to other people about how awful this dynamic feels. But Morgan, for all their faults, is very charming, especially to outsiders – this is one of the things that attracted Ash in the first place. Morgan is masterful at playing observers like a fiddle, and nobody seems to believe what Ash has to say. After all, Morgan is charismatic and manipulative while Ash is tentative, nuanced, and quick to shoulder the blame. “It takes two people to have a bad relationship,” one friend tells Ash. “Focus on what you can do and how you’re causing some of this.” Another’s advice is to “be the better person” and “go high” instead of dwelling on any harms that might have been caused by Morgan. Nearly everyone seems to agree that if a relationship has issues, both sides must be at fault. And since Ash is the responsible one, the divisions will only be healed if Ash is willing to stop asking anything of Morgan, to be even more conciliatory, to swallow their pain.

(That’s if anybody even acknowledges Ash’s pain at all. Ash has mostly learned not to show it, because they are usually mocked as a snowflake or told to toughen up or scolded for overreacting.)

Thing 5: Morgan won’t leave Ash alone. When Morgan’s friends are over, Ash is required to join in. A lot of what the friends do is put down other people (including Ash), but if Ash objects, they are told they’re a boring scold who can’t take a joke. If Ash tries to depart, they are guilt-tripped and informed that this is proof they don’t care about building bridges with Morgan. When Ash tries to hang out with their own friends, Morgan pouts at being left out and insists on joining in, only to spend the entire time making fun of them and complaining about how abnormal they are. Morgan doesn’t want to spend time with their children⁵ but refuses to let Ash and the kids do fun things alone, saying Ash is too permissive and not a good parent.

(Sometimes Ash thinks Morgan doesn’t seem to like them much – but can’t figure out why Morgan would obsess about them like this if that were true. Perhaps this is how Morgan shows love?)

This is not healthy

Words like “abuse” are flung around rather freely these days, but I think you will agree with me that this is an abusive relationship dynamic. Most people would see it this way.

They would also wonder why Ash doesn’t see it. Why does Ash persist in trying to resolve things with Morgan? Why does Ash keep coming back, only to be abused again? Why doesn’t Ash fight back? Why doesn’t Ash leave?

Now, keep those questions in mind but replace “Morgan” with MAGA and “Ash” with Democrats.⁶ Go back and read with that in mind.

It all still fits, doesn’t it?

Have I stretched this metaphor too far? I don’t think so. If anything, as I’ve been writing I’ve been cringing a little at how unsubtle it is: it didn’t require much in the way of creativity at all. I basically just thought about the dynamic in the US⁷ and slapped different names on things.⁸

Back to our questions. Why doesn’t Ash see it? Maybe a better question is, why haven’t we seen it? So much endless ink has been spilled about every conceivable aspect of the political situation in the US, about the election, about Trump, about the burgeoning fascism on our doorstep, but nothing I’ve read – certainly nothing in the overall zeitgeist – has grappled with this fairly obvious fact: we’re in an abusive relationship with Trump and MAGA, and we should always act with that in mind.⁹

I think it’s very important to talk about this. Without seeing this dynamic for what it is, we can’t recognise why we are trapped in it and what role we are playing in it. We need clarity about what is going on in order to do the psychological work we need to do on ourselves in order to survive what is coming.

Living in denial

There are a lot of reasons people can’t (or wilfully won’t) recognise their abusive relationships¹⁰ for what they are, and I see these things playing out everywhere right now. Many people – from pundits, politicians, and thinkers, to family, friends, and colleagues – seem stuck in a persistent desire to view what’s going on as just another variant on normal disagreements or normal politics. Those of us who see it otherwise are told we are overreacting or panicking or foolish.¹¹

Here are some of the main reasons I think people stay in denial. A fun¹² game is to find examples of this happening in real life. You won’t have to look very hard, I promise.

Normalcy bias

A huge thing that afflicts decision-making in all walks of life is that we have a strong bias to think that the future will be like the past. This is actually very sensible, because most of the time, the future is like the past. However, this bias is catastrophic when change is rapid. When a natural disaster looms, this bias causes people to downplay the effects and thus stay in its path (and die). When faced with a disastrous diagnosis, this bias causes people to deny it and thus delay treatment (and die). And when people whose only experience is of healthy relationships¹³ are in an abusive one, they will stay for far too long because cannot accept the abusive behaviour for what it is.¹⁴ Sometimes these people die as well.

When it comes to Trump, the normality bias is especially strong among the people who should otherwise be our country’s strongest line of defence: individuals who head our institutions, universities, journalists. Unless they study authoritarianism or have other relevant background, these are the people whose entire experience and nature support the belief that institutions will save us. Their life history is one in which political opponents agree at least on fundamental principles of democracy, in which systems do reliably stop bad people, in which the arc of the moral universe bends in the right direction. To them, it is the people who are warning them about the excesses of Trump and his cronies who are dangerous because we are (in their view) causing division and panic.

Very often these people pride themselves on being especially rational and intelligent. This means they are fools of a very special sort. They consistently discount emotions, including their own, that blare loud warning signals about what is going on. They are so confident in the strength of their intellect and impartiality that they are blind to the large extent to which their own reasoning is distorted by bias.

These people’s reasoning is deeply compromised because of their inability to recognise what is going on. It starts but does not end with the normality bias. They indulge in all of the same biases Ash does – holding Democrats and progressives to far higher standards than Trump or MAGA; implicitly seeing the left as the only ones with agency, the ones who must change, whereas Trump is more like a force of nature; interpreting everything through the lens of the political horserace; viewing political differences as “just politics” and deciding that anybody who is upset or emotional is ipso facto unreasonable; assuming that the truth must always be somewhere between the two sides, and that democrats are just as extreme as Trump is; writing countless articles about how democrats need to “reach out” to conservatives, but none about how MAGA should reach out in the other direction; making calls for unity which are really calls for the left to surrender; failing to report or emphasise democratic successes or even basic pertinent facts of the matter, to the point that nobody even knows about them. I could go on and on and on and on.

People suffering from normality bias are not actually on the side of MAGA, but they are so wrapped up in their denial that they might as well be. Their paralysis and inability to act appropriately is one of the main reasons Trump paid no real penalty for J6, why our information systems are unregulated cesspools, why our courts are stacked, why voter suppression and gerrymandering are the norm in some places, and why so many of our institutions have capitulated so much to the extreme right. Their refusal to update their prior beliefs and face reality as it stands now is part of why huge numbers voted in appalling ignorance of the actual records of the candidates. These people are the useful idiots for the Trump administration and its oligarchic backers. They are quislings who don’t even realise they are quislings.

“They’re not bad people”

Another reason that abusive relationships are hard to recognise is that we tend to think that a person has to be basically unsalvageably evil before we can legitimately label them as abusive. And while in my opinion folks like Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Elon Musk are as close to evil¹⁵ as anyone is, a lot of MAGA folks¹⁶ are more like you and me than they are like Trump. Even the MAGA people who recapitulate the dynamic above can be extremely generous and friendly and kind in the right circumstances or to the right people. Many of them love their kids and contribute to charity and would show up to pull you out of a ditch if you were their neighbour and they had a tow truck.

In the same way, abusers are often not wholly bad people. And even the worst people often have very sympathetic reasons for being the way that they are – terrible childhoods, unresolved trauma, addictions, untreated illnesses, all manner of awful life circumstances. We do not want to give up on them or be cruel, and identifying someone as abusive might seem like we’re doing that. It feels callous and extreme, like we’re being “just as bad” as they are if we not only recognise the dynamic for what it is but also to call it out in plain and simple language.

It does feel bad, and we should honour that part of us that feels that way. Empathy is a good thing most of the time.

However, empathy is not good when it keeps you in an abusive situation. To make matters worse, it’s not just empathy that’s doing it; one of the most pernicious and soul-destroying aspects of being in an abusive dynamic like this is that many of your good characteristics are turned against you. Your responsibility and competence are used as reasons to deny recognition of the ways in which you are being victimised. Your kindness is taken advantage of over and over again, and your desire to be kind is why you keep lining up to be taken advantage of even more. Your intelligence is derided as arrogance, your competence is dismissed as elitism, your willingness to help is called controlling, your generosity is interpreted as weakness, and your supportiveness is deeply resented even as it’s continually relied on.

It can feel like stopping the abusive dynamic requires you to renounce your good characteristics, because they contribute so much of the fuel on which the dynamic runs. It can feel like leaving requires you to turn off your empathy, drop your responsibility to others, stop fixing things, let people fail, let people hurt. We don’t want to be the kind of person who would do any of those things, so maybe we should just keep trying, and maybe things will get better if we just hold on for long enough.

Recognise that feeling?

It’s a trap.

Nobody ever deserves to be abused, but we contribute to this dynamic to the extent that we continue to play our part in it. Doing the same thing but trying even harder never repairs a broken situation. We need to recognise that we play two very crucial roles in perpetuating the abuse cycle, and then we need to stop playing those roles.

The first role we play is that, like Ash in the story above, we provide material support. The blue states are the engine of the economy, universities are one of the pillars of America’s international reputation, democratic administrations consistently undo many of the worst decisions of republican ones, and the entertainment industry is one of the United States’ most admirable and lucrative exports. Within red states, it is often the teachers and intellectuals and innovators and artists that drive progress. Trump and MAGA benefit from everything we do. In return they deeply resent us.

Our second role is even more important: we are the scapegoat. In the story above, Ash wondered why Morgan was so obsessed even while not seeming to like them much. Have you, also, wondered why MAGA people are so pissed off when we block them on social media or refuse to engage in other ways? If they hate us so much, why weren’t they happy hanging out on Parler by themselves? They talk about how they want a world without queer people or immigrants or feminists, and then they seek those people out and follow them around. They are obsessed with us. Why?

The reason they can’t leave us alone is because abusers need victims so that they have someone to blame for whatever has gone wrong in their own lives. And victims need to be visible. Abusers need to see our pain as they hurt us. This is because our role in the abusive dynamic, psychologically, is to give them a target to project their bad feelings onto. You can see this in the dynamic itself: the worse things go, the more they need to find a focus for their bad feelings, the more they chase after scapegoats.

What this means is that in the long run, you cannot get an abuser to stop by appeasing them. They will hurt you regardless. They want someone who won’t fight back, someone that buys into their narrative and takes the blame. They need a target for their hatred and rage. When you offer to be the responsible one – when you swoop in to cushion them from their own mistakes – you are implicitly buying into the idea that you have the power to do things like that. And, in their minds, that means that they don’t have that power and therefore they are not to be blamed when anything goes wrong. Don’t lend any credence to this narrative of theirs.

The only way to win this is not to play.

You cannot help somebody who does not want to be helped. You cannot reach somebody who does not want to be reached. When your role is to enable them, when you are there to be the person they can blame for their own decisions, the only solution available is to refuse that role. Drop all responsibility. Do not accept any blame.

Because this is the thing: they have agency. Unless they want to abdicate all responsibility for their choices – in which case they should not be in charge of anything – then the fact that they are agents means they must be the ones to deal with the consequences when their choices are bad ones.

It is true that a lot of people who voted for Trump did so on the basis of false beliefs. But, again, they have agency. They are adults, and they made the choices that left them with those beliefs. We live in a world where people carry the sum of the world’s knowledge around in their pockets. Trump is a former president whose administration these people lived through. Folks had every opportunity to learn what they were voting for. People who voted because he would increase tariffs without checking into what a tariff is, or who credulously thought children in schools actually receive genital surgeries, or who believed a known serial liar who told them immigrants are eating cats and dogs – these are not people who actually care about the truth. Everybody I know has multiple stories of trying to penetrate the web of false beliefs held by the MAGA in their lives. We use patience, we use narratives, we use facts, we use heartfelt pleading – and it almost never works, because they don’t actually want to know the truth.

They believe these lies because it makes them feel good to believe these lies – after all, the lies either offer simplistic magical solutions, or they identify scapegoats. Those are the things MAGA voters wanted, and that is what Trump gave them.

They all made the choice to be this kind of person.

So… let’s treat MAGA like the adults they claim they are. We should let them own all of their decisions for once. We need to stop helping them out and stop fixing things and stop accepting any blame¹⁷ because the main thing we’re accomplishing is to deepen the dynamic and make everything worse.

Whether or not MAGA are bad people, they have made some very bad choices. The choices are shockingly cruel and apallingly ignorant and gobsmackingly stupid. Honour your good characteristics – your empathy, your courage, your intelligence, your strength – by walking the fuck away.¹⁸ Stop letting yourself be used. Stop enabling them.

They chose this. Let them deal with the fallout of what they chose.

We can’t escape

This leads me, sadly, to the last major reason that people don’t leave abusers: because they can’t.

To be clear, sometimes when someone says they can’t leave, what they really mean is that it would be painful and hard to do so. That’s not what I’m talking about. Everything worth doing is hard. If it is “just” hard, you should suck it up and do it anyway. You are not helping anybody by staying, and are doing irreparable harm to yourself and posterity the longer you make nice and try to appease and pretend this is all normal.¹⁹

Still, it is nevertheless true that sometimes people actually can’t leave. Maybe Ash lives somewhere without divorce, or knows that Morgan would get custody of the kids and abuse them worse, or legitimately fears for their life if they were to try to leave. Maybe you are dependent on a MAGA parent or employer, or have vulnerable and innocent loved ones who would pay a very steep price if you did much.

On a societal level, we’re certainly trapped. Liberal Americans live in the same country as MAGA. Even people in other countries can’t completely disconnect from Trump and his effects; we are all in the same world as the Trump administration and the people it radicalises. None of us can actually leave, at least not physically, and some people are much more entangled than others.

If you can’t withdraw, it is understandable to want to cope by minimising or denying what is going on. There is a huge temptation to put your head in the sand and tell yourself that people like me are overreacting and it will be alright in the end. I sympathise with this temptation very strongly. But please be aware that if you do this, you’re doing exactly what they want you to do. You are signing up to be either a useful idiot or a scapegoat or both. You cannot wish away reality, unfortunately – and trying to ignore it will worsen the impact on you, because you won’t be prepared or aware. So even if you can’t leave, do yourself a favour and admit what is going on.

Also, there are ways to “leave” an abusive dynamic even if you can’t physically leave the abuser. They are difficult and imperfect but much better than nothing. That’s what I want to talk about in the last section.

“Grey rocking” at a global scale

The strategy of “grey rocking” is one of the most effective ways of dealing with abusers that you can’t escape from. The basic idea is to extract yourself from the dynamic by not giving the abuser the engagement they crave – don’t contribute your steps in the dance you were previously engaged in. What this means is that, as much as possible, you need to withdraw any material or other support (quietly, blandly, emotionlessly). More importantly, you also need to refuse to participate in the cycle of recriminations and pleading and promises and accepting blame and fighting back. You need to become the closest thing to a placid, soulless, pleasant automaton that you can – one that gives them nothing to grab on to, nothing to yell at, nothing to scapegoat. You are polite and professional and nothing else.

And to do that, you need to give up any vestige of hope that they will change. The purpose of grey rocking isn’t to alter their behaviour; it is to save yourself. You need to fully accept that anything you do to actively engage with them – and this includes watching their reaction and praying that they will learn to be better – will only extend your suffering and deepen their claws in your psyche.

When you grey rock an abuser, the first thing they do is increase the abuse, doing anything they can to provoke a reaction. This is an extinction burst, and if you ride it out without responding – which can take a very long time – they will find another target, or at least lessen the focus on you. Unfortunately, if you react before they give up, then what you’ve unwittingly done is deepen the dynamic: you’ve taught them that if they keep trying, if they push harder, they will get the reaction.

Pulling off a “grey rock” is extremely difficult because you’re fighting all of your instincts and all of the habits built up over your relationship. It is part of the reason why many, many people return to their abusers multiple times before successfully leaving. Prepare to fail; you almost certainly will. But then, when you do, take what you’ve learned and do it again. The more you try, the more you are teaching yourself new habits, the more you are teaching yourself that you don’t need to play that role, and the easier you are making it to keep the grey rock going the next time.

“But wait!” I hear you ask. “That’s all well and good when you’re trying to grey rock individuals, but what does it even mean to grey rock an entire ruling party and millions of people at once?”

Good question.

First, a reminder: the reason we grey rock is not in order to change the behaviour of the other party. It’s about changing our own responses to them so we can disentangle ourselves from the web of toxicity that is the cycle of the abuse. It’s about changing our reactions and our interpretations so that even if they continue to abuse us, we are no longer making excuses for it, we aren’t blaming ourselves, we aren’t thinking things like “if only I did something different this wouldn’t happen.”

As a side effect, when your abuser is an individual, grey rocking can eventually make you less of a target; but when your abuser controls the government and the abuse is supported and promulgated by millions of people, I don’t think there is any possible way to not be a target at all. But remember: grey rocking isn’t meant to do that. It is meant to stop the cycle and prevent them from psychologically getting to you as they target you. It is meant to fortify your emotional defences so you have the strength to fight and persevere.

So, what might it look like to grey rock the Trump administration? How can we, on a societal level, stop taking on our assigned roles in the abusive dynamic that’s going on?

One thing is that whenever Trump or his cronies do something, we should all very loudly point out what it is, what the effects will be, and that we had nothing to do with it and we (liberals) couldn’t stop it.²⁰ When there are bad consequences, we need to explicitly and repeatedly draw the links between those consequences and the policies. We’re fighting an information battle on heavily slanted territory, but we can still do what we can with people we talk to, on our social media, using whatever mouthpieces we have. Again: the point is not to get them to change; we do it for ourselves, so we remember to never ever accept blame where we shouldn’t. A nice side effect might be if any of this penetrates the fog of willful ignorance and makes it harder for them to make us a scapegoat when shit hits the fan, but we cannot rely on that happening and we should not give up if it doesn’t.

Another thing is that we should stop any and all hand-wringing about what we could have done differently. What if Harris had interviewed with Joe Rogan, what if Biden had dropped out earlier, what if what if what if. Oh my god, shut the fuck up. These questions are the equivalent of Ash fretting about how not to set Morgan off, how to do the dishes so that Morgan doesn’t get upset, how to come up with the perfect combination of words that will make it so Morgan is not abusive.

These are the wrong questions. Look at history: We won in 2020! But this didn’t change the dynamic, so it only deepened to the point that Trump was able to run away with a victory four years later. That is the problem. The problem is that a raging narcissist with the goal of turning America into an authoritarian state somehow has the support of 75 million people and presidential immunity and the focus of the media and the money of the world’s billionaires and, now, control of our country. We need to internalise that this is not normal politics and making different normal political choices would not have materially changed things. We must cut a halt to the fucking self-flagellation because it is only giving MAGA fuel and robbing us of the psychological strength we desperately need.

Relatedly, we need to take some lessons from the family dynamics of abuse because they are very relevant as we figure out how to treat each other. In families with abusive parents, the children end up jockeying around and fighting each other for the privileged roles. This can “work” for the winner, in the sense that the golden child is materially better off than the scapegoat, but it is bad in every other way. Abuse is pernicious and gets into your soul and golden children are destroyed by that as much or more than the scapegoats are – at best, they internalise the dynamic and become an abuser themselves. More likely, they do all this and either have to fold up their entire personality and individuality until it is stamped out of existence, or the abuser eventually turns on them as well. And by doing this jockeying, the kids rob themselves of their deepest source of strength and solidarity: each other.

Along similar lines, it will be incredibly tempting to divert attention onto other scapegoats: to try to place the blame and focus on trans people, or immigrants, or feminists, or young people, or whatever. Besides being morally abhorrent, this is just another version of the hand-wringing and it is stupid and ineffectual for the same reason. Most importantly, it robs us of one of our strongest assets: each other. We absolutely must stand together, because we will surely not stand separately. There is nothing any of us could have done to make Trump a different person. There are no magical persuasive words and nothing anybody can do to be completely safe, because he turns on allies without second thought and would sell his own children down the river if that meant he could have more power.

I am not saying we give up. Far from it. I am saying that we are safest if we look out for each other and we stay under the radar. On the surface, we need to look like a grey rock, refraining from shows of resistance, especially when they are futile (they have the power, remember!). On the surface, we need to create a shield of uninterestingness whose power comes from the fact that it doesn’t look like a shield at all: we aren’t fighting, we’re not pointing at each other, we’re just… there. On the inside, underneath notice, we do every fucking thing we can to support each other and resist quietly and keep the vulnerable safe. Whether it means quietly passing laws and appointing judges, or being a governmental employee or soldier who works slowly and crappily and keeps inserting plausibly deniable errors, or setting up safe havens for queer teenagers and immigrants in blue states, or quietly working to support independent journalists and less toxic social media like Bluesky, or a thousand other possibilities – there are many, many things all of us can do.

Whatever we do, though, our actions need to be invisible, relentless, and implacable. And our priorities need to be geared around keeping ourselves safe and changing the fundamentals of this dynamic.

The other part about keeping ourselves safe is the other part of grey rocking: we must reserve a core of ourselves that remains inviolate, that the abuser cannot touch. This means cultivating and feeding our hopes and dreams and joys. Joy is resistance, it is said, and that is absolutely right. The reason grey rocking helps, even if you can’t physically escape, is that it lets you psychologically escape. The abuser becomes like a natural disaster – something horrible to be endured, sure, but not something that destroys your self-worth and dignity. The way we do that is by not giving them any more purchase in our heads than is absolutely necessary.

Queer people: we need to be our weird selves, outward and unashamedly if we can, inward and unashamedly if that’s too dangerous. Immigrants should speak their native languages and celebrate their holidays; artists should draw and write and create; scientists should study whatever the fuck we want to; and we should all remember go hug our kids and have our hobbies and go out in nature and play sports and enjoy life without guilt. That is how we keep ourselves psychologically safe, how we maintain the energy to fight and endure another day.

This is going to be a long haul. I worry that in a few years the world will look so different that I will return to these words and think I was hopelessly naive.²¹ I don’t know if we’ll “win”, or what that would look like. Whether that happens will depend on a lot of things that I am not an expert in and I haven’t written about here, like politics and law and strategy and diplomacy and war.

This post isn’t about how to win in that sense. It is about how to put the psychological foundations in place so that we hold onto the pieces of ourselves while under relentless attack. It is about recognising what has been happening and how to change our role in that dynamic so we can preserve the core of who we are.