The political situation has gotten pretty dire in America, and I’m going to muse about why.

Can we agree that intelligence is the superpower of the human species? That’s not controversial, right? What’s curious about human intelligence is that, while it’s beautiful and miraculous and mysterious, it’s actually quite limited in many ways.

Our memory isn’t perfect by any means. In the short term, we can only store about five numbers in our head at once, and in the long term we run into accuracy issues based on the way we reconstruct our memories every time we remember them. And our reasoning faculties don’t achieve any kind of platonic logical purity. The limitations of our cognition necessitate the use of heuristics, cognitive rules of thumb, that can lead us astray. We’re vulnerable to confirmation bias and survivorship bias and all kinds of distortions.

But our secret sauce is language and our ability to learn from each other. This makes it so that we don’t have to be geniuses. We can learn from others and form coalitions and mount increasingly nuanced responses to larger and larger challenges. A single human is quite intelligent, but a community of humans is extraordinarily intelligent. And this is due to the math underlying communities.

Consider Abby, Brad, and Cindy, a friend group. Between them, there are actually 4 relationships: Abby and Brad’s relationship, Abby and Cindy’s relationship, Brad and Cindy’s relationship, and curiously there is also a 3-person collective relationship that they have as a friend group. Each of these relationships will generate their own feedback loops and emergent behavior in the participants.

Add a fourth person, Daniel, to the friend group, and it gets much more complex. There are new 1-on-1 relationships and a new 4-person group dynamic, but there’s also the 3-on-1 relationship between Daniel, the new guy, and the existing friend group. Maybe the guys start relating to the girls differently, and now there’s a 2-on-2 relationship between the genders.

And that capacity for complexity, that raw entropic potential, that’s what makes us so adaptable and powerful. We are social creatures, down to our bones.

Doesn’t it seem like our modern world does a lot to separate us from each other? Digital technology has hypnotized us to stay in our homes and stare at a simulacrum of community, the social equivalent of ultra-processed food that similarly fails to nourish us. The town square has disappeared from our towns, colonized by capital much like all common goods. Businesses fight like hell to keep their workers from organizing and unionizing. We are indoctrinated to distinguish between sex and race and religion and generation and sexuality and whatnot.

And what remains to organize our world? Money. Greed is a stubborn, lonely emotion that poses as the solution instead of the problem. The richest of us use their money to compel the poor, deceive the masses, stage a heist on our collective wealth, and exert violence, both the stochastic kind and the literal kind, on the unprivileged of society.

What do we do about it?

That’s the question. There’s plenty of doom and gloom in the news, and there doesn’t seem to be much for a well-meaning citizen to do about it. Feeling powerless is the hardest part about watching the news as an American citizen.

I’m a big believer that you have to build something good instead of just fighting something bad. Fighting weeds in a garden is as much about adding good plants as it is about pulling weeds. You should outcompete the weeds, take up all the sun and water and establish rich ecosystems of microbes that attack the very viability of weeds. To overcome addition, it helps to take up a hobby, find something else to bring enjoyment and connection to your life. So I think it’s misguided to want to topple a regime.

I think America has neglected itself for too long and it’s time to eat our vegetables. I think community organizing and mutual aid are what America needs to do to rebuild. We need to build wealth that isn’t measured in dollars, but in culture, education, connections, and engagement. We need to be active citizens, participating in our society instead of just watching it burn on our phones. And we need to build a community outside of the coercive, exploitative one that has conquered us. The American owning class isn’t interested in taking care of us, so we have to take care of ourselves.

I used to think protests were stupid. You don’t want to riot and destroy property because that muddles the message, but a peaceful protest is easy to ignore. Protesters have no leverage. Maybe so, but protests do one thing well: they get a lot of like-minded people in one place to talk about what matters in society. They stitch together our collective consciousness, enabling us to teach each other how to organize and better take care of each other. But most of all, they remind us that we aren’t alone.

So go to the protests. Honk at the people with the signs on the side of the road. Volunteer. We’re only powerful when we’re together.