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And here we go again with yet another section of the book I’ve been experimenting with writing, chapter by chapter on Substack: The Movement We Need. In it, I look at five core human needs: safety, belonging, value, agency and meaning, and how we might better meet them in progressive movements for social change. I’m on the last section now, looking at meaning and purpose. It’s been challenging to keep on with it with so much going on in the world, notably, Trump and Netanyahu illegally starting a war in the Middle East! But I hold the faith that there is a value in looking at these deeper issues of organizing. As often happens with my writing, it seems to expand the more I work on it. Part Two of this section on Meaning and Purpose is here, more will be coming later! If you want to read the book from the beginning, all the sections so far are here, numbered in order.
Relational Values: Immanence
In the morning, I wake up under the redwoods. They stretch up over my cabin, thrusting up into the sky a hundred feet or more, their trunks solid, their branches swaying gracefully with the wind. Their fine needles comb the fog to supply them with water during our rainless summers, while their intertwined roots hold the earth. High in their canopy live lichens, birds, insects: a whole ecosystem of its own that I would have to climb high to see. Yet all this life, all this vibrant green and majestic structure, is spun out of the most ephemeral and fluid of elements: air, water and sunlight.
I don’t need faith in unseen gods to convince me that the world is full of miracles. Miracles are staring me in the face every morning: light transmuting into form.
In a relational world, spirit is immanent, not just transcendent. Whether we call it God, Goddess, Deity, Ground of Being, Creator, or don’t call it anything at all, we sense that something greater than us unites the world and is embodied in nature and material reality itself. The ultimate source of value is not located in some distant heaven or on an abstract balance sheet, but right here, in the living world.
When spirit is immanent in an interconnected, relational world, our values shift. A relational world-view turns the world upside down. In a relational world, we value those qualities that further our sense of connection, wonder and reverence, rather than those that aggrandize power-over, control and accumulation.
Our dominant culture is deeply shaped by ideologies that locate ultimate value outside the world itself. For the religious, the source of ultimate value is a transcendent God or deity.
Transcendence, at its best, can call us to rise above current circumstances and focus on higher values—note the values embedded in the metaphor itself that shapes our language and thinking! What is high, light, disembodied is identified with good. What is low, dark, earthly and embodied is not-so-good or outright evil. At its worst, transcendence establishes a mental habit of devaluing this world, this life, all that is earthly, earthy, in favor of some abstraction. For the nonreligious under capitalism, this ultimate value often becomes in practice the short-term profits on the balance sheet. The profit motive becomes its own jealous God, demanding the sacrifice of all other values, from the majestic redwoods to our time, our creativity and our life-force.
Moreover, when good is identified with all that is high, light, and outside the world, and evil with the dark and dirty, then women are also devalued, as temptresses into the earthy, bodily animal experience of sex, as those who bring life into the world in a messy, bloody process. Darker people are devalued as well, and those who work with the earth, who get their hands dirty growing food or picking crops or fixing things, are less valued and less rewarded than those who manipulate abstractions in hedge funds or crypto trades.
But when spirit is immanent, things are valued for themselves. The redwood as a redwood has a sacred value that cannot be quantified. It is far more than a number of board feet of lumber. I cannot put a dollar value on the awe and wonder that I feel watching the droplets of dew in the needles sparkle with rainbow colors as the sun shines through the morning mist, or on the time I play with a toddler or snuggle with a lover. I write not because I get paid—although that helps!—but because I am moved to communicate. We can be like skater Alyssa Liu, who just made a come-back after years away from the sport to win gold at the Olympics. She consciously released any care about medals and tokens of value. “I came here with one intention: to share my art,” she said. As a result, her skating was free and joyful, and she did win, but more importantly, millions were uplifted by her artistry.
Mystery and Complexity
The relational world is a world of wonder. Scientists can chart the process of photosynthesis and identify its chemical interactions, but that doesn’t tell us why. Why should a world evolve into such beauty? How does this miracle happen? Or, as Robin Wall Kimmerer asks, why do asters and goldenrod look beautiful as they grow together in a field? (1) And what is their relationship to our human consciousness that thrills to their beauty?
When we embrace mystery, it’s not to go all breathless and woo-woo. It’s actually to accept that the world is not all knowable and controllable. We understand that the mechanistic model of the universe is incomplete, brought to us by the scientific revolution of the 17th century that was constrained by the fear of the mystical engendered by the Witch persecutions and the identification of ‘enthusiasm’—the understanding of the world as dynamic and alive—with radical politics. In reaction, science adopted a materialistic model of the universe. The world was like a giant clock, with its parts working together in simple chains of cause and effect. A very big clock, with a myriad of parts, but ultimately they could all be identified, categorized, their impacts measured and controlled. Science just needed time. (2)
Today, while this worldview is challenged by more advanced science that embraces quantum mechanics, systems theory and complexity theory, the mechanistic model still deeply influences our ethics and politics. Its latest incarnations, adopted by many of the techno-billionaires attempting to rule our politics, sees the world not as a clock but as a giant computer, the zeros and ones of its data ultimately measurable, controllable and predictable. David Z. Morris, in his discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried’s enormous fraud, explains how Bankman-Fried applied these theories to justify squirrely accounting and reckless risks with investors’ money. (3) This worldview which motivates Musk, Thiel and others of their ilk is justified as Rationalism, Utilitarianism or ‘Effective Altruism’—the idea that we can quantify the expected results of efforts to help others and therefore donate to only those with the greatest return on investment, and that, rather than making money in ethical ways that help others, the enlightened altruist should just concentrate on making lots of money, and then donate it. It doesn’t need a tech genius, merely an ordinary person with a small modicum of understanding of human nature, to see how such a moral framework could easily become an excuse for unbridled greed.
It’s perhaps not surprising that such a worldview would take hold among engineers who may have a solid grasp of programming but lack a grounding in biology or psychology, disciplines where complexity cannot be discounted. Living beings, and certainly human beings, are not wholly knowable, controllable or predictable, because we are composed of so many dynamic, ever-changing relationships that their potential combinations of impacts are effectively infinite. We do not always respond to the same stimuli in the same way. As the saying goes, you cannot step into the same river twice.
One way to understand complexity is to look through the lens of the Cynefin system developed by Dr. David Snowden. (4 ) ‘Cynefin’ is a Welsh word meaning ‘the place of our multiple belonging’, or habitat. In this system, situations can be categorized in five basic ways. They can be disordered—meaning we don’t know how to categorize them. They can be clear, complicated, chaotic or complex.
Clear, simple systems contain an obvious order that is clear to everyone, with solutions that are widely agreed upon. I first encountered this framework in a lecture by Graeme Hand on range management. (5). An example of a simple system might be an electric fence that encloses a grazing plot. It has a finite number of component parts, and some clear instructions for setting it up.
Situations can also be complicated: they have many parts and need experts to understand and maintain them. If something goes wrong with my hybrid electric car, I need a mechanic. But complicated problems have solutions that experts can see and agree upon, although they may at times have more than one way of solving the same problem.
Simple and even complicated situations are predictable. If I set up my electric fence correctly, it will carry a charge. If a mechanic adjusts my brakes, it’s a safe bet that they will work.
Chaotic and complex situations are unpredictable. There are too many factors involved to assume that what has happened before will happen again.
In Chaotic situations, where everything is falling apart quickly, the imperative is to act. I always think of journalist Robert Fisk’s story of being beaten by a hostile crowd in Afghanistan. As his head was being smashed by stones, with blood running down his face, he was on the verge of being killed. “I guess at this point I should thank Lebanon. For twenty-five years, I have covered Lebanon’s wars and the Lebanese used to teach me, over and over again, how to stay alive: take a decision – any decision – but don’t do nothing.”(6)
Complex situations can’t be solved by applying rigid rules, one-size-fits-all solutions, or the solutions of the past. An example of a complex situation might be parenting a toddler. One day, your child adores a soft-boiled egg, the next day, they’ve decided that it’s yucky and won’t touch it. Or another example might be trying to determine the optimum grazing regime for your cattle on a particular field and the best amount of recovery time—there’s no hard and fast rule that will work, because conditions will continually change. You need to try various things, in ways that will make it safe to make mistakes and have some failures, because of necessity some trials will fail.
Living beings exhibit syntropy—the opposite of entropy. Syntropy means that the system is more than sum of its parts. A forest is made up of trees, shrubs, groundcovers, birds, insects, animals, lichen, fungi, micro-organisms and more, but it is their interactions, the connections between them, that make up the totality of what a forest is, and there are so many of those interconnections, among dynamic elements that themselves are constantly changing, that we can never ultimately know the whole. We can make simplified models that can help us understand better some of the functions, but not the whole. A human brain is composed of cells, neurons, fats, electrical impulses—we can map many of the brain’s functions, but we still don’t know how it is that those physical characteristics generate a sense of self, and the capacity to create something truly new.
Embracing mystery means accepting that much of the world is complex, and some of it is chaotic. As the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer says, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
When we see the world as a living, dynamic web of relationships, we don’t succumb to the hubris of believing we can know, control or predict it all. We are prevented from falling victim to what Aboriginal thinker and writer Tyson Yunkaporta calls “the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem. Some people are just idiots–and everybody has a bit of idiot in them from time to time, coming from some deep place inside that whispers, “You are special. You are greater than other people and things. You are more important than everything and everyone all things in all people exist to serve you. This behavior needs massive checks and balances to contain the damage it can do.” (7)
When I understand that the world is a complex web of interactions, I know that it is a web—not a wheel in which I’m the hub, with everything revolving around me, but a vast net in which I am one knot. There’s humility in that realization, but also freedom. I can impact the world, but I am not all-powerful and therefore not singly responsible for its fate. Morris describes how the burden of believing the world is predictable, that you were part of a small elite responsible for predicting and evading its ultimate destruction, literally drove some of the techno-utopians into mental breakdowns and even suicide. (8). The counter to narcissism is humility, and humility allows us to feel part of a community, to do our bit, as the British were fond of saying in WWII, but to be relieved of the burden of having to do it all.
As Yunkaporta says, “It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network.” (9)
When we accept that the workings of the universe are richer and more complex than we can map, we can look out at the stars and see how small we are in a vast world. We recognize that we are not the center of the universe, but one small part, and feel humble. Humility comes from the same root as humus and human. When we are humble, we are close to the earth, part of the web of life that can nurture and sustain us all.
Empathy
One of the most important qualities that leads to greater connection is empathy. Empathy is not the same as sympathy or compassion. It’s not just about how much we care about someone else—although that, too, is vitally important. But empathy is a form of intelligence. It’s our ability to look through someone else’s eyes, to imagine how something might appear from someone else’s perspective.
Chris Voss, formerly a negotiator for the FBI in hostage situations, tells us how law enforcement agencies learned that the most effective negotiations were those that approached even potential murderers with ‘tactical empathy’—not “I feel your pain,” but simply perceiving and acknowledging what the suspects might be thinking and feeling: “Seems like you might be afraid that if you walk out the door, you’ll get shot.” Offering empathy can help make even a hostage-taker feel safe enough to surrender. (10)
Empathy may have been vital to our earliest ancestors who survived by gathering and hunting their food. Hunters need to track their prey, and experienced trackers and hunters know the animals intimately and can envision how they might perceive and experience their surroundings. To stalk a deer, you must understand how they might see, hear and smell you, what might cause them to relax their guard or flee in fear. The ceremonies that many indigenous cultures perform before, during and after a hunt, fasting, praying, acknowledging the animals as relatives, honoring their spirits, dancing their movements, all reinforce that primal empathy. (11)
Empathy is vitally important, because it helps us predict how our words and actions might land for someone else. Human beings are not, as I’ve said, quantifiable or predictable—but if we have any imagination at all, we will have some idea of the probable impact of our behavior. If I insult someone, they are less likely to feel “Oh, how right she is and how unworthy I am!” than to decide, “Starhawk is an asshole and I don’t like her.” Yet right-wing politicians, with Trump as their role model, continually insult their opposition and somehow seem to think this will win them supporters, while their poll numbers actually plummet. Musk apparently thought that blatantly supporting a right-wing judge in Wisconsin and then parading around a stage in a cheese hat was a winning political strategy, when it actually generated enormous opposition and helped elect a progressive. To put it simply and crudely, without empathy, you are likely to do stupid shit. And you may quote me on that!
Empathy is especially important at this challenging time, when the world seems to be run by unempathetic sociopaths. Not only are they inflicting cruelty on everyone from immigrants to laid-off federal workers, starting wars, bombing civilians, and starving masses of people, they are trying to persuade the rest of us that empathy is a form of weakness.
Elon Musk, on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast broadcast on February 28,2025, proclaimed that “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy.” (12)
Curtis Yarvin, the ideological guru of Musk, Thiel, Vance and other oligarchs, identifies empathy with women and weakness, something women will use to control men unless a strong man who remains unfeeling and dispassionate can instead use false empathy to control a woman. (13). In other words—patriarchy! It’s the same old brand that generates toxic masculinity, allocating all the nurturing qualities to women and defining them as weakness, all aggression and force to men and defining cruelty as strength. Yarvin is apparently incapable of conceiving of relationships between equal partners, each imbued with agency and value. He lives in a loveless world. Instead, he sees men and women as gripped in a never-ending struggle for power-over and control.
Yarvin and his followers also conceive of empathy as something finite and limited, that you should expend on those closest to you, that you interact with most often. “When you increase the level of empathy for all animals in the universe, regardless of species or even planet, you decrease the level of empathy for your grandmother. Unfortunately, you spend way more time with your grandmother. Or you would—if you weren’t worrying about all the animals in the universe. Get it? Your empathy meme is making you less empathic.” (14)
But he offers no evidence to back this up, except for a story from Dickens about Mrs. Jellaby, a woman who neglected her housekeeping in order to focus on her charitable causes. In reality, most emotionally competent people have no trouble feeling empathy for animals, for a starving child on the other side of the world, and for their grandmothers and their own children. And while balancing commitments to home and outside endeavors can always be a challenge, there’s no overriding reason that caring for the fate of a refugee or a bombed child in Gaza necessarily means a dirty house, or that some dust on the mantle might not be a worthwhile trade-off for some efforts to make the world more just. Maybe Mrs. Jellaby’s husband ought to pitch in and cook a meal from time to time!
Yarvin also blames misplaced empathy for the deaths and misery of soldiers in Ukraine. Were it not for the empathy of arming Ukraine, “…the regime in Kiev would have looked at the obvious military reality and helplessly made peace with the regime in Moscow. The result would be that Ukraine would be a province of Russia. Like when I was a kid. Also, Serbia would be part of Austria or something. Instead of doing a World War I. And some people would be alive, who now are not.” (15)
He blames the ‘empathy’ of the West for the war—completely ignoring Putin’s aggression, the Ukrainians’ desire for self-determination, and the question of what it would mean for other countries in Europe if Putin were allowed to invade and conquer with no consequences. Arming Ukraine, for the Western powers, was done as much out of self-interest as empathy, and if the war has resulted in enormous death and destruction, it’s not Western empathy, but Putin’s lack thereof that is to blame.
But then Yarvin loves a dictator, and openly wants to end democracy in the United States and replace it with a monarchy, in the name of efficiency and effectiveness. “All large efficient organizations are absolute monarchies.” (16)
Again, he offers no actual evidence for this statement. He ignores what Lord Acton is famous for saying: ““Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority…Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”(17)
Nor does he address any of the many, many examples history offers of absolute monarchs who inflicted horrific violence on others, ruled with cruelty that violated the rights of their subjects and made an absolute mess of their countries, from Caligula in ancient Rome to Hitler’s decision, against the advice of his army, to invade Russia, not to mention the concentration camps, the genocide and the many other ways he proves my maxim: Lack of empathy will cause you to do stupid shit! But then, Yarvin admires Hitler!
I wouldn’t waste my time on Yarvin, unless perhaps to recommend some good mental health care providers, but he is a powerful influence on some of the tech-oligarchs who now wield undue power in this world. To counter them, we do, unfortunately, need to know what they are thinking.
And they are not alone in their disdain for empathy. Christian Evangelicals, although they profess to follow Jesus who ministered to the poor, the sick, and the disdained, and instructed his followers to love thy neighbor as thyself, are now publishing books attacking ‘toxic empathy’ and mistrust any appeals to the heart from progressives as attempts to manipulate them. (18)
The results of these philosophies can be seen in their results. To take only one example, Elon Musk’s abrupt cutoff of food and medical aid to Africa and destruction of USAID is estimated to have caused more than 600,000 deaths—two thirds of them children. Food already in warehouses was left to rot while hungry people starved. Up to ten million people are projected to die over the next few years. (19) This puts him up with the great mass murderers of history, especially since that foreign aid was a tiny percentage of the U.S. budget and a miniscule amount compared to the 75 billion now allotted to harass, brutalize, imprison and deport immigrants, or the untold billions the illegal war of aggression in Iran may cost! Even the most depraved illegal gang member, devotedly pushing old ladies onto the subway tracks one after another, could hardly inflict damage on suck a scale.
Cultivating Empathy
There are many ways to cultivate empathy. Reading fiction, whether it’s great literature or a Harlequin romance, puts us into another person’s mind and perspective. Drama does the same: we experience the world vicariously and are moved by the characters’ emotions. Learning another language, studying the music or dance of another culture will help develop the flexibility of mind and perspective that can allow us to see the world through other eyes. This is why the arts and humanities are vitally important parts of an education, even if they don’t directly translate to a well-paying job. Their neglect may contribute to the proliferation of heartless tech-bros who know all about coding and virtually nothing about human relationships.
Reading, watching theater, film or video are important, but writing or acting are even more powerful ways to exercise the empathy muscle. Children playing games in which they become different characters are developing their imaginative and empathetic capacities, which is one of many reasons why free play is so important in child development. As adults we can also actively seek ways to actively cultivate empathy.
But here are some simple practices that can help. You can do these individually, or in a group:
1) Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes:
Do you have a small child in your house? Or can you imagine what it’s like to be a toddler? Get down on the floor and crawl around. Notice how the world looks from a child’s height. Try to remember how big everything seemed to you when you were small.
Or spend a day in a wheelchair getting around your home, your neighborhood or your town. Notice how your perspective changes. Things you don’t ordinarily pay any attention to suddenly become barriers. Notice how people respond to you. Do they treat you differently? I truly believe every architect and city planner should do this as part of their training.
Or try to imagine that you hold an opposite belief to your political, religious or philosophical orientation. Read the news or watch it on TV or online: what feels different? What changes in your body, your emotions, your energy? When you’re done, consciously shift your position and take a physical step out of your false identity and back into your true self.
2) Shape Shift:
Do you have a favorite pet? Perhaps your dog or cat. Or do you enjoy watching birds? Think of an animal you’re familiar with. Close your eyes and imagine that you could send your mind traveling into that animal’s body. How is the world different if every sniff of the air brings you 30,000 times as much information as you get from your human nose? How would it feel to be a raven soaring in the air currents, wheeling, diving, flipping upside down to impress your potential mate?
Don’t forget to bring yourself back fully into your human body when you’re done, patting the edges, taking a moment to notice what you are feeling physically, smelling, tasting, hearing and seeing in your human form.
3) Storytelling:
Is there someone you don’t understand? Write a short story with them as the central character. Write from their first-person perspective. Or if you’re embroiled in a conflict with someone, write the story of your dispute from their point of view.
This is an exercise I sometimes give people in mediation, and I’m often surprised at how well even those who are furious at each can actually envision how their adversary views the situation. Understanding their point of view may help you communicate more effectively and offer empathy for their emotions, even if you disagree with their actions or conclusions.
4) Role Play:
If you’ve been involved in a difficult interaction, get a friend to role play it with you. Play your opponent’s part, and notice how you feel, what happens in your breathing, your body, your emotions. Are there underlying emotions that are not being expressed on the surface? Let your friend try out varying reactions, and notice how you respond.
A movement that seeks a world of greater justice must be one that strongly champions empathy. Empathy allows us to envision how our actions might impact someone else and leads us to compassion—the ability to feel with another and to take actions that mitigate harm and offer comfort, succor and healing. Empathy provides the connective tissue of relationships, that lets us respond to one another rather than attempting to control one another, to give and receive love.
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Notes:
1) Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Thinking, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis, MN; Milkweed Editions, 2013
P. 39
2) David Kubrin. Marxism and Witchcraft. Brooklyn, NY, Autonomedia, 2019 p.181
3) David Z. Morris. Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. Repeater Books, London, 2025
4) “The Cynefin Framework—A Leader’s Framework for Decision-making and Action video with David Snowdon https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-infospace-mm_upstracking&hsimp=yhs-mm_upstracking&hspart=infospace¶m1=fbd39040n1kothjw10x4en2s&p=cynefin+framework&type=ud-c-us–s-p-zdzi7z2z–exp-none–subid-none#id=1&vid=47c98eee0945adc8d93708420078262e&action=click
5) Graeme Hand. “Designing Regenerative Grazing that Works in Practice.”May 19, 2020. https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-infospace-mm_upstracking&hsimp=yhs-mm_upstracking&hspart=infospace¶m1=5zb4pqyr2pm3rxe4m3kqq8ss&p=Graeme+hand+desigining+regenerative+grazing&type=ud-c-us–s-p-zdzi7z2z–exp-none–subid-none#id=1&vid=9497e958cdfe59e853aad36df73df6f0&action=click
6) “My Beating By Refugees Is a Symbol of the Hatred and Fury of This Filthy War: 10 December 2001.” Independent, The Best of Fisk November 9, 2020 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/robert-fisk-afghanistan-beating-refugees-b1641167.html
7) Tyson Yunkaporta. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Harper One, P. 25
8) Morris, p. 341
9) Yunkaporta, p. 85
10) Chris Voss with Tahl Raz. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. NY, HarperCollins, 2016 Chapter Three, “Don’t Feel Their Pain: Label It.” Pp. 49-73
11) What I know about tracking I learned from Jon Young, first with the Wilderness Awareness School and later the founder of the Eight Shields Network. Alas, I might have become a more skillful tracker had I only met up with him earlier in life, when I could still see clearly, hear well, and get down on the ground. Nonetheless, his work in nature awareness has taught me a lot about being present and observing nature.
https://www.jonyoung.org/
12)
13)
14) Curtis Yarvin “Is Effective Altruism Effective?” Gray Mirror, Substack. August 31, 2022
15) Ibid.
16) Ibid.
17) https://www.acton.org/research/lord-acton-quote-archive
18) David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy”, New York Times, Feb. 13, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/13/opinion/trump-usaid-evangelicals.html?searchResultPosition=1
19) Karen Feldscher. “USAID Shutdown Has Led to Hundreds of Thousands of Deaths” in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Nov. 20, 2025 https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/
20)
This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.