Month: August 2018

we should treat addiction as a public health issue

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Treating drug addiction like a criminal issue has failed. Everywhere. Not just here, but in every part of the world from the U.S. to South East Asia. It is as proven a failure as any policy worldwide, and there isn’t much of a public good case to be made for it.

People seem to feel that people who would use drugs deserve some form of punishment, but if your reasoning is punitive, you should be able to see whether that argument stands on its own instead of conflating it with the public good or well-designed public health policy. I personally don’t think that drug use should be punished: the whole problem with addiction, for those susceptible to it, is that it takes hold in the brain and makes quitting absolute hell, regardless of whether your original use was a mistake you now deeply regret.

Have some empathy: do you believe that there’s no possible path your life could have taken- not if you’d fallen in with the wrong people while young, not if you’d spiraled into horrible decisions during grief, not if you’d just been a dumbass kid and your adult self wishes you could scream at that kid to never do it? If you’d made any of those mistakes, you’d now be on the hook for it indefinitely, because that’s addiction. And instead of trying to help you get back on your feet, the state and society punishes you for the way your mistakes changed your body into something that craves a chemical like it craves food or water.

But let’s leave that aside for now. Where has drug policy worked? Portugal’s a good example. Portugal was hit by a drug epidemic in the 1980s that resulted in one of every ten people being heroin users. In 2001, Portugal decided to treat addiction seriously as a public health issue.

Portugal decriminalized the possession and use of drugs (to be clear, just possession and use, not dealing). Drug users were directed towards treatment, not into the prison system where they would only further excluded from common society, fall behind on getting work and rebuilding their lives, and fall in with hardened criminals. People caught with a small amount of drugs weren’t arrested. Instead, they had to meet with a small local commission made up of a doctor, lawyer, and social worker, who worked with them on treatment and provided support systems during recovery. Drop-in clinics in quiet and anonymous unmarked locations provided counseling, clean clothes and a shower, blood testing, and help with finding rehab, jobs, or re-integrating into society.

The drug crisis eased. Drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, and drug-related crime all dropped. HIV infection rates fell by 96%.

Portugal’s policy is guided by principles of compassion and empathy: a belief in treating everyone as individuals with human dignity, as thinking of the root causes that might lead an individual towards drugs. Without the risks of legal jeopardy, clinics, pharmacies, and NGOs were able to work together to provide a safety net of services for their communities. Government endorsement has powerful effects on social views of issues, and the cultural shift on how drug users were viewed helped create a climate where prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation could be the focus.

In the early days of the crisis, Portugal, which it is important to note is quite religiously conservative a country, responded by demonizing drug users as a stain on society and drugs as a manifestation of Satan. But that didn’t work, just like it hasn’t worked anywhere else.

It is important to note that most medical organizations describe addiction as a disease:

Like diabetes, cancer and heart disease, addiction is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological factors. Genetic risks factors account for about half of the likelihood that an individual will develop addiction.

Addiction involves changes in the functioning of the brain and body. These changes may be brought on by risky substance use or may pre-exist.

Why is willpower often not enough?

The initial and early decisions to use substances reflect a person’s free or conscious choice. However, once the brain has been changed by addiction, that choice or willpower becomes impaired. Perhaps the most defining symptom of addiction is a loss of control over substance use.

Are people with addiction responsible for their addiction?

People with addiction should not be blamed for suffering from the disease. All people make choices about whether to use substances. However, people do not choose how their brain and body respond to drugs and alcohol, which is why people with addiction cannot control their use while others can. People with addiction can still stop using – it’s just much harder than it is for someone who has not become addicted.

People with addiction are responsible for seeking treatment and maintaining recovery. Often they need the help and support of family, friends and peers to stay in treatment and increase their chances of survival and recovery.

Why some people say addiction isn’t a disease

Some people think addiction cannot be a disease because it is caused by the individual’s choice to use drugs or alcohol. While the first use (or early stage use) may be by choice, once the brain has been changed by addiction, most experts believe that the person loses control of their behavior.

Choice does not determine whether something is a disease. Heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer involve personal choices like diet, exercise, sun exposure, etc. A disease is what happens in the body as a result of those choices.

Others argue that addiction is not a disease because some people with addiction get better without treatment. People with a mild substance use disorder may recover with little or no treatment. People with the most serious form of addiction usually need intensive treatment followed by lifelong management of the disease. However, some people with severe addiction stop drinking or using drugs without treatment, usually after experiencing a serious family, social, occupational, physical, or spiritual crisis. Others achieve sobriety by attending self-help (12-step or AA) meetings without receiving much, if any, professional treatment. Because we do not understand why some people are able to stop on their own or through self-help meetings at certain points in their life, people with addiction should always seek treatment.

[Center on Addiction]

The real question: would decriminalizing drugs sell as a policy in the Maldives, or would the very phrase itself cause an uproar by people horrified at the prospect of some lawless Mad Max: Fury Road style situation? Yes, probably. It might be a step too far to start with. But I think that there are little steps we can take. In a remotely just society, drug users facing any kind of mandatory incarceration should at the very least do so exclusively in rehabilitation facilities, separate from violent offenders, where users will get treatment and have a chance at re-entering society ready to be a part of it instead of further isolated from it. I don’t think that’s enough, but it’s a start.

a real meritocracy would promote a lot more women

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this won’t be a long post. like i’ve said elsewhere, i’m not going to repeat arguments that others have made much more eloquently and more thoroughly than i have: you can find strong cases for affirmative action on the internet. i just wanted to highlight this fascinating little detail from some of the research on women in the workplace.

i’ve added a screenshot below, but the short version is that there’s strong support for the quota argument: that imbalances in the workplace such as a dearth of women in senior roles isn’t because men just have more ability than women, that it’s because of social or cultural factors holding women back, and that something like quotas mean that talented women, who otherwise might have been passed up for less talented men, are now able to get the roles they would deserve on merit.

the common argument against affirmative action is the idea that it’s not a meritocracy and that guaranteed positions for women will bring in less qualified women by squeezing out more qualified men. i mean, for starters, i know, looking around at all the brilliant and talented women i know, that the distribution of women in positions of power is nowhere near the actual distribution of ability or talent.

a common argument against affirmative action is that the natural order of things is a meritocracy because it technically is one, and then ignoring the fact that context exists or that policies happen in society, not in a vacuum. (technically, i’m allowed to contest elections too. by the letter of the law. if you ignore that context exists). but regardless, let’s check. does the evidence suggest that: a) as things stand, more talented women get squeezed out in favor of men with less ability as a result of some kind of societal sexism, or b) that with a quota, less talented women take up slots that, ostensibly, would have gone to other men if it were based purely on merit?

it’s not a perfect proxy, but the proportion of women on the board of a major company (over a few hundred companies, to smooth out results and be sure we aren’t seeing a freak case) roughly reflects corporate governance policy built to retain and promote women. in a control case, where companies operate in a perfect meritocracy, the gender balance making up a company’s top management would have zero correlation with its performance, because in all of them the top ranks would be filled by those who most merited it. if departments heavy on women perform significantly better, it’d be a strong case for the argument that these women are taking the place of less talented replacements. if departments heavy on women perform significantly worse, it’d be a strong indicator that these promoted women are taking the place of more talented male candidates.

let’s take a look at the results… there we go. the quartile of firms with the largest proportion of women in top management had a return 35.1% higher than the quartile with the lowest proportion of women. odds are, talented women around you aren’t getting their fair dues. policies that actively identify, retain, train, and promote talented women help address some of that to make it more meritocratic. bring on the quotas, and make them sizable.

women return on equity meritocracy

there’s more:

women return on equity meritocracy 2 vox

this is also borne out in a study carried out for indian village councils by two of the world’s leading development economists, abhijit banerjee and esther duflo:

One specific example of such top-down intervention is to restrict whom villagers can elect as representatives. These restrictions may be needed in order to ensure adequate representation of the minorities, and they make a difference.

India’s system of village government, or gram panchayat (the GP, or village council), has such restrictions. Elected every five years at the local level, the GP administers the local collective infrastructure, such as wells, school buildings, local roads, and so on. To protect underrepresented groups, the rules reserve leadership positions in a fraction of GPs for women and for members of various minorities (including the lower castes). If the elites had completely captured the panchayat, however, mandated representation of women or minorities would make no difference. The real bosses of the villages would continue to rule, presumably fronted by their wives, or by their lower-caste servants, whenever the bosses themselves are prevented from running for office.

Indeed, when Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, and Esther embarked on a panchayat survey in 2000 to find out whether women leaders invested in different types of local infrastructure, they were warned by everyone, from the minister of rural development in Kolkata to their survey staff (and including many local academics), that this was a futile quest. The show, everyone claimed, was run by pradhan patis (the husband of the pradhan, or chief of the GP), and the shy, often illiterate women, many of them with their heads covered, were certainly not making any decisions on their own.

The survey, however, revealed the opposite. In the state of West Bengal, under the quota system, one-third of the GPs were randomly selected every five years to be “reserved” for women to be the village head: In these villages, only women can run for office. Chattopadhyay and Esther compared the local infrastructure available in reserved and unreserved villages, just two years after the reservation system was first put in place.27 They found that women invested much more of their (fixed) budget in the local infrastructure that women wanted—in West Bengal, that meant roads and drinking water—and less in schools. They then replicated these findings in Rajasthan, reputed to be one of India’s most male chauvinist states. There, they found that women wanted closer sources of drinking water above all, and men wanted roads. And sure enough, women leaders invested more in drinking water, less on roads.

Further studies elsewhere in India have made it clear that women leaders almost always make a difference. Furthermore, over time, women also appear to be doing more than men with the same limited budget and are reported to be less inclined to take bribes. Yet whenever we present these results in India, there is someone who will tell us this has to be wrong: They have gone personally to a village and have talked to a woman pradhan, under her husband’s supervision; they have seen political posters where the picture of the candidate’s husband figured more prominently than the candidate herself. They are right: We, too, have had those conversations and seen those posters. Ensuring women run as political leaders is not the instant revolution that it is sometimes made out to be, with powerful women aggressively taking charge and reforming their villages. The women who are elected are often related to someone who was in politics before. They are less likely to chair the village meetings, and they speak less at them. They are less educated and less politically experienced. But despite all this, and despite the evident prejudice they face, many women are quietly taking charge.

Voters adjust their views based on what they see happening on the ground, even when they are initially biased. The female policy makers in India are an example. Whereas the Delhi elite remained convinced that women could not be empowered by legal fiat, citizens on the ground were much more open to the opposite view.

Before the policy of setting aside one-third of the seats of panchayat leaders to women, very few women were ever elected to a position of power. In West Bengal, in GPs that had never been reserved for women leaders, 10 percent of the pradhans in 2008 were women. Not surprisingly, the share jumped to 100 percent when the seats were reserved for women. But, once a seat that had been reserved went back to being open, women were more likely to be elected again: The share of women elected increased to 13 percent for currently unreserved seats that had been reserved once in the past and to 17 percent if they had been reserved twice. The same thing applied to city government representatives in Mumbai.

One reason for this is that voters’ attitudes toward women changed. In West Bengal, to measure prejudices about competence, villagers were asked to listen to a recording of a leader’s speech. All villagers heard the same speech, but some heard it spoken in a male voice, and others in a female voice. After they heard the recording, they were asked to judge its quality. In villages that had never had reserved seats for women, and therefore had no experience of a woman leader, men who heard the “male” speech gave higher approval ratings than those who heard the “female” speech. On the other hand, in villages that had been reserved for women before, men tended to like the “female” speech better. Men did recognize that women were capable of implementing good policies and changed their opinion of women leaders. The temporary reservation of one-third of the seats for women could thus lead not only to some additional drinking water sources but also to a permanent transformation of the role of women in politics.

so what we’re seeing here from having quotas in government is:

  1. women did more with the same limited budget and took less bribes
  2. voter attitudes towards women improve, especially views on competence
  3. more women got elected, even after the quota was removed
  4. previously restricted or less empowered women grew into their roles and took charge
  5. men recognized women can implement good policies and changed their view of female leaders
  6. it directly led to policy changes women wanted but hadn’t got under mostly male leadership
  7. even a temporary quota caused a permanent shift in the role of women in politics

it also seems pretty obvious. if you believe men and women are both equally capable, then the distribution of figures in power should roughly reflect their distribution in society. we should be seeing a roughly fifty-fifty split, most likely. if any given capable person has an equal likelihood of being a man or a woman. since there’s such a massive gender imbalance, then women must be facing some kind of structural advantage. the only other option is women being less capable, so if you still defend the idea of it being a meritocracy, you need to question whether that’s your ultimate belief.

arguing that this is just how the dice fell in a genuine meritocracy is ridiculous. in an equal society with perfect meritocracy, here are the odds that representation of women in parliament would be only around 6.5%:

odds maldives women mps

yeah, that’s not coincidence.

men have no reason to be committed to the way things are

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when colonists took over populations, they faced a major problem. how would you keep a massive population of men, who feel increasingly powerless as power was transferred to colonists, from rioting and maintain some kind of peace? they came upon something people have referred to as the patriarchal bargain: easing the sense of powerlessness of the men by enshrining, in the details of legal and cultural practice and in how they governed, by effectively giving men complete control over women and children. women and children wouldn’t be protected. women and children would be the domain of men, who could take out their sense of powerlessness by tyrannically controlling the units of their families that were made subservient to them.

the colonists had stumbled upon an interesting sociological insight: the ability to exercise power is at the core of societal views of masculinity, and society allows men to displace their humiliation at feelings of lack of power in their lives by wantonly exercising the power they can exercise over others. you can see this in rates of domestic violence by unemployed men, or in controlling behavior by jealous and threatened men. a lot of the research on societal dynamics describes it. it’s something you might have experienced. growing up, boys have the entire framework of their lives based, very subtly but very completely, around power. social status is about jostling for dominance and in every social setting, every year of school, you’re squeezed into a spot in the pecking order. you prove yourself by demonstrating physical ability or sexual exploits. you avoid the tiniest implication of femininity or non-heterosexuality because they will be ruthlessly used to push you lower on the ladder of power. you act in ways to try dispel even the possibility. even in its healthier aspects, masculinity is still framed in terms of power: the power to provide for your family, the power to protect those you love, even the power to keep your girlfriends or wives satisfied. and to round it all off, boys are told the absolute worst possible thing that can happen to them is humiliation- not hurt, not sorrow, not loss, not isolation, not fear, but humiliation.

power and humiliation. power, meaning that from boyhood onward we constantly scrutinize each other, even subconsciously, for either the smallest threat or the smallest sign of weakness, and if any are spotted- any kind of difference, any softness, any emotions expressed outside of a particular way, any misgivings- the result is ruthless. sociologists call it “policing masculinity”, and the term seems about right. it’s not about cruelty, or about the innate nature of boys. it’s that so much underlying everything we absorb about society growing up is about power. it’s about the threat of humiliation for not having the power to protect yourself from it, and then the humiliation of not having had the power to have protected yourself.

i know some of you are getting defensive right now, but that’s part of it, isn’t it? we’re taught to take this kind of thing really badly. power and humiliation are the governing forces of the male psyche, often in ways that can be incredibly harmful not just to ourselves but to people around us. the place humiliation holds for men is why, in a world where most of the women you know probably have faced and definitely have to worry everyday about facing horrific violence, men say with a straight face that we’re terrified to talk to women because we worry about being laughed at or humiliated. i think that statement is as absurd as it sounds in the context of that sentence, but i understand what drives it.

but i mean harmful. as in, men often bottle up their feelings because they don’t want to seem vulnerable. and i mean harmful, as in, intense misogyny both as a way to assert power over women and a way to tell the men around you that you’re repulsed by qualities associated with femininity or sensitivity and that you don’t think of women confidants where you can escape the policing. i mean harmful, as in, showing your friends sexts you’ve received without the permission of the sender because you’re asserting your power over someone’s body. i mean harmful, as in, cussing out or attacking a woman for rejecting you. i mean harmful, as in, turning on women who speak out about sexism or assault or violence and trying to tear down their claims or credibility on social media.

not all of us do that, sure, but power and the threat of humiliation being dominant in our collective psyches fuels some of us to do all that, and it definitely has a toxic and poisonous hold on all of us that warps our ability to exist as ourselves and compels us to keep sustaining this thing that does none of us any good.

this state of things feels normal, yeah. it feels like it’s perfectly fine, and a perfectly reasonable way for things to be. but look at any child, someone still completely innocent and learning about the world: would you wish all your views of yourself, all your neuroses and fears and insecurities, everything you were made to experience growing up, upon that child? would you want them to have to deal with all the things that made you the way you are now? that’s what we do today, to thousands and thousands of children. i think we owe it to them to try start with thinking deeply about ourselves.

bell hooks discusses this:

As a daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of thinking, to caretake and nurture others. My brother was taught that it was his role to be served; to provide; to be strong; to think, strategize, and plan; and to refuse to caretake or nurture others. I was taught that it was not proper for a female to be violent, that it was “unnatural.” My brother was taught hat his value would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that for a boy, enjoying violence was a good thing (albeit in appropriate settings). He was taught that a boy should not express feelings. I was taught that girls could and should express feelings, or at least some of them.

Family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which anti-patriarchal values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:

“Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame. At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.”

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings. Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.

Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life. Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health.

Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat. Terrence Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches:

“Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.”

To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

what’s one of a thousand ways this can play out? when male unemployment rates rise and the lack of jobs makes men feel powerless and unable to provide, we see sexual harassment claims rise [1, 2]. i’m not suggesting that the onus on preventing harassment and violence is on the job market, but that maybe, as men, we need to spend a good amount of time being real introspective about what really deep down drives us, what the root under the root is that we usually never think about, how the ways we were shaped by society might warp us in ways that might be harmful, about whether we’re a forgiving and free environment for our friends to express their feelings and whether we push them towards healthier behavior while holding them accountable, whether we will perpetuate this onto our children or we’ll end the cycle here.

the necessity of doubt

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we all probably got that chain e-mail in the early 2000s about a girl who did something blasphemous and got turned into some kind of strange beast, as physical proof of the power and presence of god. proof that we could see in not-quite-high-quality photographs, back before we knew about photoshop. i only got internet access once a week back then and my mom gathered the entire family around the computer screen so we’d all know too.

i think it did touch at a need i think many of us have: a need to know, a sense that without knowing for sure you’d be experiencing that dreaded feeling of doubt. we live in a culture that’s generally hush-hush about the experience of doubt. you know the drill: if you have doubts, you’re not a good muslim, god needs to be as real to you as everything you can see and feel and touch, cognitively you need to be able to file your belief in god in the same folder as your belief that the sun is real.

i was lucky enough to have once had a teacher who was also a sufi scholar. one day in class we ended up talking about doubt, and he gave us these scenarios.

one: he pours a cup of coffee from a jug in front of us and hands it to us. we know as a physical fact that in front of us is a cup of coffee. we saw it being poured. we smelled it in the air. there’s no faith required to believe that he was giving me a cup of coffee, because we know it happened. there’s no choice to believe. there’s only a reaction to a physical reality. there’s no way to justify a belief that it isn’t coffee, and i’d have to have no sense of self-interest to act like it isn’t.

two: he leaves the classroom and comes back with cups of coffee. mccafe, with a lid, so you can’t see or smell the contents. if he hands this cup to me and i take a sip, without the concrete physical knowledge that it contains coffee instead of water or even poison, that’s a show of faith. i trusted him. i chose to believe that he’d have poured coffee, and took a sip with the belief that i’m drinking coffee. it required no faith when i knew for sure, but the inability to know is what gives weight to the decision. having faith in god isn’t about knowing, it’s about the choice to believe even in the face of the possibility that you might be wrong.

doubt gives weight to your choice to believe. the lack of physical proof is what makes your sacrifices, or anything you do in the service of your religion, an exercise of faith. if we were sent undeniable, concrete physical evidence like a woman actually getting struck down and turned into a beast, then good deeds to avoid guaranteed punishment would be the purely self-interested way to act. being a believer while not knowing for sure means having faith.

to sign off, i want to introduce one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists along with a quote about his experience with doubt:

this is sufjan stevens talking about the above song:

“I was a teenager and this was my first experience with death. At that age, you’re easily confused. I couldn’t understand why she had to die. Experiences like this always cause doubt. Because we don’t cope well with the idea of evil in this world. Then you doubt the existence of God and His intentions… actually everything. But that’s good. One of the foundations of faith is the lack of it, the disbelief. It’s very important. Firm belief is a bit unreal. That leads to religious fanaticism. Doubt is inseparable from belief. With every figure in religion you find doubt: Abraham, Moses, all the kings and the apostles. Even Jesus doubted. So isn’t it funny how religions–especially institutions–have eliminated all doubt? They don’t understand how important it is to doubt, with all its consequences.”

you can’t know for sure. you can’t understand the inner workings of god. all you can do is have faith.

radical empathy and a relationship with god

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this is what we know about god:

god is all-knowing and all-seeing. god is in everything; god is as close to us as the jugular vein. before we do anything, we say that we do it in the name of god, the most compassionate and the most merciful. the first two names of god translate to either compassion or grace, and to mercy. at the start of our prayers, we recite a passage that asks god, the compassionate and the merciful, to guide us on the path of those that have received His grace.

we know that the names of god that we use to describe Him are attributes which can only be fully possessed by god. humans are inherently limited. we cannot understand those attributes in full, let alone possess them. but what we do know is:

god sees all. god knows all. god doesn’t only know your actions, He knows what led you to them, what you were thinking, what the context was. god understands what drives you. god understands what led to your mistakes. god understands that you are fallible, that all humans are fallible, that humans have flaws and that we all have our weaknesses, that humans feel selfishness or jealousy or temptation. god understands what could lead someone astray. god knows and understands how you felt, because god knows all there is to know, and that means He knows what it is you felt, and He understands all that there is to understand.

and with all that knowledge, god is compassionate. god is merciful. god bestows His grace. ar-rahman, ar-raheem.

there’s a word for knowing, understanding, and having compassion: empathy. it’s something we have to practice constantly in our daily lives. we empathize with the people around us, and the people we hear about, and with ourselves or the people we once were.

empathizing is an act of radical power, a flash of light that makes you, for a second, part of something bigger. empathy dissolves all that keeps us apart. empathy is the quantum mechanics of human social relationships: bring it close enough and the rules that bind us, our norms, our in-groups, our loyalties, everything we thought fixed in our identities, all become malleable.

the practice of empathy is to honor god, a form of faith that transcends faith. empathy is the most inspired we can be by god, and the practice of empathy is the purest thing a human can do.