 The way I address polarization and dehumanization in my writing and in my speaking is I make sure to present the, quote, other side in the most generous terms that I can to say, I hear you, I see you, I get it. And then to contain that in maybe a larger framework so that people know that whatever I'm saying it's not because I have not considered their position. It's not because I'm ignorant of where they're coming from. It's not because I don't know their story. So I guess it's just called empathy. It really, here's the basic principle is a question, what is it like to be you? To ask that with genuine curiosity, what is the totality of circumstances that brings you to do the things that you are doing? Do we really ask that as activists? Do we say, suppose we are trying to protect indigenous people in the Amazon against logging companies, mining companies, and the paramilitaries that work with them, and the paramilitaries go in and commit some atrocity? Do we wonder, what is it like to be a man in that paramilitary organization? What is his story? What brought him to do that? What brings the companies to do that? Who are they? Usually people set them up as the enemy. We've got to fight these organizations and protect people from them, and I'm not saying that we should never do that. There is a necessity to do that, but if we do not understand the conditions that birth those organizations and that behavior, we will fight an endless war. I see in activism not only being stuck on that superficial level of fighting the enemy, running from fire to fire, putting out each fire, reacting to one crisis after the next, but the way that we do that even can intensify the underlying conditions that create an endless supply of enemies to fight. And underlying conditions are things like judgment, are the fear and enmity that is generated by fighting. If you say you're trying to stop a pipeline, and if you're coming from a place of looking at those executives in the pipeline company and saying, I know who they are. They don't care about nature. They are evil, selfish people, greedy people. They're motivated by greed, unlike me. They're the bad guys. I'm the good guys. Imagine what it's like for that executive to hear that and to see those angry protesters and to read the comments they're making about them online. This guy, I mean, he loves his kids. He walks his neighbor's dog when they're on vacation. He doesn't think of himself as a bad guy. He's doing what everybody else in his subculture does. People think he's a great guy on the golf course, you know? So you seem ridiculous to him. You seem just like a frothing zealot if you are not understanding what it is like to be him. So that is my prescription for healing democracy. It is the question, what is it like to be you? If people ask that about each other, like on the right, they're not going to be able to uphold stories of cheating welfare moms, you know, gaming the system, and lazy, degenerate black people. Like if you actually talk to one of these guys who grew up in a ghetto whose only role models were drug dealers, who went hungry half the time, like if you hear these stories, then you cannot hold that. You cannot hold that prejudice. And the same thing, if you talk to the poor white folks where my brother's farm is in rural Pennsylvania, they might have the most bigoted attitudes you've ever heard toward black people who they never actually meet, but when you understand the poverty and the whole environment there, of course, you're like, yeah, if I grew up there, I'd feel the same way. I'd have the same attitudes toward government. They're hostility to government. And the only interaction with government is like some department of agriculture bureaucrat coming in and finding something wrong with their farm, finding something in violation no matter what, and looking at them as some kind of cretin, like let's understand what our experience is like, and then we understand, wow, we are all in this together. Every single one of us, in some way, has been traumatized by the spirit-wrecking machine that we live in.