The late Michel Foucault proposed that power was not just violence or coercion, but the institutionalized creation of concepts, categories, and lines of division. This essay is written in honor of the rigor and beauty of his thought, and the subtlety of its depths. The ideas here are not new, but are of deep importance. I enjoyed expressing them in my own language. I am indebted to Foucault, Georges Bataille, James Baldwin, Pierre Bourdieu, the Buddha, and others. Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece, The Warmth of Other Suns , is a portrait of American racism, and the vibrant quest for freedom of the African-American people. She includes vivid accounts of cruelty and violence—lynchings, torture, bombings. She details physical and economic exploitation as both an economist and a writer, describing the backbreaking work of picking hundreds of pounds of cotton just to break even. She shows the radical difference in conditions and opportunity for whites and blacks, from one-room schools in th

COVID-19 has been a planetary crisis. And though the subjective experience of COVID has differed wildly depending on geography, culture, class, race, and belief system, at least a small part of the experience of COVID has been shared by all humans. This is unique in world history, though as commentators point out it is only the first of many such a globe encompassing trials. Given this inevitable future of planetary crisis (and I don’t just mean near-term global warming, I also refer to other existential risks such as pandemics, asteroids, and AI), I wonder if we can find a silver lining in this first experience of planetary crisis.  It is well known to anyone with a bad boss or who has gone on a difficult journey that suffering is a powerful means of creating group cohesion. ‘The trial’ is one of the most ancient means of forging the social bond through rituals and rites of passage that reduce all members of society to a common substance. Anthropological thinkers argue that the period

It is difficult for me to submit to joy. It comes clunkily. I look around, abashed. I don’t want to dance too excitedly, sing too loudly, joke too freely—extend myself too much. My joy could be another person’s lame, weird, gross, strange .   This is a lesson I, and almost all of us, have subconsciously learned from a young age. It is difficult to give into free, unabashed, wacky joy because we have been miseducated. As ‘childhood’ ended, and we began to learn math and writing in the classroom, on the playground we began to learn the rules of the game. We learned how to fit in, how to play it cool, how to not be the weird one, how to not give in to joy.   We were miseducated to cringe at the free expression of those kids, either without social sense or wise beyond their years, who did express themselves freely (“band kids” or “theater kids” maybe, guys who moved their bodies a little too much like girls). We cringed for them, already seeing the social consequences of their free joy: “

An Allegorical Poem Based on Real Events Brutus woke up suddenly on a rock next to the lake. He looked around and felt strange. The lake shimmered and the sun burned on his skin. What was this? Brutus didn’t know what he was doing here. He wasn’t sure why he was thinking or feeling things. He felt very alone. He didn’t know who had put him here, and he didn’t know where to go. He wasn’t like all the other brutuses who went busily about their days, buzzing to the next task and desire until they fell asleep. He wanted to go somewhere. He needed to go somewhere. He wanted to feel comfortable and whole. He wanted to latch on to something, but there was nothing to latch on to. He couldn’t be with his own mind. Where was his home? He wanted to go inside, but there was no inside on the rock. He walked to the shady trees, but he got there and he was still Brutus. There was no crevice to crawl into. Only pounding sun and open sky and existing. Maybe he could get it ou

“Everything teaches a lesson.” I was feeling disappointed and anxious in the days following an ill-advised wrestling match and concussion. It was the end of a summer spent working at a boy’s camp, and my plans to lead a culminating backpacking trip were now in doubt. My head buzzed with headache if I tried to read, listen to music, or raise my voice. “Everything teaches a lesson.” These were my friend Nemo’s words of consolation. I don’t want lessons — I want to be healthy, to go on this trip, to be able to do everything I enjoy, I thought through tears. His consolation was spotless in its truth and logic, yet, in the moment, unable to console me at all. I’ve now learned that the average concussion heals in two weeks; my concussion experience was not an average one. There are various reasons for this — whiplash, hypochondria, poor management. But what matters is that, over the next three months, instead of recovering, my condition declined. The list of stim