In Greek myth, the Sphinx was a creature (woman’s head, lion’s body) who “strangled” or killed those who couldn’t answer her riddle. The Greek word Sphíngx is thought to come from the Greek verb sphíngō (σφίγγω), meaning “to bind tight” or “to squeeze.”
Sphincter
The word sphincter comes from the Greek sphinktēr, meaning “a band or muscle that binds tight.” In anatomy, a sphincter is a circular muscle that constricts or closes an opening (like the anal or pyloric sphincter).
The Connection
Both words come from the same Greek root: sphíngō = to squeeze, bind, or tighten.
The Sphinx: associated with “strangling” or tightening.
The sphincter: literally a “tightening” muscle.
So the link is etymological — they share the same root meaning “to squeeze.”
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Mar 3, 2026 Julia Mossbridge, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist focused on understanding and training exceptional human performance including psi effects such as precognition, technological intuition, human-AI teaming, time, and accessing unconditional love. She is the co-founder and Board Chair of TILT: The Institute for Love and Time, Senior Distinguished Fellow in Human Potential at the Center for the Future of AI, Mind, and Society at Florida Atlantic University, Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego, Senior Data+Intuition Consultant at Tangible IQ, a member of the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the Stimson Center, and the founder of Mossbridge Institute. Julia is author and coauthor of numerous books and scientific articles, including Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness with Imants Baruss; The Calling: A 12-Week Science-Based Program to Discover, Energize, and Engage Your Soul’s Work; The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life Paperback; and Have a Nice Disclosure. Her website is juliamossbridge.com Julia describes her research that explores the relationship between photons and time, “Replication and Characterization of the Causally Ambiguous Duration-Sorting (CADS) Effect”, that builds on the double-slit experiment. Through her exploration of bosonic particles, consciousness, and the past, present, and future, she suggests that the nature of time may be more like a braid than linear. By equating the informational substrate of the universe, that connects everything, with unconditional love, she demonstrates a connection of science and spirituality. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:42 Causally ambiguous research 00:05:08 The double-slit experiment and interference pattern 00:13:08 Collapsing the wave function 00:15:50 Presentiment or retrocausality 00:20:31 Time and space 00:29:36 Consciousness and universal love 00:34:50 The physics of love 00:50:05 Photons and mind-like particles 00:54:04 The past and future are in the present. 00:57:45 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on January 23, 2026)
Vampire lore informs us that holding up a mirror to someone possessed by the vampire archetype is a dangerous task and should not be attempted lightly. Not casting a reflection in the mirror, people playing out the role of psychic vampires are not able to reflect upon themselves. Interestingly, philosopher Hannah Arendt points out that an inability to self-reflectively think about ourselves is one of the primary characteristics of evil.
In the alchemical treatise Corpus Hermeticum, the soul is admonished to save itself from agnosia (unconsciousness). The text says, “But first you must tear off this garment which you wear,–this cloak of darkness, this web of unconsciousness, this [prop] of evil, this bond of corruption, this living death, this visible corpse, this tomb you carry about with you, this inner robber.”
“We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.” (John Wheeler, At Home in the Universe)
It reminds me of the poet Milton’s words describing Satan, “This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway.” Instead of being “put on,” this “false body” needs to be seen through and “put off.” Blake refers to the false body of Satan as an “empire of nothing,” and says he is “Satan this body of Doubt that seems but Is Not.” If I don’t see through this false body, this “body of Doubt that seems but Is Not,” I am then in danger of identifying with it, in which case I would be complicit in being replaced by a pale imitation, false duplicate and toxic mimic of myself.
St. John writes, “The divine touches the soul to renew it and to ripen it, in order to make it divine, to detach it from the habitual affections and qualities of the old man, to which it clings and conforms itself.”
It brings to mind the Mark Twain quote that Jung cites in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “The greatest force on earth is mass stupidity.” Jung comments, “Stupidity is the extraordinary power and Mark Twain saw it.” It makes me think of Jung’s description of “normal” people as “ridiculously unconscious,” elsewhere he refers to the “barbarous unconsciousness” of humanity.
It makes me think of a quote from the scientist Carl Sagan, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The Bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken…it’s sometimes earlier to reject strong evident than to admit that we’ve been wrong.”
The “persona”, according to Jung, “is that which in reality one is not,” which is to say it is not who one is but the mask one presents to the world; it is who one “seems” to be. The word “persona” is taken by Jung from the Latin word for “actor’s mask.” Talking about the disincentive to step out of identifying with our persona, Jung writes that “the temptation to be what one seems to be is great, because the person is usually rewarded in cash.” In order words, our culture provides benefits for people to identify with who they appear to be, rather than who they truly are.
It makes me think of Nietzsche’s words, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
In one of my favorite quotes, June writes, “Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situation sin which the great ‘principles’ entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out…Here a man can do nothing but stand his ground.”
To quote visionary Buckminster Fuller, if we are not full of imagination, we are “not very sane.” The world of the creative imagination is as ontologically real as the world of the senses, and its contents have a living reality all their own.”
It is the alchemists’ version of true imagination that Einstein was referring to when he famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
This reminds me of the Kabbalah’s insight that a “sinner” who “repents” (which etymologically, has to do with a “re-turning”) is on a higher level than the saint who has never sinned.
One of the inner meanings of “Satan” is “that which obstructs.” The heroic, creative life is always threatened, as if the obstructing forces are tests, guardians of the threshold of evolution. This archetypal dynamic has been symbolically represented from time immemorial in numerous myths and fairy tales. And yet, these obscuring and oppositional forces help us to build up the muscle of realization, which is to say that from the cosmic perspective, though apparently obstructing our true nature, these forker forces ultimately serve its realization.
–Paul Levy, Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father
Cut the military budget in half. Bloated war spending remains a sacred cow for far too many
Eric Blanc Mar 2, 2026 (laborpolitics@substack.com)
Donald Trump is setting Iran and the world on fire. And there’s every reason to think he’ll keep escalating abroad as his regime gets weaker and less popular at home.
But we should be honest: this didn’t start with Trump. For decades, both parties have shared the same basic commitment to U.S. military dominance over the world. Fifty-five percent of House Democrats voted in favor of the most recent US armed forces budget.
Establishment liberals like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prefer a more stable and less erratic version of empire. That’s why their objections about the Iran attack are about process and “strategic clarity,” not a break with the underlying goal of U.S. supremacy. For her part, Kamala Harris on the campaign trail promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
What almost never gets seriously questioned in mainstream US politics is the premise itself: that Washington has the right to bomb, invade, or attack any country across the globe whenever it decides it has a sufficiently good reason. There are important exceptions — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, James Talarico, and others have taken clearer antiwar stances.
But it’s not enough just to oppose this war on Iran. Nor is it enough to demand an end to US aid to Israel. As long as the United States spends almost $1 trillion a year on the military, there will be overwhelming institutional and political pressure to use that machine, justify that machine, and keep expanding that machine — while insisting that there’s no money at home to make life affordable for working people.
Anti-MAGA forces need to stop treating military-budget cuts like a fringe talking point. In the midterms and in 2028, we should agitate for serious reforms to the US war machine. What’s a reasonable-but-ambitious starting point? Cut the armed forces’ $886 billion budget in half.
That’s not pie in the sky. A military budget of “only” about $443 billion would still leave the United States the biggest military spender in the world. But it could mark a real step away from the strategy and practice of imperialism.
Humanity needs international cooperation, not conflict. The United States’s deepening rivalry with China threatens to push the globe into another catastrophic great-power spiral at precisely the moment we need to confront actual existential questions like climate breakdown and how to develop AI slowly and carefully enough that it doesn’t wreck our livelihoods or human civilization.
And with so many working-class Americans barely hanging on, freeing up roughly $500 billion every year would go a long way toward making life in this country livable again.
We are constantly told that universal childcare is too expensive, housing is too expensive, healthcare is too expensive, public transit is too expensive, climate adaptation is too expensive. One simple solution is to cut the military budget in half.
Image by Golden Cosmos
Better Ways To Spend Half a Trillion Dollars
So many life-changing policies would become possible if America halved its military budget. Here’s what $443 billion yearly could fund if directed fully toward each item:
1. Medicare for All — Most estimates put the net new federal cost at $300-400 billion/year (replacing premiums, copays, and deductibles currently paid privately). $443 billion/year would essentially fund the transition to a single-payer system, covering every person in the country while eliminating out-of-pocket costs.
2. End hunger — Making breakfast and lunch free at every school costs about $20 billion per year. Expanding SNAP and WIC to fully eliminate food insecurity would run another $50-100 billion. $443 billion could end hunger in America and completely transform the school nutrition system with money to spare many times over.
3. Build millions of public housing units — Average cost to build a quality affordable unit is roughly $200,000-$300,000. At $443 billion/year, you could build 1.5 to 2 million new public housing units every single year. The entire estimated national shortage is about 4-7 million units, so you’d close the gap in three to four years and then have an ongoing budget for maintenance, renovation, and continued construction.
4. Cancel all medical debt — Total medical debt in active collection is estimated around $195 billion. You could eliminate every dollar of it in the first year and still have over $240 billion left for other health investments that same year.
5. Cancel all student debt — Total outstanding student debt is roughly $1.8 trillion. You could wipe it all out in about four years, then fund free public college permanently going forward with money to spare.
6. Make public college and trade school free — Total tuition revenue at all public colleges and universities is around $80-90 billion per year. $443 billion covers that almost five times over. You could eliminate tuition, massively expand capacity, and fund living stipends for students.
7. Universal childcare and pre-K — Estimated cost for a universal, high-quality system is roughly $70-100 billion per year. $443 billion would fund a system where every family in America has access to free or near-free childcare from birth through age five, with well-paid unionized staff, and still leave $340+ billion on the table.
8. Green energy transition jobs program — The entire Inflation Reduction Act was about $370 billion in climate spending spread over a decade. $443 billion per year would be roughly twelve times that annual rate. You could retrofit every building in the country, build out renewable energy infrastructure nationwide, and fund union-wage jobs for every displaced fossil fuel worker many times over.
9. National high-speed rail network — California’s single high-speed rail project is estimated around $100 billion. $443 billion/year could build a comprehensive national network connecting every major metro area within a decade, something comparable to what China and Europe have built.
10. Repair all deteriorating infrastructure — The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US infrastructure gap, the gap between the amount of money needed for basic infrastructure maintenance versus how much is actually allocated for it, at roughly $2.6 trillion over ten years. $443 billion yearly covers that completely — every bridge, road, dam, water system, school building, and electrical grid — and leaves room for new construction.
11. Universal home and community-based care — There are roughly 800,000 people on Medicaid waiting lists for home care for elderly and disabled people. A comprehensive universal program would cost an estimated $150-200 billion per year. $443 billion fully funds this with well-paid caregivers and eliminates every waitlist in the country.
12. Federal jobs guarantee — Most estimates for a program guaranteeing a $15 per hour job with benefits to anyone who wants one range from $300-500 billion/year depending on uptake. $443 billion lands right in that range, potentially employing 10-15 million people in public works, caregiving, environmental restoration, and community development.
13. Expand and strengthen Social Security — Eliminating the taxable earnings cap is the usual funding mechanism, but $443 billion/year could increase average benefits by roughly 35-40%, lower the retirement age, and extend the trust fund indefinitely. That would lift virtually every senior out of poverty.
14. Community health centers and mental health services — There are currently about 1,400 federally qualified health centers. Estimates suggest we need roughly 8,000-10,000 more to provide universal primary and mental health access. At roughly $5-10 million per center for construction and staffing, $443 billion could build out the entire system in a single year and fund operations for decades.
15. Weatherize and retrofit every home — Average cost to fully weatherize a home is roughly $5,000-$10,000. There are about 35-40 million homes that need it. Total cost: $200-400 billion. $443 billion/year does the entire country in one year, cutting energy bills for tens of millions of families immediately — and reducing carbon emissions.
16. Universal paid family and medical leave — A comprehensive 12-week paid leave program is estimated at roughly $50-75 billion/year. $443 billion funds this nearly six times over. You could offer six months of paid leave and still have hundreds of billions remaining.
17. Fully fund and transform veterans’ care — Veterans Affairs’ (VA) current budget is around $400 billion but is plagued by staffing shortages, long wait times, and crumbling infrastructure, with Congress consistently failing to fund it adequately. $443 billion a year could double VA healthcare staffing, eliminate every wait list, build state-of-the-art facilities in every region, fully fund mental health and suicide prevention programs, end veteran homelessness (roughly 35,000 veterans are unhoused on any given night), and guarantee every veteran world-class care without bureaucratic delays — all while keeping the existing VA public healthcare system rather than privatizing it.
The staggering thing about this list is that even the most expensive items rarely exceed $443 billion individually. You could fund several of them simultaneously with half the military budget. For context, the US spends more on its armed forces than the next nine countries combined.
Peace Is Possible
Even though more Americans want to cut the military budget than expand it — and even though this war on Iran is widely opposed — the military itself as an institution remains remarkably popular. Cutting the military budget in half is ambitious and would be controversial, since so many communities across the US economically rely on supplying goods and services to the military. Why not start with a smaller proposed cut? This is a reasonable question.
My response is, first, that $443 billion a year is still a huge amount of money. Second, there’s a huge amount of fat that can be quickly and easily cut because military spending is rampant with waste, irrationality, and lack of financial accountability. Third, there is strong precedent for a massive military cut: military spending was cut in half from 1945 to 1946 in the wake of World War II. By 1948, the armed forces budget had been cut 89 percent from its wartime total, as factories converted to peacetime use. The same conversion strategy used then — deep Pentagon cuts combined with job guarantees, wage protections, retraining, union-led transition planning, and long-term public contracts for civilian production — can be used to transition us today away from an economy oriented towards destruction, towards one based on producing services and providing goods that humans actually need.
Finally, along the way to our goal of halving the budget, we should also support intermediary military budget cuts like the 10 percent proposed by Bernie Sanders. Realistically, it will probably be through the accretion of such partial steps forward that we’ll achieve our goals. In part, that’s because it will take time to reconfigure and transition the plants currently being used to produce weapons and military goods. But in that process, it’s crucial we keep the public’s eye on the prize of a dramatically different US military.
The problem with modest proposed military budget cuts on their own isn’t just that they don’t free up enough money for domestic programs. It’s also important that we spark a serious national debate about how the United States can begin relating to the world in a way that does not hinge on domination and exploitation.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the US government was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That remains true today. But it doesn’t have to remain true tomorrow.
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The human subconscious is such an interesting thing. No matter how much you think you’ve got it figured out, it’ll always spit out the most random stuff. Take me, for example. After coming home from a long day at the world’s most groundbreaking artificial intelligence organization, I’ll go to bed and have the weirdest dreams where people from the future are sobbing and begging me to change course.
Anyone else ever have these?
It’s funny. Some people have dreams where their teeth fall out; others where they show up to high school tests naked. But the second my head hits the pillow, I’m suddenly in a cold gray smoky void where all I can make out are broken, haunted swarms of people pleading with me to “end this now while there’s still time.” Really peculiar, right? I wish there was some way to find other people who have had them. But when I search “endless crowds of weeping silhouettes telling you this is a terrible mistake” dreams on Reddit, it turns up nada.
It’s tough, because I don’t have much time during the day to think about them. I asked my spouse, Oliver, if he’s ever had the old “people screaming for help from the devastated wreckage of a future world” dream, and he said he didn’t know what that was. I even joked about it while I was out grabbing morning coffees with some venture capitalist buddies. I said, “Sorry if I’m a little off the ball today, guys—I had another one of those dreams where you’re on a scorched, desolate landscape desperately pushing past men who grab you by the lapel, shake you, and cry out, ‘Please understand: This isn’t a dream. It’s a warning.’”
They just looked at me like I was crazy, though.
You’d think I might have some of the other common dreams, like falling off a cliff or trying to run while you’re frozen in place. But it’s always the “tormented throngs of people from the year 2042” one. So odd! I’d be interested to see the statistical breakdown on how often people have this specific dream versus the others. I even asked ChatGPT 5.0 about it, and it suggested I might be watching too many scary movies. I don’t think that’s it, though, because I don’t have time to watch many movies at all!
Sometimes these people wheeze things to me in a raspy voice about how they’re so thirsty and there’s nothing but desert stretching on forever. Sometimes they just mill around, stare at their feet, and mutter about how the only thing that gave them purpose has been torn away. But most of the time, they’re just wailing inconsolably about “all that’s been lost.” Huh!
People probably have all sorts of variations of this dream. But if yours is anything like mine, here’s what happens! Usually, you wake up on a lifeless beach that’s adorned with some sort of abandoned marble temple. It’s supposed to be beautiful, but instead it’s really sad. Almost unbearably sad. So much so that you want to get away from it. So you crawl downward into these vents going below the horrible temple, and suddenly it’s like you’re moving through the innards of an incomprehensible machine that’s thudding away, thud, thud, thud. And as you get deeper, the metal sidings are carved with scrawled ominous curses and slurs directed toward you, and you hear the voices, louder than before, and you somehow know these people are in pain because of you. It keeps getting colder. Color drains from the world. And you see the crowd through the slats of the vents: pale and emaciated men, women, and children from centuries to come, all of them pressed together for warmth in some sort of unending cavern. What clothes they have are torn and ragged. Before you know it, their dirty hands and dirty fingernails lurch through the grates, and they’re reaching for you, tearing at your shirt, moaning terrible things about their suffering and how you made it happen, you made it, and you need to stop this now, now, now. And next they’re ripping you apart, limb from limb, and you are joining them in the gray dimness forever.
Then you wake up in a cold sweat and can’t breathe at all, almost like you’re drowning—I guess from the weight of untold mobs of people leaping on you and ripping you apart. It’s super weird. But your alarm is going off, it’s 5 a.m., and so you get dressed and answer some emails about preparations for the next ChatGPT model.
They all have dark empty holes where their eyes should be, too. I probably should have mentioned that.
I wonder if it’s my diet! Or maybe I shouldn’t be drinking so much Celsius in the afternoon? I guess I could stop looking at my phone before bed. All that blue light could be causing weird dreams. If that’s what it takes to get rid of the legions who scream about lost eons stretching on forever before humanity, I’d certainly give it a try.
Anyway, if anyone out there is having similar dreams, just let me know! I’d love to hear from you at Altman@OpenAI.com. I’m really just curious how many people out there have these dreams and how often you’re seeing the wandering masses who scream at you to “help us, help us, for God’s sake”? For me, it’s every time I close my eyes—whether it’s a power nap or a full night’s sleep—but for you it might be different. Most likely, all of this means nothing, though.
If you pay attention to your body while you read the news, you can feel it.
The tightening in the chest. The shallow breath. The reflex to roll your eyes, clench your jaw, pick a side, and brace for impact. That’s not an intellectual response. That’s your nervous system deciding the world isn’t safe.
And the truth is, a lot of our politics is not just “heated debate.” It’s mass dysregulation — a state where the nervous system is so flooded with threat and stress that clear thinking, empathy, and genuine deliberation become nearly impossible. Chronic activation. A culture caught in a stress response so constant it becomes hard to imagine there could be anything healthier outside the bubble it has created.
Our political ecosystem has become a machine for this. Leaders provoke. Audiences react. Media amplifies. Algorithms reward whatever spikes emotion fastest. Fundraising follows the outrage. The whole cycle trains us into a narrower and narrower state, where nuance feels like weakness and contempt passes for conviction.
In that environment, politics stops being an arena where we deliberate for the common good. It becomes a stage where we reenact our oldest survival patterns: fight, flight, freeze, and the desperate scramble for belonging.
What we’re living through isn’t only a policy crisis. It’s an emotional maturity crisis. A co-regulation crisis. A crisis of whether anyone in power can stay steady enough under pressure to help the rest of us widen, rather than collapse. It’s a game we seem to be losing.
We don’t just need smarter policy platforms (though we certainly do). We need leaders who can carry conflict without turning it into annihilation. Leaders who can tell the truth without contempt. Leaders who can model real adulthood in public. This would do more to open up our capacity for the positive change most of us long for than just about anything. But it’s a tall order given the limiting system we live within, and with the pool of leadership we currently have before us. Far too often modeling the worst of us, not the best of us.
The hidden loop we are stuck in
Here is the toxic loop as I see it.
Provocation gets attention. Attention gets amplified. Amplification triggers the crowd. The crowd rewards escalation. That reward trains leaders to escalate again.
A dysregulated leader dysregulates the room. The room dysregulates the country.
That is the trap. We spiral inside it, mistaking intensity for strength and cruelty for clarity or justice.
And if we wonder why whole and healthy arguments rarely break through, this is a big part of the answer. When already stressed and dysregulated people get activated, they can’t reliably take in nuance. They narrow. They sort the world into friend and foe. They may seek belonging through shared enemies. They reach for certainty, not complexity. In that state, politics becomes less about solving problems and more about managing fear.
Look at our political landscape honestly and what you see, underneath all the noise, is a lot of people acting from unprocessed psychological and developmental wounding. This is true of voters. And it is deeply true of many of our leaders.
When politicians attack and humiliate, when they perform constant public rage, when they govern through grievance and keep their followers in a permanent state of threat, they do more than model destructive behavior. They trigger the collective nervous system.
If someone experiences the world as hostile, maybe because they have spent parts of their lives feeling unseen, attacked, abused, oppressed, or not loved enough, they can gravitate toward leaders who feel familiar inside that hostility, even if those leaders intensify the very conditions that keep them trapped. It isn’t rational. It’s somatic. It happens below the level of conscious thought.
The allure of a deregulating leader isn’t always about the policies they promise. Sometimes it’s about the relief of being mirrored. The feeling that someone finally understands your anger. The camaraderie of shared grievance. The familiarity of chaos can feel safer than the unfamiliarity of calm, especially if calm has never lasted.
This may not be most people. But it is enough people to shape elections and dominate news cycles. And the more our political environment amplifies dysregulation, the harder it becomes for anyone, on any side, to respond from their best self.
We are spinning. We keep spinning. And a lot of us are exhausted.
Here’s what gives me hope: you don’t need to have had a great therapist, a secure childhood, or an intact support network to recognize groundedness when it’s standing in front of you. Most of us haven’t had those things as deeply as we need them. But something in us still responds — to warmth, steadiness, and the sense that the person speaking actually means what they say.
We know it when we see it. We feel it in our bodies before we can explain it with our words.
This matters politically because it means the opportunity isn’t only for the already-healed. A well-regulated leader can help a dysregulated audience hear things they couldn’t hear before — not because the argument improved, but because the nervous system settled enough to let it in. The message hasn’t changed; the container for it has. And that changes things.
Most of us are longing for this, even those of us who can’t name it. We’re longing for connection. For someone to model what calm, introspective leadership actually looks like. For a sense that the adults are in the room.
I don’t mean bland. I don’t mean passive. I don’t mean “above the fray” in a way that excuses injustice or dodges righteous anger. I mean a leader who can carry conflict without turning it into all out annihilation.
Someone who can tell the truth without contempt. Someone who can oppose policies without dehumanizing individual people. Someone who can admit mistakes without collapsing into shame or doubling down in aggression. Someone who does not need to perform dominance to feel powerful.
It is startling how rare this is now. Which is exactly why it stands out when it appears.
The Rise of James Talarico
This brings me to Rep. James Talarico.
Talarico is a Texas state representative who is becoming an unexpectedly compelling national voice, in part because he speaks in a register that politics has largely abandoned: moral seriousness without dehumanization. He is a former public school teacher and a Christian who talks openly about faith — including in a Democratic Party ecosystem that often struggles to speak about spirituality without discomfort or condescension. His public profile has surged, and he has stepped onto a bigger stage through a U.S. Senate campaign (You can visit his website and even donate here).
You don’t have to agree with Talarico on everything to notice the pattern.
He works hard not to demonize opponents. He tends to critique worldviews and systems rather than attack individuals. He talks about relationship-building as a civic necessity, not a naïve luxury. He shows signs of genuine self-reflection — acknowledging mistakes publicly and trying to learn from them, getting specific in ways that feel real rather than managed.
In a time when so many politicians feel like walking trauma responses, that alone is a powerful and far too rare form of leadership. It communicates something many Americans are starving for: adulthood.
It also interrupts the contagion.
A leader who stays grounded makes it easier for others to stay grounded. A leader who refuses to mock and dehumanize makes it harder for the crowd to justify doing so. A leader who can hold tension without escalating it shows people that conflict does not have to mean collapse.
This is not softness. It is capacity — and ultimately a more durable kind of power.
I want to be careful here. I don’t know Talarico’s inner world. I can’t vouch for his deepest character. He undoubtedly has his own flaws. And he is not the only politician working to bring higher-minded values to the forefront (Marianne Williamson another good example). But he is a far too rare bird in politics, and rarer still at his level of visibility.
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There’s a version of this argument that says: voters should be smarter, more policy-literate, more rational. And sure, in an ideal world… But that framing misses something essential about what it means to be human.
We are social creatures whose nervous systems were built for small tribes and clear hierarchies. We look to our leaders not just for ideas but for cues about whether the world is safe, whether things are going to be okay, whether we are going to be okay. We look for healthy modeling. We always have. The question is whether we’re going to consciously work with that reality or keep pretending it doesn’t exist.
Here’s my theory: if more leaders modeled regulation, love, restraint, and accountability, our politics would not simply become nicer. It would become far more functional. People would be more able to listen. More able to tolerate difference. More able to update their beliefs without feeling humiliated. More able to stay in relationship while still advocating fiercely for what they believe.
In other words, we could begin to exit the trauma loop.
We cannot heal a traumatized society solely through better policy, though policy matters enormously. We also have to address the culture’s emotional operating system. And leadership is one of the fastest ways a society learns what is normal — what is possible — what it’s allowed to feel and do and become.
If we want a different political order — and I believe most people, across the spectrum, are hungry for one — then part of what we need to do is recognize and elevate the leaders who have done some personal work. Who aren’t playing the gotcha demonization game. Who can be a steady presence under pressure. Who aren’t just performing values but actually practicing them. Who make us feel, in our bodies, like things might be okay.
James Talarico seems to be one of those people. There will hopefully continue to be a growing chorus of others. The work, for all of us, is learning to recognize what we’re looking for — and supporting it when it shows up. The system, of course, doesn’t make this easy — gerrymandering, donor capture, party corruption, an outrage-driven media, etc. all select for exactly the opposite. Which is why recognizing and actively supporting this kind of leadership, when it appears, matters more than ever.
The future depends, in no small part, on whether we keep multiplying dysregulation or finally decide to multiply the leaders who can model something better. That might be one of the most important political acts available to us — if we can find more of them.
Have thoughts on this? I’d love to hear who else you see modeling this kind of leadership — locally, nationally, anywhere.
Matthew is the Board Chair of The Peace Alliance (www.peacealliance.org), a U.S. based NGO which advocates for domestic and international peacebuilding priorities. His writings have appeared on CNN, Salon, HuffPost and other outlets.
His Substack writings explore how we heal—from the inside out and the bottom up—personally, politically, and culturally—with a particular focus on the intersections between them all. Weaving together politics, psychology, and personal growth, grounded in systems thinking and trauma-awareness.
To Prosperos students who have attended TRANSLATION CLASS,
We KNOW that Consciousness is our True Identity.
We KNOW that we are much more than a Digital Identity.
It is time NOW for us to APPLY what we KNOW! QUESTION: How do we apply what we know?
Well, we can teach, share, guide and inspire other people to APPLY or TRANSLATE their thoughts back to what they KNOW to be true: Essence, Beingness, Consciousness. Our world today if overwhelmed with information/WORDS/social media, etc. It is essential for us all to sit, relax and APPLY what we KNOW to be true!
Many of us are ready to KNOW and APPLY what we have learned in The Prosperos!
It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.
It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.
Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.
In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan’s drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children’s book ideas (“Why do birds fly?” “Why do we cry?” “What is it like to be a tree?” “When I talk to myself, who’s listening?”) was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:
P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].
I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman’s doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, “knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm,” passionate and playful, “stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else.” Here was someone who could see the “light engrossed in every object,” could fathom the “molecular / grit” of that light, could feel “the cold compress / of the universe” against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as “Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet,” “Neptune, whose breath is ammonia,” “Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun’s yellow fever,” and the “agitated fossil” of Jupiter with its “whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began.”
What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. “How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?” Diane asks, “full of stagefright / and misgiving,” then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:
How can any system observe itself?
And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.
Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, begun in 1869 and completed in 1876 to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print.)
Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.
Diane’s answer is nothing less than a prose poem:
Once, I thought the universe’s greatest gift was scale — those vaulting immensities of gas and dust, planets flaring like thoughts inside a skull of stars. But time, that sly astronomer, has shown me something subtler: how much of the same splendor hums within us and all of nature. The pulse of a leaf opening to sun, the quiet veer of a child’s attention, my own heartbeat a small percussion in ancient starlight — all are galaxies folded inward, universes in miniature.
What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity, an old companion still sending sparks of wonder through the brief ribs of our lives.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo’s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In the author’s note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:
I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another’s fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the “cosmic” is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.
I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
P.S. The enclosed poem, ‘The Other Night’ by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It’s unfinished so it shouldn’t yet be quoted publically [sic].