Part 1 TL;DR
Part 1 focused on a simple, direct question:
What helps ordinary people stay grounded, capable, and connected when the ground beneath us starts to slip?
I propose that our overwhelm in this moment of geopolitical history isn’t because of what’s happening out there so much as trying to hold onto stories that were never really true.
Letting go of those stories involves a process of grieving and disillusionment.
There’s relief at the end of the process. It doesn’t feel like optimism. It doesn’t feel like certainty. It feels more like sobriety. But it depends on letting disillusionment do its work first.
We were all offered a deal: we give up personal responsibility in exchange for convenience, comfort and safety. The dream of being “carefree.”
But of course, that was never really on offer. The system was always rigged and we were just convinced to ignore it.
As material limits cause the system to reveal itself, the truth is inescapable.
Once we stop asking a system to be something it was never designed to be, we’re freed from the endless cycle of disappointment and outrage. We can stop oscillating between hope and shock — hoping it will finally deliver on its promises, then acting surprised when it doesn’t.
If the system isn’t a benevolent parent, then waiting for it to behave like one is a dead end. And if the problem isn’t a temporary deviation but a long-standing pattern, then the work ahead isn’t restoration.
It’s maturation.
Seeing the system clearly, we see how it thrives on isolation, disconnection and dysregulation. Therefore, integration, connection and grounding become the best way forward and the prerequisite for self-government.
Part 1 concluded with the question: how can we find our feet, widen our stance, and begin the slower work of learning how to ride the waves together. What is possible once we stop pretending someone else is in charge?
Self-Government Is a Skill
Once the system is seen clearly — once the illusion of neutral stewardship fades — a quieter and more demanding question comes into view.
What does it mean if we can’t outsource self-government?
Self-government isn’t a slogan. It’s a skill — actually, a bundle of skills — practiced (or not) at many scales at once.
At the most basic level, it asks whether we can regulate ourselves when things get uncomfortable. Does fear run the show, or can we pause, orient, and choose to respond rather than react? A person who cannot govern their own attention, impulses, or emotions will struggle to participate meaningfully in any shared decision-making process — no matter how good their politics appear.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a developmental reality.
And the same pattern repeats as we zoom out.
Groups that cannot stay present through disagreement tend to fracture or default to hierarchies and power imbalance. Communities that cannot make decisions together without splintering often end up deferring authority upward, trading sovereignty for relief. Societies composed of dysregulated individuals are easily manipulated; self-government is a virtual impossibility.
Seen this way, self-government is less about rights and more about readiness.
Classrooms of self-government
For much of modern history, we’ve been able to bypass this work. Cheap energy, global inequality at the point of a gun, expanding consumption, and institutional buffering allowed large numbers of people to live relatively insulated lives without having to practice much collective competence. Decisions could be outsourced. Consequences could be delayed. Coordination could be thin.
Those conditions are changing.
As external supports weaken, the internal capacities they once compensated for are suddenly visible — mostly by their absence. What feels like political crisis is often a skills gap coming into focus.
This is why calls for “more democracy” can ring hollow when they aren’t paired with the slower, less glamorous work of learning how to govern ourselves. Voting, protesting, and debating are important expressions of political life, but they are not its foundation. The foundation is the ability to sit in a room — literal or metaphorical — with others who hold different ideas, perspectives and life experiences, and sit with the discomfort while staying oriented toward a shared reality long enough to act together.
That ability isn’t innate. It’s learned.
Historically, it was learned in small, local contexts: neighborhoods, associations, congregations, unions, councils — places where cooperation was necessary, friction was unavoidable, and the costs of dysfunction were immediate and personal. These weren’t idealized spaces. They were messy, imperfect classrooms where people learned — sometimes painfully — how power works, how trust breaks, and how it can be rebuilt.
The traditional classrooms of self-governance had a set of qualities that made them well-suited to teaching these skills.
Scale
Capacity isn’t built in movements or moments of mass mobilization. Those can express capacity, sometimes powerfully, but they rarely create it. Capacity is built in small, ongoing contexts where people have to keep showing up for one another — places where withdrawal has consequences and domination doesn’t scale well.
For most people, meaningful coordination doesn’t begin with hundreds or thousands. It begins with five to fifteen humans — small enough for trust to matter and large enough for difference to exist. At that scale, skills like listening, negotiating, deciding, and following through stop being abstract virtues and become daily necessities.
Diversity
You don’t learn self-governance by agreeing with people who already think like you. You learn it by needing one another across difference — when the work is real, can’t be deferred and opting out has a cost.
This is why efforts that focus on real world projects with practical and necessary outcomes can rarely avoid healthy diversity. You are brought together around purpose, not ideology. The danger of arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is greatly reduced.
Willingness to learn and experiment
The fact that these places are messy is part of their charm. Mistakes are inevitable. What matters is whether people are supported enough to metabolize and learn from them instead of retreating into cynicism.
Capacity develops where there is enough safety to stay present, enough friction to learn, and enough continuity for patterns to become visible.
Real-world focus
Projects that focus on preparedness, mutual aid, and shared competence rather than heroic language or grand visions provide grounded anchors. These kinds of projects cut through ideology because they speak to safety, competence, and belonging — things most people care about regardless of politics - but also have inescapable connections to policy and therefore politics. Quiet coordination beats loud proclamations every time.
Patience and Strategic Perspective
This kind of work rarely feels heroic. It often feels slow. Sometimes it feels boring. But over time, it does something remarkable: it changes what people believe is possible together.
They stop waiting for permission.
They stop assuming someone else will handle it.
They develop a lived sense of agency that no amount of rhetoric can provide.
Horizontal scaling
Skills learned this way don’t stay put
People who have practiced self-government in one context carry those capacities with them into others. They recognize unhealthy dynamics faster. They’re less seduced by strongmen and simple answers. They’re harder to isolate, harder to panic, and harder to turn against one another.
This is how small-scale work produces large-scale effects — not by central coordination, but by horizontal spread. The skills travel inside people.
Which is why focusing locally isn’t retreat.
It’s leverage.
The Gentlest Place to Start
For many people, the idea of “getting involved” feels overwhelming. They picture meetings, conflict, exhaustion, or spaces already captured by loud personalities.
And they aren’t wrong. We all know this is the reality of many of our community spaces.
So it matters where we begin.
The most durable forms of coordination rarely start with causes or campaigns. They start with places — ordinary, human-scale contexts where people already cross paths and where usefulness matters more than visibility.
Libraries.
Community gardens.
Faith communities.
Community centers.
Food pantries.
Neighborhood groups.
Mutual aid efforts that quietly predate the word.
These aren’t glamorous spaces. That’s part of their strength.
They offer something increasingly rare: continuity. People return. Faces become familiar. Trust accumulates slowly, through small acts of reliability rather than declarations of belief.
Your instructions for joining in are simple:
Show up consistently.
Do what needs doing.
Respond where you can.
Learn the rhythms.
Identify the tensions.
Notice who holds quiet influence and who gets overlooked.
Pay attention to how decisions actually get made, and the quality of the decisions being made that way.
This kind of participation doesn’t require agreement on everything — or anything. It requires presence, humility, and a willingness to learn from friction rather than flee from it.
And if you’re “not a joiner”, you can create your own shared self-governance classroom just by connecting with your friends and family
Start asking questions that matter to you - and probably to them:
If something went wrong here, who would notice?
If one of us needed help, who would we call?
If there was an emergency, who would have the skills to respond?
While the skills of self-governance require practice, they don’t require outside guidance or direction.
You only need to become a little less alone than the system expects — in ways that make sense now, if things get more turbulent, or even in a calmer future.
That’s enough to begin.
What’s left when we stop pretending
Once the illusion of external rescue falls away, what remains is not nothing. What remains is the slow, learnable work of standing together — imperfectly, locally, and in real time.
That’s what self-government looks like at the human scale.
Learning to disagree without dehumanizing.
Recognizing the difference between leadership and domination.
Learning to balance rights and responsibilities
Repairing trust after conflict rather than abandoning the field
Making decisions that are “good enough” and then learning from the consequences to do a little bit better next time.
Once people start practicing it, they don’t stop at one place. They carry it with them everywhere.
Once enough people learn these skills locally, the effects ripple out regionally, nationally and globally. Things begin to shift - unevenly and almost invisibly at first, until it’s impossible to ignore.
That may not be the story we were promised.
But it’s one we can work with.