The French Revolution was a white man's revolution.
I do not say this to diminish it. Genuine insights emerged from the ferment of Enlightenment thinking that preceded 1789. The idea that human beings possess inherent dignity, that political authority requires justification, that traditions are not sacred simply because they are old—these were real advances. But at the same time we need to be clear about who was doing the thinking and whose interests shaped which ideas gained traction.
The philosophers who articulated these principles were, with few exceptions, men of the European bourgeoisie. Their audience was the educated classes. Their patrons were merchants, lawyers, professionals—the rising middle class that chafed against aristocratic privilege. When Rousseau wrote of the "general will" and Locke of "natural rights," they were developing concepts that would liberate the bourgeoisie from the constraints of the old order. This was genuine progress—for them. The question of whether these principles extended to anyone else was, for most Enlightenment thinkers, simply not asked. Or when it was asked, the answer came quickly: obviously not.
And so when the French Revolution erupted in the summer of 1789—the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—it proclaimed that men are "born and remain free and equal in rights." Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Beautiful words. Revolutionary words. Words whose scope remained conveniently undefined.
Here is what makes this history essential for understanding the polarity I want to name: the French Revolution generated universal ideals that its architects never intended to be universal. The gap between what was said and what was meant—between the words and their application—is where we can see most clearly the difference between genuine humanism and its counterfeit. And nowhere is this gap more visible than in what happened when those ideals crossed the Atlantic to France's most valuable colony.
Saint-Domingue—the western third of the island of Hispaniola, what we now call Haiti—was the engine of French wealth. By the 1780s, it produced more profit than any colony in the world. Sugar, coffee, indigo—roughly half of all that was consumed in Europe flowed from this single island. The elegant homes of Paris, the refined tastes of the French bourgeoisie, the very wealth that allowed philosophers to sit in salons and debate natural rights—all of it rested on what was happening in those fields.
Approximately 500,000 enslaved Africans worked the plantations of Saint-Domingue—about ninety percent of the colony's population. And the conditions were so brutal that this population could not reproduce itself. The average life expectancy for an enslaved person on a sugar plantation was seven to ten years. They were worked to death, then replaced. The constant importation of captured Africans was not an aberration of the system but how the system functioned. Human beings as fuel to be consumed and replenished.
The society that administered this machine was layered in ways that matter for understanding what followed. At the top sat the grands blancs—wealthy plantation owners, many of whom lived in Paris and had never set foot on the island, extracting wealth at comfortable distance from its source. Below them were the petits blancs—overseers, merchants, artisans, the ones who actually ran the machinery of the colony and wielded the whips. Then there were the gens de couleur libres, free people of color—some of purely African descent, many the mixed-race children of white planters and enslaved women they had raped, some of whom had become wealthy landowners themselves, occupying a precarious position between races and classes. And beneath all of these: half a million enslaved human beings.
Each of these groups had different interests, different fears, different possibilities. And when the tremors of the French Revolution reached across the Atlantic, each would respond according to their circumstances.
When news of the Declaration of the Rights of Man arrived in Saint-Domingue, the white planters moved first. They invoked liberty, natural rights, the general will—and what they meant was autonomy from French trade regulations, freedom from metropolitan interference, the ability to run their colony as they saw fit. They formed assemblies. They issued declarations. They wrapped their interests in revolutionary vocabulary. Liberty, for them, meant the liberty to continue owning human beings.
The free people of color petitioned next. If the Declaration proclaimed that men were born free and equal, surely this applied to them? They were free. They owned property. Some were wealthier than many small whites. A delegation traveled to Paris to make their case before the National Assembly. The debate was instructive: arguments were made that universal rights must apply universally, but the stronger counterargument was pragmatic. Without maintaining racial hierarchy, how could the tiny white minority control half a million enslaved people? The Assembly sided with the planters. Colonial governance was left to the colonists.
One leader of this failed petition, Vincent Ogé, returned to Saint-Domingue and raised a small armed rebellion. He was captured, tortured, and publicly executed—broken on the wheel, his body left on display.
Ogé would not be the last to take up arms.
In August of 1791, in a forest clearing called Bois Caïman, a gathering of enslaved people occurred. A Vodou ceremony was conducted. The houngan Boukman reportedly called upon God and the spirits for vengeance. And within days, the northern plantations were burning.
I want to be careful here about causation. It would be condescending to suggest that enslaved people required the Declaration of the Rights of Man to realize they deserved freedom—as if centuries of resistance, of shipboard rebellions, of maroon communities, of daily acts of sabotage and survival had not already demonstrated that human beings in bondage know bondage is wrong—they didn't need a white man to tell them of injustice.
What the French Revolution provided was disruption. The metropole was in chaos. The colonial administration was divided. The white factions were at each other's throats. And the ideals being proclaimed—even hypocritically—provided a vocabulary that could be turned against the hypocrites. Captured rebels were found with pamphlets referencing the Rights of Man. Leaders increasingly used revolutionary language in their communications. But they also invoked the French King, the Spanish King, God himself. They used whatever arguments served. The point was liberation, not ideological purity.
The revolt spread. Through years of shifting alliances and brutal warfare, through leaders who emerged from the chaos—most famously Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who proved a military genius capable of outmaneuvering French, Spanish, and British forces—the revolutionaries held their ground. Louverture himself is a complicated figure: he owned slaves before the revolution, he was ambiguous about full abolition in his early negotiations, he reimposed labor regimes after victory that some argued resembled the slavery that had supposedly ended. History does not give us saints.
The point I want to make here is that humanism and anti-humanism are not abstract forces moving history from above like Marxist contradictions struggling against one another. They are orientations held by actual people making actual choices—choices that multiply into forces when they collide. Each enslaved person who joined the revolt made a choice. Each planter who fled or fought made a choice. Each free person of color who sided with one faction or another made a choice. History is the accumulation of these choices and their consequences.
And then something extraordinary happened.
In February 1794, the National Convention in Paris—the revolutionary assembly that had replaced the earlier bodies—received delegates from Saint-Domingue. One of them was Jean-Baptiste Belley, a formerly enslaved man who had purchased his freedom. He rose to address the Convention and asked them to abolish slavery.
A delegate named Levasseur stood and argued that because the Revolution had failed to grant rights to Black people earlier, they should remedy this wrong now. They should abolish slavery immediately. And—crucially—they should do so without debate, as an act of atonement.
The Convention rose in acclamation. On February 4, 1794, without debate, they passed a decree abolishing slavery throughout all French colonies. Not just Saint-Domingue—everywhere. In a single moment, the universal ideals of the Revolution were made, briefly, actually universal.
This is what it looks like when proclaimed principles escape their hypocritical containment. The words, taken seriously, transform the world. The revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue had forced the question. They had made the contradiction unbearable. And for one extraordinary moment, the metropole chose consistency over interest.
It would not last. Napoleon would later attempt to reimpose slavery, dispatch an army to crush Haiti, ultimately fail—but not before luring Louverture to a meeting under false pretenses, arresting him, and leaving him to die alone in a cold French prison. By then, though, the revolution had succeeded. In 1804, Haiti declared independence—the first free Black republic in the Western hemisphere, the only successful slave revolution in history.
And then the punishment began.
The American response to Haiti reveals what the United States actually is.
Consider the situation. The slave revolt began in 1791, during the Washington administration. The American Revolution had ended barely eight years earlier. The Constitution was scarcely four years old. And here was a nation that had just fought a war for independence from imperial domination—a nation whose founding document proclaimed that all men are created equal—faced with another people fighting for independence from imperial domination, another people asserting their equality as human beings.
What did America do?
Washington sent aid—not to the enslaved people fighting for their freedom, but to France, to help suppress the revolt. The first American president, the hero of the Revolution, actively assisted an imperial power in subjugating a people seeking liberation.
The irony is so complete that it can only be understood by recognizing what America actually was from the beginning. The American Revolution was not a revolution for universal freedom—not entirely at least. I am sure many of the revolutionaries who fought in the American Revolution did hold this ideal; however, the systems that were born from it, clearly, did not have the same commitment to these ideals. At a macro scale, it was a revolution for the freedom of white colonists to become their own masters—which is to say, to become their own empire. The founders did not reject domination as such. They rejected being dominated. Once independent, they immediately set about dominating others: the indigenous peoples whose land they seized, the enslaved Africans whose labor they extracted, and eventually, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the peoples of Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Middle East, Asia, and the globe.
The rhetoric of liberty was always instrumental—a justification for acquiring the right to dominate, dressed in the language of freedom. Consider the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States."
Except as punishment for crime.
Which means that if you can make someone a criminal, you can enslave them. And so the system immediately set about making Black people criminals—through vagrancy laws, through convict leasing, through the carceral state that persists to this day. The loophole was not an oversight. It was the point. It was how the system continued what it had always done while maintaining the appearance of having changed.
Haiti revealed all of this in advance. A nation of formerly enslaved people governing themselves, demonstrating by their very existence that the ideology justifying slavery was a lie—this could not be allowed to succeed. And so it was punished.
Not every American leader responded the same way. When John Adams became president in 1797, he briefly pursued something different. He sent a consul to Saint-Domingue to establish unofficial ties with Louverture's government. He even pressured the colony toward declaring full independence from France.
Adams's motives were not purely idealistic—he was a Federalist, hostile to revolutionary France, and cultivating an independent Haiti served his geopolitical interests. But whatever his motives, he was willing to engage with Black self-governance as a legitimate political reality. This matters because it shows that the anti-humanist response was not inevitable. Different leaders, with different dispositions, could make different choices.
But, alas, a humanist leader in an anti-humanist system faces a nearly unwinnable battle without support. Adams lost the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson became president. And everything reversed.
Jefferson was enthusiastic about the French Revolution. He was considerably less enthusiastic about the abolition of slavery. As president, he immediately isolated Haiti. He cut off aid and trade. He feared explicitly that the "revolt mentality" would spread to enslaved people in the United States.
This is the author of "all men are created equal" dedicating his presidency to ensuring that Black people who freed themselves would be punished for doing so. This is the man who proclaimed self-evident truths about equality working to strangle the first nation to make those truths real for people who looked like his own enslaved children.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense—the gap between ideals and practice that afflicts everyone. This is something deeper. Jefferson knew. He had to have known. He wrote the words. He fathered children with a woman he owned as property. The cognitive architecture required to maintain this position—author of American liberty, architect of Haitian isolation, lifelong slaveholder—required constant psychological work. Constant flight from what honest engagement would reveal.
This is what I mean by anti-humanism as flight. It is not merely doing wrong. It is the systematic construction of psychological structures to avoid facing that you are doing wrong.
The United States did not recognize Haiti as a nation until 1862—fifty-eight years after independence. Recognition came only during the Civil War, after the slaveholding South had seceded, when acknowledging Haiti no longer posed a direct threat to American slavery. And even then, it was a concession wrung from necessity. It was a recognition extended only so that America would not blatantly contradict its own rhetoric—thus losing their justification to dominate, freedom—while fighting a war ostensibly about freedom.
But the irony doesn't end there folks! The Louisiana Purchase, that great expansion of American territory that every schoolchild learns to celebrate, was a direct consequence of the Haitian Revolution. When Napoleon's army was destroyed by Haitian resistance and yellow fever, when his dream of a Caribbean empire collapsed, he cut his losses and sold the Louisiana territory to the United States. The people who made "Manifest Destiny" possible were Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. But that part never makes it into the textbooks.
What happened to Haiti after independence was not merely punishment. It was a coordinated effort by the Western imperial powers to ensure that the first free Black republic would serve as a warning rather than an inspiration.
In 1825, France sent a fleet of fourteen warships to Haiti. The message they carried: pay us 150 million francs—roughly ten times what the United States had paid for the entire Louisiana territory—or face invasion. The money was to compensate French slaveholders for the "loss" of their "property." The formerly enslaved were expected to pay reparations to their former enslavers for the privilege of being free.
Haiti, isolated, embargoed, desperate for the diplomatic recognition that would allow it to trade, capitulated. The sum was eventually reduced to 90 million francs, but even this was astronomical—approximately 280% of Haiti's entire GDP. To pay the first installment, Haiti had to take out loans from French banks at extortionate interest rates. This created what historians call the "double debt": Haiti owed France for its freedom, and also owed French banks for the loans needed to pay France for its freedom. The interest compounded. The economy was strangled before it could develop.
By 1914, over three-quarters of Haiti's national budget was still being drained to service this debt. The money that could have built schools, hospitals, roads—all of it flowed to French banks. Haiti was not merely punished; it was systematically prevented from developing the institutions that would have allowed it to prosper.
When Haiti fell behind on payments, when the economy inevitably faltered, the United States stepped in—not to help, but to extract. In December 1914, U.S. Marines landed in Haiti and physically seized $500,000 in gold from the national bank, transporting it to the National City Bank of New York—what we now call Citibank. The following year, the United States began a military occupation that would last nineteen years.
During this occupation, the U.S. took complete control of Haiti's finances. They rewrote the constitution to allow foreign ownership of land—overturning a provision that had existed since independence specifically to prevent foreign economic domination. They imposed a new constitution that Haitians had not written and did not want. They implemented corvée labor programs—forced work gangs—that Haitian peasants experienced as a return to slavery. Resistance movements were crushed. Thousands were killed. The Americans were the new empire.
The occupation officially ended in 1934, but American financial control continued until 1947—when Haiti finally made its last payment on the original independence debt to Citibank. One hundred and twenty-two years after being forced at gunpoint to compensate their enslavers, Haitians finished paying the bill.
But the punishment did not end there.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the instruments changed. From warships and marines to international financial institutions. From direct colonial extraction to structural adjustment programs.
Haiti joined the IMF and World Bank in 1953. From 1957 to 1986, the country was ruled by the brutal Duvalier dictatorships—"Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc"—who worked with these institutions while looting the country. Loans incurred during this period alone accounted for approximately 40% of Haiti's debt by 2000. The money enriched the dictators and their cronies while ordinary Haitians saw nothing.
When the Duvaliers fell and Haiti began moving toward democracy, the IMF imposed structural adjustment as the condition of further assistance. These programs demanded austerity: cut government spending, fire state employees, privatize public enterprises, liberalize trade. In Haiti, thousands of state employees were fired, crippling national institutions. Import tariffs on rice were slashed from 50% to 3%, flooding Haitian markets with subsidized American rice—destroying local agriculture. In 1997, the Haitian Anti-IMF Committee led one of the largest strikes in the country's history.
When President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a liberation theologian elected by the poor—demanded that France repay the independence debt, he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 2004. France, it seems, had not forgotten the crime of taking its own ideals seriously.
The result is the Haiti we know today: the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, wracked by instability, subject to endless foreign interventions, held up as an example of Black failure by racists who never mention the two centuries of deliberate impoverishment that produced this outcome.
This was not an accident. This was not the result of Haitian incompetence or cultural deficiency. This was policy. The Western imperial powers coordinated—through debt, through occupation, through international financial institutions—to ensure that the first free Black republic would fail. A prosperous, stable, self-governing Haiti would have disproven the entire ideological architecture of white supremacy. And so they made sure it could not succeed.
The historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the Haitian Revolution was "unthinkable" even as it happened.
By this he meant something precise: the conceptual frameworks of the age had no space for enslaved Black people with agency. Planters understood resistance in terms of individual troublemakers, not political movements. Philosophers who wrote about natural rights did not consider whether those rights applied to Africans. The category of "human" that generated revolutionary ferment was, in practice, a category that excluded most of humanity.
When the revolt began, observers searched for any explanation that preserved their assumptions: the British were meddling, the planters had mismanaged, outside agitators were manipulating the slaves. Anything was more conceivable than the simple truth—that enslaved people were rebelling because slavery was intolerable and they had the capability to fight.
And when the impossible proved real, when Haiti won independence and could no longer be denied, the silencing shifted forms. The revolution was recorded but not remembered. You learned about the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution. Haiti became a footnote, an anomaly, or simply absent.
Trouillot asks: "If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later?" The fact that you likely learned about half a dozen revolutions before hearing of Haiti's is not a failure of education. It is education working as designed—producing subjects who cannot think what the system needs to remain unthought.
I have told this story at length partly because I think it is important to expand one's imagination of revolution, but also because it illustrates the polarity I am trying to name more clearly than any abstraction could.
On one side: people asserting their full humanity against a world that denied it. Taking the words of the Enlightenment seriously. Meaning liberty. Meaning equality. Fighting and dying to make those words real.
On the other side: people who proclaimed those words and did not mean them. Who punished those who took them seriously. Who constructed elaborate systems—military, financial, historiographical—to ensure that the assertion of Black humanity would be suppressed, impoverished, forgotten.
Let's put on our Marxist hats for a moment. The reparations demanded, the century of debt extraction, the occupation, the structural adjustment—this is not proportionate to any material threat Haiti posed. The colony was already destroyed; the wealth machine was broken. The punishment served a different function.
What Haiti threatened was not merely an economic arrangement. It threatened the psychological architecture that made all such arrangements possible. If the enslaved were fully human—if they had always been fully human—then those who enslaved them were not the civilized bearers of progress they believed themselves to be. They were participants in an atrocity. The entire self-understanding of Western civilization was at stake.
This is the hinge insight: the intensity of anti-humanist reaction is proportional to the injustices genuine humanism would reveal about the anti-humanist.
Jefferson, the planters, the architects of the debt regime, the administrators of structural adjustment—they were not defending merely material interests. They were defending their ability to not-see, to not-know, to maintain the psychological structures that let them live with what they were doing. The cost of recognizing Haitian humanity was recognizing their own inhumanity. And that cost was too high for them.
This is what I mean when I say that humanism and anti-humanism are not abstract forces moving history from above. They are orientations held by actual people making actual choices. Jefferson chose. Every planter who convinced himself his slaves were not fully human chose. Every banker who structured debt, every historian who omitted the revolution—each made choices. And history is the accumulation of those choices, their collisions and their consequences.
The pattern I see in Haiti—humanist assertion met with anti-humanist reaction, the reaction disproportionate because it defends not just interests but self-understanding—this pattern repeats across every struggle for human recognition. It is the polarity I want to name.
Humanism, as I use the term, is the choice to engage with the essential qualities of human existence—the mortality, the uncertainty, the freedom, the suffering, the love, the meaning-seeking that I described in the previous essay and will expand upon in this essay. It is the orientation toward rather than away from what it means to be human. It is holding the conversations that existence demands rather than fleeing them.
Anti-humanism is the opposite. It is flight from engagement. It is the refusal of the conversations, the closing down of awareness to avoid what it would reveal. It is turning away from the essential questions because facing them would demand something of you that you are not willing to give.
But here I want to make the most crucial insight that makes this polarity more than a matter of personal psychology—that connects anti-humanism to every system of domination that has ever existed:
Disconnection from your own humanity is what enables the dehumanization of others.
You cannot fully exploit someone you recognize as a subject like yourself. You cannot work someone to death if you see in them the same awareness, the same mortality, the same capacity for suffering and love that you know in yourself. And I mean really see them. To do these things—to build the systems that do these things at scale—you must first have fled from your own humanity far enough that you can deny it in others.
The French planters in Saint-Domingue were not—for the most part, I hope— cartoon villains who delighted in cruelty for its own sake. They were probably people who had constructed elaborate justifications for what they were doing—religious justifications, scientific justifications, economic justifications. They had convinced themselves that what they saw before them every day was not what it obviously was. This required an enormous act of self-deception. It required flight from the truth that was staring them in the face. It required, in other words, a prior anti-humanism within themselves before they could practice it upon others.
Jefferson is the paradigm case. He knew. The cognitive dissonance required to maintain his position—author of American liberty, architect of Haitian isolation, lifelong slaveholder—must have required constant psychological work. Constant flight from what honest engagement with his situation would have revealed.
This is why the Haitian Revolution was met with such ferocity. It was not merely a material threat. It was an existential threat to the psychological architecture that had made the slave system possible.
I should take a pause at this point to clarify my terms, because both "humanism" and "anti-humanism" carry historical baggage that I am not trying to invoke.
When philosophers speak of "humanism," they usually mean one of several things: Renaissance humanism, with its emphasis on classical learning; secular humanism, with its rejection of religious authority; Enlightenment humanism, with its faith in reason and progress. When they speak of "anti-humanism," they usually mean the theoretical turn in twentieth-century French philosophy—Foucault, Althusser, Derrida—that critiqued the notion of a unified human subject.
I am not dismissing these intellectual histories. The French theorists were right that a certain kind of humanism—the European, bourgeois variety that declared "Man" the measure of all things while defining "Man" in ways that excluded most of humanity—was a tool of domination. The irony that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was proclaimed in the same nation that ran Saint-Domingue is precisely my point.
But the critique of false humanism is not a critique of humanism as such. Frantz Fanon, writing from the position of a black man victimized by western imperialism, called for a "new humanism"—not the abandonment of the category but its genuine fulfillment, its extension to everyone it had hypocritically excluded. The Haitian revolutionaries enacted this new humanism before anyone had named it. They took the words seriously. They meant liberty. They meant equality. They threw the Enlightenment's promises back at those who had made them while practicing their opposite.
My use of humanism still contains the conclusions of this serious treatment of early humanism, but as a product of a particular existential orientation—toward engagement, toward the questions, toward full humanity for yourself and for others. Then, my anti-humanism is the refusal of that orientation, whatever intellectual or ideological costume it wears—namely imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
There is something I need to say here that I did not fully develop in the first essay, something that the Haitian example makes unavoidable.
Humanism and anti-humanism—in their fullest—are not merely interior states. They are not just psychological orientations that exist in the privacy of your own mind. They have their expressions through action. One must act like a humanist as the final test of interior transformation.
I say this because I know the temptation—I have felt it myself—to hear the language of engagement and treat it as a purely interior matter. To believe that the work is done when you have thought deeply, read widely, developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding existence. But the Haitian revolutionaries did not merely feel their humanity. They acted on it, at the risk of their lives. And the slaveholders did not merely think anti-humanist thoughts. They built systems, wrote laws, sent warships, extracted payments for over a century.
Action is the battleground of society. Not thought, not feeling, but what you actually do in the world.
This creates an uncomfortable category: the person whose interior engagement is real but not strong enough to manifest as action. The person who has genuinely grappled with mortality, who understands the claims that others make on them, who has thought deeply about meaning and freedom—but who still acts in ways that align with anti-humanism. Out of fear. Out of economic necessity. Out of social pressure. Out of habit.
Honestly, this is where most people are.
There were certainly people in the Atlantic world who knew slavery was wrong—who felt it in their bones—but who did nothing. Who continued to purchase sugar and coffee. Who voted for politicians who protected the institution. Who remained silent when silence served their comfort.
I do not want to wholly condemn this position. Interior change is real progress. If you have begun to face the questions, you have moved along the spectrum toward humanity even if your actions have not yet caught up. But I also cannot let this position off the hook. Feeding into anti-humanist society through action perpetuates its horrors regardless of your interior state. The world is not shaped by what we feel. It is shaped by what we do.
Interior orientation must be strengthened until it manifests as exterior action. This is the work. Not just feeling differently, but living differently. The gap between interior engagement and exterior action is precisely where most of us live—and precisely what must be overcome. Shoutout Minneapolis for showing us how it's done.
I want to say something about how the polarity I am describing relates to the political categories most of us are familiar with.
The left-right divide captures something real. It emerged from specific historical conditions—literally, the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly—and it tracks genuine differences in attitudes toward hierarchy, equality, tradition, and change. I am not suggesting we abandon these categories entirely. But I am suggesting that they are not the fundamental divide. They operate within a narrower frame than the one I am trying to articulate.
The left, at its best, has better content. Material analysis, structural critique, solidarity, collective action, the insight that systems shape individuals. The left has generally been on the right side of the struggles against slavery, colonialism, exploitation. I am not drawing a false equivalence.
But the left has a blind spot, and it is a fatal one—especially today. It tends to dismiss existential concerns as "idealist" distraction. Spiritual needs get treated as false consciousness or superstition. The cultural and psychological dimensions of human life get filed under "superstructure"—secondary effects of the material base, not worth serious attention in their own right. The result is that the left cedes existential ground to its opponents, and then wonders why people who would benefit materially from leftist policies vote against their own "interests."
The right, meanwhile, does address existential needs—but in perverted form. The longing for meaning, for belonging, for identity, for significance. The terror of meaninglessness, the vertigo of a world without roots or certainties—this is real suffering. The right speaks to these needs. It offers answers. The problem is that the answers are anti-humanist.
Belonging is achieved through exclusion. Meaning is provided through domination narratives. Identity is defined against enemies. Significance is granted by membership in a chosen people. These are real existential goods delivered through anti-humanist means. They work—temporarily, partially—which is why they have such appeal. But they work by denying full humanity to those outside the circle, which means they perpetuate the very conditions that created the existential crisis in the first place.
The left often has better content but ignores existential form. The right exploits existential needs but provides anti-humanist answers. The humanist framework I am proposing says: engage with the full web of existential qualities, and provide genuine—not domination-based—fulfillment. This is not centrism—fuck centrism. It is not splitting the difference. It is a different axis entirely. Or at least I think so, decide if you agree with me yourself—I'm no authority on you.
I will have much more to say about this in a later essay, where I will directly critique contemporary revolutionary thought and offer specific analysis of why movements fail when they neglect the existential dimension by using Christian Nationalism as a case study. For now, though, I want to establish the basic insight: the left-right divide, as important as it is, operates within a frame that the humanist-anti-humanist polarity cuts across and reveals as incomplete.
In the first essay, I described the essential qualities—the inescapable features of existence that any aware being must confront. Now I want to go through each of them and show what humanist engagement looks like versus what anti-humanist flight looks like so we can incrementally develop a more intimate understanding with them. This will be a long section, buckle up.
Mortality
Martin Heidegger—whatever his moral failures, and they were severe—understood this better than almost any other philosopher. His concept of being-toward-death names something essential: that authentic existence requires confronting mortality, not fleeing it. To live with death in view is not to be morbid or paralyzed. It is to let finitude clarify what matters. When you genuinely face the fact that your time is limited, that you will not be here forever, the question of how to spend that time becomes urgent in a way it cannot be otherwise. Death gives weight to choice. It reveals what you actually care about by forcing you to reckon with the fact that you cannot do everything, be everywhere, have unlimited time to get around to what matters. A fact I, and Sylvia Plath, find rather disheartening sometimes.
But we hide from this. Youth culture treats aging with contempt. Silicon Valley fantasizes about uploading consciousness or extending life indefinitely. Americans refuse to speak of death directly—we use euphemisms: passed away, lost, no longer with us. We embalm and cosmeticize corpses to make them look like they are sleeping rather than dead. We sequester the dying in hospitals, away from daily life. All of this is flight.
Denial is not the only escape route. There is also morbid obsession—fixating on death in ways that prevent living, using mortality as an excuse for paralysis rather than clarity. And there is the weaponization of mortality—the threat of death deployed to control others, as every terrorist and authoritarian knows. These too refuse the genuine encounter that would transform how you live.
Consider the difference between cultures that integrate death and cultures that hide it. The Mexican Día de los Muertos. Tibetan Buddhist sky burials. The hospice movement's insistence on allowing people to die consciously, surrounded by those they love. These responses do not make death pleasant—it isn't. But they do make it faced.
Others
Other centers of awareness populate the world—people who are not you, who have their own interiors, their own stakes, their own claims on existence. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent his career trying to articulate this: the face of the Other confronts you with a demand you did not choose, an obligation that precedes any decision you might make about whether to respond.
Do you see the person before you as a subject, or as something to be used?
This is the question that separates relation from instrumentalization. The Haitian revolutionaries encountered each other as subjects—fellow sufferers, fellow strivers, people with names and histories and loves. The French planters encountered them as meubles—furniture. That word appeared in the actual legal code by the way. Human beings classified as furniture.
Heidegger is useful here, again, despite his Nazi affiliations. His concept of Gestell—usually translated as "enframing"—names the way modern technological thinking treats everything, including people, as standing reserve: resources to be optimized, inputs to be managed, means to ends that someone else has determined. He made a provocative claim about the Second World War: that it did not ultimately matter who won, because both sides had already adopted this thinking. Both treated human beings as standing reserve. The factory worker and the gulag prisoner, the consumer and the party member—all reduced to functions within systems that did not see them as subjects.
The point is not false equivalence between Nazism and its opponents. The point is that the mode of thinking which reduces persons to resources can infect any system, any ideology. And it is available in every encounter you have. Every interaction offers the choice: subject or object, relation or use.
Uncertainty
You will never achieve certainty on the questions that matter most. What happens after death. Whether your beliefs are correct. How the story ends. This is dismaying—I find it dismaying—but it is also the condition of genuine choice. If everything were certain, decisions would be calculations rather than commitments. Uncertainty is the space in which freedom operates.
The humanist response is to hold uncertainty without collapsing into paralysis or false certainty. Acting with conviction while remaining open to being wrong. Intellectual humility that still permits commitment. Krishna's Karma of Action from the Gita. Science, properly understood, embodies this: conclusions held provisionally, submitted to testing, open to revision.
But science, sadly, has also become its own dogmatism. I say this not as an anti-science reactionary but as someone who believes in the genuine scientific method and is disappointed by what has been done in its name. Scientism—the belief that only scientific knowledge counts as real knowledge, that anything not measurable is not real—demands certainty where none is possible. It dismisses experiential, aesthetic, and spiritual ways of knowing because they cannot be quantified.
"Trust the science" has become catechism rather than method. Expertise has become priesthood rather than practice. This is not an argument against expertise—it is an argument against weaponizing expertise to foreclose inquiry. The genuine scientific attitude is humility before what we do not know. The scientistic attitude shuts down questioning to uphold systems of assumptions as certainty. Religious dogmatism and scientific dogmatism are mirror images: both flee uncertainty by manufacturing false ground to stand on.
Truth and Reality
You cannot make truth bend to your preferences. The world is not infinitely malleable to your wishes. Something is, independent of what you want to be the case. No amount of lies about a situation can change the way things happened.
Rest in peace Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I am sorry that the administration is trying to convince us to deny reality.
When I say humanist engagement with truth, I mean watching the videos of atrocities without blinking. I mean the discipline of honestly assessing conditions rather than constructing narratives that protect your preferences. I mean letting reality make claims on you even when—especially when—those claims are uncomfortable.
The flights from truth are legion. Ideology forces reality into predetermined frames, permitting you to see only what the ideology allows. Post-truth claims that power determines what counts as true, that there is no reality independent of who gets to define it. And anti-intellectualism—blatant denial when reality threatens a worldview you refuse to question.
This last one is rampant. Climate change denial despite overwhelming evidence. Manipulation of crime statistics and economic data to support political narratives. The rewriting of history to protect comfortable myths. Significant portions of contemporary America have constructed entire alternative realities, maintained through media ecosystems designed to insulate people from contact with disturbing evidence. This is not different interpretations of ambiguous data. It is wholesale fabrication.
The slaveholders of Saint-Domingue practiced this too. The evidence of their slaves' humanity was in front of their faces every day—in acts of love, grief, resistance, creativity. They had to not-see what they were seeing. They had to construct an alternative reality in which what was obviously true was not true. Anti-intellectualism and reality denial are not modern inventions. They show up whenever someone benefits from you believing a lie.
Truth is the quality that makes all the others possible. When reality becomes negotiable, you cannot honestly face mortality, others, freedom, or meaning.
Time
The Haitian revolutionaries understood they were making history. They acted not just for themselves but for their descendants, for the idea that people like them could be free. This is what it means to live connected to past and future—honoring inheritance while remaining open to transformation, planting trees whose shade you will not sit in.
Contrast this with the collapse into eternal present that the attention economy produces. Every second filled with stimulus. No space for reflection. No awareness of temporal depth. A literal trance state in which history disappears and future becomes inconceivable.
Or frozen nostalgia—the past as escape from present demands, a golden age to which we must return. MAGA.
Or frantic acceleration—life so fast that reflection becomes impossible, always reacting and never acting.
Consider indigenous temporalities: seven-generation thinking, the awareness that you are an ancestor of people not yet born. Now consider the quarterly profit cycle that cannot see past the next earnings report.
The difference seems obvious to me. And yet most of us live closer to the quarterly cycle than to seven-generation thinking. The systems we inhabit make it so.
Meaning
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz. His insight, forged in conditions of ultimate extremity, was that meaning is not manufactured or purchased—it is found, discovered through how you respond to what life presents. In the camps, those who had a "why" could bear almost any "how." Those who lost their sense of meaning often died even when their physical conditions were survivable.
Meaning is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
But where does it come from? Not from consumption—buying experiences, accumulating status markers, treating the world as a catalog from which you can order significance. Not from domination—feeling significant because you are above others, because you have power over them. Not from borrowed frameworks—letting an ideology or institution tell you what matters so you do not have to discover it yourself.
Nihilism claims that nothing really matters. But this is itself a meaning-claim, and usually a defense against the risk of caring. The nihilist has not escaped meaning; they have adopted a meaning-framework that protects them from vulnerability at the expense of their soul.
The work of meaning is discovering what matters through engagement, relationship, contribution—through the essential conversations rather than the shortcuts. It is the work of a lifetime, never complete, always being revised. No one can do it for you but you.
Suffering
Any Buddhist will tell you that suffering is a consequence of attachment. Meaning makes things existentially permanent to us, and impermanence is the well from which all suffering flows. The Buddhist response is to loosen attachment, to accept impermanence, to find peace in the dissolution of fixed meaning.
I must disagree—respectfully, but firmly. I believe we are more human when we embrace meaning and learn from the suffering it inevitably produces. The Haitian revolutionaries knew suffering intimately. It fueled rather than paralyzed their action. They did not transcend their pain; they let it teach them what mattered enough to fight for.
Compassion—suffering-with—is not pity from above. It is recognition of shared vulnerability. It requires acknowledging suffering, your own and others', allowing it to teach without being destroyed by it.
The escapes are familiar. Numbing: refusing to feel, using substances or distraction or dissociation. Inflicting suffering to prove invulnerability: the logic of the abuser, who cannot tolerate their own vulnerability and demonstrates power by causing pain. Spiritualizing suffering: "it's God's plan," "it builds character"—metaphysical justifications that avoid addressing actual causes. Pathologizing all suffering: treating it as dysfunction to be medicated rather than information to be understood.
Movements that take suffering seriously—that honor it, that seek to understand and address its causes—are humanist. Ideologies that blame sufferers, that tell them their pain is their own fault or an illusion to be transcended, are not.
Freedom and Responsibility
At some point, you must own what you do.
The Haitian revolutionaries chose—at immense risk—and owned that choice. They could have remained enslaved, could have waited for liberation to be granted. They chose otherwise. This is what it means to act from genuine decision rather than mere conditioning, to accept responsibility without being crushed by it.
"Just following orders" is the paradigm of refused responsibility. It is what the camp guards said. It is what ICE agents will say. It is what people always say when they participate in atrocities they would rather not own. And it is insufficient.
Determinism becomes anti-humanist when used as total exemption: "I had no choice," "the system made me," "it was my upbringing." These may be partially true as explanations. But they cannot be final words. At some point, the buck stops.
Meanwhile, consumer society offers false freedom as substitute—the ability to choose between fifty brands of cereal presented as though it were meaningful agency. This is freedom drained of content, choice without consequence, the appearance of self-determination in a life whose major parameters remain fixed.
The humanist position holds both: yes, we are conditioned, shaped, constrained. And yet, within those constraints, we choose. The space may be narrow. But it is real. And what we do within it is ours.
Identity
Who are you?
Not your job title. Not your demographic categories. Not the persona you perform for others. Who are you when no one is watching? Who are you becoming?
Carl Jung called this work "individuation"—integrating the disparate elements of the psyche, withdrawing the projections you cast on the world, facing the shadow you would rather deny. Becoming who you actually are rather than who you were told to be or who you constructed to survive.
I see a trend I find troubling: the performative man. Scroll through social media and you'll find them—men performing toughness, success, dominance. Or performing tenderness, humility, tolerance. Both are personas assembled from templates, never questioned, designed to appease algorithms and audiences. The aesthetic of confidence without the substance of self-knowledge. The aesthetic of introspection without actual introspection. They have not constructed identities; they have downloaded them.
This is not masculinity, toxic or otherwise. It is flight from the genuine work of becoming a man—which would require facing vulnerability, uncertainty, the possibility of failure, the reality that you do not know who you are and must discover it through living.
Then there is identity as weapon—knowing who you are only by knowing who you hate. The slaveholder's identity: I am white, which means I am not-Black, which means I am human in a way they are not. Identity through negation rather than genuine self-discovery. I trust you can think of contemporary examples.
The difference between having an identity and being an identity is everything. To have an identity is to know it is yours—constructed, revisable, held. To be an identity is to be trapped inside it, unable to distinguish yourself from the mask.
Belonging
The Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton was building before he was murdered operated on a specific principle: Black, Brown, and poor white people finding common cause, belonging together because they faced common conditions, not because they were identical. Solidarity across difference. Connection that does not require exclusion.
This is rare. More common is belonging through exclusion—we belong because they don't. The logic of every ethnonationalism, every supremacist movement. Identity secured not through positive content but through negation: we are the real Americans, the true Christians, the chosen people, and our belonging is guaranteed by the exclusion of those who are not.
Christian nationalism provides a clear contemporary example. The Christian nationalist belongs to something larger than themselves, feels part of a cosmic story, knows their place in a community. These are real goods. The longing for them is legitimate. But they are achieved through exclusion, through the designation of enemies, through a belonging that requires others to not-belong. "Real Americans" against the coastal elites, the immigrants, the secularists. The chosen against the damned.
I will have more to say about this in a later essay. For now, I want to name the pattern: anti-humanism does not ignore existential needs. It exploits them. It provides real goods through means that require the dehumanization of others.
The opposite of exclusionary belonging is not atomization—belonging to nothing, pure isolation, Mamdani's "frigid individualism." That is just another flight. The genuine alternative is solidarity: belonging that expands rather than contracts, that finds common cause across difference, that does not need enemies to maintain cohesion.
Love
Bell Hooks insisted that love is not a feeling but a practice. Not something that happens to you but something you do. Her definition: the will to extend oneself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another. Active engagement with the flourishing of the beloved—not sentiment but commitment.
She wrote: "The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move toward freedom."
This requires seeing the other as subject, as a being whose flourishing matters. It requires vulnerability—opening yourself to someone who could hurt you. It requires making demands and accepting them, challenging and being challenged. Che Guevara called it revolutionary love: love extended beyond the personal to the people, to humanity, to the possibility of a world where flourishing is supported rather than crushed.
Hooks pointed out that a culture which confuses love with cathexis—with having your own needs met—cannot sustain genuine love. What passes for love is often mutual need satisfaction, transactional exchange dressed in romantic language. I love you because you make me feel good, because you meet my needs, because of what I get from you.
This is not love.
Genuine love involves willing the good of the other even when it costs you. Even when it is inconvenient. Even when—especially when—it requires you to change.
The counterfeits are everywhere. Love commodified: the romance industry, dating apps as marketplaces, pornography as substitute for connection. Love as possession: treating the beloved as object owned rather than subject encountered. Love withheld as control: manipulating affection to maintain power. Sentimentalized love: the greeting-card version that asks nothing, changes nothing, makes no demands and accepts none.
Creation
The Haitian revolutionaries created a nation, a possibility, a new human self-understanding. They did not merely resist; they built. This is creation as expression of freedom, love, and meaning woven together—bringing forth rather than merely consuming.
The "creator economy" has hollowed out this word. Content for platforms. Products for profit. Creation in service of algorithms rather than human flourishing. Disruption as ideology—tearing things down and calling it innovation.
And then there is the refusal to create at all. Pure consumption. Passive reception. The stance of the spectator who watches life rather than lives it.
To create is to add to the world. It is to say: this did not exist, and now it does, because I made it. This is one of the ways we participate in existence rather than merely enduring it.
Embodiment
Try living without a body. I'll wait.
We are not minds piloting bodies. We are bodied minds, minded bodies, irreducibly both. Presence in physical existence is not optional. The question is how we inhabit the flesh we are.
I think of the fitness industry as it has developed in certain corners of online culture—the world of David Goggins, the "Clavicular" aesthetic, the treatment of the body as a project of domination rather than habitation. Pain is proof of worth. Exhaustion is virtue. Your body is not enough; it must be beaten into submission.
This is war against the body, not care for it. The body becomes enemy, weakness, the thing that must be conquered and punished. Young men and women are fed this message through manufactured insecurity: suffering is the path to respect. The body becomes a site of performance rather than presence—something to display rather than to live in.
I used to treat my body this way. It is not strength. It produces bodies that look impressive and psyches that are at war with themselves. The person who cannot rest, who cannot be present in their body without punishing it, who treats every moment of ease as weakness—this person has mistaken domination for care.
The opposite flight is Cartesian disembodiment: the fantasy of pure mind, uploaded consciousness, the body as meat to be escaped. Silicon Valley dreams of leaving the body behind. This is anti-humanist flight from the most basic feature of our situation.
To inhabit the body is to treat it as self rather than instrument. Care for the body as care for self. Presence rather than performance.
Inheritance
The Haitian revolutionaries inherited the language of liberty from the French Enlightenment—and threw it back at those who had proclaimed it while practicing slavery. They did not reject the inheritance. They fulfilled it. They meant the words their enslavers had only pretended to mean.
This is critical engagement: taking what serves life, refusing what doesn't, transforming rather than wholesale accepting or rejecting. Honest reckoning with what you have received.
Uncritical acceptance treats tradition as authority: "this is how it has always been" as justification for whatever exists. Wholesale rejection fantasizes that you can start from nothing, as if history did not shape you. Both are flights from the actual work of sorting through what you have been given.
And then there is weaponized inheritance—my ancestors justify my domination, my people's historical suffering licenses my present cruelty.
I'm looking at you, Zionists.
Play, Beauty, and Joy
I described these as strange in the previous essay because they do not fit neatly alongside the others. Play is activity for its own sake, without instrumental purpose. Beauty is the experience of encountering what is harmonious, fitting, alive. Joy is the felt quality of flourishing. They can be avoided without the same intense necessity lashing out—no one dies directly from lack of play. And yet something dies. Something essential goes missing.
Being whimsical. Frolicking because the field is pretty, god damnit. Laughter that arises from real delight. These are modes of engaging existence that cannot be reduced to duty or necessity.
What concerns me is the pose of nonchalance. Being too cool to care. Too sophisticated to be moved. Too knowing to be caught in sincere enjoyment. Ironic detachment as armor against the vulnerability of genuine response.
If you never admit to caring, you cannot be hurt by loss. If you approach everything with arch distance, you protect yourself from the risk of being moved.
But this protection is a prison. The person who cannot be caught caring cannot fully live. The experience of delight that asks nothing beyond itself—genuine laughter, genuine awe, genuine absorption in something beautiful—this is one of the ways existence justifies itself. Deny it and you miss the point.
Watch how quickly people qualify their enthusiasms. "I know it's silly, but..." "Don't judge me, but I actually like..." The preemptive cringe. The defensive irony. The refusal to be caught in unguarded sincerity.
This is fear. Fear of being seen as naive, as vulnerable, as someone who actually cares about things.
Honestly? I think it's pathetic.
That was a long section, but I want these qualities to really become second nature to consider. Let me now draw out what all of this implies for understanding systems of domination. I claimed earlier that anti-humanism is the psychological ground on which all such systems are built. Let me be more specific about what I mean—because these systems are more than their narrow definitions suggest.
Capitalism is not merely private ownership of the means of production. It is a system that requires treating humans as inputs and appetites. Workers are labor-power—costs to be minimized, productivity to be maximized, humanity to be ignored except insofar as it affects output. Consumers are desire-bundles—appetites to be stimulated, manipulated, channeled toward purchase.
The capitalist who genuinely sees workers as fully human—as beings with the same mortality, meaning-seeking, suffering, and love as themselves—is actually a socialist. The blind extraction of capitalistic greed requires flight. It requires not-seeing the person whose labor you are purchasing as a person in the full sense.
Marx saw this with his concept of alienation: the worker separated from the product of their labor, from the process of their labor, from their fellow workers, and ultimately from their own species-being—their human essence. But what Marx sometimes underemphasized is that capitalism requires alienation in the capitalist too. The owner who exploits is also necessarily blind. You cannot treat others as standing reserve without becoming something less than fully human yourself.
Capitalism does not just exploit bodies. It requires and reproduces anti-humanist psychology in everyone it touches—workers who must suppress their awareness of what they are sacrificing, owners who must suppress their awareness of what they are doing, consumers who must not think too carefully about where their goods come from. It is a logic of understanding all relationships in the world as instrumental.
Consumerism is capitalism's cultural offspring—a lesser expression but a developed one, the ideology that emerges when capitalism saturates consciousness itself. Where capitalism proper concerns the organization of production and the extraction of surplus value, consumerism colonizes the psyche. It teaches people to understand themselves primarily as consumers, to seek meaning through purchase, to construct identity through brand affiliation, to process emotions through retail therapy. Consumerism transforms the citizen into the customer, public life into the marketplace, and human worth into purchasing power. It is the final victory of capitalism over interiority—when even your sense of self becomes a product to be assembled from what you buy.
White supremacy is not merely individual prejudice or explicit hatred. It is a system that requires the psychic operation of making certain people less-than-human. The slaveholder in Saint-Domingue had to convince himself that what he saw before him every day was not what it obviously was—injustice. This required a prior flight from his own humanity—specifically from truth, from the reality confronting him, from the recognition that would have made his life impossible.
James Baldwin saw this clearly: whiteness is a metaphor for power, and maintaining it requires perpetual self-deception. W.E.B. Du Bois named the "psychological wage"—the compensation offered to poor whites in the form of felt superiority, which kept them from recognizing their common interests with Black workers. White supremacy does not just harm Black people or other people of color. It deforms white people too. You cannot maintain it with your humanity intact. The constant psychological work of not-seeing what is in front of your face, of maintaining fictions about yourself and others, of suppressing the recognition that would undo everything—this work extracts a cost.
But white supremacy's twisted genius extends beyond the white-Black binary. It constructs a minority hierarchy—a ladder beneath whiteness where non-white groups are ranked and positioned against each other. Asian Americans are offered the "model minority" myth: proximity to whiteness in exchange for anti-Black complicity and political quiescence. Latino communities are divided by colorism and nationality. Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible. Each group is given someone to look down upon, someone to distinguish themselves from, someone whose oppression they can participate in to elevate their own status.
This is social control through manufactured horizontal hostility. Asian Americans, seeking white approval they will never fully receive, engage in anti-Blackness to secure their precarious position. Black communities, denied full citizenship, sometimes direct resentment toward immigrant groups. Latino communities internalize colorism that privileges European features. Everyone fights everyone beneath whiteness while whiteness itself escapes scrutiny. The minority hierarchy ensures that those who might unite against the system that oppresses them all instead exhaust themselves in lateral conflict. Hurt people hurt people—and white supremacy ensures there's always someone positioned "beneath" you to kick.
This is why white supremacy resists dismantling so fiercely. It is not only defending material privilege, though it is doing that. It is defending a psychological architecture that would collapse into unbearable self-recognition if its fictions were abandoned. The ferocity of the defense is proportional to what would be revealed.
Patriarchy is first and foremost a system of domination over women. Women are denied full subjecthood—treated as objects of desire, vessels for reproduction, domestic servants, emotional laborers, and afterthoughts in the organization of public life. The violence is direct: rape, battering, femicide, forced marriage, genital mutilation. The violence is structural: wage gaps, glass ceilings, reproductive control, the double shift of paid and unpaid labor. The violence is epistemic: the dismissal of women's knowledge, the silencing of women's voices, the erasure of women's contributions from history. Patriarchy says to half of humanity: you are not fully human. You exist in relation to men—as mothers, daughters, wives, objects—never as subjects in your own right.
But patriarchy also requires men to abandon aspects of their own humanity: vulnerability, tenderness, receptivity, emotional depth, the full range of human experience that has been gendered as feminine and therefore made shameful. This is not equivalent harm—men benefit from patriarchy even as it damages them—but it is genuine harm nonetheless. The patriarch has fled his own full humanity in order to maintain domination.
This is why patriarchy damages men too—not symmetrically, not equally, but genuinely. The role of dominator requires the suppression of everything that would make domination unbearable. The man who cannot cry, who cannot be tender, who cannot admit weakness or ask for help, who experiences intimacy only through control—this man has amputated parts of himself. He has purchased dominance at the price of wholeness.
Hooks was clear about this: patriarchy is maintained through psychological operations in everyone. Women and men internalize it. Women and men perform it. The system reproduces itself not just through institutions but through the psyches it shapes.
And patriarchy is the father of heteronormativity and anti-trans violence. Once you establish that there are two genders defined in opposition and hierarchy, you must police the boundaries. Anyone who loves outside the prescribed pattern threatens the system. Anyone whose very existence proves the categories are not natural—that gender is constructed, that the binary is a fiction—must be eliminated or forced into conformity. Queer people and trans people are not incidental victims of patriarchy. They are direct targets, because their existence reveals what patriarchy needs to remain hidden: that the whole edifice is built on lies.
Imperialism is the ideology of domination between peoples—the belief that some nations, some civilizations, some races have the right to control others. It is the logic of power projected outward, the conviction that the strong should rule the weak, dressed in whatever justifications the era provides: the civilizing mission, the white man's burden, development, democratization, humanitarian intervention.
Colonialism is one expression of imperialism—the specific practice of establishing settlements, extracting resources, and governing foreign territories directly. But imperialism does not require colonial administration. When the United States maintains over 750 military bases in approximately 80 countries, this is imperialism without colonialism. When the IMF imposes structural adjustment programs that dictate domestic policy to sovereign nations, this is imperialism without colonialism. When multinational corporations extract resources under agreements that leave local populations impoverished, this is imperialism without colonialism. The flag does not need to fly over occupied territory for domination to operate.
Understanding this distinction matters because imperialism adapts. When the age of formal colonialism ended, when the costs of direct administration became too high and the moral justifications too threadbare, imperialism did not die. It transformed. Neocolonialism, economic imperialism, military hegemony—these are imperialism in new clothes, achieving the same ends through different means. The relationship of domination persists; only the mechanisms change.
Imperialism requires believing that dominated peoples are less human—the "civilizing mission" that justified centuries of plunder. This belief required massive self-deception in the imperialist. They had to believe they were bringing progress to primitives, enlightenment to the benighted, even as they extracted wealth and destroyed cultures.
Fanon saw this clearly: imperialism dehumanizes the imperialist as well as the colonized. The violence required to maintain empire corrodes the humanity of those who inflict it. You cannot torture without becoming a torturer. You cannot kill without becoming a killer. The imperial administrator who oversees atrocities and goes home to his family, who reads bedtime stories to his children while signing death warrants—this man is at war with himself in ways he may never acknowledge.
France's response to Haiti reveals more about France than about Haiti. The demand that the enslaved pay their enslavers for the crime of being free—this is not rational economic policy. This is the desperation of a system that cannot afford to acknowledge what it has done and must double down to avoid implosion.
The implication of all this is that these systems are not just materially unjust. They are existentially destructive. They require and reproduce anti-humanist psychology in everyone caught within them.
This is why fighting them requires not just material redistribution but psychological and existential transformation. Changing conditions and changing consciousness must go together. You cannot build a just society with people who have been formed by injustice—not without attending to that formation, not without the inner work as well as the outer.
This has always been the insight of genuine revolutionary movements. It is what Fanon meant by calling for a "new humanism." It is what the best traditions of liberation theology, of revolutionary spirituality, of transformative organizing have understood. Material change is necessary but not sufficient. The inner life matters. The psychology matters. The question of who we are becoming as we fight for a different world—this question cannot be deferred until after the revolution. It is part of the revolution.
The polarity is now named. Humanism and anti-humanism—engagement and flight—the choice to move toward full humanity or away from it.
This is not a doctrine to be accepted but an orientation to be practiced. It is not a claim about human nature but a description of a spectrum along which every person and every society can be located. It cuts across existing political categories, revealing their incompleteness. It grounds every system of domination in the prior flight from humanity that makes domination possible. And it reveals what is at stake in every encounter, every choice, every moment of life: not just justice or equality, but humanity itself.
In the essays that follow, I will develop this framework further still. The qualities I have described, as I'm sure you saw, do not stand alone—they form a web, each shaping and shaped by the others, and understanding this web intimately is necessary for understanding how flight from one quality corrupts engagement with all the rest. The anti-humanist psychology I have described is not, for most people, chosen—it is manufactured by systems that profit from keeping human beings in perpetual flight, and understanding this manufacturing is necessary for knowing how to resist it. The battleground between humanism and anti-humanism is not only interior but extends across material, cultural, spiritual, and existential domains, and understanding this terrain is necessary for revolutionary practice. And the question of active evil—of those who choose domination deliberately—requires careful treatment that I have only gestured at here.
But for now, I want to leave you with something simpler. A question you can ask yourself, honestly, without judgment:
Where are you on this spectrum?
Not as condemnation, but as orientation. The revolutionaries at Bois Caïman faced their moment. The question is not whether you would have been brave enough to join them—that kind of hypothetical is useless. The question is what you are doing now, with the moment you are in.
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst