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people don’t buy products when they understand them. they buy products when they feel understood.

Across the economy, private-equity firms are known for laying off workers, evading regulations, reducing the quality of services, and bankrupting companies while ensuring that their own partners are paid handsomely. The veil of secrecy makes all of this easier to execute and harder to stop.

I was beginning to lose track of what “society” actually was.

He is too young to have learned to hate himself yet, but that seed is already there; given time, it will grow, and bear bitter fruit.

As we write this book, the pandemic continues, and the supposed light at the end of the tunnel is a “return to normalcy” concocted by a government eager to restore the status quo that delivered us to this moment. In the interest of capital, we are being sold a narrative of recovery that ignores the structural failings that have magnified the

This shared belief would shape collective actions—policies, inventions, movements—that bring those ideals closer to reality. Conversely, shared fears or pessimism can manifest as stagnation or decline. The universe, like a vast neural network, appears to respond to the dominant inputs it receives, rewarding focus, effort, and alignment while

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

—Albert Camus

emulate the sparrow, the “wisest of birds.” According to the Zhuangzi, “If its eyes do not spot a suitable place, it will not look twice. If it happens to drop the nut it is carrying, it will simply abandon it and continue on its way. It is wary of people, and yet it lives among them, protected within the altars of grain and soil.”

Everything is a story, and people need to understand themselves as having a meaningful role within the story you, as an organizer, are telling. If their role in your story feels like “doom appreciator,” most people will recoil, retreat to their own smaller story, and keep the focus there.