December 8, 2025
A Note in Solidarity
Just last night, my daughter, a high school freshman with eyes full of fire and a healthy skepticism for just about everything I say, was wrestling with a government essay. The topic was the separation of powers. She looked up from her laptop, a deep frown line between her eyebrows that I know I’m responsible for at least half of, and asked, “Dad, if all these checks and balances are supposed to keep things stable, why does it feel like everything is always one decision away from falling apart?”
I didn’t have a simple answer. I’ve spent a lifetime learning to navigate a world that often feels like it wasn’t built with my stability in mind. You build a good life, middle-class and comfortable, you teach your kids to work hard and trust the process, but you always feel the vibration of the tightrope. You feel it when you get an unexpected medical bill, when you hear about another round of layoffs in a friend’s industry, when you see the fear in the eyes of a neighbor who looks different from you.
That feeling isn’t just in our heads. It’s the central story of our time, reflected in the headlines from just the last 24 hours. We see it in the Federal Reserve, where a handful of officials in a closed room make decisions about interest rates that can mean the difference between a new car for your family or another year of just getting by, all while facing immense political pressure. We see it in the Supreme Court, where a single ruling could unravel 90 years of precedent, concentrating immense power in the hands of one person by dismantling the independence of agencies designed to protect us from consumer fraud to environmental disaster. We see it in the fear that keeps thousands of children, in cities from Los Angeles to Charlotte, out of school because their families are terrified that the people sworn to protect them might deport them. And we see it in the paradox of technology, where developers are building our future with AI tools they admit they don’t trust, creating a digital world that is both miraculous and dangerously fragile.
The Myth of the Individual Solution
The dominant narrative we’re sold is that the answer to this instability is individual. If your healthcare is too expensive, you need to be a better “consumer” and shop around for a better deal. If you’re worried about AI taking your job, you need to “upskill” faster. If you’re struggling, you just need to pull harder on your bootstraps.
But this narrative is faulty. It collapses the moment it touches reality. Ask Sarah Monroe, the Ohio mother who had a good job, a six-figure income, and a high-deductible health plan. When a serious heart condition hit during her pregnancy, she did everything “right.” She still ended up with $13,000 in medical debt, a repossessed car, and a drained savings account. The “job” she was trying to do wasn’t to be a savvy healthcare shopper; it was to keep her family healthy and financially stable. The situation that individuals forced her into, one that prioritizes market logic over human need, made that impossible.
This same failure of the individual-solution myth is playing out in the world of technology. Developers are using AI to build software faster than ever. But nearly half of them don’t trust the code it produces and they spend more time fixing its subtle, hidden bugs than if they’d written it themselves. They’re trapped in a situation where the demand for speed, driven by market competition, overrides their own expert judgment about quality and safety. They’re walking the tightrope, too.
A New Way of Seeing: Solidarity in Practice
Our problem isn’t individual effort, but the collective practice we’re all caught in. The framework of Solidarity in Practice from tfp Collective offers a different lens. It suggests that the path to stability isn’t choosing between individual freedom and collective good, but creating conditions where they strengthen each other.
Singularity: The current practice suppresses the unique, irreplaceable value of each person. When an immigrant child is afraid to go to school we don’t just lose a student; we lose a unique perspective, a future innovator, a potential bridge between cultures. When a developer’s expert concern about “AI slop” is ignored for the sake of speed, we don’t just get bad code; we lose the benefit of their hard-won wisdom. Honoring singularity means recognizing that these unique voices aren’t obstacles to efficiency; they are our most valuable resource for creating resilient and adaptive solutions.
Solidarity: This isn’t charity or abstract unity. It’s a practical commitment to creating conditions where everyone can flourish. For the families facing medical debt, solidarity means creating risk-pooling responsive processes that don’t force individuals to bear the full weight of a health crisis alone. For developers, it means creating collective organizations, like modern-day guilds, that can set standards for technology and negotiate its use, so no single developer has to choose between their job and their professional integrity.
Shared Power, Individual Voice: The move to concentrate power in the presidency, to override local school districts with federal enforcement, to let market pressure dictate technology adoption. These all represent a failure to share power. The alternative isn’t chaos. It’s creating new ways for those most affected by a decision to have a genuine voice in making it. It’s about recognizing that the parent emailing a teacher in fear, the patient drowning in bills, and the developer worried about code quality all have critical knowledge that our current top-down responsive processes ignore.
Concrete Proof: Getting the Job Done
We focus on the real “jobs” people are trying to do and building responsive practices that help them succeed.
The Job: Building a Stable Life. Immigrant families are trying to educate their children and contribute to their communities. Instead of top-down enforcement that creates fear, empower local communities to create their own safety and integration strategies. This is Relational Evolution in practice, allowing solutions to emerge from the authentic participation of those involved rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all blueprint.
The Job: Maintaining Health and Financial Security. Families are trying to get the care they need without going bankrupt. Instead of forcing them to be “consumers,” support the growth of community health cooperatives that pool risk and give members a real voice in how their healthcare is managed.
The Job: Ensuring Technology Serves Humanity. Developers and workers are trying to maintain agency and meaning in their work. Instead of letting a few tech giants dictate our future, invest in public AI infrastructure and created worker-led groups to co-design how AI is deployed in their workplaces.
Last night, I didn’t have a perfect answer for my daughter. But I told her this: the responsive processes we participate in feel unstable because many of them are harmful. We fail to respect our uniqueness and our need to belong and contribute. But this harm creates an opening. The feeling of being on a tightrope ends when we stop trying to balance alone and start weaving a net together. That net is woven from solidarity, from shared power, and from the radical belief that every individual voice is essential to our collective strength.