I think Democrats often lose because they spend too much time talking about what they don’t want and not what they do want (“I’m not the other guy” has been a losing message since the 1830s), and because they always lose their confidence and try to pander to centrists. People vote because they want change! Only people who are completely satisfied with their lives (or really dialed into electoral politics) will vote for someone who promises to keep everything the same.

So let me talk about what I do want and how we can get it:

• A peaceful environment where most of the government’s decisions are low-stakes for most people
• An environment where many people with different origins, backgrounds, and histories can live in community
• An environment that inspires me to work hard and rewards me for that hard work
• An environment that allows me to live a brilliant and unique life that I am in control of
• An environment that forgives my mistakes
• An environment where I am safe from people that would harm me unjustly
• An environment that provides these same kindnesses to everyone

You may think that I’m not being realistic by wanting to have all of this at the same time. I assure you it is possible, because we are not playing a zero sum game: other people succeeding does not have to mean that you must fail.

There is plenty of competition in this life. There are situations where there can only be one winner. However, a lot of those situations are manufactured, and the only reason there’s only one winner is because the guy who set the rules said so. We live in a world with more than enough resources to satisfy every person (with more being created every day), so there’s no reason other than selfishness that we can’t all get a piece of the ever-expanding pie.

The common argument against this vision is that you must be selfish to protect yourself against selfish people. This is actually true, but it’s incomplete! You don’t need to be a selfish individual, and instead you can be in a selfish group. You can keep expanding your group by absorbing people who have decided it is better to cooperate than to fight, until your group is so large that it is simply called “Americans”. Within the group, you are selfless to each other, because it works better than the alternative.

I’m not saying you should be the same as everyone else. I’m just saying that if we all banded together and helped each other out, we’d all get better results. People who lean on their families have it easier than people who don’t, and families that can lean on their friends are stronger than families who don’t. We should keep expanding the size of the units that lean on each other until it gets as big as a country.

Cool ideas. Actions?

So how do you actually start? It’s all about building relationships with people around you. Like relationships between family and families, some of these relationships will cut across class, age, race, and gender divides. Not every relationship can be deep and complicated, because attention is finite. But it needs to be clear on both sides that you’re there to help each other.

Give your neighbor some extra muffins you have. Teach your friend’s friend’s brother how to change their engine oil. Hold the door open for an old person, or a young person. And if you can do it without being too awkward, talk to the person, even if it’s only a sentence or two at a time!

We’ve learned to insulate ourselves because strangers can hurt us. They can reject us, harass us, assault us, decieve us, or trap us. I live in New York City, and I’ve experienced this, and I’ve learned the mission-focused forward stare that all New Yorkers have.

The lovely thing about starting a relationship with the people around you (as opposed to a random person in a random place) is that as soon as you do, you both have an incentive to behave yourselves (so that you are not banished by the other people around you).

Being in community is not the same thing as making a whole bunch of new friends. You can do that if you want, and it’ll probably be awesome, but building a community is more about making yourself accountable to the people that you coexist with and getting them to do the same. You guys don’t have to hang out all the time.

What comes next?

What comes after community is organization. To be a “selfish group”, you need to define what the group wants, which means you need leaders, advocates, and foot soldiers. Your group can decide that they want anything, like higher pay, lower rent, four-day work weeks, the abolition of non-Honeycrisp apples, or to go out and dance. Becoming good at prioritizing and achieving your group goals is critical to making people want to join and stay in your group.

Some goals will be attainable at your current size, and some won’t. For the ones that aren’t, you’ll need to join forces with other organization(s) that share your goal. If you share a lot of goals, you can even merge your organizations. For this to work in the long term, you need to merge the communities, too.

Eventually, your organization will become so large, and your goals so lofty, that you will need to interface with The Government. The best way to do this is to place members of your organization in The Government by voting for them. Especially for local government positions, this could be absurdly easy (many local government officials are used to running unopposed).

How does this lead to utopia?

I have specific policy ideas for achieving my stated goals. I will write them down in a separate post.

The point of this post is that a bright future is possible, but it requires us to grab onto each other, hold tight, and move together.

What about my rights?

In the absence of government protection, we must tread carefully and protect each other.