A Letter To All

I had a conversation with an offline relation. The conversation went in directions that led to this blog as a result. It led me to realize everything I have shared with those I consider friends and family has been undervalued and ignored like always. So I decided to write this, although like everything else I share with you, I expect it to be treated as insignificant, irrelevant, or inutile. And I say and mean that with very few exceptions.

I left the Democratic Party in 2020 after watching them rig their primary for the second time in a handful of years, the same party whose lawyers argued in court during *Wilding et al. v. DNC Services Corp.* that they were a private corporation with no legal obligation to honor their own primaries. Both mainstream parties are technically corporations operating under different strains of Lockean liberalism, holding a duopoly since the 1860s, and after the ballot reform changes of the 1890s, that control became functionally merged. Like it or not, they are operating as a functioning uniparty with two corporate divisions, treating citizens like wage slaves. And some of you are acting like you are okay with this, like you just need some padded chains and fluffy handcuffs for your shackles, while others cherish the shackles as they are or want to go back to older style shackles. Back to my point.

After leaving, while looking for a new political home during the Floyd protests, I read and shared the principles of Marxism. An ideology I was raised and educated to treat as taboo, but when I actually engaged with it, my first impression was that it called for reform and aligned with American values. The deeper I went, the clearer it became that it was largely a framework for analyzing exploitation and a call for the full realization of the liberty and equality this country claims to stand for. Not a boogeyman. A diagnostic tool. And still, after years of sharing documents, books, and primary sources, people cling to the anti-communist indoctrination they absorbed without ever examining it. That is textbook Identity Protective Cognition. The same psychological mechanism that keeps people loyal to cults. Paired with cognitive dissonance, it creates a wall no amount of evidence penetrates. Unfortunately, I cannot say this is limited to politics, but I will stay on this topic for now.

They say the majority of Americans read and reason at a ninth-grade level or below, the equivalent of a 15-year-old or younger, and I do not say that to be cruel. I say it because after years of this, the analysis becomes unavoidable. A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Zettler et al., drawing on over 144,000 Americans, found that dark triad personality traits including psychopathy, narcissism, sadism, and Machiavellianism are measurably higher in populations experiencing greater corruption, inequality, poverty, and violence. The D-factor model holds that everyone carries some degree of dark triad traits, but that aversive material conditions amplify them. For the religious, your morals are reflected in your faith, and since politics are an expression of morals, your faith is showing up in your politics whether you claim it or not. Your own scriptures named these traits as sins, whether the seven deadly sins, the cardinal vices, or the arishadvargas. You try or claim to try to be a good person, yet the study confirms you are exhibiting them. And yet here we are.

Throughout 2024 I consistently pointed people to third parties like the American Solidarity Party, PSL, the Libertarians, the Greens, parties with actual paths to 270, parties that in many states only ever need signatures or bodies in voting booths. I will put it plainly. If a candidate has a bucket large enough to win, it only needs to be filled. If you claim you want a different outcome but then see that bucket, declare it cannot win, and drop your ball into one of the buckets you said you did not want, you have personally guaranteed or set the path to guarantee the outcome you claimed to oppose. One cannot want change and then refuse to act toward it when they have the power. All that does is maintain the current power structure and give people an excuse to complain about something.

I have over the past few months referenced liberal Harvard professor Eric Beerbohm's 2012 work on voter duty and ethics, to show I look at more than anti-capitalist sources. Beerbohm argues that because representatives act in the name of all citizens, voters become partial authors of whatever those representatives do, including the injustices. That creates a moral obligation to vote for non-harm candidates (and he is not saying harm to your personal comforts), third parties or long shots, even when they cannot win, because voting for a candidate who will commit injustice makes you complicit in it. Abstaining and revolt only become the morally coherent options in the scenario where every candidate on the ballot will commit serious harm. Third parties and alternative candidates existed in 2024. That escape hatch was available. And still, people came back to me then and continue coming back to me now saying they need an alternative candidate and party. Everything was and remains already there except individuals willing to choose what they claim to want. 60% of Americans claimed to want a third party in 2024 (58% to 62% per Gallup), yet third parties received less than 2% of the vote. Either people were lying, or they acted against their own interests.

It is like watching a thirsty person stand in a downpour refusing to put out a cup while complaining they need a cup full of water.

And to the people who have resigned themselves to the idea that this is simply how things are, yet continue to complain without doing anything to change their conditions. Who simultaneously claim they do not do politics and do not bother worrying about things outside their control. By opening your mouth to others about it, you have already contradicted yourself. I have not forgotten about you. You too are complicit in our material conditions by choosing inaction as an action. It would be different if you chose not to vote but organized your community to alleviate the problems you vent about, but you do not even do that work. Look around. Has accepting things as they are improved your conditions? Has resignation paid your bills, secured your future, or protected the people you claim to care about? Choosing inaction as your response to aversive material conditions does not neutralize those conditions. It guarantees they continue. Your inaction and stoicism are not passive. They are a contributing cause of the conditions you complain about. You just walk around offering nothing of value in your words or actions, diminishing your worth as an associate and tarnishing your relations with others in and out of your community. 

I am an activist-misanthrope. This is not a contradiction, see Ian James Kidd if it confuses you. I organize and educate because the conditions demand it, not because I have illusions about people. But I will be honest: this specific pattern, watching people I consider friends and family perform helplessness while rejecting every concrete option myself and others placed in front of them, tells me exactly how much weight my analysis and the information I share actually carries in their minds.

I am neurodivergent. Socializing already costs me something. I cannot keep absorbing the additional drain of watching people voluntarily maintain their Stockholm Syndrome toward parties, institutions, and a system that is actively consuming them. At some point, protecting my own capacity to function and continue doing the work has to take priority over managing other people's comfort with their own ignorance. If this is too harsh or you find this disrespectful, I cannot help it. I addressed my problem with you because at the end of the day the problem was mine to correct, and this is the process of doing so. If you have a problem with my statement, psychology taught in interpersonal speech communication tells you that you must fix it, not me. You can ask me to change, but the problem is yours to resolve. I am posting this because I am addressing my problems, and I will not take it back. Now that you know I will not be changing my position on this, you have to figure out what you are going to do next. Just remember that I have and will continue to act in proportion to your actions. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. People act according to their material conditions. And psychology tells us that how someone chooses to respond to a situation is shaped by everything they have experienced within it. All three sciences are saying the same thing. Act accordingly.

The recurring patterns are clear to me from lived experience, the very same patterns I have repeatedly tried to share, only to see them dismissed. Even AI analysis of incentives, competition, abstention, incrementalism, and resignation shows how each, absent better mechanisms, tends to generate new problems while diagnostics get ignored or silenced. Real solutions must be rooted in light triad traits such as empathy, cooperation, and honesty rather than the familiar dark triad machinery of power, control, and self-interest. This is my analysis of the conditions I have lived and continue to live in.

And for the record, I have referenced AI analysis here precisely because those who dismiss my analysis seem more willing to accept the same conclusions when they come from a different source. That contradiction is worth naming.

This secular humanist and international communist has taken his turn. The next move is yours.