I'm writing this with the windows shut. The sky outside has that strange orange-gray cast that once felt like an anomaly and now feels like a season. Somewhere, a fire is burning that I'll never see, and its smoke has found its way into my lungs anyway, whether I asked for the connection or not.
Turn on the news, and you'll find a war grinding on, a democracy that increasingly feels like it's being held together with tape, and more people than I can count who are quietly, exhaustingly stretched by the financial and emotional cost of just getting through a month. It's tempting to file these under separate headings — climate, geopolitics, politics, economics — each with its own experts, villains, and fix. I understand the temptation. It's more manageable that way.
I don't think it's true, though. I think we're looking at one wound, showing up in four places.
The Comfort of Separate Crises
There's a real relief in believing our problems are unrelated. If the smoke in my lungs, the war on the news, and my neighbor's second job are unconnected, then each one is somebody else's department. I can worry about my corner and trust that other, more qualified people are handling theirs. Separateness, as a way of seeing the world, is efficient. It can provide the illusion of control. It's also, I've come to believe, false — and not false in some abstract philosophical sense, but false in a way that actively keeps us from understanding what's happening to us.
Here's the claim I want to sit with: connectedness isn't just a nice idea, a value we could choose to hold or not. It's a fact about what's real — an ontological fact, meaning a fact about the basic structure of existence, not merely a fact about ethics or feelings. Relation isn't something added on top of separate things that already exist on their own. Relation is what makes a self a self in the first place — connected to others, to a body, to a planet, in ways prior to and more basic than its separateness.
If that's true, a culture built on the opposite premise — that the self is fundamentally separate, self-contained, and in competition — isn't making four unrelated mistakes. It's making one mistake, and we're watching it play out on four different stages at once: a climate treated as external to us rather than woven through us; an electorate treated as a pile of atomized individuals rather than a genuine between; and an economy treated as a machine for extracting value from separate competitors rather than a web of mutual provision.
The Real Enemy Isn't Each Other
Here's where I want to be careful, because this is exactly where diagnoses like this one usually go wrong. It would be easy to turn "we've forgotten connectedness" into another us-versus-them dynamic — blaming the other political side, the other generation, or the people who don't see it the way I do. That's not what I mean, and it's actually the opposite of what I mean.
The philosopher Martin Buber drew a distinction that I think names exactly what's gone wrong: the difference between relating to something as a Thou — a full, irreducible presence, met rather than used — and relating to it as an It — an object, a means, a thing to be managed or extracted from. Most of us don't wake up choosing to "It" the people around us. We're formed by a system that Its people as a matter of design: a system that treats workers as labor costs, citizens as data points, and neighbors as competitors for scarce resources. And a system that Its people long enough teaches them to "It" each other back. Grievance, resentment, and the impulse to find an enemy in those who are different — these aren't character flaws showing up randomly. They're what a system organized around separateness (and the related structures of hierarchy and control) produces, reliably, as a byproduct.
So when I say the crises are connected, I don't mean "we're all to blame." I mean the adversary is the arrangement — economic, social, political, and cultural — that keeps insisting we're separate when we're not and profits, in various ways, from our believing it.
And it's worth being honest that this isn't confined to one kind of institution. It's tempting to locate the "It"-ing in a single villain — corporations, government, or whichever camp we're least sympathetic to — but the same defining move shows up across business, politics, civic life, and religion alike: the maintenance of power and control over others as an organizing priority, whatever language each domain uses to dress it up.
A company that treats employees as replaceable inputs, a government that treats citizens as a managed population rather than a body it's accountable to, a social hierarchy that sorts people by whose belonging counts, and a religious institution that trades genuine encounter with the sacred for control over who's in and who's out — these aren't four different failures. They're the same failure, wearing different institutional clothes. Power-over is what an "It"-relation looks like once it's been built into a structure and handed down across generations. That's precisely why this can't be solved by swapping which institution is in charge. Change the personnel inside a power-over structure, and the structure still produces the same result.
This is also why the picture doesn't collapse into cynicism. Recognizing power-over as the cross-cutting pattern isn't the same as saying every institution is irredeemable — it's saying the diagnostic question for any of them is the same: does this arrangement hold people as ends, met in their full presence, or does it hold them as means, useful only insofar as they're productive enough, not so different that they make us feel uncomfortable, controllable? That question cuts through the usual left/right, secular/religious, and public/private lines that keep us fighting each other instead of the actual pattern.
My Take
Here's what I keep coming back to: none of the four crises I named at the start will be solved by treating any of them as an isolated technical problem, because none is actually isolated. That doesn't mean the technical work doesn't matter — it does. But technological fixes bolted onto an unexamined ontology of separateness tend to produce more separateness, dressed up as progress (although it is time we ask ourselves, "Progress toward what end?") I think the actual work in front of us is stranger and harder than any single policy: it's remembering and then acting on the fact that we were never as separate as the system needed us to believe.
I don't have a five-point plan for that. I have a conviction that getting the diagnosis right matters — that as long as we treat the smoke, the war, the democracy, and the daily grind as four separate emergencies, we'll keep responding to each in ways that make the others worse. Getting the diagnosis right doesn't cure anything by itself. But it's where any real cure has to start.
Go Deeper
● I and Thou by Martin Buber — the foundational text on relation as more basic than the separate self; dense but short, and worth sitting with slowly.
● The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra — a scientist's case for interdependence as a description of how living systems actually work, not just a philosophical preference.
● The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker — for the harder question underneath this post: why a culture would choose separateness and denial even when connectedness is staring it in the face.
References
● Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 2000) — I-It/I-Thou framework, drawn from the established project reference material; no direct quotation used.
This is the first piece in a short series working through what it would mean to take connectedness seriously — not as a mood, but as a fact about what's real. The next piece goes further into the philosophy underneath it.