Guest post by Whip Randolph
[From the One Disease One Cure Newsletter]
Remember that old story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?
A con man tricks an emperor into believing that he is dressed in beautiful, expensive clothing when, in fact, he is wearing nothing at all. Afraid to be called a fool by this very confident man, the emperor pretends that he really is wearing beautiful clothing, and his close officials go along with it. The emperor then goes out among the public stark naked, and the masses of people pretend to admire his fine clothing. Everybody maintains this pretense until a child blurts out that the emperor is stark naked.
Why would all the adults pretend to believe an obvious falsehood? When I first found this story as a child, it seemed silly! Eventually I learned that this story actually explains one of the major drivers of racism and hatred in the world, including major events happening in the news right now.
So what does The Emperor’s New Clothes have to teach about ignorance, racism, and hatred happening right now?
In this story, the emperor is the ruler, meaning he decides on the laws and how they’re enforced, and he can punish people who express beliefs that he doesn’t like. The people in this story know that, and know that it is safer to believe that he is beautifully addressed, or at least pretend. After all, acknowledging the truth could lead to imprisonment or worse.
It’s simply a common pattern in unhealthy cultures for authorities to punish people for saying uncomfortable truths, and I believe this pattern will continue until we can generate healthy cultures again.
Let’s look at some historical examples to see how this works.
In the US pre-Civil War south, slavery was assumed to be good for the slaves by all right-thinking people. Doctors even had a diagnosis called “Draepetomania” where any slave who tried to escape was believed to have a mental illness! Why would they believe such nonsense, even highly trained doctors, instead of simply recognizing the evils of slavery and acknowledging peoples’ healthy desire to escape?
The answer is simple: any white Americans who acknowledged the evils of slavery were heavily punished. In the slave states, people could be imprisoned for 10 years for having a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that showed slavery in a sympathetic light. Draepetomania represents what I call a blind belief where people believe something because authorities make it the safe or convenient thing to believe, not because it’s true. In other words, it was safe for doctors to believe the runaway slaves had mental illnesses, and it was unsafe to see runaways as healthy and slavery as evil.
Likewise in the Soviet Union and China in the mid 20th century, the government and society were assumed to be great and getting better, so any activists were assumed to have mental illnesses as well. Many activists were arrested and accused of having mental disturbances and sent to prison hospitals where they were treated like the political prisoners they were. These activists were behaving legally and trying to serve their people, and authorities made up theories of mental illness as a cover story to justify imprisoning them.
In this social pattern, authorities punish people for speaking the truth, making it safe and socially acceptable to believe falsehoods. Unfortunately, this can also cause huge amounts of racism and hatred in a society, as people are encouraged to adopt racist or hateful attitudes, and those who don’t are punished.
The Ku Klux Klan was a campaign of paramilitary violence operated by wealthy ex-slaveowners in the US South after the US Civil War. Most Americans know that this violence was directed at black people to scare them into remaining second class citizens. But few know that this campaign also attacked any white people who sympathized with those black people!
In other words, whites who were racist were left alone or even rewarded. Any anti-racist white people risked rape, murder, having their house burned, or other atrocities. I believe this is a major driver of anti-black racism in the US South: authorities wanted that racism to avoid solidarity among poor white and black people, and for centuries they brutally punished any white people who tried to stand for what’s right. Many KKK members were sheriffs and politicians, so the law was part of the problem!
Similar stories abound from unhealthy cultures around the world — that is, societies where a few people rule over everyone else. Nazi Germans and Soviet citizens were each trained by their governments to hate the other side during World War II. Anyone who didn’t hate risked being called a sympathizer and traitor and going to jail. When these authorities wanted war, they propagated hatred among the populace and punished anyone who spoke the truth and refused to hate.
Why did so many Germans learn to hate Jewish people after World War I? Well, the German monarchy, business leaders, and generals had really screwed up and lost World War I. Knowing it was a foregone conclusion, they surrendered before the enemy had crossed into German territory. Unfortunately, they had lied to the German public, and the media contained propaganda which said they were winning the war until the moment they surrendered. Thus many Germans were really confused: why did they surrender if they were winning?
The political, military and business leaders wanted to avoid accountability for losing the war and spreading lies, so they propagated a “stab-in-the-back” narrative, blaming Jews, labor activists, liberals, and others for undermining the country from within.
A tragic number of Germans believed this nonsense, and it wasn’t an accident: propagating hate and ignorance towards Jews and activists and blaming them for Germany’s WWI defeat was a way for the ruling class to avoid accountability for losing the war and lying about it in the news. Tragically this was one step on the road to the Holocaust a few years later.
Racism, hatred, and ignorance can thus be widely propagated by authorities for a variety of reasons. It is confusing to discuss because authorities will punish someone for one secret reason, but publicly accuse them of something different. For example, a Nazi German peace activist may have tried to convince his neighbors that ending WWII would be better for the country, but he’d be arrested and accused of spreading Soviet propaganda and undermining the army. The activist was only trying to speak the truth or share a perspective in service of his people, but he was punished and accused of something different.
The more examples I found like this — where people are punished for acknowledging the truth, or punished for not being racist or hateful in ways that serve the needs of unaccountable ruling classes — the more I saw it play out right in front of me in the news.
Right now, the United States is supporting Israel in its genocide of the Palestinians. Israel has occupied Palestine for decades, keeping Palestinians under intense surveillance. The control was so tight that even many years ago the Israelis were literally counting the calories of food being allowed in to keep the Palestinians at starvation levels, continually a notch above famine.
The Israelis began the genocide in October 2023, with tremendous US support in the form of weapons, surveillance, fuel, political cover at the United Nations, and more. But just how bad has the violence been? Many news stories say that only 40-50,000 Palestinians have died — surely a tragedy, but not a genocide.
Before the present conflict started in October 2023, the Palestinian population was estimated at 2.2 million. When US President Trump took office, he stated the Palestinian population as around 1.7-1.8 million.[1] Other estimates confirm this, using normal techniques to estimate military+civilian casualties in war. So between October 2023 and February 2025, Israelis had killed ~400,000-500,000 people through military violence, famine, disease, and so on while extremely few Israelis have died.
How have the Israeli and American governments trained their population to tolerate and even support this genocide? You guessed it: spreading racist and hateful propaganda towards Palestinians, and punishing anyone who tried to speak the truth and stand up for what’s right.
Many government statements called the Palestinians subhumans deserving immense cruelty. For example, Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Israelis were trained to see Palestinians as a threat on par with Nazi Germany, rather than victims of a cruel occupation.
In Israel, a school girl expressed sympathy with the Palestinians, saying she hoped they could return to their homes soon. She was suspended from school as other students threatened to burn her house down and the Ministry of Education accused her of “incitement against IDF [Israeli] soldiers.”
In America, we see similar disturbances. Anyone who tries to acknowledge the truth about Israeli aggression towards Palestinians is accused of antisemitism. President Trump is deporting many people for attending what he calls “illegal” protests and accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism for allowing protests against the genocide. This is only an expansion of the policy that his predecessor president Biden started.
And it’s not just the government that tries to scare protesters away from acknowledging the truth: many business leaders are trying to scare people into submission too. One businessman, Kevin O’Leary, went on television and said all activists were being monitored with AI-enabled cameras, and their protesting would be recordered and show up in background checks, and they would never be hired again! In fact, North Carolina outlawed wearing face masks outside just to make this possible.
Just like American slave owners scared poor and middle class white people into hating black people or remaining silent so they wouldn’t oppose slavery, modern day political and corporate leaders are trying to scare us into submission so we won’t oppose their genocide.
Why are Israeli and American government and corporate leaders supporting this genocide? People can only speculate: is it part of a plan for creating a major new west-Asian trade route through Israel? Accessing gas deposits off the Gaza coast? Developing beachfront real estate? All the above, or something else? When unaccountable leaders refuse to speak the truth, it can be difficult to know why they behave as they do.
So let’s take stock: the protests are legal, and the Israeli genocide against Palestine is real, and it’s not antisemitic to point these things out. But a strong coalition of American and Israeli business and political leaders have decided to support this genocide, and they’re punishing people for standing for what’s right by accusing them of antisemitism and using this as a cover story to justify punishing them.
This shows how ancient patterns of nations with rulers (or ruling classes) are playing out again all around us. America may not have a king, but anytime one person or a group can impose law on the rest, and choose how that law is enforced, you wind up with the same kind of tyrrany. This is predictable in any society where people are punished for upholding their own law (because that’s supposedly the police’s job, but of course they have to just follow orders). Ancient Rome, Germany, the Soviet Union, Israel, Canada, communist China, the capitalist United States — all of them have shown this pattern where authorities punish truth-tellers and propagate racism and hatred when it suits them. All these countries are actually dictatorships: cultures where some people dictate the law to everyone else, and everyone else is expected to just accept it.
These stories of selfish rulers contrast vividly with countless of stories of generous servant-leaders of healthy cultures. The Haudenosaunee describe how, when they were able to live in a fully traditional way until the early 1800s, their spiritual leaders were their political leaders, and to become a spiritual leader a person had to give away huge amounts of material goods. In other words, their leaders were the most generous.
Martin Prechtel described a similar pattern with the Tzutujil Mayans of central America. Leaders were expected to never campaign for office — it was up to others to see who should be leader and lift them up, due to their generous service. And each time a leader reached a new level in their hierarchy, they were expected to give away more and more goods, returning to total poverty so that they would be on the same level as the rest of the society. Like the Haudenosaunee, they chose the most generous leaders, the ones most willing to act in service of their people. They maintained this way of life until about 1990, when the Guatamalan military inflicted tremendous violence with American backing.
These stories seemed amazing when I first found them, but they are actually quite normal in societies that maintain a baseline of mutual respect as normal way of life, where everyone stands for what’s right as a normal way of life.
In these kinds of societies, I don’t see racism or hatred. So many problems, including racism, hatred, sexism, pollution, poverty in the midst of abundance, corruption, greed, child abuse, and more are symptoms of the root cultural disease where a few people rule over the rest. Any culture with this disease will show these symptoms, each in its own way. And I believe a single cure could end all these terrible troubles: creating cultures where everyone stands for what’s right, and no one rules over anyone else.
This is the theme of my free book One Disease One Cure. It explores examples of 69 different healthy cultures, including many alive today and others in the recent past, who maintain a baseline of mutual respect internally. They show that humans can live without racism or sexism or hatred. We can live without corruption and greed, with leaders that serve the people instead of selfishly serving themselves. Nations like the Ashaninka, Yequana, Haudenosaunee, Zapatista, Mbuti, traditional Cherokee and Nootka, and many others show that these terrible things are not inevitable. But so long as we remain in unhealthy cultures, with unaccountable rulers who behave extremely selfishly and punish anybody who stands for what’s right, all these terrible troubles will continue.
I will end on a positive note: the nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have maintained their healthy culture for over 900 years till the present day, and they did this after experiencing a period of intense warfare 1,000 years ago. The Zapatistas are a collection of many different indigenous cultures in southern North America that experienced oppression for five centuries until 1994, when they rose up in resistance. They didn’t just install a new ruling class, but actually generated a new, sovereign healthy culture where the leaders serve the people, and everyone is expected to stand for what’s right. As but one example of the deep transformation, interviews with many Zapatista women attest to a dramatic decline in sexism.
These stories showed me that we’re not doomed to having unaccountable rulers. It’s possible to have deep change. But in order to do that, we must recognize the root cultural disease, and find a way to cure it: by creating cultures where everyone stands for what’s right, and nobody rules over anybody else.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559
(The book contains citations for all this material, except Trump’s Palestinian population estimate which occurred after publication)
Jan Wiklund
I find this article cherry-picking cases that fit the thesis.
In all Europe by now hatred of immigrants from south of the Mediterranean is growing. That has nothing to do with being punished for siding with these people – one isn’t.
It rather has to do with increasing insecurity due to neo-liberal politics and shrinking economies: people are afraid of being losers and fight desperately to pass this fate upon others. But to do that with a good conscience you must believe that these “others” deserve it.
It is easy to fool oneself if one’s interest demands it.
KT Chong
A new Yale poll shows that young American voters, age 18 to 21, are now overwhelmingly Republicans. They lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections:
https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z-2060258
I also recently came across Catherine Liu, (who is Yale-educated but not related the the poll,) a cultural critic and theorist. She presents the most compelling and succinct argument that could explain why Americans are turning against Democrats and liberals.
Trump’s Tariffs, Identity Politics, and the Class War No One Talks About — Everything About the U.S.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMZau-n2Ru4
She makes the connections between IDENTITY POLITICS (i.e., DEI, gender ideologies, social justice) and the CLASS WAR (the economic + cultural war of the elites against the working middle class.)
I think Ian Welsh and people like him are not aware or are in denial that their critics of the elite-centric neoliberal capitalism and support for the elite-driven identity politics and social justice… is a doublethink. It is a form of cognitive dissonance. The class war are BOTH economic AND cultural. You really should not—and cannot—separate the two connected components. Americans see that Democrats, liberals and progressives are relentlessly pushing and enforcing the cultural ideals of the elitists, (e.g., identity politics, social justice, DEI, gender ideologies, transgenderism, etc.,) and they connect the cultural battle of the class war with the economic battle of the elites against Americans. The class war is a whole package that includes BOTH economic and cultural components, and it is a package deal. You can’t separate the two… young Americans and people who support Republicans and Trump certainly do not.
BlizzardOfOzzz
“It rather has to do with increasing insecurity due to neo-liberal politics and shrinking economies: people are afraid of being losers and fight desperately to pass this fate upon others. But to do that with a good conscience you must believe that these “others” deserve it.”
Or maybe they see that Africans are ugly and stupid and would not like their country flooded with them. Some things are easy to explain without resorting to a Big Gay Word Salad.
mago
Hey Blizzard. How you doing? Been a while.
If you’re dealing in sarcasm, maybe make it known. If you indeed feel some beings are intellectually, culturally and racially inferior because of the way they look and talk and dress, well I guess you’re just another binary kind of guy.
I’m guessing you’re a guy and not one of those other people.
Next thing you know they’ll be coming after you.
Soredemos
@KT Chong
Republicans suck, and have sucked for a very, very long time (we’re a long way from the Radical Republicans). They are now openly waging a war against the people and institutions of this country. They are, no hyperbole, traitors, in any reasonable sense. Both in intent and in practice, they are enemies of the United States and everything it at least rhetorically claims to stand for.
Now, as a filthy Marxist, I don’t actually have much love for most of the sacred institutions and values of Liberalism, but accelerationism can only be a desirable phenomenon if there’s some sort of credible revolutionary potential waiting in the wings to take advantage of the situation. In the US there absolutely isn’t (or at least nothing of the Left). There are no American Lenins and Trotskys waiting to spring into action.
How did we get to this point? Because the Democrats also suck. They are a staggeringly inept political party, that have so fumbled for decades that we reached a point where the Republicans could get elected just by focusing on various very obviously stupid Democratic weak points. Republicans could basically run and win on ‘we’re not Democrats’, because the Democrats, hand in hand with those same Republicans, oversaw decades of clear economic treason.
And their only response to criticism on those grounds was either gaslighting (‘America is already great’, ‘the Biden economy is fine, everyone who says it isn’t is just a weirdo with bad vibes’), or distraction into various irrelevant bullshit issues that were either real but of vanishingly small relevance, or outright made up strange nonsense (the entirety of the trans ‘debate’, where liberals made a mockery of actual science, on this and some other issues, while shouting ‘believe science!’).
The Republicans were already thinly veiled monsters, and are now fully mask off, to the point that I think if the election were somehow redone right now Trump would lose, or at least win by far, far less than he did just a few months ago (unlike Democrats, Republicans will actually capitalize on power once they have it. They’re going all out with their agenda, or trying to, with the considerable chaos factor of Trump and his seemingly arbitrary whims). So how badly must the other party be for the GOP to ever seem like a viable option? For a huge amount of the country that simply doesn’t vote, both options suck and are equally invalid.
The choice was between annoying, condescending smug liberals who openly hate huge swathes of the country that are genuinely suffering as a clear and direct result of policies Democrats openly championed, and who offer nothing in return other than insults and weird, blue-haired social engineering that is actually at minimum strange, if not outright repulsive, to most people, and a GOP which is actually just as culpable for the economic betrayal of the US, but which has somehow managed to successfully project that treason onto just the Democrats.
How fucking bad must the Democrats be for the Republicans to have ever seemed like a viable option to anyone? It seems like the DNC set finding out as an overriding policy goal, and succeeded.
Curt Kastens
Here is something that I a white well educated northerner until I was 55 years old. I did not feel threatened by the progress of black people in the US because I did not see that I was in economic competition with blacks. Blacks were only 2% of the population of the state when I was growing up. Not around 30% which is the case in some areas of the former confederacy.
More importantly the further up the economic ladder that one is the less likely it is that one would be affected by living in a society in which African Americans had the same economic outcomes as whites. If that were the case many African Americans would rise up to the middle quintil of income or savings or what ever other economic measure that one wishes to use. But each level on the economic ladder above that would be reached by fewer and fewer African Americans. Only 10% of African Americans would reach to the top 10% of economic measurements, And if you are a white person in that top 10% and were displaced because African Americans were getting an equal outcome in the benefits of our society you would fall in to the top 20% not exactly a terrifying outcome.
But if you are a white person in the bottom 20% huge numbers of blacks will rise to that level or higher. That means that there is a huge chance that a white person in the bottom 20% would fall in to the bottom 10%. In a non socialist economy falling in to the bottom 10% would be a terrifying prospect.
Therefore it should not be surprising that poor southern whites would be far more hostile to programs and policies that would benefit African Americans than relatively well off northern whites. Socialist policies could remedy that problem IF it were properly explained and sold to poor whites. But for now socialism is a four letter word in the US. And the collapse of industrial civilization will occur before socialist type policies are accepted in the USA.
We are failing. We have failed. We are going to fail. The faster our civilization comes crashing down the faster fhe mutt holes will no longer be enjoying themselves.
Curt Kastens
Damn am I getting senile. IN the comment above I meant that I did not understand until I was 55 years old that the poor southern whites have a lot more to fear economically speaking if African Americans achieve economic parity in the US than not poor northern whites do.
Warvigilent
hmmm, love how my rants get modded but statements above of rank racism and bigotry seem to get not so much as a slap on the wrist. I thought one of the lessons for the left was to stop giving these likely bots/ paid trolls any space or speaking time. let alone bother debating them or their noxious and vile “ideologies”. Stop tolerating the intolerant.
and before some saintly centrist or finger wagging facsist comes to berate me for my lack of free speech ill point to the clear and obvious crackdown on free speech from the right. maybe that will put a stake in any belief the right gave a fuck about protecting free speech.
Eric Anderson
I think it was a great post.
I also think your theory also has room for expansion.
For example, I live quite rural red state. Here exists a subtle yet pervasive “relational violence.” Think of the KKK w/o the physical violence and the hoods and robes.
If you step out of the party line, you’re a pariah.
bruce wilder
I won’t say, “I disagree” with the guest post — one cannot exactly disagree with a worldview or a wish for a better world. I can say that politics is grounded in human nature, the nature of a supremely social animal with deep instincts for social cooperation and competition. It is too little appreciated, imho, that even (logically) prior to political interests emerging into society, human ambivalence finds expression in the divisions of opinion emerging within discourse. As soon as people begin talking and dancing with one another — which is instantly, so powerful are the impulsive instincts for social cooperation and competition — they naturally agree, disagree, argue, concede, align and assume roles. Roles. The play’s the thing, you see. The drama. But, I digress.
The point I wish to make is that before the alignment into groups and roles and interests — logically prior or foundational to the rest — there exists human ambivalence. Prior to definite roles or philosophies, prior to committing to particular tastes and habits as markers of a social and personal identity, humans contain a sea of doubt and ambivalence. Ambivalence that contains myriad unresolved contradictions. Unresolved because we haven’t agreed or disagreed with our fellows, haven’t argued, picked sides, chosen leaders or heroes, assumed roles in the family, the tribe, the community. In that primordial soup of politics, which is ambivalence, humans love and hate. Everything. That is what “ambivalent” means: being for and against.
I am sure anyone foolish enough to persist in reading this comment is smart enough to see where I have been going from the start: my answer to where do hatred and racism come from, would be human ambivalence. Like love and the spirit of universal brotherhood, they are there in everyone from the beginning, at the base.
Recognizing ambivalence in one’s self is an antidote to projecting pathology onto “the other”, if you let it be. “We are all fallen sinners” is the Christian expression of that idea, the prerequisite to seeking grace.
We do not have to imagine that we are engaged in a crusade against wrongthink or awaiting a millennial transformation of cultural consciousness (as many Christians did historically). It wasn’t usually all that productive then or now to construe our political dramas that way. Democratic discourse and process depend on respect and tolerance for differing tastes and judgments and the ability to agree to disagree while acting in concert or cooperatively. In politics and economics, we overcome the inevitable conflicts of interest to some large extent by agreeing to argue abstract rules and principles. We have to find the higher consciousness to overcome the animosity that arises from the diversity of views that is the natural product of ambivalence. I do not think that means rejecting “racism” or “hatred” as the alien artifacts of self deceptions to which we ourselves are magically immune.
Human beings are a supremely social species whose great evolutionary advantages find application in a deep division of labor. Authority and hierarchy in organizing cooperation amidst that deep division of labor are both apparently necessary and obviously problematic. Wishing away authority and hierarchy seems to me to be deeply unserious as a way to approach the political problems of devising institutions that manage the inherent conflict of interests as well as deeply felt ambivalence that authority and hierarchy inhere.
someofparts
From the studies Margaret Mead did in New Guinea, it seems that the methods of care for new infants and very young children are crucial in shaping human personality to be either peaceful or warlike. I think the omission of this in cultural studies by men is a blind spot. I think the child-rearing methods of a community must be studied and taken into account if we hope to create our own peaceful communities based on what we learn from studies like these.
Jan Wiklund
Here an economist who have identified such words fascists in the past excelled in, and looked if they are coming back. And they do – except in France. It seems that France is the only western country where inequality hasn’t increased since 1990, so people have no real need for hatred: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/04/15/the-deep-roots-of-fascist-thought/
“I think the answer has to be that for many people, ideology is an instrument, not a goal. People believe in the ideals of humanism and the Enlightenment to the extent that this ideology delivers real benefits. And for several centuries, it did deliver the goods, obviously because rationality and evidence are a great way to solve problems. But lately, many anglophones have been losing faith in science, reason, and evidence, turning instead to darker ideas from the past.”
Incidentially, the fascist vocabulary was at its height in the 17th century, the age of the absolute kings.
Oakchair
Democrats, liberals and progressives are relentlessly pushing and enforcing the cultural ideals of the elitists, (e.g., identity politics, social justice, DEI, gender ideologies, transgenderism, etc.,)
——-
Those aren’t the cultural ideals of the ruling class. They’re the distractions, divisions and 2 minutes of hate the ruling classes uses to prevent even the discussion of the usurping of their own power.
The ruling class controls the narrative to such a degree that the masses think using the pronoun they instead of he is “far left”.
Considering they control every institution and political party it shouldn’t be a surprise that every institution and political party operates to their benefit at the expense of everyone else. Regardless of how much those entities role play as revolutionaries, neutral, caring and rivals.
Whip
Someofparts: I agree, child-rearing has a huge effect in how a person relates to others in adulthood. One Disease One Cure goes into detail about those too, but there wasn’t room in the essay.
bruce wilder: It is easy to theorize about ambivalence. Read the writings and listen to the words of people of healthy cultures, and you won’t it. I got to spend time with a healthy culture called the Ashaninka and everyone was profoundly generous and trustworthy, and I wasn’t the only one to observe that.
Many visitors to these kinds of society have noticed the utter lack of prisons and police, and the simultaneous lack of crime. Why no crime if there are no prisons or police? Because when everyone is trained to stand for what’s right – and when the society rewards this instead of punishes it – a different, deeply respectful society is the result. (respectful to each other anyway).
Why is ambivalence so common that it seems universal? I actually believe it’s because we’re not allowed to stand in solidarity with each other, especially by upholding the law ourselves, and holding authority figures accountable.
If you tried to enforce your own law, you would be punished, because that is the police’s job, and we see how well that works out. So people talk about having laws, but most do not actually try to enforce them, and don’t do much about it when the police fail to enforce them too (at least on the upper class). Of course this produces ambivalence. But in societies where people can have total trust that others will stand in solidarity with them, there isn’t the same ambivalence. There’s relaxed trust – and I see countless examples when I look for it; this is not theorizing.