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However, I know a bit about something I call "spirit"—which I use to mean the way collective human belief creates effects in the world, creates what is possible and not possible—creates, in other words, the endlessly mutable reality that we might refer to as “the way the world is.”

I know about an emerging spirit that believes that everyone deserves access to basic human needs—which includes space to live safely as who they know themselves to be—simply because of the fact of their humanity, without a thought to how that life should be deserved or earned.

This is a spirit that sees human beings as the source of all value, rather than a cost to be exploited.

It is an observable spirit that has been emerging into human consciousness for maybe the last 100,000 years or so.

And I know about a dominant empowered spirit that believes that only some deserve life, as mediated through its adherents’ own ideas of how people ought to be permitted to exist, and its adherents’ beliefs that they are the ones who get to issue that license.

This is a spirit that sees human beings as a resource to be controlled and used, or else punished and ignored eliminated.

It has been an observable dominant spirit in human history for the last however long humans have been around.

If I wanted to give these spirits labels, I suppose that “the left” and “the right” and their attendant political rubrics could make for a marginally useful shorthand.

But it strikes me the more accurate labels than "left" and "right" would be "humanist" and "supremacist."

And—while it’s true a supremacist spirit can be found in every state and within all our major ideologies and religions and political parties—it’s not difficult to see which of these political parties is pursuing the supremacist spirit energetically, ruthlessly, and relentlessly.

To see the supremacist spirit most energetically in motion in the United States, one has only to look around at what happens where the white christian fascist party—that is, the Republican Party—is thriving most.

In these places, we have racist gerrymander and the shuttering of whole areas of college curriculum dealing with racial and gender awareness, and newspapers raided by police, and librarians harassed and libraries closed, and children refused medical treatment and their parents menaced with loss of custody, and rising maternal death rates that disproportionately affect Black people, and fleeing medical professionals, and on and on and on.

And all of this deliberate and targeted abuse is designed to systemically, structurally, and rhetorically accommodate a supremacist spirit whose political view is that other types of humans do not matter, and shouldn’t have space to exist and thrive as themselves, and should be abused and punished for any refusal to be dominated.

Anyway: I'm told that supremacists are bothered, because some people don't want to be friends anymore.

And I'm told that this is a great big problem: the fact that people won't be friends with people aligned with supremacy, and the fact that supremacists are bothered by it.

It bothers supremacists when humanists won’t be friends because of their alignment with supremacy, I guess. They feel strongly that friendship is something they deserve, though it feels less like something they actually want, and more like something they think they’re owed.