omniharmonicSovereignty Is Solidarity
There is an unspoken argument that runs beneath the surface of nearly all of our political disagreements. On one side stands the self-interested individual, the figure we tend to associate with libertarians, the one primarily concerned with liberty, choice, and freedom. On the other side stands the relational self, primarily concerned with care work and mutual aid, animated by the sense that we are responsible for one another. We have learned to treat these as opposites, as the two poles of a spectrum we are forever being asked to choose between. You are either for the sovereign self or for the solidarity of the collective. You cannot, it seems, be for both.
I want to suggest that this is not only false but backward. Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising: two faces of a single phenomenon, each calling the other into being. We cannot have either one in any durable form without the other. The kind of sovereignty worth wanting is a sovereignty that requires solidarity to be real, and the kind of solidarity worth wanting is a solidarity that requires sovereign, healthy individuals and communities to make it possible. The tension between them is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is the structure that holds everything up.
What follows is, in one sense, an argument about politics and economics, about commons and care, about who enforces which boundary and how. But underneath the argument runs something quieter and more fundamental: an invitation to feel a shift in how you experience being a self at all. The two poles only look like opposites from inside a worldview that imagines the self as separate to begin with. Loosen that single assumption and the whole contradiction dissolves, not by splitting the difference, but by seeing it was never really there.
The Throne and Its Web
So let’s begin there, beneath the politics and the economics, with the question everything else rests on: what is a self, that it could be sovereign at all?
My beloved soul friend Jordan “Josie” Siegel once said something that now lives permanently rent free in my head: every being sits atop the throne of its own selfhood, a throne built from the web of its relationships. We tend to imagine the self as something that exists first, complete in itself, and only afterward enters into relationships, the way a king establishes a kingdom. But Josie has the order reversed. The throne does not come before the web. The throne is made of the web. There is no sovereign self that precedes its relationships; the self is something co-created, woven into being by the very relations that hold it. Pull away the web and there is no one left sitting there at all.
This is the ontological ground beneath everything that follows, the same shift I and others have written about elsewhere as the movement from separation to interbeing. To be is always to inter-be. Nothing stands alone; everything arises in relationship, dependent and entangled. The boundary we draw around the self is real, but it is real the way the wall of a living cell is real: not a barrier sealing off an interior, but a membrane through which a continuous exchange with the world is always taking place. The self is less a fortress than an eddy in a river, a pattern that holds its shape precisely by letting the current move through it.
Once you feel this, the supposed contradiction between sovereignty and solidarity quietly comes undone. If my very selfhood is co-arising with yours, if I am, in some literal sense, partly constituted by my relationships with you, then my sovereignty was never a possession I held against the world. It was always something the world and I were making together. Sovereignty stops being the opposite of solidarity and reveals itself as one of its expressions. This isn’t a clever rhetorical move. It’s what the world actually looks like from the far side of the shift, and the rest of this essay is simply an attempt to build the political and economic forms that take that view seriously, to let what is ontologically true become socially real.
The same pattern repeats all the way up: from the single self, to the circle of care, to the watershed, to the federation of watersheds. It is patterns within patterns, the same gesture of bounded openness, drawn again and again.
What Sovereignty Actually Means
If the self is an eddy rather than a fortress, then sovereignty cannot mean what we usually take it to mean. When most people hear it, they imagine the rugged individual: a self walled off from the world, defended against intrusion, owing nothing to anyone. Or they imagine the state, with its monopoly on violence, drawing borders and enforcing them with armies. Neither is the kind of sovereignty I am interested in, because neither reflects the reality of interbeing.
The sovereignty I mean is functional sovereignty, which is, by definition, community sovereignty: the capacity of a community to delineate and enforce its own boundaries, not through force, but through the alignment of incentives and agreements. This is a different relationship to power and authority altogether. It is not the power to dominate but the power to cohere. It is the kind of power wielded by the relational self: the ability of a pattern to hold its own shape while the current keeps moving through it.
Here we run into one of the most persistent misunderstandings about the commons and anarchy. People imagine commons or anarchist governance as something totally open-ended, a free-for-all in which anyone can take whatever they want, Mad Max violence or the proverbial tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. But this gets it exactly wrong. Anarchist or commons governance is all about boundaries. It’s about creating boundaries that are enforced through peer agreements rather than through the monopoly of violence. The whole project is to build positive-sum relationships through shared agreements, where the cost of not upholding those agreements is precisely what keeps the system coherent. Enforcement does not come from above. It emerges from the relationships themselves.
A functionally sovereign community enforces its boundaries by governing access to shared pools of resources. Increasingly, that access can be programmatically insured, through blockchain smart contracts, for instance, where if the community revokes your privileges, you simply lose access to the resource. In the digital realm this is nearly frictionless. In the physical realm you still need other forms of enforcement, which is why community self-defense is a real part of this picture and not one we should be squeamish about. But an enormous amount can be accomplished simply by aligning incentives so that staying in good standing is more valuable than defecting. The commons is not the absence of boundaries. It is boundaries enforced by relationship instead of by the gun.
You Cannot Be Sovereign Alone
Once you see sovereignty this way, something becomes obvious that the rugged-individual fantasy works hard to obscure. If the throne is built from the web, then a throne with no web beneath it is not sovereign. You cannot be sovereign by yourself, because there is no “by yourself” to be sovereign in. You cannot enforce a boundary alone.
Consider what we have done with the idea of private sovereignty. We have created these little false bubbles, the home, the corporation, inside which the nuclear family or board of directors supposedly possess full sovereignty. If someone comes to take what is yours, you have the right to defend it, with violence if necessary. And if your own violence is not enough, law enforcement will come and punish the person who took something of yours. But notice what this means: even our most cherished image of individual sovereignty turns out to be underwritten by the state. We mostly rely on the police to defend the rights of private property. Our “individual sovereignty” was always borrowing its sovereignty from the state.
This false sense of sovereignty works for those whose private property the state sees as legitimate. Historically, this standard has been applied primarily along class and racialized boundaries, coming to the aid of elites and looking the other way when the sovereignty of other groups is at stake. Famously, Black Wall Street was razed to the ground by white mobs who feared the longtail effects of black community sovereignty. Almost a hundred years later, police would evict protestors from Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park, demonstrating that community sovereignty is not the kind of sovereignty the state is interested in protecting.
More and more each day, the institutions that once promised to protect and provide for us are revealing their gross illegitimacy, demonstrating that they do not exist to serve the needs of ordinary people. In a world where that is true, we have no choice but to develop our own means of enforcing collective boundaries. The borrowed sovereignty extended to us by the state as a privilege and not a universal right was never ours to begin with. We are going to have to learn to generate our own.
But the survivalists and the bunker-builders are attempting to reclaim their sovereignty from an ontologically confused position. The fantasy of weathering what is coming, the destabilized markets, the supply-chain shocks, the climate instability, the authoritarian governments, by retreating into a fortified box stocked with canned goods is a complete fiction. It fails for the same reason every fortress always fails: there is not and could never be a truly sealed interior. There is no hiding. There is no ‘away.’ There is no protecting yourself alone. The truth is far more demanding and far more hopeful: we actually need each other. But we do not need each other in the abstract. We need each other in the concrete and practical sense that real sovereignty is something we can only build together. You cannot be sovereign alone. You can only be sovereign in relationship, which is to say, the web that makes you vulnerable, exposed and interdependent, is the very same web that makes you strong.
A Cautionary Collectivist Tale
Several years ago, I was doing mutual aid organizing with a group of radical peers. One of the people we were organizing with told us that the solidarity we kept talking about felt performative. Superficial. What they actually wanted, they said, was for us to pool everything. To put all our resources into a common pot and share without reservation. Anything less struck them as a half-measure, a way of feeling virtuous without making the real sacrifice.
The tragic irony was hard to miss, though no one said it out loud. This person was among the most unwell people in the group, physically, mentally, financially. And so the call to pool everything carried, underneath it, an unspoken reluctance that ran through all of us. We wanted to be in solidarity with each other. But there was a risk in solidarity that none of us were willing to bear.
What none of us had the courage to name was the felt sense that the collectivist impulse to pool resources requires individuals who are well. If you pool resources from a group of people who do not have enough, then yes, technically everyone has more than they started with. But you have not built solidarity. You have built codependence. And codependence is not the same thing as interdependence.
Interdependence is the recognition that our actions and our choices have real consequences for one another, and that we are responsible for those consequences. It is the throne and the web in working order, a self that holds its shape and knows itself woven into others, drawing strength from the connection rather than dissolving into it. Codependence, by contrast, is a kind of reliance that limits the agency of the individual, a binding that keeps everyone smaller than they might otherwise be. It is what happens when the eddy loses its own internal pattern and slackens back into undifferentiated current: connection without coherence, web without throne. The two can look superficially alike, because both involve depending on others. But one expands agency and the other contracts it. One is the membrane doing its living work; the other is the membrane dissolving.
This is why functional sovereignty for a self-governing commons requires healthy individuals to participate in it. It requires people who have enough excess capacity, enough surplus of time and energy, enough internal coherence, self-knowledge and wholeness, to actually tend and steward the commons, because tending a commons takes time and energy and contribution. If everyone arrives empty-handed, with nothing to spare, no unique offering derived from their personal individualized experience, there is no one to do the stewarding, nothing to share, and the commons cannot stay healthy. The kind of sovereignty I am interested in is therefore a collective sovereignty: one in which we recognize our individual responsibilities and contributions even as we work to tend the commons, not the commons in some abstract, planetary sense, but the commons that lives in the actual space between specific people.
Even the most committed collectivist societies in human history understood this. There were always boundaries around who was and was not part of the collective. Not out of cruelty, but out of a fact as basic as physics: it is simply impossible to care for everyone at the same time. Care work is irreducibly relational. It requires intimacy, trust, and reciprocity, and those things do not scale to infinity, because they are made of attention, and attention is finite. They live in particular bonds between particular people.
What the State Forgot, and What the Libertarian Remembers
For most of the twentieth century, we made a bargain. As communities and corporations grew larger and more complex, we agreed to trade participation in civic life for bureaucratic efficiency, to let trained experts and bureaucratic institutions handle the messy work of caring for one another. The citizen became a client, receiving services from a theoretically benevolent administration. For a while it seemed to work. Then, beginning roughly in the Reagan era and continuing with bipartisan enthusiasm for the next four to five decades, those same functions were steadily privatized and hollowed out, until the state retained the forms of care, child care, food and housing assistance, while evacuating their substance. We are left with an arrangement that is, in many ways, the worst of both worlds: a society that has neither the thick local bonds of mutual obligation nor a state that actually delivers on its promises.
The deeper damage is harder to see, because it is ontological rather than merely fiscal. When we made care the responsibility of bureaucratic institutions, we made it the responsibility of bodies that are structurally incapable of caring, because they are concerned only with the collective, and yet the collective is made up of individuals. A bureaucracy cannot see the web of particular relationships in which a person is actually held; it can only see the category. And so it treats homeless human beings as a “homelessness problem” rather than as particular people, each with their own trauma, their own economic and social and cultural circumstances, their own specific path into and potentially out of crisis. From this vantage the solutions are always imposed from above, never gripped into actual relationship. They cannot be. The institution has no hands with which to hold anyone, because hands belong to individual people, and the bureaucracy operates as an impersonal institution.
This is the point at which the libertarian critique, so often caricatured, deserves a fairer hearing. We tend to imagine libertarians as people who simply do not care, who have rationalized their indifference into a philosophy. But many libertarians are in fact deeply committed to care work. They simply do not believe that care belongs within the purview of the state. This is not because they are heartless. It is because they have seen the consequences of handing care to faceless institutions: it removes the responsibility of the individual to actually show up for their community. When care becomes the government’s job, it stops being mine.
But the polarity between individualism and collectivism cuts both ways. Yes, there are intensely self-motivated people who hide behind libertarian language to justify keeping what they have. But the existence of the selfish libertarian does not let the compassionate liberal off the hook. The liberal who insists that the government must solve the problem of care is very often outsourcing a responsibility they are themselves unwilling to carry. It is easy to vote for a program that will feed the hungry with someone else’s hands; it is hard to learn your unhoused neighbor’s name. The bureaucratic solution can be, in practice, a way of purchasing distance from the very people we claim to care about, a moral indulgence that lets us feel compassionate while remaining personally uninvolved. The libertarian’s error is imagining we can do without infrastructure for care. The liberal’s error is imagining that infrastructure can be made of paperwork rather than relationship. Neither is willing to pay the real price, which is presence.
You can watch this happen in yourself. When we feel that homelessness is the government’s problem to solve, we walk past the homeless person on the sidewalk. We do not treat them as a human being sharing the same physical space we are standing in. The bureaucratic abstraction has interposed itself between us and the person right in front of us, and in so doing it has robbed us of something fundamental about our own humanity. We outsource our care, and then we wonder why our society has become so cold.
The answer is not the libertarian fantasy of the rugged individual who maintains no systems of care for the vulnerable and the marginalized. That is its own kind of cruelty, and its own kind of fiction. The answer is to reroute the systems of care out of the faceless institutions and back into direct relationships in place. Into bioregional organizing. Into local mutual aid. Into solidarity that has a face and a name. We do not want less care. We want care that is re-embedded in relationship.
The society we currently inhabit may be less caring than even the fully libertarian version would be. There was a time when an individual church community, learning that one of its members had been laid off, would simply feed them, would help cover the rent while they got back on their feet. That capacity was real, and it was relational, and we have largely lost it. The bureaucratic state did not augment that capacity. It atrophied it. What I am proposing is not a leap into some untested future but a reinvigoration of something we already know how to do, scaffolded now with better tools.
Membranes, Thresholds, and the Scales of Solidarity
If care is relational and cannot scale to infinity, then real solidarity requires membranes. It requires relational thresholds, boundaries that define who is inside a given circle of care and who, for now, is not. This sounds harsh until you realize that the alternative is to care for no one in particular, which is the same as caring for no one at all. We are not trying to care for everyone simultaneously. We are trying to care for specific people with whom we have actual bonds of reciprocity, trust, and intimacy.
A boundary of belonging is not a wall built to keep people out. It is the specific, relational act by which someone actually chooses to be in solidarity with someone else. This is the difference that makes everything work. Forced solidarity is not solidarity at all; it is conscription, and it breeds the resentment we feel toward jury duty rather than the devotion we feel toward our own people. Real solidarity has to be entered, consciously, by a self that knows itself well enough to mean it. The membrane is what makes the choice legible, what lets us say, with our whole selves, I am choosing to be inside this circle with you, to bear the real costs of intimacy because of what is ultimately gained from mutual care.
For that choice to stay genuine, the membrane has to hold two properties. It has to be real: an actual threshold, with an inside and an outside, or there is nothing to choose and nothing to consent to. And it has to be fluid and adaptive and self-regulating: porous enough that people can enter and leave, mutually accountable enough that the circle can enforce its own agreements as we do the messy work of caring for each other. A boundary that cannot move becomes a prison; a boundary that will not hold becomes a site of extraction. What we are after is exactly the living membrane we began with, the cell wall, firm enough to maintain integrity, permeable enough to stay alive, crossed only by consent. Here the image we planted at the level of the single self reappears at the level of the community, because it is the same pattern: bounded openness, the throne resting on a web that it neither dissolves into nor seals itself against. This is what keeps belonging from curdling into either tyranny or the tyranny of structurelessness. The boundary is what makes the belonging consensual, and the consent is what keeps the boundary humane.
And here it helps to notice that you already belong to many such circles, each defined by a different kind of shared stake.
I am in economic solidarity with the other members of my cooperative: we share a material fate tied to the same enterprise. I am in social and cultural solidarity with the people I do community organizing with: we share a project and a set of relationships. And I am in ecological solidarity with the people who share my bioregion: because we all have a vested interest in the same healthy water, the same healthy air, the same healthy soil. Notice that these are not abstractions. They are not “the environment” in general. They are this watershed, this foodshed, this soil, this community. The specificity is what grounds the solidarity and makes it material. You are in solidarity with your watershed-mates whether you like them or not, because you will all drink the same water.
When we form networked commons with relational membranes around these different common-pool assets, we are not building some kind of global solidarity. We are building pockets of material solidarity: dense, particular, and real. And then, crucially, from within those membranes we can begin to compose larger structures: nested, federated networks that allow us to be in broader solidarity where it is appropriate, consensual, and bounded.
The trick is to design the scale of each solidarity membrane proportional to the nature of the shared stake. Another bioregional group on the far side of the continent does not share my watershed. We are not in ecological solidarity around the same water. But we do share solidarity around information, around the hard-won knowledge of how to steward a watershed, which we can exchange freely across the distance between us. That is an appropriate, real, and genuinely interdependent form of solidarity, scaled correctly to what we actually have in common. This is the difference between solidarity that is grounded and solidarity that is performative: the grounded kind always knows exactly what it is grounded in.
Why Solidarity Needs Teeth
For any of this to mean something, the communities involved have to be functionally sovereign. Without enforceability, communities face what has been dubbed by political economists as “the free rider problem.” In any shared space, some people will benefit from the solidarity of the group without ever entering into reciprocity with it. They take from the commons without giving back to it, and because there is no consequence for taking without giving, the people who take the most pay the least. Left unchecked, this dynamic does not just create unfairness. It quietly converts solidarity into extraction.
This is exactly why solidarity needs functional sovereignty. It needs the appropriate stakes, and it needs enforceability, the capacity to say this is the boundary, and these are the consequences of crossing it. Functional sovereignty is what makes solidarity real, because it gives the commons actual consequences and actual norms, enforced through relationships rather than through top-down authority. Without that capacity, solidarity is just a sentiment, and sentiments are inevitably strip-mined.
This is the heart of what Elinor Ostrom spent her career demonstrating. Studying real commons that had endured for centuries, from fisheries to irrigation systems to alpine pastures and forests, she found that they did not survive by being open and unbounded. They survived because the communities governing them had clear boundaries, locally crafted rules, graduated sanctions for those who broke them, and accessible ways to resolve conflict. They survived, in other words, because they were functionally sovereign. The lesson is not that we must choose between freedom and rules. It is that real freedom, the freedom to share a commons without watching it collapse, is constituted by the right rules, made and enforced by the people who live with their consequences.
So the solidarity I am arguing for is rooted in reciprocity, relationships, and accountability, not in some abstract, frictionless solidarity that asks nothing and therefore protects nothing.
The Most Universal Solidarity We Can Actually Reach
There is a deep temptation, especially for those of us formed by the humanistic Enlightenment, to want our solidarity to be universal, to extend to every human being equally, as a matter of abstract right. This is a beautiful aspiration. It is also, I have come to think, a trap, because it tends to launder our responsibility upward into an abstract bureaucratic state that is supposed to hold these universal obligations on our behalf, obligations it has, in fact, been systematically evacuating for the last fifty or sixty years. We pledged allegiance to humanity in general and stopped feeding our neighbor in particular.
The honest difficulty is this: most people simply do not want to pay to support people they do not know. This is not a moral failing to be scolded away. It is a deep feature of human social wiring, a tribal dynamic that makes it genuinely hard for us to care about people we cannot see. You can wish it were otherwise. That will not help.
But this doesn’t mean we should have no infrastructure for care. It means the infrastructure must be fractal, scaling horizontally by rooting interconnected networks in the context of particular relationships and particular ecologies, so that at every scale we are accountable to actual people rather than to the abstract idea of helping people. The care does not disappear. It changes shape. It stops being a promise made to humanity and becomes a practice carried out between humans.
With this understanding, it becomes almost obvious that place-based, ecological solidarity at the bioregional scale is as close to a universal form of solidarity as we can reach while still staying grounded and relational. The bioregion is the largest scale at which we still have a genuinely material solidarity relationship: a stake we share not because we agreed to it in principle but because we are literally embedded in the same living system, breathing the same air, drinking from the same watershed, fed by the same soil. This is the throne and the web at the scale of a landscape, the same pattern of bounded openness we met in the single self, now drawn large enough to hold a whole community of beings, human and otherwise. Beyond the bioregion, solidarity thins into abstraction. Within the bioregion, it remains rooted in the flesh, living bodies sharing nutrients, water, and exchange. Instead of reaching for the universal and closing our hands on empty ideas, we root ourselves at the widest point where our feet still touch the ground.
Pre-Capitalism and Post-Capitalism Root In Relationship
This is also, finally, where the libertarian and the liberal worldviews stop fighting and start to reconcile. The libertarian is right that bureaucratic, state-administered care is dehumanizing and robs us of the relationships we might otherwise have. The liberal is right that we need real infrastructure for caring for the vulnerable, and that leaving people to fend for themselves is a moral catastrophe. Both are right. What neither sees clearly on its own is the synthesis: we keep the infrastructure of care and we relocate it into direct, place-based relationship, circles of care that we enter into by way of consent and rational self-interest. We get the care without the bureaucracy and the relationship without the self-abandonment.
What does this actually look like? It looks like communities organizing their own care infrastructure: insurance pools, rotating savings groups, rotational labor, mutual aid. These are all civic solutions, ways of meeting real needs that do not route through financial transactions. These mechanisms work because they run on real relationships.
Take rotational labor, a practice that has appeared across nearly every human culture. The arrangement is simple: you can ask your peers for non-commodified, freely given labor to build something, to raise a barn, bring in a harvest, repair a home, with the shared understanding that when the time comes and someone else has the need, you will show up for them. No money changes hands. What makes it work is the relationship and the reciprocity woven through it. Strip out the relationship and the whole thing collapses, because there is nothing left to guarantee the return except the bond between people.
Now contrast that with jury duty. Jury duty is, in a sense, the minimum unit of civic participation our system asks of us: to sit in judgment of our peers, to determine whether a stranger is guilty and what they are guilty of. And we hate it. We do everything we can to get out of it. Why? Because it is utterly non-relational. I do not know this person. I have no relationship with them and no reciprocity with them. So I do it begrudgingly, as an imposition, never as a genuine civic duty, because the relationship that would make it meaningful has been engineered out of it. The same act that feels like sacred obligation inside a real community feels like a parking ticket when it is demanded by an abstraction.
The re-localization and re-embedding of care is how we renew civic integrity itself. It becomes my actual responsibility to show up for the people I am in solidarity with, not because a court summoned me, but because my own sovereignty is bound up in their well-being. If they are not well, I cannot be well. That is not a sentiment. It is a structural fact about interdependent systems, and once you feel it in your own life it does not let go of you.
Growing the Circle Horizontally
I feel the weight of this most acutely when I encounter the things that make us feel powerless: people falling into homelessness, communities being over-policed, the steady grinding of systems that seem to leave no room for any of us to do anything at all. The disempowerment is real. And the answer to it is not to wait for the government to come and save us, because the government is not coming to save us. Nor is it to retreat into the bunker, because the bunker is a fiction. The answer is harder than either of those options.
The answer is to start small. To build material solidarity with the people you already know, not humanity in the abstract, but the specific, named, reachable people already in your life, and then to expand that circle gradually, on the basis of real relationships. This is how we rebuild the social fabric. This is how the civic responsibility we have outsourced and lost gets renewed: one relationship at a time, one shared stake at a time.
And when we have built these nested, functionally sovereign solidarity circles, we can begin to grow them horizontally rather than vertically. Vertical growth means scaling up into ever-larger and more abstract institutions, each level of aggregation putting more distance between the helper and the helped until no one can see anyone at all. Horizontal growth means federating: linking circle to circle, commons to commons, watershed to watershed, each one keeping the relational knowing that makes solidarity real. We do not scale by abstracting away from the web. We scale by weaving patterns within patterns, the same living membrane drawn at every magnitude, never losing touch with the particular even as it grows vast.
This is how we get back to a society in which people are actively engaged in caring for one another, not out of guilt, not out of compulsion, not out of allegiance to an identity group, but because they can see plainly that their own sovereignty requires the health of the whole. The self and the other stop being rivals. They are revealed as what they always were: the two ends of a single tension, holding up a structure that neither could hold alone.
Sovereignty is solidarity, not as a paradox to be admired from a safe distance, but as a plain description of how a self actually exists within embedded relationships. The boundary and the bond are one gesture drawn from two directions. To know where you end is to know to whom you are bound. To be truly sovereign, free and capable and whole, is to belong, on purpose, to a particular people and a particular place, and to build with them the kind of strength that no one was ever going to find alone. This is the shift, and it is available now, in the next relationship you choose to actually enter, the quiet turning by which separation gives way to interbeing, and we stop trying to save ourselves from each other and finally, at long last, begin to walk each other home.
If you’d like to learn more about my process writing with AI, my commitment to you as a reader, and my intention for this publication, please read this essay or my about statement.