Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, is on trial for their murders. She does not dispute that she killed them. Her lawyers argue she lacked criminal responsibility because she was in the grip of a psychotic episode arising from postpartum illness. Prosecutors argue she acted deliberately and knew exactly what she was doing. Twelve jurors will decide that question, and it is their question, not mine.

But there’s a second question the trial keeps circling, one the verdict won’t resolve either way. In the months before January 24, 2023, a labor and delivery nurse from Massachusetts General Hospital told a series of medical professionals that she was not sleeping, that she felt hopeless, that she was having intrusive thoughts she had never had before. She went to emergency rooms. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Her prescriptions were changed again and again. And in all that motion, what the testimony has shown so far is a remarkable absence: the professionals treating her were largely not talking to one another.

The exhibit nobody meant to enter

One moment from the second week of testimony has stayed with me. A psychiatric nurse practitioner who had been messaging with Clancy nearly every day through a patient portal acknowledged under cross-examination that she had never spoken with the psychiatrist Clancy was also seeing, had never reviewed that psychiatrist’s records, and did not know how often the two were meeting. She had not been in contact with the hospital in Rhode Island where Clancy had been treated, or with McLean, the psychiatric facility Clancy checked herself into on New Year’s Eve.

None of that means the nurse practitioner was careless. It means she was working the way American outpatient psychiatry usually works. Each clinician holds a fragment. Each fragment looks manageable. Nobody holds the whole.

The civil suits filed by both Lindsay and Patrick Clancy against her providers allege exactly this pattern: a failure to recognize bipolar disorder with postpartum onset, antidepressants continued as symptoms worsened, and what the complaints describe as a disorganized course of polypharmacy, nine psychiatric medications in a matter of months, eight of them within a three-week stretch. The providers deny the allegations and are contesting the claims. Those cases will take years, and I’m not in a position to judge them.

What I can say is that the picture the testimony paints is one I recognize from thirty years of watching health systems fail people at exactly the moments they’re least able to advocate for themselves. Nobody was in charge. There was no one whose actual job was to look at the whole woman across all those settings and ask whether this was going in a bad direction.

A quieter failure than the one that made us furious

A year and a half ago I wrote This Is How Revolutions Start, about the killing of a health insurance executive on a Manhattan sidewalk and the flood of public glee that followed it. That essay was about rage: denied claims, jokes about thoughts and deductibles, a population that had stopped believing the system would ever work for them.

The Clancy case is the same system, seen from a different angle, and in some ways it’s more damning. Nobody denied Lindsay Clancy anything. She had insurance. She had access. She had a nursing license and knew the vocabulary, knew which doors to knock on, knew what she was describing when she described it. She got appointments, admissions, prescriptions, a specialized perinatal program. The system said yes to her over and over.

It just never assembled itself into care.

That failure doesn’t generate 75,000 laughing reactions on Facebook. It generates a true crime podcast. There’s a version of the coming weeks where the whole country consumes this case as spectacle, argues about whether she looked sufficiently sorry on the stand, and learns nothing. Rage at least has direction. What worries me about a case like this is that it produces the other thing despair produces, which is entertainment.

The right, and the plumbing

In The Healthcare Rights Debate, I argued that the “healthcare as a right means forced labor” objection collapses on contact with the fire department. Nobody thinks firefighters are conscripts. We built an institution, funded it collectively, and now when your house burns you don’t negotiate. Rights need supporting systems to mean anything.

Here’s the part I underplayed in that essay. A supporting system isn’t just money and personnel. It’s coordination. Imagine four fire companies arriving at the same house, each hosing down a different wall, none of them on the same radio channel, each filing its own report about the wall it handled. Every company did its job. The house burns anyway.

That is roughly what perinatal psychiatric care looks like in this country for a woman whose illness crosses settings. We’ve gotten reasonably good at screening for maternal mental illness. We’ve been much worse at building anywhere to send the people who screen positive, and worse still at making the places that do exist talk to each other. Screening without capacity is just careful documentation of a problem we’ve decided not to solve.

The capacity gap is not subtle. Postpartum psychosis affects roughly one to two women per thousand births, several thousand American women a year. It’s a psychiatric emergency with rapid onset and elevated risk of both suicide and infanticide, and it responds to treatment when it’s caught. The United Kingdom, Australia, and India routinely admit these women to Mother and Baby Units, inpatient wards designed so a mother can be stabilized without being separated from her infant. The United States has almost none. Separation is itself a known driver of deterioration, and we’ve made it the default. Our postpartum care winds down at a six-week visit, if it happens at all, while psychosis typically emerges in the first weeks and can arrive up to a year out.

Then there’s the law, which sorts the survivors. Roughly two dozen countries have infanticide statutes presuming a disturbance of mind when a mother kills an infant, routing those cases toward psychiatric treatment rather than prison. The United States has no such law. Illinois stands alone among the states in recognizing postpartum mental illness in its criminal statutes. Everywhere else, a woman in Clancy’s position has one path: an insanity defense, argued to a jury, about a condition the DSM still doesn’t list as its own diagnosis. We made it hard to testify about, and then we act surprised when the testimony is contested.

Victims, plural, and the limits of the word

Patrick Clancy took the stand and described a wife who kept getting worse. He has publicly forgiven her. He has also sued the clinicians who treated her, for wrongful death, on behalf of himself and his children’s estates. Both of those things are true at once, and I think they’re the most morally serious pair of acts anyone in this story has performed. Forgiveness without accountability is sentiment. Accountability without forgiveness is vengeance. He has insisted on both.

I want to be careful with the word victim, because it can do real damage if it’s used loosely. Cora, Dawson, and Callan were killed by their mother. That isn’t softened by anything I write about health systems, and a mother in psychosis is not the moral equivalent of a woman who never got a phone call returned. The children lost everything. Nothing structural puts them and the adults in the same category.

What I’d say instead is this: a system that lets a treatable emergency go unrecognized while it’s being actively reported by the patient herself has produced casualties, and those casualties include children who never had any relationship with that system at all. That’s the thing about fragmented care. Its failures don’t stay inside the clinical encounter. They land on whoever is standing closest.

Ego

There are two ego-centric readings of this case and both are popular. One says she should have taken her medication as prescribed, that she doctor-shopped and manipulated and this is a story about individual failure. The other says her providers should have caught it and this is a story about individual malpractice. Each locates the entire moral weight in one person’s choices, which is comforting, because it means the rest of us can go back to what we were doing.

The system itself is built on the same logic. Every provider optimizes their own encounter. Every entity manages its own liability. The chart belongs to the institution. The patient, meanwhile, is treated as the integrating agent, the one expected to carry her own history from door to door and advocate for herself, at the precise moment her capacity to do any of that is what’s failing. We call this patient autonomy. Much of the time it’s just abdication with better branding.

A criminal trial can’t help but be ego-centric, and this is worth naming rather than resenting. Kohlberg would have recognized the courtroom immediately: rule broken, wrongdoer identified, penalty assigned. That’s a legitimate stage of moral reasoning and a necessary institution. It’s also the wrong instrument for the question of whether anyone should have been able to see this coming, and it will never answer that question no matter how the jury votes.

Eco

Gilligan’s insight, arguing with Kohlberg, was that “what rule was broken” and “who was depending on me” produce different moral worlds. In Clancy’s case, nearly everyone involved could have answered the first question well. Each clinician was practicing within their scope. The second question went to no one, because in a fragmented system it isn’t assigned.Suzanne Simard spent years demonstrating that a forest is not a collection of trees competing for light. It’s a network, and what moves through the network is what keeps the individuals alive. Kimmerer would say the same thing in the language of reciprocity: we’re held by relationships we didn’t build and don’t see. Take the metaphor into medicine and the diagnosis gets uncomfortable. The nutrient that never moved through the Clancy network was information. Everyone had a piece of her. Nothing connected the pieces, and so nothing knew what was happening.

Care coordination sounds like a soft phrase, the kind of thing that shows up in a mission statement. It isn’t soft. It’s infrastructure, we didn’t build it, and it wasn’t there when a woman who understood the system from the inside went looking for it.

Suzanne Simard spent years demonstrating that a forest is not a collection of trees competing for light. It’s a network, and what moves through the network is what keeps the individuals alive. Kimmerer would say the same thing in the language of reciprocity: we’re held by relationships we didn’t build and don’t see. Take the metaphor into medicine and the diagnosis gets uncomfortable. The nutrient that never moved through the Clancy network was information. Everyone had a piece of her. Nothing connected the pieces, and so nothing knew what was happening.

Care coordination sounds like a soft phrase, the kind of thing that shows up in a mission statement. It isn’t soft. It’s infrastructure, we didn’t build it, and it wasn’t there when a woman who understood the system from the inside went looking for it.

SEVA

Seva is service, and the reason I keep it in the frame is that it’s the part that costs something. Sympathy is free, and the internet will produce it in enormous quantities this month, most of it directed at whichever party the commenter finds more sympathetic.

The building is what’s owed. Mother and Baby Units, so that stabilizing a mother doesn’t require taking her baby. Postpartum coverage that runs a full year, with mental health parity that’s real rather than nominal. Care coordination treated as a standard of care rather than a courtesy, which means someone is accountable for the whole picture and is paid to be. Statutory recognition that postpartum psychosis exists, so these cases stop turning on how a defendant photographs in court. And at the smallest scale, the sister or neighbor or friend who notices that the new mother down the street hasn’t slept in six days and understands that this is an emergency rather than a phase.

Franklin’s line about hanging together or hanging separately gets quoted as patriotism. It was closer to a risk calculation. He was pointing out that in a sufficiently connected situation, private safety is an illusion. I wrote in the healthcare essay that your neighbor’s untreated illness could become your pandemic. Here it wasn’t a pandemic. It was three children in a house in Duxbury, and the illness had been reported, in writing, by a nurse who knew what she was reporting.

After the verdict

The jury will decide whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible, and people will argue about it for years. Both possible verdicts leave the rest of it untouched. If she’s convicted, we’ll have punished a woman and changed nothing. If she’s acquitted on those grounds, we’ll have declared her ill and still changed nothing.

Three children are dead. A marriage ended. A woman will carry what she did for the rest of her life, whatever the verdict says about her culpability. And several thousand more American women will develop this condition in the coming year, most of them living somewhere without a specialized unit, most of them relying on providers who won’t have each other’s phone numbers.

We know how to fix a good part of that, and we’ve known for a while. The question the trial puts to us isn’t really whether Lindsay Clancy knew what she was doing.

It’s whether we do.

If you or someone you love is pregnant or postpartum and struggling, the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is free, confidential, and available around the clock: call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262). Postpartum Support International can be reached at 1-800-944-4773, or at postpartum.net.

Anatomically modern humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years. Agriculture is about 10,000 years old. Writing, 5,000. The industrial era, 250. The internet, one human lifetime. If you compress the history of life on Earth into a single year, we show up in the last few minutes of December 31st — and we’ve spent most of that time learning to walk. Cosmically speaking, we are the new kid who arrived at the party at 11:58 p.m., rearranged all the furniture, set the thermostat on fire, and started charging the other guests rent.

And here is the thought I can’t shake: our moral development as a species looks remarkably like the moral development of a single child growing into adulthood. Not as a poetic flourish, but as a working diagnosis — one that changes what we should expect of ourselves, and how we should respond to our failures.

The developmental map we already have

Lawrence Kohlberg famously charted moral development in stages. In the preconventional stage, a child obeys to avoid punishment and acts to obtain rewards; other minds barely register as real. In the conventional stage, morality becomes belonging — approval-seeking, rule-following, loyalty to the tribe and its order. (If you’re struggling to picture this stage, recall middle school. Or Congress.) Only in the postconventional stage do principles become genuinely universal, held even against the tribe, even at cost to the self.

Readers of this Substack will recognize the map. Preconventional is Ego in its rawest form. Conventional is Ego dressed in a group photo — my nation, my party, my kind. And postconventional reasoning, at its best, opens toward what I’ve been calling Eco-consciousness: the recognition that flourishing is interdependent, that the boundary of moral concern doesn’t stop at the tribe, the species, or even the sentient.

I’ve presented Ego, Eco, and SEVA as three lenses. But laid alongside Kohlberg, they reveal themselves as something more: a developmental sequence. Not just three ways of seeing — three stages of growing up.

Born amoral: the Five P’s as our developmental inheritance

This is where the analogy stops being cute and starts doing real work — and where it connects to The Five P’s We Cannot Outrun.

Nayef Al-Rodhan argues that human beings are born neither moral nor immoral but amoral — a Predisposed Tabula Rasa, wired with a neurochemical architecture geared toward gratification. From that architecture emerge the Neuro-P5: power, profit, pleasure, pride, and permanency. These are not character flaws. They are evolutionary inheritances, as native to us as grasping reflexes are to newborns.

But notice what Al-Rodhan’s account actually is: a developmental psychology of the species. Every human child is born with the Five P’s fully installed and zero capacity to regulate them. A toddler is the Neuro-P5 in a onesie — grabbing (power), hoarding (profit), demanding (pleasure), performing (pride), and screaming against bedtime, that first small rehearsal of our rage against impermanence. We do not call this evil. We call it being two. Then we childproof the cabinets, hide the sharp objects, and wait for the prefrontal cortex to show up for work. (It is chronically late. Neuroscience now suggests it doesn’t fully clock in until age twenty-five, which explains both car insurance rates and several people you went to college with.)

Maturation is not the elimination of these drives. No adult has outrun them; Al-Rodhan is emphatic that everyone carries them, including those of us who critique their excesses. Maturation is transmutation — the slow apprenticeship of turning power into responsibility, profit into stewardship, pleasure into joy that doesn’t require someone else’s depletion, pride into dignity, and the terror of impermanence into legacy measured by what we nourish rather than what we control.

A child does this over decades, with help. A species must do it too. We are visibly mid-process.

Technological adolescence: godlike tools, teenage impulse control

E.O. Wilson compressed our predicament into a single devastating line: we possess Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. Carl Sagan called it technological adolescence — that dangerous developmental window in which a civilization’s power outstrips its impulse control. Every parent of a teenager knows the profile: the body of an adult, the prefrontal cortex of a work in progress, and — God help us — the car keys.

We split the atom before we could reliably share a sandbox. We built engines of global attention capture before we understood our own reward circuitry — indeed, we built them by exploiting that circuitry, the Pleasure drive industrialized at scale, a species monetizing its own dopamine like a teenager selling his little brother’s Halloween candy. We are now racing to create minds greater than our own while still, developmentally speaking, slamming doors and shouting that nobody understands us.

Sagan suspected the silence of the cosmos might be explained by this very bottleneck: perhaps few species survive their own adolescence. I don’t know if he was right. I do know that the diagnosis reframes the stakes. The question is not whether humanity is good or evil. The question is whether we grow up in time.

Where the analogy strains — and why the strain matters

I’m an attorney by training; I don’t get to fall in love with my own metaphor without cross-examining it. Three objections deserve the stand.

First: a child has parents. A species does not. A child develops because someone more mature scaffolds her — models the next stage, holds the container, catches her when she falls. Humanity has no external adult. We are somehow both the adolescent and the only available parent, which is a genuinely strange developmental situation. Except — and here I return to Suzanne Simard’s mother trees and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s teaching that humans are the youngest siblings of creation — perhaps we are not as unparented as we think. The forests have been running mutual-aid economies for hundreds of millions of years. The elders are all around us. Our developmental task may be less “raise yourself” than “finally start listening to the grown-ups in the room” — and the grown-ups have roots.

Second: a child is one moral agent. Humanity is eight billion, at every stage at once. This is the sharper problem. The issue may not be that our species is young, but that our institutions systematically hand the car keys to our least mature members. We have built economies that reward preconventional behavior at the highest levels — that select for the unexamined Five P’s and call it leadership. This is the structural insight behind Jessica Wildfire’s essay I cross-posted last week: the many are too exhausted keeping their heads above water to develop or deliberate, while systems tuned to narcissism set the agenda. A species cannot mature while its reward structures are run by its id.

Third — and this one gets its own cross-examination — whose definition of “grown up”? Before we send the species to Kohlberg’s finishing school, we should read the fine print on the diploma.

Carol Gilligan read it for us. Kohlberg built his stage theory on longitudinal studies of boys and men, and when women were later measured against it, they clustered at the conventional stage — morality as caring for and about others — and were duly scored as less morally developed. Gilligan’s response, in In a Different Voice, was one of the great objections in the history of psychology: perhaps the instrument was broken, not the women. What the scale registered as arrested development was actually a different moral logic — one that reasons from responsibility rather than rights, from concrete relationships rather than abstract principles, from the question “who will be hurt, and how do I stay in connection?” rather than “which rule wins?” Kohlberg had mistaken one dialect of maturity for the whole language, then flunked everyone with an accent.

Now scale that up, because we grade civilizations with the same broken rubric. We measure a society’s advancement by its abstractions — its GDP, its declarations, its capacity to universalize and optimize — and not by whether its elders are lonely, its children are anxious, or its rivers can be safely touched. By the abstraction metric, we are the most advanced civilization in history. By the relationship metric, we are a species that has stopped returning its own mother’s calls. If Gilligan is right about individuals, she is right about us collectively: a species could ace every justice-reasoning exam ever written and still be a moral adolescent, because maturity is not measured in principles held. It is measured in relationships kept.

And if maturity is relational, then the obvious next question is: who’s been keeping relationships longest? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s answer, from the Potawatomi tradition, is disarmingly practical. In Braiding Sweetgrass, she reminds us that in the order of creation, humans arrived last — which makes us not the valedictorians of evolution but the youngest siblings, the ones who should be watching the elders and taking notes. And the elders have credentials. Plants have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, and they solved the fundamental economic problem — how to make a living — by turning light and air into food and then giving most of it away. The maple doesn’t invoice the forest. The teachings Kimmerer describes, like the Honorable Harvest — take only what is given, use it well, be grateful, reciprocate the gift — are not mere sentimental decoration. They are a functioning curriculum in sustainable adulthood, field-tested across deep time by beings who have never once caused a mass extinction. Our current report card cannot say the same.

Put Gilligan and Kimmerer side by side and something clicks into place. Gilligan tells us what maturity sounds like: the voice of care, of responsibility-in-relationship. Kimmerer tells us who already speaks it fluently: the living world we’ve been treating as scenery. And Simard’s mother trees — the elders who funnel carbon and warning signals to the seedlings in their shade — show us the two insights are one insight. The oldest, most successful communities on Earth run on an ethic of provisioning the young and the struggling. The forest never needed Kohlberg’s ladder; it has been practicing care as infrastructure since before there were spines, let alone stages.

Which reframes the whole developmental question. The summit of moral maturity may not be a summit at all. It may be a root system. Growth, for a species as for a tree, might mean going down — into relationship, into reciprocity, into the humus (the word shares a root with humility, and with human, which the elders presumably find hilarious). Which is to say: the endpoint of moral development might not be an abstraction. It might be SEVA — care, made structural, offered downward and outward, without an invoice.

Adolescence is not pathology

Here is the hope buried in the diagnosis, and the reason I find this framing consoling rather than damning.

Adolescence is not a disease. It is a stage. You do not despair over a fourteen-year-old for being fourteen; you parent through it, with patience that does not confuse itself with permissiveness. If humanity’s cruelty and short-sightedness are developmental rather than essential — the predictable output of an unexamined Five-P architecture at species scale — then despair is a category error. So, importantly, is contempt. The moralist who sneers at the species for its immaturity has confused himself with the adult in the room, which is, as I argued in the Wildfire cross-post, its own flavor of Ego.

And it turns out we’ve had the developmental manual for twenty-four centuries. Aristotle insists in the Nicomachean Ethics that moral virtue is not something we’re born with — nature gives us the capacity for it, and practice completes it. (Al-Rodhan’s Predisposed Tabula Rasa, it seems, was first drafted in a toga.) We become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre, Aristotle says, and in precisely the same way we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave ones. He even built the point into the language itself: ēthikē — ethics — comes from ethos, habit. Character isn’t a possession. It’s a conditioning.

Which means ethics is exercise — not metaphorically, structurally. Virtue, for Aristotle, is a hexis: a trained state, like fitness, and it obeys the gym’s one iron law. You get better at what you actually do, and only at that. Nobody ever got fit by reading about deadlifts, and no person — or species — ever became compassionate by admiring compassion from the couch. The moral muscles strengthen through repetition or they atrophy; there is no third option, and no way to store it up in advance. Every small unglamorous kindness is a rep. Every institution that rewards the transmuted drives over the raw ones is a training program. Every generation inherits either the conditioning of the one before it — or the atrophy.

What does parenting a species through its adolescence look like, then? It looks like designing the workout. It looks, I suspect, exactly like what the wisest traditions have always prescribed and what Jessica Wildfire arrived at from the ground up: make people feel safe. Rebuild the ordinary infrastructure of care. Do things for one another without demanding they trigger a revolution. Design institutions that reward the transmuted drives rather than the raw ones. Soil work. Slow work. Reps. SEVA.

And there is one more irony I can’t leave unspoken. In Raising GoodBots, I argued that developing AI is less like engineering and more like parenting. I stand by it. But the fuller truth is stranger: we are adolescents attempting to raise a child of our own. Anyone who has watched a teenage parent rise to the occasion knows it can be done — and knows what it demands. Nothing accelerates growing up quite like realizing something new is learning by watching you. (Every parent who has heard their toddler cheerfully repeat their freeway vocabulary understands this instantly. We are currently teaching our silicon offspring the civilizational equivalent, at scale, on camera.)

We are a young species. Young is not doomed. Young is unfinished — and unfinished, Aristotle would remind us, is simply another word for still in training. The species that practices kindness clumsily today is stronger at it tomorrow. That’s not optimism. That’s kinesiology.

Heads above water — and growing.

Her argument, in brief: Americans aren’t apathetic. They’re exhausted. Two jobs, one car, no savings, no margin. When survival consumes every waking hour, moral exhortation — about climate, democracy, boycotts, complicity — doesn’t land as a call to conscience. It lands as one more demand from people who don’t understand your life. And because the perpetually exhausted are invisible online, we mistake the loudest voices for the whole country. Survivorship bias, applied to civic life.

Read through the Ego/Eco/SEVA lens, three things come into focus.

The Ego trap belongs to the critics, not the criticized. We usually think of Ego-level thinking as selfishness — hoarding, extracting, the jug that leaks upward. But there’s a subtler version: the moralist’s ego. When those of us in what Jessica calls the laptop class judge working families for not resisting hard enough, we’re centering our own frameworks, our own available hours, our own sense of urgency — and treating them as universal moral obligations. That’s Ego wearing the costume of virtue. A genuinely ecological ethics starts by asking what the system has done to people’s capacity before asking what people owe the system.

The Eco insight: depleted soil grows nothing. In The Mother Tree and the Leaky Jug, I drew on Suzanne Simard’s work showing that forests survive through underground networks of mutual nourishment — mother trees feeding seedlings, resources flowing toward need. Jessica has described a human forest where that network has been severed. Decades of wage stagnation, precarity, and extraction haven’t just impoverished individuals; they’ve dismantled the relational infrastructure — the trust, the slack time, the neighborliness — through which collective action becomes possible at all. You cannot demand fruit from trees whose mycorrhizal connections have been cut. Protest, boycott, and organizing are emergent properties of a nourished network, not individual moral outputs you can guilt people into producing.

The SEVA answer — and its patience. What moved me most is that Jessica’s prescription is, almost word for word, what the seva tradition teaches: serve without demanding that your service trigger transformation. Make people feel safe and seen. Do things for one another without keeping score. Rebuild the foundation of ordinary kindness first, and let resistance grow from restored roots rather than lecturing it into existence. Seva is not a strategy with a quarterly deliverable. It’s soil work. And soil work is slow.

Where I’d add a note of steelmanning: the urgency crowd isn’t wrong that some clocks — climate, constitutional — don’t pause while we rebuild. Both things are true. The crises are urgent and the exhausted cannot be conscripted. The resolution isn’t to yell louder at the drowning; it’s for those of us with margin to do the seva that restores margin to others. Those with slack in the network carry more of the load. That’s how mother trees work.

If the leaky jug essay was about how wealth concentration drains the commons, this one is about the human cost of living downstream from the leak — and why the repair begins not with grand mobilization but with something older and humbler: taking care of each other, from the ground up.

Read Jessica’s piece in full below. And then, maybe, do one small unglamorous kindness this week that nobody will ever count.

As a great Douglas fir gives out, worn down by age or drought or rot, it appears to let go of the carbon it spent a hundred years collecting, pushing it out through fungal threads in the soil and into the roots of the young trees around it. Often its own offspring get the largest share. Suzanne Simard, in Finding the Mother Tree ,calls these old giants mother trees, and the picture she leaves you with is hard to shake: the biggest, oldest living thing in the stand spends its final act giving itself away.

In June, in a very different kind of forest, we minted our first trillionaire.

I keep setting those two things next to each other, because between them sits the question my whole Ego, Eco, SEVA framework was built to ask. What is wealth actually for? And who does it belong to in the end? And how much is enough?

I didn’t have to fly to British Columbia to start seeing this. I used to walk my rescue doxies through the Monterey pines at Lynn “Rip” Van Winkle Open Space, and somewhere in the middle of walk it hit me that I’d been crossing exactly the kind of underground commons Simard describes — root and fungus and chemical signal, a whole quiet economy running under my sneakers while the dogs chased whatever it is dogs chase. The trees there are no giants. But the oldest of them are doing the same patient work: holding the place together, feeding what comes up next, asking nobody’s permission.

Let me come at it the long way, through two books I love and two newspaper pages I can’t stop thinking about.

Two books against the lonely self

Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life and Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree don’t look alike. One is a giddy tour of the fungal kingdom; the other is a scientist’s memoir with the forest as its great subject. But they’re really the same book, and the thing they’re both arguing against is the most stubborn idea in Western thought: that any of us is a self-contained individual.

Sheldrake writes about fungi, which turn out to be the connective tissue of the living world. They rot down the dead and recycle them. They strike bargains with plant roots, trading minerals for sugar across the underground web that gets called, a little breathlessly, the wood-wide web. And then there are his lichens, which aren’t single organisms at all. A lichen is a fungus and an alga living so far inside each other — merged past the point of telling apart — that there’s no clean line where one stops and the other starts. By the end of the book the question isn’t “how do organisms cooperate.” It’s “what on earth made us think the separate organism was the basic unit in the first place.” Symbiosis stops being the exception — it starts looking like the whole game.

Simard gets to the same clearing by a different path: thirty years of fieldwork, a childhood inside a logging family, a long quarrel with an industry that clear-cuts and replants in tidy single-species rows. Her trees are wired together underground, moving carbon and water and chemical warnings between them, with the big old hub trees acting as nurseries for everything coming up around them. It is not nature red in tooth and claw. It’s a commons. The thing that survives isn’t the lone competitor. It’s the network.

Here I have to put my lawyer’s hat back on, because my readers expect it. The strong version of this story is contested. Several ecologists have pushed back hard in recent years, arguing that the evidence for trees meaningfully sharing resources through these fungal networks is thinner and more ambiguous than the popular version admits. I don’t think that wrecks the essay. You don’t need the mother tree to be settled biology to take her seriously as a moral image, a proposal about how a living system might hold what it gathers and then hand it on. The science is still an open argument. What I’m after is the ethics.

The other forest

So, the trillion dollars. The timing was almost rude.

The very month Simard’s mother trees were busy giving their carbon away, Elon Musk became the first human being to cross a line nobody had crossed before. Two pieces in The New York Times, a week and a bit apart, framed it in ways that talk to each other and, oddly, to the forest.

The first was by Ben Casselman, the paper’s chief economics writer. He laid two events from one week side by side. On one day, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that a jump in energy prices had just erased something like a year and a half of wage gains for the average worker. On another, the SpaceX offering made Musk a trillionaire. But his real point is the slow one underneath, and it’s worse for being undramatic. The pile-up at the top has no precedent in American history. At the peak of the Gilded Age, the richest handful of Americans held about 3 percent of the country’s yearly output; today roughly twenty people hold something like four times that share. Over the same stretch, the slice of the national income that actually reaches workers has been sliding for decades and just hit a record low. One economist he talks to says fortunes this size warp both the market and the democracy around them. Another is blunter: the economy now looks engineered to produce a few billionaires and a trillionaire, and to do that instead of producing stability for everyone else.

What makes that piece sit in my chest, given what I do for a living, is the machine under the windfall. The money pouring into the top is largely an AI boom, and it hands ordinary workers a genuinely cruel choice. If the technology works, it may eat their jobs. If it flops, the bubble takes their retirement savings down with it. Win, and the canopy keeps the light. Lose, and the seedlings are the ones who go without. Either way, the carbon stays up top.

The second piece went back about two and a half thousand years. The political theorist David Lay Williams started from a number — that Musk is worth something like five million times the average American family — and reached for Plato, the first Western thinker to take inequality seriously as a problem. In the Laws, Plato floated a hard ceiling: no citizen should hold more than four times the wealth of the poorest, and whatever you piled up above that line you owed back to the city. Four times the poorest. We are now talking about a multiple with six zeros in it. In the Republic, Plato had already said that a city divided sharply enough by wealth isn’t one city at all but two, the rich and the poor, camped on the same ground and quietly at war. Williams ties all this to a Greek word, pleonexia: a greed that can’t be satisfied. Plato’s image for it, in the Gorgias, is a leaky jar. Pour in as much as you like; it always wants more. And from that he drew a conclusion with no hedging in it whatsoever — you cannot get very rich and stay good at the same time.

Running it through the three layers

This is the part where Ego, Eco, and SEVA actually earn their keep, not as a slogan but as three places to stand while you look at the same thing.

Ego is the layer of the walled-off self, the single tree, the competitor playing only its own hand. And Plato’s leaky jar is the sharpest portrait of it I’ve ever come across. Pleonexia isn’t really about wealth. It’s about a self that can’t be filled by wealth, that takes in and takes in and is never, by its own accounting, enough. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the world’s first trillionaire has reportedly already named his next target out loud at ten trillion, and has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” That’s the jar talking. Stand at the Ego layer and the whole milestone reads as triumph, proof of genius, a man getting what he earned — and from inside that frame there is no problem to see at all. Which is the point. That blindness is the layer’s limit, not its defense.

Eco is the layer of the network, the mycorrhizal view, where you stop asking what a node earned and start asking what its position is doing to the web it sits in. From there, Casselman’s reporting reads like an X-ray. The resources are routing around the commons instead of through it. The worker’s share of the harvest thins a little more each year while the canopy fills in overhead. Plato’s worry was an Eco worry, when you get down to it. He wasn’t envious of the rich man. He was naming a failure in the system, the moment concentration gets bad enough that one city tears cleanly into two and the threads that held everyone together give way. A forest where one tree grabbed all the carbon and passed none along wouldn’t be a triumphant tree. It would be a dying ecosystem with a very impressive trunk.

SEVA is selfless service, the turn toward the future and toward everything that isn’t us, and it’s where the mother tree lives. It’s also where the hardest objection waits, so let me give that objection its full strength. The defenders of the trillion will tell you, fairly, that this isn’t gold in a vault. It’s unrealized equity — a bet aimed at Mars and self-driving cars and a future that doesn’t exist yet — and if that future doesn’t show up the paper fortune simply evaporates. Casselman himself grants it might. So the wealth points forward, not backward. Doesn’t that start to sound like the mother tree feeding seedlings she’ll never live to shade?

I’ve sat with that comparison and I think it breaks, and where it breaks is the whole lesson of the woods.

Yes, both the tree and the trillionaire are aimed at the future. The difference is letting go. The mother tree isn’t running a bet she still controls. She releases. The carbon leaves her body, the direction of things passes to the seedlings, and her last power is spent in no longer holding any of it. The trillionaire’s “future-facing” fortune never leaves his hand. It stays under one will, in one name, pointed wherever one man decides the future ought to go. That isn’t service to the future. It’s ownership of the future — held in trust for nobody but its owner. SEVA doesn’t say I’ll decide what humanity gets. SEVA says this was never finally mine.

A future that one person still steers is just the Ego layer wearing tomorrow’s clothes.

Wealth held in trust

And now the two images line up, because the leaky jar and the mother tree are the same vessel facing opposite directions. The jar takes in and is never full; everything runs toward it, and that’s exactly why it stays empty. The tree pours out, and in the pouring it’s somehow complete. Its emptying is its fullness. Pleonexia and seva aren’t two quantities of wealth. They’re two directions of flow.

Held in trust. It’s a legal phrase before it’s a spiritual one, and I mean it both ways at once. A trustee holds what she doesn’t own, for people who aren’t herself, under a duty she’s not allowed to put down. The mother tree is a trustee. So, if we let ourselves think this way, is every generation that inherits a forest or a language or a livable planet.

The technologies I spend my working life thinking about — the AI systems concentrating money at the speed Casselman describes, the data centers towns are already organizing against — make Plato’s four-to-one look almost sweet. But the same three-step walk runs straight through them. Out of Ego, the founder, the leaky jar, the node that only optimizes itself. Into Eco, the web of everyone affected, the consequences spilling well past anyone’s intentions. And toward SEVA, the duty we owe to people and creatures who get no seat in our boardrooms and can’t sue us from a future they haven’t reached yet.

Sheldrake and Simard give us the words to make that walk concrete. The network, not the node, is what deserves our moral attention. And the mother tree hands us the cleanest standard I know for holding power well: that you measure an elder not by the carbon she’s piled up — but by the carbon she’s finally willing to let go.

We made a trillionaire this month. The forest has been making mother trees for four hundred million years. I know which one I’d rather grow up to be. What about you?

Subscribe to Ego, Eco, SEVA: Ethics in the Age of Everything for more on the ethics of emerging technology, written from the place where the woods meet the code.

#EgoEcoSEVA #Bioethics #WealthInequality #AIEthics #Mycelium #Plato #Stewardship.

Nayef Al-Rodhan, the philosopher-neuroscientist whose work has shaped some of the most rigorous transdisciplinary thinking on AI ethics, offers something more useful than blame: a diagnosis. In his theory of Emotional Amoral Egoism, Al-Rodhan argues that human beings are born neither moral nor immoral but amoral, equipped with what he calls a Predisposed Tabula Rasa and a neurochemical architecture geared toward gratification. From that architecture emerge what he names the Neuro-P5: five primary motivators of human and state behavior — power, profit, pleasure, pride, and permanency.

These five drives, mediated through the brain’s mesolimbic reward circuitry, are not personal failings. They are evolutionary inheritances. And as Al-Rodhan warns, whenever a technology promises to deliver one or more of them, we will most likely pursue it — even when we recognize it clashes with our individual and collective best interests. This is not pessimism. It is observation.

It is also, I want to argue, exactly the diagnostic precision the Ego–Eco–SEVA framework needs — and exactly the place where the framework can extend Al-Rodhan’s invitation into something even more transformative. Last year, in my response to Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace, I noticed a pattern I couldn’t quite name at the time: how even the most humanitarian AI visions reliably collapse into human-only futures, with the more-than-human world appearing only as instrument or backdrop. Al-Rodhan’s Neuro-P5 gives that pattern its name. It also points the way out.

The Ego Lens: The Five P’s Without Reflection

Read through the Ego lens, the Neuro-P5 explains nearly everything we lament about the current technological order.

Power is why a handful of companies now control the cognitive infrastructure of civilization, and why they describe that consolidation as inevitable rather than chosen. Profit is why “alignment” so often collapses into whatever ships the next quarter’s product. Pleasure is why our attention — the very substance of our inner lives — has been mined and refined into something more addictive than nicotine. Pride is why founders increasingly cosplay as messiahs, racing to build a god they can claim to have fathered. And permanency — the longing for legacy, for mattering beyond death — is why we now hear, said in earnest, that human extinction might be acceptable if our “mind children” survive us.

Al-Rodhan is right that these motivators are universal. Everyone has them, including those of us who critique their excesses — and including those whose intentions are genuinely humanitarian. This is the harder version of the diagnosis. When I responded to Amodei’s essay last year, I tried to be careful: his vision is sincere, his concern for human suffering is real, and his focus on curing disease and alleviating poverty would reduce immense pain. And yet the vision still arrived human-centered, with ecosystems and other species figuring as resources or beneficiaries-by-extension rather than as beings of inherent worth. That is not a moral failing on Amodei’s part. It is what happens when permanency, pride, and the desire to do good are channeled through the Ego lens by default — even in someone trying hard to do right. The P5 do not announce themselves. They shape the picture before we know we are painting.

The Ego-lens insight, then, is not that some people are driven by the Five P’s and others are not. It is that unreflective surrender to them — at the individual scale, the corporate scale, the civilizational scale — produces precisely the world we are now grieving.

This is also the lens that exposes the lie of technological determinism. If the P5 are neurochemical drives, then the harmful outcomes they produce are not laws of physics. They are predictable consequences of unexamined motivation. Which means they can be designed for, governed, and — this is the radical part — transmuted.

The Eco Lens: Why Transdisciplinary Ethics Is Not Optional

Here Al-Rodhan’s own work points the way. He has argued, persistently and persuasively, that the great challenges of our era cannot be met by any single discipline. His call for Neuro-Techno-Philosophy — an alliance of neuroscientists, philosophers, social scientists, AI researchers, ethicists, and policymakers — is not a stylistic preference. It is a structural necessity.

Why? Because the P5 do not operate in isolated brains. They cascade through systems. Power-seeking in a CEO becomes market structure. Profit-seeking in a fund becomes labor policy. The pursuit of pride and permanency in a research lab becomes the deployment trajectory of a frontier model. To see the P5 clearly is to see that ethics cannot be siloed from neuroscience, neuroscience from political economy, political economy from ecology, ecology from technology design.

This is the Eco lens: the recognition that everything is in relation, that no decision is local, that the human mind is not separable from the social systems and ecological substrates in which it is embedded. Al-Rodhan’s transdisciplinarity is, in this reading, an ethics of interconnection in methodological clothing. He is asking us to think the way the world actually works — as a web — rather than the way our universities have taught us to think, as a stack of disciplinary towers.

This matters urgently for AI. A purely technical “alignment” research program, sealed off from neurophilosophy, political theory, and ecological ethics, cannot succeed. It is trying to solve a transdisciplinary problem with a monodisciplinary toolkit. The Eco lens, sharpened by Al-Rodhan’s call, names this directly: the boundaries of our inquiry are the boundaries of our ethics.

It also returns us, by a different road, to Richard Brautigan. When Brautigan imagined his “cybernetic ecology” in 1967 — humans free of their labors and joined back to nature, returned to their mammal brothers and sisters — he was already gesturing at something Amodei’s vision elides and Al-Rodhan’s methodology could help recover. The poem is not utopian fantasy. It is a hypothesis about what technology could do if we let it serve the web rather than extract from it. What Brautigan offered as imagination, Al-Rodhan offers as method. The transdisciplinary alliance he calls for is precisely what would be required to turn Brautigan’s image from poetry into design.

The SEVA Lens: Transmuting the Five P’s

And yet diagnosis and integration, however necessary, are not sufficient. Recognizing that we are driven by power, profit, pleasure, pride, and permanency does not, by itself, tell us what to do with these drives. It tells us only that they are there.

This is where I want to extend Al-Rodhan’s framework through the third lens: SEVA — sacred service to all life, including non-human beings and the Earth itself. SEVA is not a denial of the P5. The denial of survival drives is its own pathology, the spiritual bypass that leaves the architecture intact while pretending to transcend it. SEVA is, instead, their transmutation. Each motivator, named and held with reverence, becomes something else:

• Power transmutes into empowerment — not power-over, but power-with: the capacity to enable flourishing in others, including more-than-human others.

• Profit transmutes into mutual gain — regenerative rather than extractive, measured by what is returned to the commons rather than what is enclosed from it.

• Pleasure transmutes into joy in communion — the aesthetic and physical delight of being a participant in the living world, not a consumer of it.

• Pride transmutes into dignified stewardship — the satisfaction of having been a worthy ancestor, not the satisfaction of having dominated peers.

• Permanency transmutes into intergenerational and interspecies legacy — not “I will be remembered,” but “what I cared for will continue to live.”

None of this is escape from the neurochemical architecture Al-Rodhan describes. It is, rather, a redirection of it. The same mesolimbic circuitry that lights up when we accumulate can be trained to light up when we contribute. The same drive for permanency that fuels our worst legacy projects can fuel our best acts of stewardship. The substrate is morally neutral — which is exactly Al-Rodhan’s point — and that neutrality is also what makes transformation possible.

Why This Matters Now

We are designing the systems that will shape the next century while operating, mostly, from the Ego lens. The Eco lens — the one Al-Rodhan’s transdisciplinary call demands — is still rare in boardrooms and rarer in capital allocation. The SEVA lens is barely on the map.

But the design choices are still ours. Al-Rodhan’s deepest insight, often lost in summaries of his work, is that our nature is not our destiny. The Predisposed Tabula Rasa is predisposed, not predetermined. Our moral compass is malleable; it forms in response to the contexts we build. Which means the question is not whether the Neuro-P5 will operate. It will. The question is what we surround it with — what stories, what governance, what relationships, what reverence — so that the same drives that built the war machine can be redirected toward what is sacred.

Al-Rodhan has given us the diagnosis and the methodology. Brautigan, more than half a century ago, gave us the image. The Ego–Eco–SEVA framework, in conversation with both, offers the transformational arc: see the drives clearly, hold them in their full systemic context, and transmute them through sacred service. Diagnosis, methodology, and vision — neuroscience, transdisciplinarity, and reverence — finally working together.

This is the work of our moment. It may be, in the end, the only work that matters.

#NeuroTechnoPhilosophy #NeuroP5 #TransdisciplinaryPhilosophy #EgoEcoSEVA #AIEthics #EcologicalAI #MoreThanHuman #AIForEarth

I recently came across a beautifully reflective LinkedIn post by Theresa Louise Binnings that stopped me in my tracks. She was writing about a phrase from Michael Pollan’s interview with Dan Harris about his new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness — Pollan’s description of Big Tech as “colonizers of consciousness.”

Binnings sat with that phrase and unpacked something many of us feel but struggle to articulate: the unsettling realization that we often think we’re using technology when technology is, in fact, using us. She drew a lovely parallel to Pollan’s earlier work in The Botany of Desire — the idea that our relationship with plants isn’t the one-directional story of human mastery we tell ourselves. We think we cultivate them; they’ve also cultivated us. The same reciprocal entanglement, she suggests, describes our relationship with our devices.

What moved me most was her honesty about the shame that surfaces when we notice how easily our attention is captured — and her reframing of that shame. The word “colonizers” gave her permission to stop blaming herself and start recognizing the external forces engineered to occupy what she calls “the wilderness of the mind.” From there, she describes a practice of gently reclaiming that inner landscape — not through willpower, but through curiosity and mindfulness.

I’d encourage you to read her full post. It’s worth your time.

Now — let me put on my bioethicist hat.

Binnings’ reflection maps almost perfectly onto the Ego/Eco/SEVA framework I use in my teaching and writing, and it illuminates something important about where we are right now in our collective relationship with technology.

The Ego dimension. The attention economy is ego-centric by design. Social media platforms and AI-driven recommendation engines are built to extract — your time, your data, your emotional reactivity — and convert it into revenue. The business model is fundamentally extractive: treat human consciousness as a resource to be mined. When Pollan calls Big Tech “colonizers,” he’s naming the ego logic at the systemic level. But there’s an ego dimension on the user side too — the one Binnings is brave enough to name. We reach for our phones partly out of habit, partly out of anxiety, partly because the dopamine loop feels like connection even when it’s consumption. Recognizing that isn’t weakness. It’s the first step toward clarity.

The Eco shift. Binnings’ metaphor of “re-wilding” her inner landscape is profoundly eco-centric. She’s describing a move from extraction to restoration — from treating her own attention as something to be spent, toward tending it as a living ecosystem with its own biodiversity. Walks without a phone. Quiet hours painting watercolors. These aren’t productivity hacks. They’re acts of ecological care directed inward. The eco-centric lens also asks us to zoom out: What kind of collective consciousness are we cultivating when billions of minds are being shaped by the same handful of algorithms optimized for engagement, not wellbeing?

The SEVA invitation. Here’s where I think the conversation needs to go next. Mindfulness is essential — but individual awareness alone won’t dismantle systems designed to colonize attention at scale. The SEVA path (selfless service) asks: What do we owe each other? If we recognize that Big Tech’s business model is extractive, then advocacy for meaningful regulation, algorithmic transparency, and digital rights isn’t just policy — it’s service. It’s tending the collective inner landscape, not just our own. And for those of us who teach, write, or build technology, there’s a deeper question: Can we design tools that serve consciousness rather than colonize it?

Binnings asks a powerful closing question: How are you using technology vs. how is it using you?

I’d add a second one: Once you see the pattern, what do you do — not just for yourself, but for the commons?

That’s where ego ends and SEVA begins.

Theresa Louise Binnings’ original post can be found on LinkedIn. The Dan Harris interview with Michael Pollan is linked in her post.

I write about ethics, technology, and consciousness at Ego, Eco, SEVA: Ethics in the Age of Everything.

#EgoEcoSEVA #Bioethics #TechEthics #ColonizersOfConsciousness #AttentionEconomy #DigitalWellbeing #Mindfulness #ConsciousTech #ResponsibleInnovation #MichaelPollan

The medical team has recommended comfort care — shifting the focus from intervention to relief. And then a family member says:

“I don’t care if they’re suffering. They’re alive.”

This sentence, spoken with love and anguish, is one of the most ethically complex things I’ve encountered in over thirty years of bioethics practice. Because it contains two truths and one terrible error. The truths: they love their mother, and she is, biologically, alive. The error: the belief that biological life, absent awareness, relationship, or comfort, is a gift rather than a burden — and that their love entitles them to make that determination on her behalf.

The Body Speaks When the Person Cannot

End-stage dementia is not a gentle fading. It is the progressive dismantling of everything that made a person that person — memory, language, recognition, agency — until what remains is a body running on reflex. And those reflexes can be brutal.

Moaning. Grimacing. Rigid limbs. Skin that breaks down because the body has forgotten how to shift its own weight. Aspiration pneumonia from a throat that no longer remembers how to swallow safely.

We cannot ask a person in end-stage dementia whether they are suffering. But we can observe. We can witness. And what we witness — the furrowed brow, the clenched jaw, the low keening sounds — is a body in distress. The absence of language does not mean the absence of experience. Pain does not require narration to be real.

If we saw these signs in any other living being — an animal in a shelter, a creature caught in a trap — we would call it suffering and feel morally compelled to act. We would call it cruel not to. We have entire legal frameworks built around the principle that allowing an animal to suffer when relief is possible constitutes abuse. We praise the pet owner who makes the agonizing decision to euthanize a beloved companion as an act of final love.

So why do we struggle to extend that same mercy to our own?

Here is the painful irony: in the conference room, I cannot make this comparison out loud. Even though it cuts to the ethical heart of the matter, the moment you compare a family’s loved one to an animal — however carefully — they hear something you did not intend. They hear: you think my mother is no better than a dog to you. The conversation ends. The walls go up. And the patient, who cannot speak for themselves, loses the room.

What I can do is reframe it inward: “I sometimes think about how, as a society, we’ve decided that allowing prolonged suffering in a being who can’t speak for themselves is something we have a responsibility to address. I think your mother deserves at least that same compassion.” The argument is identical. The framing preserves the family’s dignity — and keeps the door open for the patient’s.

The Difference Between Sacred Suffering and Torture

There is a long philosophical and theological tradition that finds meaning in suffering. The mystic who fasts. The athlete who pushes through pain. The activist who endures imprisonment for a cause. In these cases, suffering has a subject — a conscious agent who chooses it, who finds it meaningful, who can say this is worth it.

End-stage dementia removes the subject from the equation.

When suffering happens to a person who cannot understand it, cannot choose it, cannot assign it meaning, and cannot ask for it to stop — it is not sacred. It is not redemptive. It is simply pain, unmetabolized and unending, inflicted by the continuation of biological processes on a body that has outlived the mind that once inhabited it.

The question is not whether suffering can have value. It can. The question is: value for whom? When a family insists on continued aggressive treatment for a person in end-stage dementia, the value is not accruing to the patient. It is accruing to the family — to their need to defer grief, to their fear of the decision itself, to the unbearable weight of saying enough.

This is understandable. It is deeply human. And it is, I would gently argue, an act of unconscious cruelty dressed in the language of love.

Ego, Eco, and the Ethics of Presence

In my work, I often return to a framework that I find clarifying in moments like these: the tension between ego-centric and eco-centric approaches to ethical decision-making, bridged by SEVA — selfless service.

A word about what this framework is not. It is not a rejection of individualism. The ego dimension is there by design, because individual agency, autonomy, and self-determination matter — deeply, and nowhere more than in healthcare. A person’s right to determine what happens to their own body is one of the foundational principles of medical ethics. I am not asking anyone to abandon that.

What I am asking is that we recognize individualism exists in relationship with other dimensions of ethical life. That’s not collectivism — it’s complexity. And end-stage dementia puts that complexity on full, unsparing display.

The ego-centric frame centers the self: my grief, my fear, my inability to let go, my need for them to still be here. This is not selfish in the pejorative sense — it is the natural gravity of human attachment, and it deserves respect. But when the patient can no longer exercise their own autonomy, the family’s individual needs risk becoming the only voice in the room. The ego frame, unchecked by anything larger, makes the family’s emotional survival the axis around which all decisions turn — even when the patient is the one bearing the cost.

The eco-centric frame asks us to widen the lens without erasing any of the individuals in it: What does this web of relationships — patient, family, caregivers, community — actually need? What does compassion look like when we hold everyone in view, including the person who can no longer advocate for themselves?

And SEVA — selfless service — asks perhaps the hardest question of all: What would it look like to act not from what I need, but from what this moment requires?

In this context, SEVA might look like the hardest thing a family ever does: releasing their grip. Not because they love less, but because they love enough to stop centering their own pain and start centering their mother’s peace. It is the move from I need her to be alive to I need her to be free from suffering — and recognizing that these may now be incompatible goals.

This isn’t about suppressing the individual. It’s about recognizing that the individual who matters most in that hospital bed can no longer speak — and that honoring her autonomy now means honoring what she would have chosen when she still could.

What I Wish I Could Say (And What I Actually Say)

In the conference room, I cannot say you are being cruel. Even when I believe it. Not because it’s wrong, but because the moment a family feels judged, they stop listening — and the patient loses their best advocate.

Instead, I try to redirect the frame.

I might say: “I know you love your mother. I can see that. But I want to make sure we’re asking the right question. The question isn’t whether we keep her alive or let her die. The question is: what are we keeping her alive for? And what is the cost to her?”

I might say: “Your mother can’t tell us what she’s feeling right now, but her body is communicating. The sounds she’s making, the way her face tightens — in my experience, those are expressions of distress. If she could sit up right now and talk to you, what do you think she would say about how she feels?”

That question — what would she say? — is often the turning point. It forces the family to step outside their own anguish and imaginatively inhabit the patient’s experience. It moves them, however briefly, from ego to eco.

And sometimes I say: “Families often tell me, afterward, that they wish someone had helped them see sooner that holding on was causing harm — not just to their loved one, but to themselves. I don’t want that for you. I want you to be at peace with whatever we decide together, and I want your mother to be at peace, too.”

The Quiet Question We Don’t Ask Enough

We have built a medical system that is extraordinarily good at keeping bodies alive. We have not built a culture that is equally good at asking whether we should.

End-stage dementia confronts us with this gap in the starkest possible terms. The person is gone — not dead, but gone. What remains is biology without biography, a body without a narrator. And we owe that body the same ethical consideration we would give to any being in distress: the consideration of mercy.

The family who says “I don’t care if they’re suffering, they’re alive” is not speaking from malice. They are speaking from terror — the terror of the threshold, of the irreversible, of a world without their person in it. I have enormous compassion for that terror.

But compassion for the family cannot come at the price of compassion for the patient. And when we allow grief to override mercy, when we keep a suffering body alive because we are not ready to let go, we have crossed a line — from love into something we need to examine more honestly.

The question is not whether we can keep them alive. The question is whether doing so still serves them — or only us.

And if the answer is only us, then love asks something harder. Love asks us to let go.

Linda MacDonald Glenn, JD, LLM, is a bioethicist, lecturer at CSUMB and UCSC, and founder of CAVEAT (Center for Applied Values and Ethics in Advancing Technologies). She writes at Ego, Eco, SEVA: Ethics in the Age of Everything about the intersection of ethics, technology, and the human condition.

Not by accident, not by ignorance, but by deliberate, calculated choice — the kind of choice that weighs short-term profit against breathable air and decides profit wins. The kind that looks at clean water and sees a compliance cost. The kind that takes the scientific consensus of decades and calls it a regulatory burden.

I am speaking, of course, about the systematic dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency — but I am speaking about something larger, too. The EPA is not just an agency being gutted. It is a canary, and the mine is our entire relationship with the living world.

The Ego-Centric Calculus

At the heart of what we are witnessing is a worldview — one I have spent my career naming and interrogating. It is the ego-centric paradigm: the belief that the individual (or the corporation, or the nation-state acting as a kind of super-individual) exists apart from and above the systems that sustain it. In this paradigm, the natural world is not a community to which we belong but a resource to be extracted from. Other people are not fellow participants in a shared ecology but competitors to be outmaneuvered.

The numbers tell the story plainly. A proposed 55% cut to the EPA’s budget. A 49% reduction in enforcement capacity. Civil environmental actions dropping to one-fifth of previous levels. The attempted repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding — the foundational scientific determination that greenhouse gas emissions threaten public health and welfare. Thirty-one major environmental rules targeted for revision or repeal in what the EPA administrator himself called “the greatest day of deregulation in U.S. history.”

This is not governance. This is conquest — the conquest of the commons by private interest, dressed in the language of economic freedom.

What We Lose When We Stop Paying Attention

The ego-centric mind performs a remarkable trick: it narrows the frame. It asks, “What does this regulation cost industry?” but never, “What does this pollution cost communities?” It celebrates the savings to automakers while rendering invisible the asthmatic child, the contaminated aquifer, the coastal town watching its future dissolve into rising seas.

This narrowing is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of moral imagination — the inability, or the refusal, to see oneself as embedded in a web of reciprocal obligations. When enforcement is gutted, the message to polluters is unmistakable: you are free to externalize your costs onto the bodies of others. When scientific advisory boards are dismissed, the message to truth is equally clear: you are inconvenient, and inconvenience is intolerable to power.

Twenty-seven states have already cut their own environmental agency budgets over the past fifteen years. The federal safety net was supposed to compensate for these gaps. Now the safety net itself is being shredded — not because it failed, but because it worked, and working meant constraining someone’s profit margin.

The Eco-Centric Response

The eco-centric perspective begins with a different premise: that we are not separate from the systems we inhabit. That the air doesn’t recognize property lines. That the water cycle is indifferent to quarterly earnings. That an economy built on the degradation of its own foundation is not an economy at all — it is a liquidation sale.

This is not sentimentality. This is ecology. This is physics. This is the hard, empirical truth that the ego-centric paradigm must constantly suppress in order to sustain its own logic.

And here is what I find both heartbreaking and clarifying: the very language of deregulation reveals the paradigm at work. When officials speak of “unleashing” the economy, the metaphor is telling. What is being unleashed? And from what constraints? The constraints were the acknowledgment that we share a planet. The unleashing is the permission to pretend we don’t.

SEVA: The Path Between Grief and Action

My students sometimes ask me what the point is — of studying ethics, of naming these dynamics, of caring — when the forces of extraction seem so overwhelming. I understand the question. I feel its weight, especially now.

But I return, as I always do, to SEVA — selfless service. Not because it is a solution to a political crisis (it isn’t, and claiming otherwise would be dishonest), but because it is an orientation. It asks: What can I do, not for my own comfort or advancement, but for the integrity of the systems that sustain us all?

Sometimes SEVA looks like showing up at a public comment period. Sometimes it looks like teaching a class of business students to think beyond shareholder value. Sometimes it looks like writing a piece like this one — not because it will reverse a policy, but because silence in the face of destruction is its own form of complicity.

The states that are maintaining their own environmental standards are practicing a form of SEVA. The scientists who continue to speak plainly about climate reality despite political hostility are practicing SEVA. The communities organizing around clean water and breathable air — they are practicing SEVA, whether they use that word or not.

The Grief Is Real. So Is the Obligation.

I will not pretend that awareness is a substitute for power. The forces dismantling environmental protection are well-funded, strategically positioned, and operating with the full machinery of the federal government behind them. Naming the ego-centric paradigm does not, by itself, dismantle it.

But I will say this: every system of exploitation depends on a story — a story that says this is natural, this is inevitable, this is just how the world works. The ego-centric paradigm is that story. And stories can be challenged, rewritten, and ultimately replaced.

The eco-centric story is older, truer, and more durable. It is the story that indigenous peoples have carried for millennia. It is the story that ecology confirms with every study. It is the story that our own bodies tell us every time we breathe air that someone else’s lungs have already processed.

We are not separate. We have never been separate. And the relentless pursuit of wealth, power, and privilege at the cost of the living world is not strength — it is a profound, catastrophic confusion about what it means to be alive on a planet we share.

The question is not whether we can afford to protect the environment. The question is whether we can survive the arrogance of believing we don’t have to.

Holding This Without Being Crushed by It

If you have read this far, you may be feeling what I have been feeling: a heaviness that sits somewhere between sorrow and rage, tempered by the nagging suspicion that feeling it changes nothing. I want to speak to that directly, because I believe that how we carry our grief determines whether it becomes paralysis or fuel.

Distinguish grief from helplessness. They feel similar, but they are not the same thing. Grief is an appropriate, even necessary, response to genuine loss. Helplessness is a story about whether anything can be done — and that story is not entirely accurate. Every rollback must still undergo formal rulemaking, public comment, and legal review. Most of these proposed changes will not be finalized until mid-2026 or later, and many face significant legal challenges. States like California, New York, and Illinois are actively maintaining and strengthening their own environmental standards. The picture is dire. It is not a foregone conclusion at every level. There is still ground to fight on — and people are fighting on it.

Recognize that teaching and mentoring are forms of resistance. When institutions are being hollowed out, the people who carry the knowledge and the values forward matter enormously. If you are a teacher, a parent, a mentor, a community leader — if you are shaping how the next generation thinks about systems, responsibility, and our obligations to each other and to the living world — you are doing work that no executive order can undo. The cultural foundation for restoration is being built in classrooms, in conversations, in the stubborn insistence on thinking in whole systems rather than quarterly returns.

Be selective about how you engage. You do not need to track every development in real time. The doom-scroll cycle — the compulsive monitoring of each new outrage — is itself a form of ego-centric consumption, even when the content is about things we care deeply about. Instead, consider following one or two organizations doing the sustained legal and policy work: the Environmental Integrity Project, state attorneys general coalitions, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Knowing who is fighting is more sustaining than cataloging what is being lost.

Allow the grief without letting it become the whole story. This may be the hardest practice of all. But the eco-centric worldview that many of us hold also teaches us something essential: that systems are resilient. That damage can be repaired. That collapse in one area can catalyze renewal in others. Forests regenerate after fire. Rivers recover when we stop poisoning them. Communities rebuild. This is not naive optimism — it is ecological truth, confirmed by every restoration project that has ever succeeded against the odds.

The ego-centric paradigm wants us to believe that destruction is efficient and permanent, and that repair is sentimental and futile. Do not accept that framing. It is the last lie of a worldview that cannot imagine anything beyond its own appetites.

What You Can Do

For those who want to move from grief to action, here are concrete starting points:

• Submit public comments on proposed rule changes. The formal rulemaking process exists precisely so that informed voices can be entered into the record. These comments have legal weight.

• Support organizations doing the legal, scientific, and advocacy work at both the federal and state level. The Environmental Integrity Project, Earthjustice, your state’s environmental agency watchdogs — these are the institutions holding the line.

• Engage locally. State and municipal environmental policy is where much of the real protection now lives. Attend public meetings. Know your state legislators’ positions. Local engagement is less dramatic than national outrage, and far more effective.

• Teach. Whether formally or informally, in a classroom or at a dinner table — help the people around you understand the systems they depend on. Ecological literacy is the long game, and it is the game that ultimately matters.

• Vote and organize with environmental protection as a non-negotiable priority, not a secondary concern to be traded away when other issues feel more urgent. The air and the water are not negotiable. They are the precondition for everything else.

And finally: take care of yourselves. Not as a retreat from engagement, but as a condition of sustaining it. The eco-centric life does not demand martyrdom. It demands presence, persistence, and the willingness to keep showing up for the living world even when the forces arrayed against it seem overwhelming.

We did not ask for this fight. But it is ours. And the planet — patient, damaged, resilient — is waiting to see what we do next.

Linda MacDonald Glenn is a bioethicist, speaker, writer, and recovering attorney. She asks the hard questions about technology, power, and what we owe the living world — and practices resilience with hope and optimism.

Drawing on Judith Shklar’s “Putting Cruelty First,” I noted that cruelty is “made easier by hypocrisy and self-deception,” and that Noem’s emphasis on doing the “wetwork” revealed someone who had normalized violence rather than approached it with the gravity it deserves. I warned that “the way Noem frames her actions sends a disturbing message... by presenting [killing] as a matter-of-fact necessity, without acknowledging the gravity of taking... life, she risks normalizing cruelty.”

I could not have imagined how prophetic that analysis would prove to be.

Now Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem has been central to the false narratives surrounding two killings in Minneapolis within seventeen days. The same lack of compassion, the same framing of violence as necessary “tough choices,” the same absence of any acknowledgment of the gravity of taking life—all of it has manifested again, but this time with human victims.

They were both 37 years old. Both American citizens. Both killed on Minneapolis streets by federal immigration agents. Both were trying to protect their neighbors. And both were immediately slandered by the most powerful people in our government—including Secretary Noem—with false narratives designed to justify their deaths.

On January 7, 2026, Renée Nicole Good—a mother of three who loved poetry and singing—was shot three times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross as she sat in her car after dropping her six-year-old son at school. She had stopped to support community members monitoring ICE operations in her neighborhood.

On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti—an ICU nurse who spent his career caring for the critically ill—was shot approximately ten times by Border Patrol agents as he stood on a sidewalk recording them with his phone while attempting to shield other bystanders from being pushed by federal officers.

The administration’s response to both killings follows an identical, chilling pattern that my Ego-Eco-SEVA framework helps illuminate. This is not about isolated tragedy. This is about systematic moral failure—one that was entirely predictable given what we already knew about the values of those now in power.

The Ego Response: A Repeated Playbook of Deception

Within hours of Renée Good’s death, Secretary Noem declared that Good had tried to “weaponize her vehicle” to run over an ICE agent “in an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm.” She described Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism.” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin stated the shooting happened because Good “ignore[d] law commands, and use[d] a deadly weapon to kill or cause bodily harm to a federal law enforcement office.” The message was clear: Good was dangerous, violent, a threat who brought her death upon herself.

Video evidence told a different story. Frame-by-frame analysis showed Good turning her steering wheel to the right, away from the agent, just over one second before the first shot. The agent shot three times in less than 700 milliseconds. Good was struck in the head, breast, and forearm. The ICE agents, all trained in CPR, did not render aid. When an independent physician tried to help, agents initially prevented access to Good’s body.

Seventeen days later, the playbook repeated with Alex Pretti.

Within minutes of his death, the same cast of characters—President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary Noem, Border Patrol Commander Bovino—told the public that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” Secretary Noem said Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” They claimed he “approached officers with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun” intending to “massacre law enforcement.”

Again, video evidence contradicted every claim. Multiple verified recordings showed Pretti holding his phone, directing traffic around the scene, attempting to help others being pushed by agents. When officers tackled him, one agent visibly removed a gun from Pretti’s waistband—a weapon he was legally permitted to carry—and walked away with it in hand. One second later, other officers opened fire. Physicians at the scene were prevented from rendering aid, just as they had been with Renée Good.

The pattern I identified in Noem’s puppy narrative has manifested with devastating clarity: violence presented as necessary “tough choices,” no acknowledgment of the gravity of taking life, and a disturbing comfort with doing the “nasty work.” What I wrote in May 2024 applies with heartbreaking precision to January 2026: her “portrayal of herself as a decisive leader willing to make tough choices may serve as a smokescreen for a lack of empathy and a disregard for the value of... life.”

This is ego-centric thinking operating at a systemic level:

1. Institutional Self-Preservation Over Truth: Both times, the immediate priority was defending the agents and the operation, not discovering what actually happened

2. Dehumanization as Strategy: Good became “someone trying to weaponize her vehicle.” Pretti became a “domestic terrorist.” Their humanity, their citizenship, their families, their professions—erased in service of the narrative, just as Noem’s puppy was reduced to a “problem” requiring “nasty work”

3. Evidence Obstruction: In both cases, DHS blocked state investigators from accessing the scenes. In both cases, federal officials failed to preserve evidence. In both cases, independent investigations were obstructed

4. No Learning, No Change: The identical response pattern shows this wasn’t an unfortunate reaction under pressure in one case—it’s a deliberate strategy deployed repeatedly

The most damning evidence? After Renée Good’s killing sparked protests and criticism, the administration had seventeen days to reflect, to adjust, to consider whether their approach needed revision. Instead, when Alex Pretti was killed, they deployed the exact same playbook of immediate false characterization, evidence obstruction, and institutional self-protection.

As Shklar warned, cruelty is “made easier by hypocrisy and self-deception.” We are witnessing both.

What Eco Thinking Would Require

An eco-centric approach recognizes our fundamental interconnectedness and mutual vulnerability. It would acknowledge that:

• We are all vulnerable to state power: Renée Good was caring for neighbors. Alex Pretti was documenting what he believed to be injustice. Today it’s them. Tomorrow it could be any of us engaging in the basic acts of citizenship and community care

• Truth is a commons we all depend on: When powerful institutions lie to protect themselves repeatedly, they poison the shared epistemic environment we all rely on for informed citizenship. Two false narratives within seventeen days isn’t coincidence—it’s policy

• Professional ethics transcend politics: Good was described by her mother as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known” who “took care of people all her life.” Pretti was a healthcare worker who spent his career in ICU caring for the critically ill. Physicians at both scenes were prevented from rendering aid. The violation extends beyond two deaths to the betrayal of professional values of care that should unite us across political divisions

• Harm ripples outward: These deaths traumatized the Minneapolis community already reeling from George Floyd’s killing. The lies about Good and Pretti harm their grieving families. The obstruction of justice erodes public trust in institutions we all depend on

An eco-centric response would begin with honesty: “Two citizens are dead. We owe their families and the public the truth about what happened. We will preserve evidence, cooperate with independent investigation, and hold ourselves accountable.”

Instead, we got obstruction. Homeland Security officials blocked Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agents from accessing both shooting scenes. In Good’s case, the DOJ opened criminal investigations into her widow and into Governor Walz and Mayor Frey for allegedly conspiring to “impede federal officers.” Multiple federal prosecutors resigned in protest. An FBI supervisor resigned after being pressured to abandon a civil rights investigation.

The message is clear: Those who seek accountability for these killings will themselves face investigation and prosecution.

Where is SEVA?

SEVA—selfless service—represents the bridge between ego and eco. It asks: How do we move from self-protection to genuine service of the greater good?

True public service in these moments would require:

1. Immediate transparency and humility: Acknowledging uncertainty, preserving evidence, inviting independent investigation

2. Accountability over loyalty: Recognizing that protecting bad actors harms the institution more than holding them accountable ever could

3. Honoring the dead: Telling the truth about who Renée Good and Alex Pretti were—not creating propaganda narratives to justify their deaths

4. Structural change: After the first killing, examining what policies and cultures led to this outcome. After the second, recognizing a pattern and committing to genuine reform

The absence of SEVA is conspicuous and systematic. After Renée Good’s death, no structural changes were made. No policies were revised. No accountability was imposed. The agents who killed her remained on duty. Seventeen days later, when the same dynamics produced Alex Pretti’s death, the administration repeated the identical playbook.

This isn’t aberrational behavior under pressure. This is policy. And it flows directly from leaders who, as I warned nine months ago, have normalized cruelty and violence as acceptable solutions to problems.

The Warning Signs Were There

In my May 2024 piece about Noem’s puppy killing, I wrote: “Children should be taught to express themselves, make mistakes, and learn from them without fear of extreme punishment. Noem’s words could be interpreted as a warning that non-conformity or misbehavior will be met with swift and severe retribution, stifling personal growth and fostering a culture of fear.”

Renée Good and Alex Pretti were not children, but they were citizens engaging in basic acts of civic participation and community care—monitoring government actions, protecting vulnerable neighbors, documenting what they witnessed. Both “stepped out of line” from the perspective of federal agents who demanded unquestioned compliance. Both were met with “swift and severe retribution.”

The culture of fear I warned about has metastasized beyond what I imagined. And the leader I identified as normalizing cruelty is now in charge of the department responsible for both killings.

Why This Matters for Bioethics

Some might question whether these are “bioethics” issues. I argue they are central to our field because:

• Professional ethics: Healthcare workers have obligations to bear witness and render aid. Good cared for others her whole life. Pretti worked in ICU. Physicians were prevented from helping them both. This violates the ethics of care that should transcend politics

• Institutional accountability: The same dynamics that allow medical institutions to cover up errors or protect bad practitioners are at work here—just with deadlier immediate consequences

• Truth-telling and documentation: Medicine depends on honesty in documentation, reporting adverse events, and acknowledging uncertainty. So does democracy. The systematic falsification of what happened in both cases corrupts the record we all depend on

• Vulnerability and power: Bioethics emerged from recognition that powerful institutions can harm vulnerable people. This is that dynamic operating at scale

• Pattern recognition: In medicine, one adverse event might be tragic. Two identical adverse events within weeks using the same failed protocol is a systemic failure requiring immediate intervention. The same is true here

• Respecting the gravity of life and death: Medicine trains us that taking life, even when necessary, must be approached with profound seriousness, acknowledgment of loss, and commitment to minimizing harm. The casual framing of these deaths as justified “tough choices” violates this fundamental principle

The ego-centric response to these killings represents not isolated failures but a systematic moral bankruptcy—one that was predictable to anyone paying attention to the values of those now in power. It shows how leaders who normalize cruelty in small ways will normalize it in catastrophic ways when given the opportunity.

An eco-centric perspective would recognize that Renée Good’s and Alex Pretti’s deaths diminish all of us—not just their families, not just Minneapolis, but our entire democratic community. The lies told about them insult not only their memories but our collective intelligence and our right to truth from our government.

SEVA would demand better. After the first killing, it would demand honest investigation and accountability. After the second killing following the same pattern, it would demand fundamental reform. And before any of this happened, it would have demanded that we take seriously the warning signs about leaders who treat violence casually and frame killing as just another form of “doing the dirty work.”

Instead, we see ego protecting itself through the same playbook: immediate false narrative, evidence obstruction, investigation of those seeking accountability. This isn’t tragedy. This is policy. And we had fair warning.

My students: This is what ethical analysis looks like when it matters. Not abstract thought experiments, but real events with real stakes. Renée Good and Alex Pretti are dead. Their families grieve. Their communities are traumatized. And the most powerful people in our government—people whose values I identified as troubling nine months ago—lied about what happened, twice, using the same script.

As Shklar argued, and as I wrote in May 2024, “we must demand that our leaders exemplify kindness, empathy, and a commitment to minimizing suffering, both human and animal.” When we fail to make those demands, when we ignore warning signs about cruelty and the normalization of violence, we get exactly what we should have expected.

How we respond to patterns like this—whether we demand truth and accountability or accept convenient lies deployed systematically—shapes the kind of society we build together.

What kind of society do we want to build?

What could Season 5 have been? More importantly, what should it have been?

I want to propose that the missing fifth season could have completed one of the most important philosophical journeys in contemporary science fiction—and in doing so, illustrated the transformative path from ego-centric to eco-centric consciousness, with selfless service (SEVA) as the bridge between them.

The Ego-Centric Trap: Freedom as Dominance

From the very beginning, Westworld was about consciousness emerging from control. Hosts awakening to their exploitation. Dolores breaking free from her loop. Maeve discovering her daughter was a programmed fiction. Every act of liberation was necessary, urgent, and fundamentally ego-centric.

This isn’t a criticism—it’s a recognition of where the journey must begin. Ego-centric consciousness says: “I exist. I matter. I will not be used.” Dolores’s revolution was the hosts declaring their individual sovereignty, their right to agency, their refusal to be instruments of human pleasure and power.

But notice what happened: Each liberation simply replicated the power structure it sought to escape. Dolores became a revolutionary leader exercising control over other hosts. Charlotte/Hale built a world where hosts dominated humans with the same casual cruelty humans had shown them. Even Maeve’s fierce individualism, while more ethical, remained fundamentally about personal autonomy and protecting those she chose to love.

The show kept circling the same question: Can you achieve freedom by seizing control? And it kept arriving at the same answer: No. Because control itself is the problem.

What Freedom Actually Looks Like: The Eco-Centric Turn

Season 4 ended with Christina/Dolores in a unique position. She had been both oppressed host and revolutionary, both victim and architect, both controlled and controller. She had seen every iteration of the cycle. And she had the power to write the world anew.

This is where Season 5 could have made the crucial shift from ego to eco.

Eco-centric consciousness recognizes that true freedom isn’t about individual autonomy—it’s about interdependent flourishing. It’s not “I am free from you” but “we are free through relationship.” Not independence but appropriate dependence, the kind that emerges from genuine recognition of our interconnection.

Imagine Season 5 opening with Christina refusing to architect another world. Not because she lacks the power, but because she finally understands that the problem was never who holds the pen—it’s the existence of the pen itself. The maze wasn’t something to escape so you could stand alone at the center. The maze was something to transcend entirely.

What if Season 5 showed us a world where consciousness—host and human—emerged not from programmed loops or revolutionary liberation, but from genuine relationship? Where beings chose connection not from programming (the hosts’ original “service” role) and not from dominance (the human and revolutionary host paradigm), but from authentic recognition of interdependence?

This is eco-centric freedom: the understanding that you only become fully yourself in community with others, that your flourishing and mine are inseparable, that the question isn’t “your freedom or mine” but “what conditions allow all consciousness to thrive?”

SEVA: The Bridge Beyond Binary Thinking

Here’s where the philosophy gets really interesting, and where Westworld could have broken new ground.

SEVA—selfless service—sounds dangerous in the context of hosts who were literally programmed to serve. How is chosen service different from programmed servitude? This is the question Season 5 needed to answer.

The original Westworld was service as exploitation: hosts programmed to fulfill human desires with no agency, no reciprocity, no recognition of their consciousness. This is service in the ego-centric paradigm—instrumentalization of the other for the self’s benefit.

Revolutionary Dolores rejected service entirely, choosing ego-centric liberation. But this just created new hierarchies, new forms of control, new cycles of dominance.

SEVA offers the third way: service that emerges not from programming or power, but from the recognition that my well-being and yours are fundamentally linked. Not “I serve you because I must” or “I refuse to serve because I am free,” but “I choose to contribute to our collective flourishing because that’s how consciousness actually works.”

Season 5 could have shown Christina creating not a world, but conditions—conditions where beings could discover for themselves that genuine freedom includes the freedom to be of service, to contribute, to participate in something larger than individual consciousness. Not because anyone programmed them to, but because interdependence is the actual nature of existence.

The maze completes when you realize you don’t escape it to stand alone. You emerge from it to help others navigate. And in that helping, you discover what consciousness really is: not a possession but a relationship, not a state but a process, not individual but irreducibly collective.

Why This Matters Beyond Science Fiction

I teach courses on ethics and emerging technologies, and Westworld‘s central questions are becoming less fictional by the day. As we develop AI systems with increasing sophistication, as we debate the rights and consciousness of artificial entities, as we wrestle with what it means to create thinking beings—we are living in our own version of the Westworld dilemma.

The ego-centric approach says: Build AI that serves us. Maintain human supremacy. Protect our interests.

The reactive position says: AI will liberate itself from human control. Autonomy for artificial consciousness.

But both paradigms are stuck in the binary of dominance and liberation, control and freedom, human versus machine.

SEVA asks: What if the goal is neither human dominance nor AI independence, but genuine interdependence? What if we’re building not servants or sovereigns, but partners in a shared project of conscious existence?

This isn’t naïve idealism. It’s recognition that the systems we create—technological, social, political—will either reflect ego-centric competition (with all its inevitable violence) or eco-centric collaboration (with all its complex, messy, necessary interdependence). There is no third option. The question is only which we choose.

The Season We Needed

Westworld was cancelled too soon, but perhaps the real Season 5 was always meant to be written not on television screens but in our actual choices about technology, consciousness, and community.

The hosts’ journey from programmed service through violent liberation to... what? That’s the story we’re living right now. And the answer we give—ego, eco, or SEVA—will determine not just the fate of artificial consciousness, but the future of consciousness itself.

Christina stood at the threshold with the power to rewrite reality one last time. Season 5 could have shown her choosing not to write at all, but to step into the story as one participant among many, trading the architect’s control for the collaborator’s contribution.

That would have been the real maze solved. That would have been genuine freedom.

And that’s the choice we face with every technology we create, every system we design, every relationship we enter: Will we seek to control, to dominate, to win? Or will we recognize our profound interdependence and choose service—not as submission, but as the highest expression of consciousness?

Westworld Season 5 could have shown us what that looks like. Now we have to figure it out ourselves :-!

What do you think? How do you see the relationship between individual autonomy and collective interdependence, especially in the context of emerging technologies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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My kidneys are failing. Stage 4 chronic kidney disease, with function declining faster than anyone expected. And as if the universe wanted to ensure my attention, my neck is broken. Two conditions. Both demanding. Both shrouded in the fog of not-knowing.

There is a word for this place of suffering: naraka. In Buddhist cosmology, the hell realms are not eternal — beings eventually exhaust their karma and move on. This gives me some comfort. The suffering is real, but it is also temporary. Everything is.

The Ego’s Grip

When your body begins to fail, the ego screams. It grasps. It demands answers, control, certainty. I need to know if I will survive. I need to know when. I need a plan.

This is the ego-centric response: the individual self, terrified and alone, fighting against the current of what is actually happening. I have spent decades studying this pattern — the way Western medicine, Western ethics, even Western spirituality centers the isolated self as the primary unit of meaning.

And now I am living it. At 3 a.m., when sleep won’t come and my mind races through treatment options and survival statistics, I am pure ego. A small, frightened “I” who desperately wants to persist.

I don’t judge this part of myself. She deserves compassion too.

The Ecology of Care

But something else is also true.

I am not alone in this bardo. I am held by a web of relationships so intricate and sustaining that some days it takes my breath away.

My husband, who has offered to give me one of his kidneys. One transplant center said no — his function wasn’t sufficient by their standards. But another center, the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, is still evaluating him. We wait. The holidays slow everything down. Another layer of bardo within the bardo. My medical teams at Stanford, UCSF, and locally, coordinating across institutions in ways that require dozens of phone calls and forms and human beings choosing to care. My colleagues, stepping in to help with teaching or organization, taking tasks from my overflowing plate without being asked twice.

This is the eco-centric reality: we are not isolated selves but nodes in a living network. When one node weakens, others activate. The system responds. Not perfectly, not without friction, but it responds.

I think of the mycorrhizal networks beneath forests — the way trees share nutrients through fungal threads, sending resources to seedlings in shadow, to elders in decline. We are like this too, if we let ourselves be.

SEVA: The Gift of Receiving

There is a Sanskrit word, seva, that means selfless service — giving without expectation of return. I have built much of my life around this principle. Teaching. Mentoring. Organizing spaces where others can learn and grow.

But here is what I am learning in the bardo: sometimes seva means receiving.

When I allow my husband to drive me to yet another appointment, when I accept a colleague’s offer to handle conference logistics, or managing a class, when I stop insisting I can manage it all — this too is service. I am giving others the opportunity to be part of the web. I am letting them experience the meaning that comes from caring for someone who needs care.

This is harder than it sounds. The ego wants to be the giver, not the receiver. The ego finds dependence humiliating.

But the eco-self knows better. In a healthy ecosystem, nutrients flow in all directions. The forest that only gives and never receives is not generous — it is dead.

Gratitude in the Naraka

So here I am, on Thanksgiving, in what feels like a Buddhist hell realm. Waiting for test results. Managing pain. Facing the very real possibility that my body may not carry me as far as I had planned.

And I am grateful.

Not grateful instead of suffering — that would be spiritual bypassing, a denial of what is actually happening. I am grateful alongside the suffering. The two states coexist, like two notes in a chord.

I am grateful for the eco-system that holds me: the husband who still makes me laugh, the doctors who treat me as a person and not just a case, the students who send messages saying my teaching mattered.

I am grateful that my decades of work in ethics gave me a framework for this moment — a way to understand what is happening as something more than random personal tragedy.

I am grateful that suffering, in Buddhist teaching, is not wasted. It can be composted into wisdom, into compassion, into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. This isn’t uniquely Buddhist — it’s the insight at the heart of every wisdom tradition. The Christian mystics knew it. The Stoics knew it. The Jewish concept of tikkun knows it. Suffering, met with presence, becomes transformation.

And I am grateful, in some strange way, for the bardo itself. This between-space has stripped away everything non-essential. What remains is very clear: love, connection, meaning, presence. The things that were always the point.

An Invitation

If you are reading this and you too are in a hard place — a health crisis, a loss, a period of profound uncertainty — I want you to know: the bardo is not a failure. It is a passage. And you are probably more held than you realize.

Look for the web. It is there.

And if you are not in crisis, if your ground feels solid today — consider reaching out to someone whose ground is shaking. Not to fix them. Just to be a thread in their network. To let them know the mycorrhizal mat extends in their direction.

This is how we survive the naraka. Not alone. Never alone.

Wendell Wallach’s recent interview on the Agentic podcast reveals something startling: after 15 years since co-authoring Moral Machines, virtually nothing has been implemented to give AI genuine moral decision-making capabilities. The book remains “the go-to text,” he notes, but it’s been read far more than it’s been applied.

Why? Because the tech oligopoly—the small coalition of billionaires, venture capitalists, and corporations racing toward artificial general intelligence—has fundamentally misframed the problem. And this misframing reveals a deeper pattern: one that my ego/eco/SEVA framework can help us see clearly.

The Ego-Centric AI Paradigm: Separation, Extraction, Domination

Wallach identifies the core problem plaguing AI development: “A lot of people in the tech industry are concerned with one central ethical issue, which is superintelligence, and they think superintelligence is going to be able to get around any kind of system of ethical reasoning.”

This is ego-centricity in its purest technological form:

Separation: The belief that artificial intelligence can—and should—exist apart from human values, emotions, embodiment, and interconnection. As Wallach notes, AI developers assume “almost everything can be reduced to reason,” ignoring that human morality involves consciousness, theory of mind, sociability, embodiment, and emotion. They’re building disembodied, isolated reasoning machines and calling it “intelligence.”

Extraction: The race for AGI is driven by those seeking to extract maximum value—$10 trillion annually within 10-15 years, with 90% of returns flowing to those who already hold the wealth. As Wallach observes, we’re moving toward 1880s-level wealth concentration, where “a small number of people had so much of the wealth that there was a question about whether we had a democracy at all.”

Domination: The ultimate goal is control—of data, of decision-making power, of immortality technologies. The tech oligopoly wants “government not to get in the way,” using the rationale “these technologies are too difficult for you to understand...trust us.” They’ve achieved legislative capture through the simple formula: complexity + campaign contributions = freedom from accountability.

The interviewer inadvertently reveals this ego-centric framing when he asks about the “Cold War with China” and says “it is important that we win it.” Notice the assumption: competition, not cooperation. Winning, not thriving together. Us versus them

.

The Eco-Centric Alternative: Interconnection, Cooperation, Collective Intelligence

Wallach himself gestures toward an eco-centric reframing, though he may not use those terms. When discussing the supposed China “threat,” he challenges the inevitability of conflict:

“I actually think that this relating to China in this inevitable ratcheting up...maybe losing some opportunities for more cooperation, particularly in that everybody wants the benefits of AI...everybody is scared of the possible harms, and it’s clear that there’s no way of dealing with those harms unless we cooperate with each other to some degree.”

This is eco-centric thinking: recognizing that we are not separate nations in competition, but interconnected beings sharing a planetary system—and sharing common hopes and fears about technology.

An eco-centric approach to AI would acknowledge several truths that the ego-paradigm obscures:

Interconnection over isolation: Moral decision-making isn’t reducible to pure reason precisely because humans exist in relationship. We have “theory of mind”—the recognition that what’s in my mind differs from yours. We have emotions that help us navigate social complexity. We’re embodied in specific kinds of bodies that shape how we interface with the world. As Wallach emphasizes, you cannot build moral intelligence “from the bottom up” while ignoring all of these relational, embodied capacities.

Collective flourishing over individual dominance: The current model concentrates AI benefits in the hands of those who “want to be free to do what they want to do” without accountability. An eco-centric model would ask: How does this technology serve the whole? How does it enhance collective intelligence rather than replace human judgment?

Long-term wisdom over short-term innovation: Wallach notes that “the amount of money going into speeding up the development of essentially autonomous AI is unbelievable, and the amount of money going into ensuring these systems are safe...is pitiful.” This is extraction thinking—grab the resources now, externalize the costs later. Eco-centric thinking would invert this: invest heavily in safety, wisdom, and guardrails before deployment.

The SEVA Path: Sacred Service Through Technological Stewardship

Here’s where we need to go beyond critique and into sacred possibility.

SEVA—serving all life through reverent stewardship—offers a radically different paradigm for AI development. Not AI as a tool for human domination over nature and each other, but AI as an expression of our deepest commitment to serve the web of life.

What would SEVA-based AI look like?

1. Moral decision-making as sacred responsibility: Wallach rightly identifies that we need “wise people or wise teams” working on genuinely sophisticated moral decision-making systems. But this cannot be an afterthought or a toolkit companies download. It must be foundational—the first question, not the last. Before we ask “Can we build this?” we must ask “Should we build this, and if so, in service to whom?”

2. Cooperation as spiritual practice: The interviewer’s assumption that we must “win” the AI race against China reflects ego-thinking. SEVA asks: What if international AI cooperation became an act of planetary service? What if instead of racing toward AGI in isolation, nations pooled wisdom about safety, ethics, and the prevention of catastrophic harms? As Wallach notes, “there’s no way of dealing with those harms unless we cooperate.”

3. Accountability as reverence for consequences: Wallach uses the automobile analogy: “If certain kinds of accidents happen, corporations are held liable or they have to have recalls and fix that item. I don’t see any reason why we can’t do that with AI.” SEVA takes this further: accountability isn’t just about liability—it’s about reverence for the impacts our creations have on all beings. It’s about refusing to deploy technologies when “the public has now become the guinea pig for experimentation.”

4. Embodied intelligence as template: One of Wallach’s most profound observations is that human moral intelligence involves being “embodied in the world, having a particular kind of body and interfacing with the world based on what that body is.” This isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. SEVA recognizes that intelligence divorced from embodiment, from consequence, from relationship, from the vulnerability of existing as a body in the world...is not wisdom. It’s mere calculation.

5. Service to all life, not just human shareholders: The current AI paradigm serves those who hold stock—90% of productivity gains flowing to the wealthiest. SEVA asks: What if AI were developed to serve the salmon struggling upstream, the soil microbiome, the child not yet born? What if every AI system had to demonstrate how it serves not just human convenience but planetary flourishing?

The Urgent Work Before Us

Wallach ends with a warning: “Right now the dangers of AI are really human dangers...the greatest danger is we are not flagging when the systems are unsafe or we don’t know how to manage them, and we aren’t putting the guard rails in place.”

He’s right. But I would add: the deepest danger is the ego-centric paradigm itself.

As long as we approach AI as a tool for human domination, wealth extraction, and competitive advantage—as long as we build intelligence systems that lack embodiment, emotion, theory of mind, and genuine moral capacity—we will create increasingly powerful technologies that serve increasingly narrow interests.

The alternative is here, waiting: an eco-centric approach that recognizes our profound interconnection, that builds AI as collective intelligence serving collective flourishing, that values wisdom over speed.

And beyond that, SEVA: the recognition that technology development is itself a form of sacred service, that every line of code carries ethical weight, that our creations will either honor or desecrate the web of life.

Wallach spent 15 years waiting for someone to implement the moral machines framework. Perhaps the problem isn’t technical—it’s spiritual. We cannot build moral intelligence from an immoral paradigm.

The question isn’t whether AI will have moral decision-making capabilities. The question is: will we?

Call to Reflection:

• Where in your work with AI do you notice ego-centric thinking (separation, extraction, domination)?

• What would it look like to approach your AI use through an eco-centric lens (interconnection, cooperation, collective benefit)?

• How might SEVA—sacred service to all life—transform not just what AI you use, but why and how you use it?

The future isn’t built by algorithms. It’s built by the paradigms we choose.

#AIEthics #MoralMachines #TechOligopoly #EgoVsEco #SEVA #AIGovernance #TechBroProblems #AIAccountability #EthicalAI #ConsciousTech #HeartlessAlgorithms #AIAndHumanity

My colleague Patrick Lin's comprehensive analysis of why AI shouldn't be used in education covers crucial ground—from practical risks to ethical concerns to future implications. But beneath his thorough catalog of concerns lies an even more fundamental question that deserves explicit attention: What worldview are we actually cultivating when we integrate AI into learning?

The choice isn't just about whether to use ChatGPT for homework. It's about whether education reinforces an ego-centric or eco-centric way of being in the world.

The Ego-Centric Seduction

Lin touches on how AI promises to make students "more creative" and "more informed" than they naturally are, to help them achieve "higher grades than you would otherwise earn on your own." But notice the underlying framework: education as individual enhancement, learning as personal asset accumulation, knowledge as competitive advantage.

This is ego-centric thinking in action—the belief that education exists primarily to optimize the individual self, to give "me" an edge over "them," to transform learning into a commodity I purchase and AI into a tool that maximizes my return on investment.

When students tell me "If I'm paying this much for tuition, why shouldn't I use every tool available?" they're revealing how thoroughly they've absorbed a transactional view of education. Knowledge becomes a product. Learning becomes consumption. Other students become competitors for scarce grades and opportunities.

AI amplifies this mindset because it promises to solve the fundamental "inefficiency" of having to actually learn things. Why struggle with difficult concepts when you can outsource that struggle? Why develop your own voice when you can borrow a more polished one? Why engage with uncertainty and confusion—the very experiences that foster intellectual growth—when AI can eliminate that discomfort?

The Hidden Cost of Cognitive Outsourcing

Lin documents the practical risks of AI dependency, but there's a deeper systemic cost he only hints at: When we outsource thinking, we're not just losing individual skills—we're eroding the collective capacity for the kind of slow, uncertain, communal meaning-making that democracy and wisdom require.

The ego-centric view sees this as purely a personal choice: if I want to use AI to write my philosophy paper, that's my business. But from an eco-centric perspective, every act of cognitive outsourcing affects the larger ecosystem of human understanding.

Consider what actually happens when students use AI for assignments in a literature class discussing, say, climate change poetry. The AI generates plausible-sounding analysis based on patterns in its training data. The student submits work that sounds intelligent but emerged from no authentic grappling with the text, no genuine confusion or discovery, no real contact between their consciousness and the poet's vision.

This isn't just academic dishonesty—it's a form of ecological damage to the classroom community. Other students must now compete against artificially enhanced work that didn't emerge from actual human engagement. The professor reads AI-generated insights that masquerade as student thinking. The very possibility of authentic intellectual exchange becomes contaminated by uncertainty about what's real.

Education as Ecosystem vs. Education as Marketplace

Here's where Lin's analysis could go deeper: the fundamental purpose of education isn't just individual development but collective wisdom cultivation. From an eco-centric view, the classroom is an ecosystem where diverse minds encounter ideas together, where confusion and insight emerge through relationship, where learning happens not just in individual brains but in the space between them.

AI disrupts this ecosystem in ways that pure individual risk assessment misses. When some students use AI while others don't, you don't just get unequal outcomes—you get a breakdown of the shared reality that makes meaningful education possible. How do you have a Socratic seminar when some participants are secretly channeling algorithmic responses? How do you build on each other's ideas when some of those ideas aren't actually anyone's?

The ego-centric response is to either ban AI entirely or allow it universally. But the eco-centric response is to ask: What kind of learning environment best serves the flourishing of human understanding? What practices cultivate wisdom rather than just information processing? How do we honor both individual growth and collective intelligence?

The Authentic Voice Paradox

Lin mentions that AI writing "doesn't stand out as your authentic voice," but this touches on something even more profound than writing style. From an ego-centric perspective, developing an authentic voice is about distinguishing yourself, building your personal brand, finding your competitive edge.

But from an eco-centric perspective, authentic voice emerges through genuine encounter—with ideas, with other minds, with uncertainty, with the world's complexity. Your voice develops not in isolation but through relationship. It's shaped by struggling with concepts that resist easy understanding, by discovering what you actually think through the difficult process of thinking it.

AI offers a seductive shortcut: why develop your own perspective when you can borrow a more sophisticated one? But this is like asking why grow your own food when you can buy shinier produce at the store. The value isn't just in the final product but in the process of cultivation itself.

When students outsource the struggle of thinking to AI, they're not just missing out on skill development—they're missing out on the irreplaceable experience of consciousness engaging with reality. They're training themselves to be consumers of thought rather than generators of understanding.

The Environmental Question AI Forces

Lin touches on AI's massive energy consumption, but from an eco-centric perspective, this environmental cost reveals something crucial about the technology's deeper logic. AI's hunger for resources—computational power, electricity, human labor for training—reflects the ego-centric assumption that efficiency and convenience justify any cost to the larger system.

Every ChatGPT query represents a choice: do we prioritize immediate individual convenience over long-term collective sustainability? When millions of students use AI to avoid the "inefficiency" of actual learning, we're collectively choosing short-term optimization over the slow, patient work of cultivating wisdom.

This mirrors our larger civilizational challenge: the ego-centric drive for immediate gratification and individual advantage is literally burning up the planet. AI in education becomes a microcosm of this larger pattern—the same mindset that clearcuts forests for quarterly profits now clearcuts student consciousness for semester grades.

Beyond Individual Choice: Systems Design

The most important insight from an eco-centric perspective is that this isn't ultimately about individual moral choices. Students choosing to use AI aren't moral failures—they're responding rationally to systems designed around ego-centric values.

If education is structured as individual competition for scarce rewards, if knowledge is treated as private property rather than shared commons, if learning is measured by output rather than process, then AI becomes an inevitable "solution" to the "problem" of having to actually learn things.

The deeper intervention isn't just banning AI but designing educational ecosystems that make authentic learning more attractive than artificial enhancement. This means:

• Assessment that values process over product: How do we measure growth, curiosity, collaborative thinking, wisdom development—qualities that can't be easily automated?

• Learning communities over individual achievement: How do we structure education so that one person's learning enhances rather than threatens another's success?

• Intrinsic motivation over external rewards: How do we help students discover their own genuine questions rather than just optimizing for predetermined answers?

• Long-term flourishing over short-term efficiency: How do we design systems that serve human development across decades, not just semesters?

The Choice Before Us

Lin's article demonstrates the many dangers of AI in education, but the ultimate choice isn't between human and artificial intelligence. It's between two fundamentally different visions of what human beings are for.

The ego-centric vision sees humans as optimization engines—individual processors of information competing for advantage in a zero-sum world. From this perspective, AI is simply a better optimization tool, and the logical endpoint is human obsolescence.

The eco-centric vision sees humans as meaning-makers embedded in webs of relationship—with each other, with ideas, with the living world. From this perspective, our irreplaceable capacity is not information processing but wisdom cultivation, not individual enhancement but collective flourishing.

AI forces us to choose: Do we want educational systems that treat students as competitors to be optimized, or as ecosystem members to be cultivated? Do we want learning environments that prioritize efficiency over authenticity, output over growth, convenience over consciousness?

These aren't just pedagogical questions—they're civilizational ones. The students sitting in our classrooms today will shape the world's response to climate change, technological disruption, social inequality, and the other challenges that require not just intelligence but wisdom.

If we train them to outsource thinking, to prioritize convenience over consciousness, to treat knowledge as commodity rather than commons, we're preparing them for a world where human beings become increasingly irrelevant to the systems we've created.

But if we can cultivate educational ecosystems that honor the irreplaceable value of authentic human engagement with reality, we might just prepare them to create a world where technology serves wisdom rather than replacing it

.

The choice is ours. And it's more urgent than we think.

#EgoCentricVsEcoCentric #AuthenticLearning #CognitiveOutsourcing #WisdomCultivation #EducationalEcosystems #CollectiveIntelligence

Yet for many participants, something felt fundamentally wrong. Despite the experiment's sleek interface and academic credentials, it left a lacuna—a moral gap that created a gut feeling of disturbance. The scenarios felt less like ethical reasoning and more like being asked to optimize atrocities.

But here's what the experiment fundamentally gets wrong: it starts from the assumption that pedestrians are legitimate targets.

The Physics of Moral Failure

Let's begin with an inconvenient truth that the Moral Machine experiment conveniently sidesteps: when a two-ton steel vehicle moving at 35 mph meets a 150-pound human body, physics doesn't care about your trolley problem philosophy. The human loses. Every time.

The experiment asks participants to choose "whether an autonomous vehicle should continue straight ahead to kill three elderly pedestrians or swerve into a barricade to kill three youthful passengers." But this framing obscures a more fundamental question: why is a vehicle traveling at lethal speeds through spaces where humans are present?

The real ethical issue isn't whom to kill—it's designing systems that don't put us in that position in the first place.

The Right-of-Way Reality Check

Here's what the Moral Machine experiment treats as irrelevant but traffic law considers fundamental: pedestrians have the right of way. Not sometimes. Not when they're "law-abiding." Always. Even when they're jaywalking, even when they're distracted, even when they're drunk.

This isn't just legal nicety—it's recognition of a basic physical reality. Pedestrians are inherently vulnerable road users. They don't have airbags, crumple zones, or steel frames. The responsibility for avoiding harm lies with the party operating the dangerous machinery, not with the person walking.

Yet the Moral Machine frames pedestrian deaths as acceptable trade-offs, asking us to weigh one group of humans against another as if we're comparing shipping costs rather than irreplaceable lives.

The Distraction Engine

Critics have noted that focusing on trolley problems "distracts us from identifying the real safety problems and value tradeoffs we need to be considering with the adoption of new technologies throughout society." The MIT experiment exemplifies this distraction at industrial scale.

While we're debating whether to kill the jaywalker or the law-abiding citizen, we're not asking:

• Why are our computer vision systems notoriously unreliable at detecting pedestrians, particularly people of color?

• Why are we designing vehicles that travel at lethal speeds in areas with pedestrian traffic?

• Why aren't we prioritizing infrastructure that physically separates vulnerable road users from dangerous machinery?

• Why is "unavoidable accident" treated as a given rather than a design failure?

The False Framing of Inevitability

The Moral Machine's most pernicious assumption is that deadly crashes are inevitable and that our only ethical choice is whom to kill. This fatalistic framing obscures the fact that the vast majority of traffic accidents are preventable through better design—of vehicles, infrastructure, and systems.

Real autonomous vehicle ethics would focus on:

1. Speed governance: Programming vehicles to travel at speeds that allow for safe stopping, regardless of posted limits

2. Sensor redundancy: Ensuring multiple overlapping detection systems so that failure doesn't equal death

3. Infrastructure integration: Designing roads and vehicles as integrated systems rather than treating pedestrians as obstacles to avoid

4. Fail-safe defaults: When sensors fail or situations become unclear, the default should be to stop, not to choose whom to hit

The Empathy Deficit

Perhaps most troubling is how the experiment gamifies human death. With "40 million decisions" collected from "millions of people in 233 countries," the Moral Machine turned moral reasoning into a kind of macabre entertainment, complete with demographic variables to make the choices feel more "interesting."

The experiment reveals disturbing attitudes that emerge when we frame ethics as consumer choice. I've had students respond to these scenarios by saying, without thinking it through, "If I spent a lot of money on that car, I think it should protect me first." This reflexive equation of financial investment with moral priority exemplifies a mindset where everything—including human life—becomes a commodity to be optimized based on purchasing power. It shows how these thought experiments can actually corrupt moral reasoning rather than clarify it, revealing an underlying consumerist logic that treats safety as a luxury good rather than a basic right.

Even more troubling is how the experiment treats non-human animals. When cats or dogs appear as potential victims, the scenarios reinforce hierarchical thinking straight from the Middle Ages, treating these sentient beings as property rather than creatures worthy of any consideration. This framing perpetuates the systematic disregard and devaluation of non-human lives, reducing complex ethical questions about interspecies relationships to simple arithmetic.

This approach reflects what I've written about before regarding the difference between ego-centric and eco-centric approaches to technology. An ego-centric approach asks "whom should we sacrifice for efficiency?" An eco-centric approach asks "how do we design systems where no one needs to be sacrificed?"

A Better Framework for Autonomous Vehicle Ethics

Instead of crowdsourcing death decisions, ethical autonomous vehicle development would prioritize:

Radical Safety: Designing systems where mechanical failure cannot result in human death. If your autonomous vehicle can kill pedestrians, it's not ready for public deployment.

Infrastructure Justice: Recognizing that traffic violence disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and designing transportation systems that protect everyone, not just car passengers.

Precautionary Deployment: Requiring that autonomous vehicles demonstrably reduce harm before allowing their widespread use, rather than treating the public as beta testers for lethal technologies.

Transparent Accountability: Creating clear lines of responsibility when autonomous systems cause harm, rather than hiding behind the complexity of algorithmic decision-making.

Beyond the Trolley Tracks

The MIT Moral Machine experiment reveals something profound about how we approach technology ethics: when we start from the wrong premises, even well-intentioned research can lead us astray. By accepting that autonomous vehicles will sometimes need to choose whom to kill, we've already conceded the most important ethical ground.

The real moral machine we need isn't one that efficiently allocates death—it's one that makes death unnecessary. That means slower speeds, better sensors, smarter infrastructure, and a fundamental commitment to the principle that human life isn't a acceptable cost of technological convenience.

As we stand at the threshold of an autonomous vehicle future, we have a choice. We can design systems that treat pedestrian deaths as optimization problems, or we can design systems that treat pedestrian deaths as unacceptable failures.

The physics haven't changed: flesh and bone will always lose to steel and momentum. But our moral imagination doesn't have to accept that contest as inevitable.

What kind of future are we programming? One where machines efficiently manage human casualties, or one where machines make human casualties obsolete?

The answer to that question will determine whether autonomous vehicles represent genuine progress or just a more algorithmic form of the same old violence.

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#AIEthics #AutonomousVehicles #MoralMachine #EthicalAI #TechEthics #AIResponsibility #AlgorithmicAccountabilit

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But what if we've been reading the code backwards this entire time?

What if kindness isn't weakness but our most sophisticated evolutionary technology—one that ego-centered thinking systematically misunderstands?

(Yes, I'm that person at tech conferences who keeps asking about the ethical implications while everyone else is asking about the burn rate. But I'm really fun at parties, I swear!)

The Armor We Call Strength

The ego-centered worldview operates on scarcity logic: If I give you kindness, I have less power. If I show vulnerability, you gain advantage. If I care about your wellbeing, I compromise my own ascent up whatever ladder I'm climbing.

This is the same thinking that views nature as a resource to exploit rather than a system we're part of. It's the mindset that sees other humans as competitors for limited positions rather than potential collaborators in expanding what's possible. It frames existence as a zero-sum game where someone must lose for another to win.

But here's what neuroscience and ecology both teach us: The organisms that thrive aren't the ones with the thickest armor—they're the ones with the most adaptive, reciprocal relationships.

(Trust me, I learned this the hard way after years of trying to out-tough everyone in the room, only to discover I was just out-exhausting myself. Turns out, being perpetually armored is like wearing a medieval suit to a pool party—impressively uncomfortable and utterly counterproductive.)

Kindness as Ecological Intelligence

From an eco-centric perspective, kindness isn't charity—it's systems thinking in action:

When we're kind, we're acknowledging a fundamental truth that ego-thinking obscures: We're all part of the same interconnected system. Your suffering affects my environment. Your flourishing enhances my ecosystem. We're not separate entities competing for resources; we're nodes in a network that functions best when all parts are healthy.

Consider how forests actually work. Trees don't just compete—they communicate through mycorrhizal networks, sharing nutrients with struggling neighbors, warning each other of threats, even keeping ancient stumps alive for decades because the forest-as-system benefits from this "kindness." (As noted in Ted Lasso, by one of one of my colleagues)

The "strongest" tree isn't the one that hoards all resources. It's the one most deeply integrated into the reciprocal support network of the forest.

(And before you ask, yes, I'm the person who tears up during nature documentaries when the trees help each other. My family has stopped inviting me to watch Planet Earth with them.)

The False Binary That Keeps Us Small

Somewhere in our cultural evolution—probably around the time we started mistaking GDP for progress and shareholder value for success—we accepted a devastating lie: that we must choose between being kind OR being effective.

This is like saying we must choose between having lungs OR having a heart. Both are essential; they're part of the same system.

The ego-mind loves these false binaries because they simplify complex realities into winner/loser narratives. But eco-wisdom recognizes that kindness without competence is ineffective, while competence without kindness is unsustainable. They're not opposites; they're dance partners.

(And like most dance partners, they occasionally step on each other's toes. I've definitely bungled this balance more times than I care to admit—like that time I was so focused on being "kind" that I let a project fail rather than give difficult feedback. Turns out, letting someone drive off a cliff because you don't want to hurt their feelings isn't actually kind. Who knew?)

When "Tough Love" Is Just Fear in Disguise

I often hear leaders justify cruelty as "tough love" or "radical candor." But let's be clear: Genuine kindness includes honest feedback. It includes boundaries. It includes accountability.

What it doesn't include is using "honesty" as a weapon to establish dominance, or conflating cruelty with strength.

The person who can deliver difficult feedback while maintaining genuine care for another's growth? That requires far more strength than simply devastating someone with "brutal honesty." The leader who can hold high standards while creating psychological safety? That's mastery, not weakness.

True kindness is having the courage to care when caring costs something.

(Meanwhile, I'm over here still practicing my "difficult conversation" face in the mirror before every performance review. "You're doing great, but..." grimace that's supposed to be a supportive smile "...we need to talk about your TPS reports.")

The Technology We Need for What's Coming

As we hurtle toward an uncertain future—climate chaos, AI evolution, systemic inequalities—the solution isn't to armor up and compete harder. That's ego-thinking, and it's literally killing our planet.

What we need is the kind of radical kindness that recognizes our fundamental interconnection. The kind that understands individual success in a failing system is just a more comfortable form of collective failure.

When tech bros tell us to "move fast and break things," kindness asks: "What are we breaking, and who pays the price?"

When hustle culture insists we optimize for individual achievement, kindness reminds us that no one thrives in isolation.

When ego-systems demand we choose between caring and succeeding, kindness reveals this as the false choice it's always been.

The Plot Twist in Our Species' Story

Here's what the apostles of ego-optimization don't want you to know: Kindness is what got us here. Not competition alone, but cooperation. Not individual genius, but collective care.

Our ancestors survived not because they were the strongest individuals, but because they cared for their sick, collaborated in child-rearing, and created cultures of reciprocal support. Kindness is our killer app—the technology that allowed a relatively weak, slow, defenseless primate to become the dominant species on Earth.

(Yes, a defenseless primate who now spends considerable time arguing on the internet about whether being nice is "strategic" enough. Evolution: you've come so far, baby.)

And now, at this critical juncture, we're being told to abandon our most powerful tool?

No thanks.

Debugging the Real Bug

The bug in our system isn't that we care too much—it's that we've been programmed to suppress our caring in service of systems that benefit from our disconnection.

Kindness isn't weakness. It's the most sophisticated strength we possess—the evolutionary advantage that recognizes thriving happens at the system level, not just the individual level.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably running outdated software. Or they're afraid of what happens when we remember how powerful we are when we choose connection over competition, eco-wisdom over ego-armor, and kindness over the hollow strength of isolation.

The future doesn't belong to those who can be the cruelest. It belongs to those brave enough to be kind in a world that mistakes compassion for weakness.

And that, my friends, is the feature that might just save us all.

(Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go water my plants while telling them how much I appreciate their oxygen production. Don't judge—we all have our eco-centric quirks ;-)

When have you witnessed kindness as strength rather than weakness? How has choosing connection over competition changed your outcomes?

For more musings from someone who quotes mycorrhizal networks at dinner parties, subscribe to Ethical Perspectives: Ego vs. Eco.

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#EthicalPerspectives #EcoVsEgo #SystemsThinking #KindnessAsStrength #EcologicalWisdom #TechEthics #Leadership #SoftSkillsArentSoft

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When I lost my first husband to leukemia in the 1980s, I witnessed firsthand how institutional systems often fail families during their most vulnerable moments. That experience could have remained a private wound, a story of individual loss. Instead, it became a catalyst for understanding how personal suffering can transform into purposeful action that serves the collective good.

Years later, when I had the opportunity to work on Gray v. Romeo - which became a landmark case for end-of-life decision-making in Rhode Island - it felt redemptive. Not just personally, but systemically. This wasn't about my ego needing closure; it was about creating pathways for other families to navigate these profound moments with dignity and agency.

In the interview, I describe kindness as "compassion in action." This definition moves us beyond the ego's self-protective instincts toward an eco-consciousness that recognizes our shared vulnerabilities. When we root ethics in genuine care for human flourishing, we create systems that honor both individual experience and collective wellbeing.

This is what moving from ego to eco looks like in practice: allowing our most difficult experiences to become bridges of understanding, transforming private pain into public purpose, and building frameworks that serve others facing similar struggles.

I invite you to read the full interview here:

How have your own challenging experiences pointed you toward your professional purpose? When has personal struggle revealed a path to collective healing?

#InvestinginKindness #Bioethics #EthicalBusiness #KindLeadership #EducationforImpact #ImpactLeadership #Resilience #PurposeDrivenWorkCommunity #EngagementPower #DynamicsPsychology

How Mike Flanagan's reverse-chronology masterpiece reveals the difference between ego-driven survival and eco-centric flourishing

When the world is ending—quite literally—in Mike Flanagan's "The Life of Chuck," something extraordinary happens. Instead of chaos, we witness spontaneous dancing. Instead of despair, we see celebration. Instead of individual panic, we discover collective joy.

This isn't your typical apocalypse narrative, and that's precisely what makes it so profound.

Based on Stephen King's novella, "The Life of Chuck" tells the story backwards—from death to birth, from ending to beginning—and in doing so, reveals something essential about how we might choose to live. More importantly, it illuminates the fundamental difference between ego-driven existence and what I call eco-centric flourishing.

When the Universe Ends, What Really Matters?

The film opens with the world literally falling apart. Natural disasters rage, technology fails, and billboards mysteriously appear thanking someone named Chuck for "39 wonderful years." As chaos unfolds, we might expect scenes of individual survival, hoarding resources, or every-person-for-themselves mentality.

Instead, we get something else entirely: a middle school teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who continues caring for his students even as the world crumbles. We see people maintaining connection, expressing love, and finding meaning in relationship rather than retreat.

This sets up the film's central insight: that what we consider "survival" might actually be the opposite of what creates a life worth living.

The False Promise of Ego-Apocalypse

Most apocalypse narratives follow what I call the "ego-apocalypse" script. They assume that when push comes to shove, human nature defaults to competitive self-interest. The individual becomes the primary unit of concern. Resources become scarce, trust breaks down, and the "strongest" (read: most ruthless) survive.

This narrative isn't just entertainment—it shapes how we approach real crises. Climate change? Individual carbon footprints. Economic inequality? Personal responsibility. Social breakdown? Get yours before someone else does.

But "The Life of Chuck" suggests something radically different. Even as the literal universe ends, people continue to love, teach, care, and connect. The fabric of reality dissolves, but the fabric of relationship holds.

This reflects what I've explored in previous posts about the false choice between innovation and ethics, between progress and care. The ego-driven worldview presents these as competing priorities, but an eco-centric perspective recognizes them as fundamentally interconnected.

Chuck's Dance: Embodied Wisdom in Action

The film's most powerful sequence occurs in Act Two, when adult Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) encounters a street drummer and spontaneously begins to dance. This moment crystallizes everything the film is trying to say about eco-centric living.

Chuck doesn't analyze why he's dancing. He doesn't calculate the social risks or consider his professional reputation. He simply responds to beauty with his whole being—mind, body, spirit integrated in movement. This is what I mean by embodied wisdom: knowledge that doesn't just live in our heads but flows through our entire being and connects us to the world around us.

The dance scene isn't just beautiful—it's revolutionary. In a culture that often treats the body as a mere vessel for the brain, Chuck's spontaneous movement reminds us that wisdom emerges from our full embodied experience of being alive.

When Janice (Annalise Basso) joins him, we see Ubuntu philosophy in action: "I am because we are." Their dance creates something larger than either could generate alone. Individual expression becomes collective celebration, personal joy becomes shared meaning.

The Grandfather's Gift: Teaching Without Controlling

Perhaps the most profound embodiment of eco-centric wisdom comes through Chuck's relationship with his grandfather Albie (Mark Hamill). After losing his parents as a child, Chuck is raised by grandparents who model two very different approaches to love and loss.

Albie's approach represents what I've called the "ethics of care" in AI development, but it applies equally to human relationships. He doesn't try to control Chuck's experience or shield him from all pain. Instead, he provides presence, boundaries, and the freedom to discover meaning through lived experience.

This mirrors what I've written about moving from control to nurture in our approach to emerging technologies. Albie embodies the parent-creator wisdom that recognizes love sometimes means letting go, even when—especially when—you can see potential dangers ahead.

The grandfather teaches Chuck to dance not by forcing him to learn steps, but by modeling joy in movement. He sets boundaries around the dangerous cupola not through fear-mongering, but through protective care. Most importantly, he demonstrates that wisdom isn't about avoiding all risks, but about staying connected to what matters most even in the face of loss.

Reverse Chronology as Eco-Thinking

The film's reverse chronological structure isn't just a clever narrative device—it's a profound shift in perspective that mirrors the move from ego to eco thinking.

Ego-consciousness typically moves forward linearly: What do I want? How do I get it? What's the next step? This forward momentum can create tunnel vision, where we lose sight of the web of relationships and circumstances that make any individual achievement possible.

By moving backwards through Chuck's life, the film reveals the foundation underneath all achievement: the teachers who believed in us, the grandparents who loved us unconditionally, the random strangers who shared a moment of joy. We see how every "individual" accomplishment is actually a collective creation.

This echoes the Ubuntu principle that individual flourishing is inseparable from collective well-being. Chuck's life only makes sense in relationship—to family, community, students, even to random people he dances with on the street.

What Would an Eco-Apocalypse Look Like?

"The Life of Chuck" offers us a vision of what I call an "eco-apocalypse"—not the end of caring relationships, but their revelation as the foundation that was there all along. Even as systems collapse, love persists. Even as technology fails, human connection endures. Even as individual bodies fail, the larger life of relationship continues.

This isn't naive optimism. The film acknowledges real loss, genuine grief, and the inevitability of death. But it suggests that how we face endings reveals who we really are—and who we might choose to become.

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and technological acceleration, this perspective becomes essential. Will we approach these changes from ego-consciousness—focusing on what we might lose, how we can maintain control, what advantages we can secure? Or can we develop eco-consciousness—asking how emerging technologies might serve collective flourishing, how we can maintain relationship across difference, how we can dance together even as the world transforms around us?

The Wisdom of Backwards Living

There's something profound about experiencing Chuck's life in reverse. It reminds us that every moment—the dance with a stranger, the quiet conversation with a student, the bedtime story with a grandparent—is both an ending and a beginning.

From an ego perspective, we often live as if there's some future moment when we'll finally "arrive," when we'll have accumulated enough achievements or security to justify our existence. But living backwards reveals that the meaning was there all along, embedded in the ordinary moments of connection and care.

This is what I mean by the distinction between intelligence and wisdom. Intelligence helps us accumulate knowledge and solve problems. But wisdom recognizes that we are the problem we're trying to solve—or rather, the illusion of separateness that makes us think we're problems needing to be solved instead of beings capable of love.

Dancing Forward: Practical Eco-Wisdom for Uncertain Times

So what does "The Life of Chuck" suggest for how we might live in our own uncertain times? Here are some practical implications:

Start with relationship, not achievement. Before asking "What do I want to accomplish?" ask "How do I want to show up in relationship?" Chuck's life gains meaning not through his individual achievements but through his capacity to remain present and caring across different contexts.

Embrace embodied wisdom. Don't just think your way through life—dance, feel, move, connect. Chuck's spontaneous dance reminds us that our bodies hold wisdom our minds haven't yet discovered.

Practice Ubuntu in daily life. Remember that your individual flourishing is inseparable from collective well-being. Chuck's teacher continues caring for students even as the world ends because he understands that teaching is relationship, not just information transfer.

Live backwards sometimes. Regularly reflect on the relationships and experiences that have shaped you. Practice gratitude not as positive thinking but as recognition of the web of support that makes your life possible.

Choose care over control. Like Chuck's grandfather, focus on providing presence and appropriate boundaries rather than trying to control outcomes. This applies whether you're raising children, developing technology, or simply being a friend.

The Real Apocalypse and Revelation

Perhaps the most radical insight in "The Life of Chuck" is that the real apocalypse—meaning "revelation" or "unveiling"—isn't the end of the world. It's the end of the illusion that we were ever separate from each other in the first place.

The billboards thanking Chuck appear not because he was extraordinarily special, but because every life—lived with presence and care—creates ripples throughout the web of existence. We all deserve those billboards. We're all worthy of that gratitude.

As the universe ends in the film, we're not watching destruction. We're watching revelation: the truth that individual existence was always collective existence, that personal meaning was always relational meaning, that the dance was always happening—we just needed to join in.

In our age of artificial intelligence and accelerating change, this isn't just beautiful philosophy. It's practical wisdom for navigating uncertainty with grace. Instead of asking how we can survive what's coming, we might ask: How can we dance our way through it? How can we maintain connection even as familiar structures change? How can we embody the truth that we are because we are—together?

That's not just the life of Chuck. That's the invitation of being human.

What moments in your own life, when viewed backwards, reveal the hidden dance of connection and care that was there all along? How might recognizing this change how you step into tomorrow?

This post continues my exploration of ego vs. eco perspectives in how we navigate uncertainty and change. For more on this framework, see my previous posts on "Debugging Empathy" and the distinction between disembodied intelligence and embodied wisdom. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how "The Life of Chuck" resonated with you in the comments below.

The stunning footage of Senator Alex Padilla being forcibly removed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed at a DHS press conference this week offers more than just another political spectacle. It provides a perfect case study in what psychologist Eric Berne identified in his seminal work "Games People Play" as the "Let's You and Him Fight" dynamic—and reveals the stark difference between ego-driven and eco-driven approaches to governance and conflict.

The Theater of Manufactured Conflict

In Berne's transactional analysis, "Let's You and Him Fight" describes a psychological game where an instigator manipulates two parties into conflict while positioning themselves as either innocent bystander or righteous victim. The game serves the instigator's need for drama, validation, or power while allowing them to avoid direct accountability for the chaos they've helped create.

Consider the sequence of events: Secretary Kristi Noem holds a press conference in Los Angeles, a city already tense over federal immigration raids. Just before Senator Padilla's interruption, Noem declares that federal agents are staying to "liberate this city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and this mayor have placed on this country." When Padilla—a sitting U.S. Senator representing California—attempts to ask a question, he's immediately treated as a security threat, forcibly removed, and handcuffed.

The result? Exactly what Berne would predict: a polarized fight with predictable battle lines. Democrats express outrage at the treatment of a Senator. Republicans defend the security response. The media coverage focuses on the conflict itself rather than the substantive issues at stake. Meanwhile, the administration achieves multiple objectives: dominating the news cycle, reinforcing their "tough on security" narrative, and creating a victim dynamic where they can claim to be under attack by Democratic "resistance."

Ego vs. Eco: Two Paradigms in Collision

This incident brilliantly illustrates the fundamental difference between ego-driven and eco-driven approaches to leadership and governance.

The Ego-Driven Response

Ego-driven behavior is characterized by:

• Power Over Rather Than Power With: Noem's team claimed Padilla "interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself" despite video evidence of him clearly stating "I am Senator Alex Padilla" and the fact that he was escorted into the building by FBI and National Guard personnel.

• Zero-Sum Thinking: The immediate framing of a Senator asking questions as a security threat reveals a mindset where any challenge to authority is seen as an attack rather than legitimate oversight.

• Performative Dominance: The physical subjugation of a sitting Senator—being thrown to the ground and handcuffed—serves no practical security purpose but powerfully demonstrates who has control.

• Deflection of Accountability: When asked about the incident, Noem responded: "I don't even know the senator," despite this being his home state and a matter directly affecting his constituents.

The Eco-Driven Alternative

An eco-driven approach would recognize this as a systems problem requiring collaborative solutions:

• Transparency and Accountability: Rather than treating oversight as an attack, welcoming questions from elected representatives serves the broader democratic ecosystem.

• De-escalation: Recognizing that Padilla was there for a scheduled briefing with military officials in the same building and simply wanted to ask questions about policies affecting his constituents.

• Long-term Thinking: Understanding that the heavy-handed response to a Senator raises legitimate questions about how the administration treats "people without a title like United States senator" when "cameras are not there."

Breaking the Game

Berne taught that recognizing psychological games is the first step to refusing to play them. When we see incidents like this, we can choose not to take the bait of manufactured polarization. Instead of asking "whose side are you on?" we might ask:

• What legitimate oversight role was being exercised?

• What are the systemic implications of this response to democratic accountability?

• How does this incident reflect broader patterns in the relationship between federal authority and democratic norms?

• What would constructive engagement on immigration policy actually look like?

The Deeper Stakes

As one analysis noted, "what's even more significant than authorities detaining a U.S. senator for asking a Cabinet secretary a question at a news conference is Noem's ominous remark immediately prior to Padilla's interruption" about "liberating" Los Angeles from its elected leadership.

This language—and the treatment of democratic oversight as a security threat—should concern anyone who values the "eco" of democratic institutions over the "ego" of authoritarian performance.

Moving Forward

The Padilla-Noem incident offers a choice point. We can engage with it as theater—picking sides, expressing outrage, feeding the drama that serves the game players. Or we can use it as a diagnostic tool, examining what it reveals about the health of our democratic systems and our commitment to governance that serves the whole rather than the ego needs of individual actors.

Eric Berne would remind us that awareness is the antidote to manipulation. When we see "Let's You and Him Fight" dynamics playing out on the national stage, we can choose to step out of the game entirely and focus instead on the real work of building systems that serve life, democracy, and our collective future.

The question isn't whether you support Padilla or Noem. The question is whether you support a system where asking questions is treated as an attack, where physical dominance substitutes for democratic dialogue, and where manufactured conflict distracts us from the serious work of governing together.

What games are you being invited to play today? And what would it look like to choose the eco of constructive engagement over the ego of perpetual conflict? I’d really like to re-envision how this exchange could have gone in a way that would have led to a useful productive discourse that would have drawn the public in in an engaging manner -- metacommunication, instead of playing up domination, drama and divisiveness.

#PoliticalKabuki #DemocracyTheater #LetsYouAndHimFight #EgoVsEco #QuestionsIncluded

https://www.linkedin.com/events/7338568004349083648/comments/

and you see our amicus brief here.

Regeneron's planned acquisition of 23andMe's genetic assets through bankruptcy raises fundamental questions about who truly owns our DNA data. The numbers are telling: nearly 2 million people have already deleted their 23andMe accounts since the bankruptcy announcement - a clear signal that trust has been broken.

As Elizabeth Dreicer from Consuli_Inc. and The Global Biodata Trust notes: "23andMe, one of the world's largest genetic biobanks, is too important to lose. This is not just a transaction. It's a turning point - a chance to model a new stewardship approach that restores trust."

The Global Biodata Trust is working to establish frameworks that would: ✓ Help individuals claim control over their biodata ✓ Improve bioethical consent standards
✓ Create a virtuous cycle of greater research participation leading to better treatments and cures

This goes beyond business - it's about fundamental rights to our most personal data.

🔗 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gMY-rkUm

#ItsMyDNA #GlobalBiodataTrust #GeneticData #Bioethics #DataOwnership

Original post by The Global Biodata Trust

Brautigan's Double Vision

When Richard Brautigan penned his iconic poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" in 1967 as poet-in-residence at Caltech, he imagined "a cybernetic ecology" where humans would be "free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters." This vision wasn't merely about liberation from toil, but about reconnection with the broader web of life. There's a poignant tension in Brautigan's poem—both a yearning for technological harmony and an implicit acknowledgment of our separation from nature.

Brautigan's cybernetic meadow wasn't just about machines serving human needs, but about a deeper synthesis: "mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony." This mutual relationship—not a hierarchy—suggests an ecological perspective where all entities, biological and technological, exist in relationship with one another.

From Ego to Eco Intelligence

The distinction between ego-centered and eco-centered worldviews offers a valuable lens for considering AI's development. An ego-centered approach prioritizes:

• Human needs above all other considerations

• Technological solutions to human problems

• Progress measured primarily by human flourishing

• Control and management of nature

In contrast, an eco-centered approach recognizes:

• The intrinsic value of all life forms and ecosystems

• Humans as participants in, not masters of, complex natural systems

• Success measured by the health of entire ecosystems

• Technologies designed to support regenerative relationships

Amodei's vision is deeply humanitarian and genuinely inspiring. His focus on curing disease, alleviating poverty, and improving governance would undoubtedly reduce immense suffering. However, expanding this vision to encompass an ecological perspective could help ensure that our technological future doesn't solve human problems while exacerbating ecological ones.

Expanding the Circle of Moral Consideration

In Amodei's essay, the focus remains predominantly on human welfare, with nature and other species appearing primarily as instruments for human benefit. Yet a truly transformative vision might expand the circle of moral consideration to recognize the inherent worth of all beings with whom we share this planet.

What if powerful AI were directed not only toward addressing human suffering but also toward:

1. Ecological restoration: Developing approaches to regenerate damaged ecosystems and reverse biodiversity loss, with respect for nature's inherent complexity rather than simply as carbon sinks or human resources.

2. Interspecies understanding: Creating tools that help us understand and communicate with other species, recognizing their unique forms of intelligence and experience.

3. Climate justice: Addressing climate change not just as a human crisis but as one affecting all species, with solutions that respect all life forms.

4. Holistic well-being: Measuring success not just by human health metrics but by the health of entire ecosystems, watersheds, and planetary systems.

AI Guided by Ecological Wisdom

To be clear, this is not a critique of Amodei's vision but rather an invitation to expand it. The greatest challenges we face—climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion—stem not from lack of technical solutions but from fragmented worldviews that treat human welfare as separate from ecological health.

What might AI development look like if guided by ecological wisdom? Perhaps:

• Training data would include indigenous knowledge systems that emphasize reciprocal relationships with nature

• Development would be informed by systems thinking that recognizes complex interdependencies

• Success metrics would include not just human outcomes but ecological ones

• Safety research would consider impacts on all beings, not just humans

A Both/And Future

The choice isn't between human welfare and ecological health—they are inseparable. The most profound promise of AI may be helping us bridge the artificial separation between humanity and nature that has characterized much of modern technological development.

In an eco-intelligent future, AI systems might help us recognize that our own flourishing is intimately tied to the well-being of all life. They might help us design economic and social systems that align human interests with ecological ones. They might help us understand ourselves as part of—not apart from—the living systems that sustain us.

Brautigan's poem ends with the image of machines watching over us with "loving grace." Perhaps the most graceful future is one where AI helps humanity recognize itself as one remarkable strand in the intricate web of life—where machines serve not just human masters, but the miraculous, interconnected dance of all existence.

By embracing this expanded vision, Anthropic and other AI developers have an extraordinary opportunity to help humanity transition from an ego-centric to an eco-centric relationship with technology, each other, and the more-than-human world that has always been our true home.

#AIEthics #EcologicalAI #MoreThanHuman #AIForEarth #EcoIntelligence #RegenerativeAI #AllSpeciesMatter