Rachel has moved...!

Follow me on mas.to instead? I'm moving to that instance...

Squirrel. FOSS and global justice activist. Union maid. Escaped a fundo Baptist cult. Former foster kid, fly pusher, and legal editor. Psych/philosophy BA/MA; Neuro PhD dropout.

avatar is a picture of my face

original stuff is CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

#copyleft #FOSS #anarchism #OpenScience #solidarity #union #antifascism #ActuallyAutistic

mas.to: https://mas.to/@resl
pixelfed.de: https://pixelfed.de/riesl
"music": https://soundcloud.com/eggkombustion

Public Key

npub1zs9rwqnftwgyfxdgzsk2dc73ucjza5wur7jrx3d49udg4hhklfhq0ag0d2

NIP-05 Address

resl_at_kolektiva.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspgz3hqf54hyzynx5pgt9xu0g7vfpw68wplfpngk6j7x52mmm05msprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnt9fjare

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1zs9rwqnftwgyfxdgzsk2dc73ucjza5wur7jrx3d49udg4hhklfhq0ag0d2

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Last Notes

2025-03-20 23:24:00 UTC

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Thank you 🥹 It would be great if I could pronounce sprache without hurting myself but I must be patient with myself... lol

2025-03-20 22:15:27 UTC

For fun I made this... "song" and music video today. I call it "Wortliedvideo" and dedicate my masterpiece to... you.
https://makertube.net/w/6s1yXR3mfHxngihDpbRQ5n
#music #German #DIY #video #MastoArt #song #PeerTube

2025-03-12 17:12:09 UTC

@npub13ny…ykuy
I follow @npub1gnj…vk7h @npub10v4…s27h and @npub1ny7…uv57 among others but never thought about how to start one, oddly enough!

2025-03-06 14:45:33 UTC

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Not dog barf, specifically, but once I got raw milk all over the interior of my car.
Most of the fix was using baking soda, I think. It took many rounds of baking soda to finally get it cleaned.

2025-01-31 15:05:10 UTC

Everyone on #Mastodon is so cool, attractive, and intelligent. You beautiful badass sweethearts. I love you all.

2025-01-20 14:59:57 UTC

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high fashion

2025-01-15 15:08:39 UTC

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Is she open to followers she doesn't know IRL? I want to follow her to welcome her lol

2025-01-15 15:01:26 UTC

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We need to make cute little visual how to guides that make it easy

2024-11-10 18:19:04 UTC

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It sounds like someone is confusing what he has heard with what most women choose (or are implicitly pressured) not to express openly to him.

2024-11-03 03:16:02 UTC

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That can be the name of our podcast. Jk

2024-10-28 22:29:06 UTC

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I cannot see it either, to confirm

2024-10-28 18:04:25 UTC

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No need to reply. Sorry to hear.

2024-10-28 16:02:19 UTC

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Yanis Varoufakis

2024-10-28 14:19:35 UTC

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Have I sent you this link to an episode of Larry Lessig's podcast where he interviews Katrín Oddsdóttir yet? Here it is now:
https://player.fm/series/another-way-by-lawrence-lessig/s5e24-lifeboats-katrin-oddsdottir
I know it does not help directly, but listening to this at least gave me a great feeling of parasocial contact with this woman whose fight mixed with sense of humor and will to be happy is just deeply comforting to experience -- I think you will appreciate it similarly.

2024-10-25 14:06:41 UTC

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I hope you can rest and heal. I'm going to try that myself today

2024-10-25 13:56:11 UTC

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Ouch. You have eye pain? I'm sorry I missed that

2024-10-25 13:51:15 UTC

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Sadly almost anything is possible

2024-10-25 12:44:24 UTC

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I can help. Maybe I should make a video but choosing an operating system can be a lengthy process if you aren't in a hurry

2024-10-25 00:38:56 UTC

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CoG/TFI seems it must have money behind it

2024-10-24 21:24:12 UTC

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Mine could see themselves as "conservatives" but likewise believed they were authoritarian for morally upright reasons, you know, for the good of us all and so on... It is scary. It's everywhere, and it's hard or impossible to see properly when it isn't embodied in whatever the individual in question is predisposed to be able to detect. If that made sense.

2024-10-24 21:14:59 UTC

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It feels good to be part of society too, to be positively-regarded by other people, even if it means being silly or trying to be likeable even though inside there is a lot of pain or loneliness-- it feels really important because we know what the extreme possibilities are when someone is targeted by the group and for whatever reason becomes, even temporarily, "the outgroup" person, or perceived as deserving of punishment

2024-10-24 21:12:29 UTC

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Yeah! This is... this is what happens... this... somehow I'm just glad to be able to feel real right now by this conversation. Thank you.

2024-10-24 21:05:27 UTC

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Yeah, what the fuck... That's why it feels useless to try to write. People tell me, "You should write out these points and publish" and I think, "Oh, yeah? That's going to fix things?" I've even told you to write and publish. I suggested we do that this morning... it just sounds sane so I think it must be sane.
But if I'm speaking with no filter I think nothing can fix the past or the damage that has been done, and writing about it doesn't change anything. It gets eaten up by the same idiocy that allowed it to happen in the first place.

2024-10-24 19:55:53 UTC

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It felt to me when I left the cult lifestyle and wanted to fix the problem to help other people out of cults that the law would care and that somehow I would manage to build public awareness and create policies to stop cults and somehow prevent this from ever happening... but I was not able to do anything like that. I studied and thought doing good research to explain the situation scientifically would help me fight back against what I thought the source of it all was--metaphysics.
But the situation is just so much bigger and more common and more resistant to change than I knew, even if it does have to do with metaphysical beliefs. Even if I had become a neuroscientist showing how it influences behavior to believe in metaphysical things more than materialist things... that's been done, and the cults are still there... and I can't function well to do much at all because of what I was raised to think and do. That's the worst part. Knowing I struggle to even think and act as a self-possessed self, and feeling that struggle as I try to do that, unrelentingly.
I'm going to send the rest of my notes to you privately cause I just want to talk to you about what to do now.

2024-10-24 19:12:14 UTC

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I couldn't watch that one without a YouTube account so I watched this one I found with newpipe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4S135KMZn4
It makes me feel less ashamed of my own anger

2024-10-24 17:59:23 UTC

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Thank you!

2024-10-24 17:55:37 UTC

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The freakin cutest kid of course, first of all, but second, I did not know you were in a cult. Tell me more...?
Maybe we should have a jitsi hangout and talk about the weird shit we experienced growing up... we should write a book together... stories from our childhoods...
I wanted to reply this privately but I also want these stories and even questions and curiosity about them to be as public as possible at the same time...
Not sure what you might feel like sharing or how publicly, so, I don't know what to ask or how to prompt what would be comfortable for you, but share if you are holding back until someone is curious.
I'm never sure what to share in public about me, but I'm curious about everything else, especially people who have experiences similar to mine... probably that is stating the obvious. But nonetheless! I'm curious.

2024-10-24 16:35:43 UTC

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lol

2024-10-24 13:33:49 UTC

Is there anybody out there going to listen to my story? All about the squirrel who came to stay...

2024-10-23 22:14:43 UTC

"Land of the free" is way off, but "home of the brave" still tracks... if we pretend it isn't poverty keeping us from moving...
https://mkorostoff.github.io/incarceration-in-real-numbers/
#USpol #incarceration #Data #visual

2024-10-18 15:29:07 UTC

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You are doing it very well in my opinion, nonetheless. Lol

2024-10-18 15:25:15 UTC

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😍

2024-10-16 13:48:59 UTC

It's simple: nobody's free until everybody's free.
#solidarity #CivilRights #politics

2024-10-16 13:32:06 UTC

Some dumb fuck told me this morning that I care more about free software than the people who write or use it... No, actually, that's bullshit. I ONLY care about the free software MOVEMENT because I try to use systems thinking and all of the information I have to figure out how any stupid first-world individual like me has any chance at all of effectively protecting myself and others, and resisting the global fascism dominating every corner of our communications and lives in the enslavement of more people than are already enslaved, and I strongly believe that the free software movement was that chance, which underlied every other civil rights movement, and that chance is dwindling away before my eyes because all the PEOPLE I care about, including strangers like that idiot, seem to think caring about people means letting them drown in their own toxic addictions instead of trying to save them from what I've BARELY managed to escape and figure out how to identify and avoid again myself. Maybe I'm unsuccessful at saving anyone from anything, but DON'T FUCKING TELL ME I DON'T CARE ABOUT PEOPLE. I'd much rather be able to just perform friendship and goodwill by being a yes-man to everyone's passing whim and let that suffice for care, but the forces we are up against as a society require a lot more strength and cunning than that to survive and resist, and it is not looking good for our stupid asses if anyone thinks I don't fucking care about people. Fuck off with that shit... and wear a fucking seatbelt in the car, and eat your goddamn vegetables so you can live a long life, you dickhead... I love your stupidass, because I love everyone, when I'd rather really not give a shit. Capiche?

2024-09-29 13:13:20 UTC

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Sigh. Don't worry. From me there is no judgment anymore of people who use commercial software or malware... only sympathy...
Commercial software is of course predatory and very powerful, and it is not your fault that it is carefully-designed and highly effective at holding you and your family hostage in its hands.
If I want to liberate people, I need to care enough to make resources to help ease their transition to free software and make that decision's personal and political implications more intelligible to people, especially the people who feel the least "tech savvy" and so are the most vulnerable to the tech lords and their modern online fiefdoms.
To judge people for using facebook would be like judging a homeless person for exhibiting suboptimal personal hygiene. It is a fault of the laws and customs that create the possibility for that experience, not of the individual who is led into that experience and allowed by such a status quo to endure it without public outcry.

2024-09-28 15:45:22 UTC

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...I see

2024-09-28 14:09:33 UTC

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It seemed he was talking about the country's wealth. Isn't it funny how we have to learn the state of the world according to authorities but its logic is completely irrational?
The state is supposedly the sum of its people, but the people constituting the state are poor while the state itself can be said to be somehow rich, perhaps only in relation to other states, which are also construed to have wealth separate from the wealth or poverty of their citizens, despite that they are too only relevant insofar as they represent those citizens... I mean, it is just the most blatant gaslighting I've ever seen and on such a massive scale... with really no oversight, no greater authority of the whole to witness and correct its obvious error...
Of course many people see the error, and from within our separate "national borders" we protest the mistake, and beg for justice, but we accept for some reason that we are too small to be heard by those who speak for us, whose authority is supposedly based on their function as advocates for the common good. We are convinced that we must not be part of a majority yet, since surely the sovereigns would do what was in the majority's best interest, if not the whole's...
In psych, some researchers study a construct called "Just World Beliefs" -- and these beliefs that things are how they ought to be correlate positively with statements used in measures of constructs like right wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. It is comforting to imagine that everything is in its right place, because it implies that justice is a given, as opposed to something won, which could then be lost.
If you are depressed due to the economic injustice in which you live, and depression, let's say, overwhelms you so much that you become unproductive in wage labor agreements, and so become unemployed, and try filing for disability in the US, for example, you enter into a bureaucratic obstacle course of the most dizzying, self-deprecating, and demoralizing rigmarole you've ever imagined, to try to win some bizarre debate with strangers about whether you understand your own abilities or not.
There is no social security whatsoever in this country--and conservatives are fed so much noxious rhetoric about slackers and excessive spending on welfare programs that they just assume it is even possible to receive disability income if you are disabled, which few actually disabled conservatives are even able to overcome the stigma of disability to request...
It is so maddening... the dishonesty and hypocrisy and deterioration of social cohesion and trust because of the influence of so-called "free" market capitalists... I just... it is... exhausting. The fact that the average American thinks "communism" MEANS authoritarianism is the problem. Lies permeate our entire culture.

2024-09-27 23:33:04 UTC

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Okay, I see. The "it" I meant was meant to speak to the economic damage I thought Frans was suggesting he and others around his age caused for others, so I wanted to point out that his generation was set up! So, I should have said, "since the 40s at the LATEST..." indeed!
Your family history sounds fascinating and tragic and heroic. Do you plan to write a little family chronicle/autobiography sometime? I would like to read it...

2024-09-27 19:54:13 UTC

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Wait, I am confused about what is all made up and what you say "Nope" to specifically--cause I said a lot in my post, and I am not sure what you are replying to when you share the point about being in Gen X.

2024-09-27 19:41:49 UTC

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It wasn't the average person's fault. In some respect, there is never really a person or group of people to blame since blame doesn't usually get us very far, if we learned anything about the aftermath of the First World War, for example... but in another respect, if we wanted to blame anyone, let's blame Harry Dexter White, who had the opportunity to take Keynes's bancor plan at Bretton Woods and say, "Excellent. Let's do that, except none of us gets special drawing rights. Each country is truly equal to the central bank, and in that way, no nation can dictate the regulatory mechanisms in their own favor, because that would of course defeat the whole purpose of deficit and surplus regulation" but instead said, "Excellent, except instead of a neutral reserve currency, let's make sure the US is unlikley to ever depend on any other country or the central bank for financial supremacy by making the dollar the reserve currency, and pretend that's sustainable by saying for now it's going to always be backed by gold, even though Nixon can just opt out of respecting that sad excuse for a safety measure a few decades from now, and only poor people who've been made all the poorer by that time will suffer from the immediate fallout resulting from the bubble's inevitable burst. That way the US can bask in its dominance as long as possible, regardless of any and all future consequences for the supply chains that are becoming increasingly interdependent and international."
I mean, of course he didn't actually say that verbatim, cause that would have required an impossible degree of humility, insight, and psychic fortune-telling re: the Nixon shock, but it was all implied in what he did say, and so ultimately, the economic recessions and troubles the world has been facing since the 70s and especially since 2008 were all actually already building up since the 40s and are all Harry Dexter White's fault.
Feel any better? lol

2024-09-27 19:31:41 UTC

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https://kolektiva.social/system/media_attachments/files/113/211/175/587/784/103/original/850313a3cf5df3c1.mp4

2024-09-27 18:36:40 UTC

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Yes--I was born in 1993. It's an honor to do whatever I can to keep fighting the good fight and protect and re-establish in some cases what your generation and previous generations fought to secure for civil liberties and peacemaking between people and nations. It is hard to see the fights won that powerful interests have tried to start over and pretend are no longer settled.
It is hard in general to see progressive unity in politics with the naked eye, so to speak, but I think it is much stronger than we are led to appreciate by the machines that churn out the same old stories even after their now-defunct morals have long been out of public favor.
I appreciate the encouragement from you and I think that alone is more of an active support to our shared goals than is sometimes easy to appreciate. So don't worry--your communication, trust, and goodwill matter greatly and helps me at least very much.

2024-09-27 16:54:42 UTC

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Yeah, it has become an attractor where going inside of it can keep you stuck inside of it, thinking that we are not capable of adequately understanding our social relations or our relation to the wider world without trying to ignore what is immediately perceptible.
It might be true that there are hard limits to how much one can control willfully and how much one can perceive or sense at a given time in a given place, but to believe that some realm of being outside of 'the physical' is MORE real than the physical, and that our bodies are somehow less real than that which we cannot perceive leads to a viscious cycle of habitually ignoring one's own sensations, survival needs, and social instincts toward solidarity and social support networks. In general it is already hard enough to accurately perceive the details and changes and patterns of change of what is constituting and what is outside of our bodies... so to believe that there is more truth or reality somehow in whatever we cannot perceive with our senses and can only imagine just further disables us from interacting safely in our environment... this was a topic I wrote about in college a bit--it helped me to term this "the diffrence between the belief that the physical is ontologically primary to the metaphysical vs. the belief that the metaphysical is ontologically primary to the physical" cause that seemed a fair way to describe the distinction.

2024-09-27 16:44:20 UTC

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Good to know-I'll check it out.
Another Way is https://feeds.simplecast.com/oibbcLXn
or the site is https://equalcitizens.us/anotherway/
There was an episode a while back where he interviewed an Icelandic activist that made me so happy to get to hear in large part because of her kickass personality--she was just exactly the kind of self-led, fearless, but friendly and funny person I know is inside of me and gives me strength--so it was excellent for the parasocial contact beyond just the informative stuff about Icelandic democracy reform they discuss. I suggest that one if you want my favorite.
Here is that episode:
https://chtbl.com/track/DE4279/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/937934f6-2a23-41dc-ba20-ec5b30aaead3/episodes/0448c72a-4aba-4af6-ae7f-6249a39a1443/audio/1db95263-9fef-4919-8b7b-edf6c2bba15b/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=oibbcLXn
But then Lessig is also chronicling the ongoing progress of the intitiative he started in Maine that will hopefully help get money out of politics in the US--I mean, that is the longterm movement of course. So that's the content of the more recent episodes

2024-09-27 16:34:55 UTC

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Good to e-meet you. Thank you for joining in! I'm saying so many things in that statement--and none of them clearly enough.
I keep telling myself, "Go ahead and write freely--you are just making a small comment in an informal setting... there is no wrong way to do it... it's OK if it's complex or confusing, because it needs to be short enough to fit into a comment," when in reality, the thoughts or arguments I try to share REQUIRE more formal a structure and more time than a small comment can afford them. If I do not work to make this argument clear and accessible, it will not matter if it could be helpful, because it won't be. I'll do better to put thoughts into formats and words that make them clear so I can enjoy the connection I seek by sharing them.

2024-09-27 16:08:06 UTC

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Thank you for making this point so I know you are not annoyed with my monologuing.
It is hard to find journalism and literature that feels it is speaking to what I think is most important, and so I'm thinking now, "I have free time... I can write... I can record myself speaking and publish it in an RSS feed... I know what I think is important and have done almost too much research to explain it... why don't I just accept that it is time for me to stop searching for the arguments I know make sense and just make them my damn self? Others like me will appreciate there being that content out there for them, just as I would appreciate it if I could find someone else making the arguments I know make sense. No one else is going to do EXACTLY what I want someone to do, especially if I don't do it first."
On that note though in case I haven't shared with you yet, Larry Lessig is someone I've found with supportingly strong arguments I wouldn't have heard or considered without him sharing them, and a plan he's doing work to execute that I wouldn't be able to help him do if he or someone like him hadn't created the foundation for others to join in doing it-and thank the gods he puts out a podcast called Another Way that was really good to find for me.
It's kind of funny-totally irrelevant, but in case you find it funny too-the recordings for some reason capture the littlest sounds of his lips like, opening and closing, and his breath somehow too? a bit? and it makes me feel like I felt when I worked as a nanny sometimes, wanting to clean some applesauce off of a baby's mouth really badly cause he was finished eating, and I just felt there should not be applesauce there, but knowing "it doesn't fucking matter--just ignore the applesauce and play with the baby--your compulsive grooming can wait until you're at home where you can maniacally vacuum your windowsills or some shit. THE APPLESAUCE DOES NOT MATTER. STOP THINKING ABOUT THE APPLESAUCE" and yet every so often still losing connection with the baby because my mind zooms in 100% to the applesauce again... like... it is just this weird auditory applesauce in Another Way that I find really funny to notice myself noticing so much, if that makes sense, but yeah, besides the awkwardness of its ASMR production style, the podcast is great. LOL
Do you listen to podcasts often and if so are there any you really like?

2024-09-27 15:39:27 UTC

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It is so frustrating that the internet and more than sufficient hardware and international communications infrastructure exists but international direct democracy still really does not. How can this still be?! For god's sake, it's time to organize into international citizens' assemblies and insist we make the bright future we might have as a real, functional democracy, if we could stand up and move on from beliefs in a just world stratified into classes of rich vs. poor without fear of immediate suppression by people supposedly working to "maintain" "public safety" - jesus christ.
In a second I will write these essays in a more appropriate context, but--It's STILL human slavery that poor inhabitants of the global south are made to struggle in perpetual debt peonage to the officials of autocratic countries controlling the world by threat of force, despite that the IMF calls its economic colonialism "giving loans" to "developing" nations, as if any institution established to maintain a dictatorship like ours ever had moral or legal legitimacy in the first place.
(Rusty, please tell me to write something with a clearer purpose than satisfying the impulse to keep venting my thoughts and feelings to someone who already understands me online. lol I will try to make myself do what I think makes sense now--but this has felt very good; thank you. ❤️ )

2024-09-27 15:16:11 UTC

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Surely I'm stating the obvious but:
If you believe in metaphysical entities, and still manage to make physical, social peace relations the highest priority, based on a humanist moral that constrains your holistic vision for social organization and political institutions, then there is nothing wrong with there also being that part of you experiencing spiritual transcendence through personal faith in whatever metaphysical world feels real to it. But if you allow yourself to be led primarily by a part of you that believes there are metaphysical reasons to neglect and even destroy the peace relations in physical, social space, then your essentialist construal of reality is getting in the way of the sense perception your body uses and needs to survive. The Calvinist doctrine of original sin and the arbitrary perfection of a patriarchal god and "His" chosen "elect" vs. the damned goes hand in hand with the social Darwinism of capitalist logic and Friedman economics that consider preventable phenomena like homelessness and hunger the necessary evils of a "natural" hierarchy justified by an unquestionably moral, divine universal order. But in material terms, it is merely the tendency for autocracies to exploit potential democracies, and our ability to agree to construe it as such instead of as natural and necessary is how we can establish a basis from which to cooperatively act in the interests of a common good. It is important that we all figure out the narrative that we all share and can trust that we share it and are aware that we share it. There comes a point when the popularity of essentialist ideas becomes dangerous to the survival of our species, and when rejecting it, we have to make clear that this is the first and only relevant reason why we object to its dominance. It is not that a person is just... foolish or bad... for believing things that can't be sensibly perceived by everyone or commonly shared--it is that in order for us to all communicate and support each other's survival and our own, each person, to the extent possible, must also be able to see what CAN be sensibly perceived by everyone and commonly shared, and must understand why it is dangerous to lose sight of that.