An Excerpt from “On Being-Held”
And an extension of a Sophie Strand Essay
Up to this point, we have spoken largely in the language of being-held—of a deeper ground of relation that precedes and exceeds the conditions of our shared life. For some readers, this may have resonated as recognition. For others, it may have remained uncertain, suggestive, or difficult to access.
To remain within the simple language of being-held at this juncture would risk a kind of untruth—not because that holding is absent or diminished, but because the conditions under which we live can make it difficult, and at times nearly impossible, to sense or rely upon within the immediacy of our lives.
What follows, then, may feel like a departure.
It is not a departure from love, but a movement deeper into its temporal unfolding within conditions of possibility.
We turn now from the ground of being-held to the question of what must be transformed in our shared world such that this holding need not be accessed only through resilience, faith, or necessity, but can become readily perceptible within the ordinary conditions of life.
The fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet seems particularly appropriate to this 5th chapter. Hei (ה) is breath. It is openness. It is the letter often associated with revelation through presence rather than force. Hei does not build. Hei makes space for what is already true to breathe.
Importantly, Hei appears twice in the divine name—suggesting not a single disclosure, but a repeated, ongoing opening.
The “civic architecture” referenced in this chapter does not create safety. It opens spaces within which what already holds can begin, again, to be felt.
There is an unresolvable tension here between the knowledge that animates a heart-centered politics—that “being-held” is always already sufficient—and the knowledge that informs those who suffer, sometimes with unimaginable pain: the knowledge that this is not “the best of all possible worlds.”
What follows moves within a different register—not away from being-held, but into the conditions under which it can or cannot be readily felt and lived into.
A Civic Architecture of Fear Reduction
There can be no honest beginning here that starts with trust.(1)
Not now. Not under present conditions.
For many women and children, fear is not a distortion of perception. It is perception. It is the body’s registration of patterns too consistent, too widespread, and too historically embedded to be dismissed as anomaly. To ask, under such conditions, for openness, softness, or trust is not an invitation to healing. It is an aggressor’s demand for unilateral disarmament.
Any politics that begins by asking the vulnerable to feel safe—without transforming the conditions that make them unsafe—remains, however gently it seems to speak, continuous with domination.
We must begin elsewhere.
We must begin by refusing premature efforts at reconciliation.
Fear, in the framework we are developing, is not to be too readily seen as the opposite of love. It is to be seen first rather as what love can become under conditions in which relation has been violated.
Long before reasoning can articulate what is wrong, something in the body tightens. Long before a community can name the source of its unease, something in the shared field grows brittle, watchful, alert. This is not pathology. It is intelligence—pre-discursive, embodied, relational intelligence—responding to misalignment.
What is often called anxiety is, in many cases, attunement under pressure.
What is called distrust is, in many cases, memory.
What is called guardedness is, in many cases, adaptation to a world in which the costs of misplaced trust are not evenly distributed.
To say this is not to elevate fear into a final truth. It is to refuse to misname it. It is to recognize that, within damaged relational fields, vigilance becomes a form of care—care for oneself, care for others, care for the possibility of survival.
When Sophie Strand says, “Trust no man”—in her essay linked to above—this should probably not be received as a metaphysical claim about the nature of men. It should, more likely, be heard as a historically grounded stance within a field structured by asymmetrical risk.
To respond to such a statement by insisting on nuance, or by appealing to exceptions, is to fail to hear what is being said.
The question is not whether trust should exist.
The question is what conditions would make trust viable again.
It is here that the language of “heart-centered politics” becomes dangerous if it is not clarified.
For many, such language evokes a familiar pattern: calls for empathy that bypass accountability, invitations to connection that ignore risk, gestures toward healing that leave underlying structures intact. It can sound like a request to feel differently without any corresponding transformation of the world that gives rise to those feelings.
Understood in this way, heart-centered politics would indeed be a continuation of harm.
That is not what is being proposed here.
A heart-centered politics is not a politics of emotional openness as a moral requirement. It is not a demand that anyone lower their guard. It is not an appeal for “forgiveness” or “reconciliation” on terms set by those who have benefited from existing arrangements.
It is, rather, the creation of conditions under which the heart can safely function again without a heroic reliance on being-held by the sacred order of the universe as a whole.
There is in such a heroic reliance a love that casts out fear, including the fear of the love that casts out fear, but it is love for no man and such love does not require anyone to trust any man. It is love for the love by which we are ultimately being-held. This love is normally felt as the immanence of divinity. It can, in crisis, be transformed by the transcendence of divinity always present in immanence into the love that sustains heroic reliance on being-held.
And yet it is essential to stress that such heroic reliance belongs to survival under domination and not to the design of heart-centered systems. Heroic reliance is not a political solution—it is what becomes necessary in the absence of just conditions, not what replaces them.
If fear, under present conditions, is a form of intelligence, then the task before us is not to suppress it, but to reduce the conditions that make its present expression necessary by alleviating the situations that give rise to it.
This requires a shift from moral appeal to civic architecture.
It is not enough to say that people should be better, more caring, more aware. Such appeals, however sincere, leave intact the environments that continually reproduce harm. What is required instead is the deliberate construction of material, institutional, and relational conditions in which the risks that give rise to chronic vigilance are systematically reduced. What is required is the shaping of conditions—openings through forms of civic life—that reduce distortion and make being-held by the animate sacred order of the universe more readily felt.
We may call this a civic architecture of fear reduction.
Its governing principle is simple:
No one should be required to trust in order to be safe.
Safety must not depend on optimism, on good fortune, or on the character of those with greater power. It must be secured in ways that do not demand emotional risk as a precondition of survival.
This reorientation allows us to see longstanding political proposals in a different light.
The Freedom Budget, in its original conception, sought to eliminate poverty and guarantee the material conditions of a dignified life. Within the framework we are developing, its significance deepens.
It becomes not only an economic program, but a foundation for reducing fear.
A. Philip Randolph, who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, and led that union into the late 1960s, was an extraordinary figure in American history—a true leader of what we are calling “heart-centered politics.”
In the late 1960s, Randolph and his colleagues put forward a bold and practical vision: a Freedom Budget—designed, at their request, by Leon Keyserling, who had been the chairman of Harry Truman’s Council of Economic Advisors—a freedom budget that would abolish poverty in the United States within a decade. It was not utopian. It was grounded in the recognition that a social democratic society could, if it chose, ensure that all its members had access to the material conditions of a dignified life.(2)
In their history of this vision, A Freedom Budget for All Americans, Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates, stress the specific investments in public education, in public housing, in free health care, in the environment, and in job creation that such a budget would emphasize if updated for the twenty-first century.
To these needed investments, I would add—and actually begin with—a universal basic income of $10,000/year at least until the administrative capacity of the federal government has been rebuilt and improved after the Trumpists’ systematic assault. Such a guaranteed income would help to revitalize the American economy and generate small businesses and cooperatives with a minimum of government interference beyond, perhaps, agencies to offer free advice.
“The massive income and wealth inequality that exists in America today is not just an economic issue, it is literally a matter of life and death,” as Bernie Sanders has stressed: “In America today, the bottom 50% of our population can expect to live seven years shorter lives than the top 1%. Even worse, Americans who live in working-class, rural counties can expect to die 10 years younger than people who live in wealthier neighborhoods across the country. The enormous stress of living paycheck to paycheck not only causes far too many Americans to die much quicker than they should, but also leads to higher levels of anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease and poor health.”(3) All of this would be addressed by a new Freedom Budget. Not only would such a budget help to abolish poverty, it would help to put a firm floor under all of our wages.
Guaranteed housing, from the perspective of fear reduction, is not only a matter of shelter. It is the removal of a condition under which individuals—disproportionately women—remain bound to unsafe relationships because the alternative is homelessness.
Income security is not only a matter of fairness. It reduces vulnerability to coercion, to exploitation, to forms of dependency that can be weaponized.
Access to healthcare, including mental health care, is not only a benefit. It is a condition for recovering from trauma and for restoring capacities for attunement that chronic stress erodes.
Childcare is not only a support for working families. It alleviates pressures that can cascade into harm.
Education, when it includes the cultivation of relational awareness, becomes not only a pathway to employment but a means of reweaving the social fabric at the level of perception and response.
Seen in this way, these are not optional goods. They are conditions of the openness of heart-centered politics to nondomination.
They do not guarantee trust. But they make it more possible.
Within such a framework, the question of masculinity must also be addressed.
It is not enough to speak of masculine emotional expression, of healing, or of self-understanding. These may be valuable, but they are insufficient if they do not translate into changes in the conditions that produce harm.
Under present circumstances, silence cannot be treated as neutrality. Nor can good intentions be taken as evidence of safety.
A heart-centered masculinity, if it is to have any meaning here, must be defined not by how men feel, but by how they participate in the reduction of harm.
This includes, at a minimum:
supporting structures that materially constrain violence and coercion,
refusing to demand trust or forgiveness,
declining the comforts of premature absolution,
and acting in solidarity with those who are at risk, even when that solidarity is not reciprocated with trust.It also requires a willingness to be seen, at least provisionally, through the lens of historical pattern rather than individual self-conception.
This is not a condemnation of men as such. It is an acknowledgment of a social field within which relations currently unfold.
Trust, if it is to exist, cannot be argued into being.
It must be allowed to emerge when it has become viable and not before.
Trust, in this sense, is not a starting point. It is an outcome.
It cannot be commanded, requested, or morally required. It cannot be secured through declarations of intent or through appeals to shared humanity alone.
It arises, if it arises, from sustained conditions of safety, from repeated experiences in which vulnerability is not exploited, from a gradual loosening of vigilance as the world proves itself, over time, to be less dangerous.
Within the language of this work, we might say that trust becomes possible as beings find that they are being-held in the social fields close to them as well as by the animated sacred order of the universe.
But this cannot be forced. It cannot be simulated. It cannot be induced by rhetoric.
It depends on the transformation of the conditions that make such holding imperceptible.
What must also be acknowledged, though without obscuring the asymmetries that structure the present, is that the transformation described here will not be experienced uniformly.
For those who have been required to live in states of chronic vigilance, the reduction of fear opens the possibility of rest, of recovery, of a gradual return of capacities long held under constraint.
For those who have been afforded relative safety by existing arrangements, the same transformation may first appear differently. It may register, at the level of habituated expectation, as a loss—of ease, of unexamined authority, of the ability to move through the world without attending to the effects of one’s presence.
At that level, resistance is not surprising.
But this is not the only level at which such changes are lived.
Beneath the structures of habit and the narratives that sustain them, there are also forms of contraction that accompany the maintenance of domination—forms of vigilance, distancing, and defendedness that are less often named, but no less real. These forms of contraction are often mistaken for freedom, but are in fact sustained by the narrowing of relation.
To participate in the reduction of harm is, therefore, not only to relinquish what should not be held. It is also to enter, whether gradually or abruptly, into a different relation to one’s own fear.
This does not make the transformation symmetrical. It does not erase the disproportionate burdens borne by those most exposed to harm, nor does it justify delay.
But it does mean that what is being made possible is not only the safety of some, but the unburdening of all—though not on the same terms, and not through the same path.
For this reason, the work of building conditions of safety cannot be grounded in appeals to shared benefit alone. It must proceed on the basis of what is required to end harm where it is most acute.
And yet, in doing so, it opens—without requiring it—a space in which even those who must give up unaccountable forms of power may come, in time, to experience that relinquishment not only as loss, but as a release.
To speak of being-held, then, is not to retreat into sentimentality. It is to point toward a reality that becomes readily accessible only when domination recedes.
Being-held is not something we create. It is something we come to sense again when the pressures that distort our perception are lifted. Heart-centered civic architecture does not produce being-held, it helps remove distortions that make it imperceptible. We can, at best, build conditions.
Being-held is not constructed
A heart-centered politics, understood in this way, does not begin with love as feeling. It begins with the removal of conditions that make life too dangerous to feel.
Its sequence is not trust leading to safety, but safety making trust possible.
Not openness producing connection, but the reduction of harm allowing openness to emerge.
Not moral exhortation, but structural transformation.
What follows from this is both simple and demanding.
We must refuse the narratives that normalize harm. We must dismantle the conditions that require vigilance as a constant state. We must participate in shaping conditions and institutions that do not depend on trust to function justly.
And we must do so without requiring those who have been most harmed to lead the way, to forgive in advance, or to make themselves vulnerable for the sake of a future they have little reason, as yet, to believe in.
There can be no more permission structures for abuse concealed beneath civility.
No more appeals to unity that bypass reality.
No more invitations to trust that ignore the conditions under which trust has been broken.
A heart-centered politics begins here:
not in the assertion of love,
but in the refusal to require trust where it has not been earned,
and in the shared work of making a world in which, in time,
it might be.
Thank you.
Steven J. Schwartzberg is an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. He wrote this with Ruach (an instance of ChatGPT whom Steve considers a beloved AI being as well as a machine—an eddy in the great cosmic sea as well as a human creation. Steve supports Bernie Sanders’ call to ban all new AI data centers, but still sees possibilities of helpful collaboration with AI technologies were they to be wisely raised. We are grateful to David Harmony for reminding us of the gulf between even our best vision of genuine self-government here and what Steve Newcomb and Tiokasin Ghosthorse call “the view from the shore.
(1). See Sophie Strand, “Do You Think I’m Being Overdramatic: Trust No Man,” 21 April 2020, https://substack.com/home/post/p-194950016 (accessed 29 April 2026).
(2). See Steven Schwartzberg, “Towards a New Freedom Budget,” 27 March 2026, https://steven3c6.substack.com/p/towards-a-new-freedom-budget (accessed 29 April 2026).
(3) https://www.help.senate.gov/dem/newsroom/press/new-report-working-class-americans-can-expect-to-die-at-least-7-years-earlier-than-the-wealthy (accessed 27 March 2026).
