Life cycles

Life cycles depend on the stickiness of an idea to begin with. For instance, even though slavery ended, Jim Crow laws continued. So did redlining and caste systems. Racism didn’t die—just the outright treatment of owning another human. So much focus goes into changing one policy or another. But rarely does policy change the hearts of the people. The tricky part of managing a democracy is that everyone has a voice, even when we don’t agree with them, even when their take is despicable. The shortcut here is to censor. Perhaps a better path is questioning why someone draws these types of conclusions. No one is born racist. You become a racist over time, over many decisions.

Of course, this isn’t just racism. Xenophobia, homophobia, sexism…again, these are all ideas that stick in our culture. Why do ideas like this continue to hang around in 2025? The stories we tell do indeed persist because of the stories we tell. “How things are done around here” truly is a power we can’t negotiate in each individual life.

But not all hope is lost. As I mentioned above, slavery was legal until one day it wasn’t. We got rid of “Us vs. Them” and stopped scapegoating—in other words, we stopped fooling ourselves in what story (often market-related) we were telling and began to tell a better one.