Co-Disintegration

According to polyvagal theory, human beings are at their healthiest when they are in a ventral vagal state—a state of openness, connection, curiosity, creativity, trust, and the capacity to rest and grow. It is the physiological foundation of cooperation and repair. It is the state from which communities form and futures can be imagined.

Other states exist. In sympathetic activation, the nervous system prepares for threat: fight, flight, vigilance, urgency. In dorsal vagal collapse, the body shuts down under overwhelm: numbness, withdrawal, despair, dissociation. These are not moral failures. They are survival responses.

Healthy societies, like healthy nervous systems, depend on co-regulation—the mutual signaling of safety through fairness, predictability, shared meaning, and belonging. When those signals disappear, something else begins to take shape.

A society that keeps its people chronically activated or shut down cannot remain stable for long. When this activated state is mediated by nameless, faceless state actors, deprived of their own humanity while violating the rights of their fellow Americans, co-regulation becomes impossible.

We are living through a breakdown beyond dysregulation. I have come to think of this moment as co-disintegration.

In complex systems—biological, chemical, ecological, or social—disintegration occurs when a targeted or sustained stressor overwhelms the system’s capacity to regulate itself. At a molecular level, bonds weaken under heat, radiation, or pressure; at an ecological level, keystone disruptions cascade through food webs; in human bodies, chronic stress exhausts adaptive responses and forces shutdown or hyperactivation. Currently, we are weakening under ICE.

What accelerates disintegration is not stress alone, but stress applied unevenly, persistently, and without avenues for repair. Feedback loops break. One cannot find recourse for injustice or abuse. Protective mechanisms fail. The systems of power are tasked with monitoring themselves. Disintegration is not chaos—it follows rules. It is a predictable outcome when regulation is stripped away faster than it can be restored.

When stress becomes ambient—when threat is normalized, when cruelty is excused, when violence is witnessed repeatedly without repair and authority models contempt rather than care —the system doesn’t just strain. It starts to fragment. People don’t merely disagree; they lose the ability to perceive one another as human. Regulation gives way to reactivity. Curiosity collapses into suspicion. Connection is replaced with dominance or withdrawal. Disintegration is the process of breaking down.

How did we get here?

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, many are feeling not so free and very afraid. In a nation that fought a Civil War over human bondage. In a country whose identity rests not on religion or race, but on a Constitution—on the radical claim that all are created equal, and on amendments meant to guarantee liberty in practice, not just in promise.

For all our ideals—never fully realized, but relentlessly articulated—this nation was founded in an effort to escape tyranny. And yet the sickness of domination has never disappeared. We seized this land through domination. We built much of this nation through the domination of human beings. And increasingly, we imagine our future through the domination of technology. That impulse has lived just below the surface, adapting, waiting. Waiting for the right moment. For the right leader. Waiting for enough fear, enough fracture, enough sustained stress to make its return feel justified.

For many Americans, the election of Barack Obama felt like swimming toward the surface—like finally being able to breathe shared air. It suggested the possibility of a broader “we.” But what advocates for inclusion underestimated was the depth of resistance they were pressing against. They were pushing on America’s original sin—supremacy—and it was very much alive.

To be clear: racism, misogyny, and cruelty never disappeared. They were restrained—contained by social norms that made their open expression costly. When this President mocked a disabled person during a campaign, a portal tore through the social fabric. Cruelty became permissible again—not by accident, but by design, under the guise of restoring strength, order, and authenticity. It became acceptable to call people garbage and animals, to act without consent, and to treat civil rights as inconveniences rather than guarantees.

When Americans pushed back against this cruelty—against punching down—the backlash followed a familiar pattern. Empathy was mocked. Inclusion was labeled as excess. Compassion was reframed as weakness. Then a small, misunderstood, and vulnerable group—transgender people—was surgically selected as a socially permissible target. From there, the scale could widen. What begins as sanctioned cruelty toward one group becomes a rehearsal for cruelty toward many.

Perhaps it wasn’t so shocking when they invited you to hate a trans woman in prison. Easy. Laughable. That pre-party of ridicule, humiliation, and manufactured disgust whet the appetite for hating “violent criminal illegal aliens.” Can you hate those people? No problem. But aren’t all non-citizens sort of criminals, if you really think about it?

Fine. Let’s get to the main course.

Can the protest of Black Americans be framed as riots -- a group we frame as menacing when they are simply crossing the street? Yes. Good. What about people who stand with those menaces to society? Why not a liberal grandmother in a purple puffy coat with long white hair? Sure. Any neighbor can be a domestic terrorist if they check the right box. Fuck Around and Find Out, correct?

If they can get you to hold an attitude toward the most marginalized group, your slide to dehumanizing an ever larger piece of the American pie is smoother.

Scholars across disciplines describe this erosion. Sociologist Diane Vaughan called it normalization of deviance: when violations of norms become routine because catastrophe doesn’t arrive immediately. Psychologist Jonathan Shay described moral injury: the damage done when people are forced to witness or participate in actions that violate their conscience, sanctioned by authority. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call it democratic backsliding: when restraint erodes, rules apply unevenly, and institutions stop regulating themselves.

Co-disintegration is not chaos—it is acclimation to our own breaking down. It is our insistence on homogeneity and the denial of diversity, a structure antithetical to biological systems.

Our undoing has always followed the same temptation: domination in service of sameness. We mistake control for strength, homogeneity for order, and preservation of the familiar for survival. And yet this instinct flies in the face of everything we know about life itself. In nature, systems endure not by enforcing uniformity but by cultivating difference. Biodiversity is what allows forests to withstand fire, ecosystems to recover from drought, and bodies to fight disease. Monocultures collapse at the first shock; diverse systems adapt.

Democracies survive when power is dispersed, voices are varied, and no single way of being is mistaken for the only legitimate one. When we attempt to dominate difference—racial, cultural, political, economic, or embodied—we are not defending civilization; we are dismantling its immune system. What we are witnessing now is not strength returning, but fragility accelerating: a system trading resilience for control, diversity for fear, life for the illusion of order.

At the same time we were cozying up to bigotry and cruelty, we have slowly acclimated to the militarization of our police and the steady thinning of our civil rights. State violence on American streets is not new, though the targets of law enforcement brutality are ever-expanding.

Somewhere along the way, pain became insubordination. To say this hurts, to name fear, to ask for dignity or restraint, was to be recast as the problem itself. Questioning authority became the ultimate betrayal—like a spouse who says, you hurt me, and is struck for failing to appreciate the sacrifice of the hand delivering the blow.

Step across the thin blue line, they warned, and you place yourself against an armed monolith—not because you raised a fist, but because you raised your voice.

Each unchallenged moment becomes a signal: this is acceptable now.

The process of co-disintegration continues.

In Rock Island, diverse people share sidewalks, schools, rivers, weather, and futures. Integration here is not an abstraction—it is daily life. Difference is not a threat; it is texture. The absence of diversity does not feel neutral. It feels like a desert—emptied of story and possibility.

For those who have only experienced human difference through hierarchy or forced proximity, it is difficult to imagine diversity as something desired rather than managed. They cannot fathom that preserving America as a place for all people is a worthy goal—or that some nervous systems regulate best in a diverse ecosystem, and that homogeneity can feel unsettling, even dysregulating.

It is not an accident that pressure is being concentrated on places where diverse people share a collective nervous system and a common vision of We the People.

Violence—directly or vicariously—accelerates disintegration. Trauma narrows perception. Fear makes neighbors look like threats. And when authority models cruelty or indifference, the message is unmistakable: you are on your own.

In nature, when a system is pushed beyond its limits, it does not simply vanish—it breaks down and becomes something else. Unstable elements disintegrate, releasing energy and giving rise to a daughter isotope: a new form, often more stable than what came before. Collapse is not the end of the story; it is a transformation.

What emerges carries the memory of what failed, but reorganizes around different bonds, different rules, different thresholds for endurance. The question before us is not whether disintegration is happening—it is what kind of system we will allow to emerge in its wake.

It is not far-fetched to think that Rock Island—a tiny blue dot in a sea of red, home to one of the most diverse high schools in Illinois, home to more immigrants than any of our neighbors—will find itself in the crosshairs of this moment.

When ICE hits our streets, what will emerge? My hope is an organized response: to document this history as it unfolds, to build mutual aid for neighbors who are not safe to leave their homes, to raise our voices against a country where armed, masked, anonymous agents roam public streets, collecting bounties for bodies.

And beyond this moment—when leaders seek to shape a nation by force rather than consent—what comes next must be built on constrained power. Not faith in benevolent leaders, but structures strong enough to restrain human fallibility. Laws that bind those at the top as tightly as those at the margins. Institutions that remember their purpose: not to protect power, but to protect people from it.

What emerges next must be grounded in civic courage, not spectacle. Courage that looks less like dominance and more like presence—the courage to speak when silence would be easier, to intervene early at the level of language, norms, and behavior, before harm metastasizes.

It must restore co-regulation as a civic value. Societies, like nervous systems, cannot thrive on perpetual threat. Safety is not enforced through fear; it is cultivated through fairness, predictability, and belonging. Those we pay to carry guns in our name cannot hide their faces—the very place we look for safety cues—and then blame us for our fear.

This means refusing the lie that domination is strength. Rejecting the false choice between submission and control. Withdrawing consent—from rhetoric that dehumanizes, from systems that extract, from leaders who inflame rather than regulate.

The daughter system we build must prioritize principles over personalities.

The Constitution itself is an act of restraint—an acknowledgment of human fallibility and a commitment to guardrails. A democracy governed through restraint is not weak. It is durable.

We are not waiting for collapse. We are standing inside it.

And still, we get to choose.

Whether we organize around fear or around conscience. Whether we harden or heal. Whether we mirror violence—or refuse to reproduce it.

Disintegration does not guarantee renewal. But it makes renewal possible.

If Rock Island becomes the daughter isotope of this moment—more stable, more humane, more resilient—it will be because we choose restraint over dominance, accountability over silence, and belonging over fear.

That is not weakness.

That is the chemistry of endurance.