It started with me being smug, which is usually how my better thoughts begin before eventually humbling me.
I was chuckling at free market capitalists arguing that Chinese electric vehicles should be kept out of the U.S. through tariffs. The whole thing felt like ideological slapstick. The sacred market must decide all things—unless, of course, the market decides Americans might buy cheaper cars from China. Then suddenly the invisible hand needs a border patrol agent and a clipboard.
At first, I enjoyed the easy contradiction. Free markets for thee, protectionism for me. But like most cheap laughs, it started leaking into something more serious. The joke wasn’t just hypocrisy. It was a crack in the costume.
We talk about free markets, but we bail out corporations. We celebrate competition, but shield incumbents. We praise efficiency, then dictate where production should happen. At some point, it stops looking like a system of principles and starts looking like a system of preservation.
This is where my brain, ever subtle and well-adjusted, leapt immediately to: capitalism is the engine of suffering and everyone is pretending the machine is a birthday cake.
And I still mostly believe the machine is bad. Capitalism rewards accumulation, and accumulation creates asymmetry. Once asymmetry exists, those with power shape the rules to preserve it. Run the simulation a million times and I suspect we end up in some version of this same grotesque carnival: profits privatized, losses socialized, billionaires weeping into tax shelters while the rest of us are told to tighten our belts for freedom.
But the useful realization was that I was not only angry at capitalism. I was angry at any system that allows power to accumulate, then protects that accumulation from failure. A system like that stops evolving. It becomes self-sealing. It absorbs crises, monetizes dissent, brands alternatives as childish, and whispers that there could never be anything better.
That’s the suffocating part. Not that the system is flawed, but that it behaves as if it is final.
And then comes the small, ridiculous question: what exactly am I supposed to do about it? I am not a politician. I am not a billionaire. I do not have a secret policy lever hidden behind the canned beans. My sphere of influence is basically my family, my writing, my paintings, and whatever strange bird-snake mythology is currently emerging from my garage.
For a moment, the answer felt like withdrawal. Don’t participate. Don’t feed the machine. Step outside the culture of consumption wherever possible. Refuse the loop of identity, desire, purchase, reinforcement. That still feels important. The system gets thinner when I stop letting it sell me a self.
But withdrawal alone is not creation. It makes space, but it does not necessarily transmit anything.
The shift came when I realized I was looking for power in the wrong place. I was looking downstream: money, policy, institutions. But upstream of all of that is meaning. Systems do not run on capital alone. They run on stories: what we call normal, what we call success, what we believe is possible, what we quietly agree not to imagine.
That layer is not owned entirely by politicians or corporations. It is shaped by art, language, symbols, jokes, essays, paintings, and the small weird transmissions people send into the world when they refuse to speak only in approved scripts.
So no, I cannot rewrite trade policy. But I can create. I can write something that makes a person pause. I can paint something that feels strange enough to loosen a bolt. I can make mirrors—warped, funny, uncomfortable mirrors—and hold them up to the machinery.
That may not feel like power if power only means domination. But maybe that is the trap. Maybe I have been measuring power by the system’s own preferred metrics.
Change starts at home, sure. But not in the bland refrigerator-magnet way. It starts at home because the home is where perception is trained. It starts in what we consume, what we refuse, what we make, what we laugh at, what we teach our children to notice, and what kinds of beauty we smuggle into the ruins.
So my little chuckle about Chinese EV tariffs turned into something else. It became a reminder that contradiction is often a doorway. When the ideology slips, the structure shows. And when the structure shows, the question is not only “How do we tear it down?” Sometimes the question is: “Where is it thin enough to push?”
I am not outside the system. None of us are.
But I can still make something that distorts it just enough for someone else to see the seams.