On transcendence, abundance, and what happens when people find each other
This is Part Two of a two-part series. If you haven’t read Part One, The King’s Dilemma, you might start there. It sets up everything that follows.
In Part One, we looked at George III and the feudal logic he shared with today’s administration: the idea that authority flows from the top, that hierarchy is divinely ordained, that the people beneath cannot be trusted with their own freedom. We looked at the resentment architects who built that machine, the harvesters who profited from it, and the ordinary exhausted people who got caught inside it.
But I ended with a different question. Not what do we do about the king, but what happens to the people who stop arguing with him altogether?
That’s what this post is about.
RESENTMENT NEEDS A HOST
Here’s something I’ve been unpacking since watching that documentary. Resentment doesn’t generate itself. It needs architects, people who build the machine. But it also needs hosts, ordinary people whose real pain gets captured and amplified until it becomes the only thing they can see.
George III was not the host of colonial resentment. He was its final casualty. The hosts were the people whose exhaustion and grievance got shaped into a consuming fire by the pamphlet writers like Thomas Paine and firebrands who understood that fear is a more reliable fuel than hope. Our modern media is no different.
And the interesting thing is what happened when enough of those hosts found each other outside the machine.
They didn’t defeat it. They outgrew it. They crossed an ocean and in space beyond that crossing they lost the resentment framework entirely, the idea that dignity and abundance flowed from the top down, that there was only so much to go around, that the crown controlled the supply.
The Atlantic Ocean gave them something we rarely talk about: space. Room to imagine differently. Room to ask what they actually wanted, not just what they were permitted to want. Room to find each other instead of competing for the king’s favor.
In that space, resentment lost its host. And something else became possible.
THE MECHANISM THAT KEEPS US SMALL
I’ve been working on a book called Room to be Human, coming later this year, and its central argument is that time poverty is one of the great unacknowledged drivers of our current resentment culture.
When people are exhausted, anxious, and financially precarious, they don’t have the breathing room to ask bigger questions. They don’t have the space to transcend. The manufactured scarcity of modern life, the relentless pressure to earn more, spend more, compete more, isn’t just taking our money. It’s taking our imagination. It’s taking the mental and spiritual space where a different kind of life might become visible.
This is how resentment reproduces itself. Keep people scrambling and they stay dependent on whoever promises to name their enemy and fight on their behalf. The resentment architects need your scarcity to keep you as a host. The moment you experience enough abundance, enough space, enough breathing room, you start to see through it.
The colonists didn’t transcend George III because they won an argument. They transcended him because they found enough space to want something bigger than his approval.
A LECTURE THAT STOPPED ME IN MY TRACKS
Last week David Brooks delivered a lecture at Yale that I think you need to watch. The whole thing. It’s an hour and worth every minute.
Brooks traces a cultural arc from the moral realism of the 1940s, through liberation, through backlash, and into what he calls the decade of resentment. But he doesn’t stop at the diagnosis. He argues that people are beginning to turn back toward what he calls a humanistic core. Theology. Literature. Philosophy. The great conversation about what it means to flourish as a human being. This has been my own recent experience, and sharing it is why I write.
He calls it moral formation. And like me, he believes it’s already beginning.
What struck me is that Brooks is describing exactly the kind of shift that requires space to happen. You cannot form morally when you are drowning. You cannot turn toward humanism when you are too exhausted and resentful to see the person next to you clearly as a human. The shift he’s describing isn’t just intellectual. It’s what happens when people finally get enough room to breathe. Room to be Human.
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/0YRTSA9q-6M?si=Wlfc_rEnJSJU6JSW
THE NO-KINGS SPARK
I’ve been watching the No-Kings movement with new eyes since putting all of this together.
What if it isn’t primarily a political movement? What if it’s a transcendence movement? Or what if it could be?
Think about what it means to say No Kings at a deep level. It isn’t just a rejection of a person or a policy. It’s a rejection of the entire feudal framework, the logic that says abundance flows from the top, that your worth is determined by your proximity to power, that scarcity is natural and hierarchy is divine.
When enough people say that simultaneously, something shifts. Not because they’ve won an argument but because they’ve chosen higher ground together. They’ve turned toward each other instead of toward the architects of their resentment. And in that turning, just as it was for the colonists, something new becomes possible.
Brooks traces the last great moral formation back to the 1940s. I wonder if we are at another founding moment. A new crossing, not across an ocean, but away from the resentment framework itself, toward the humanistic core he’s describing, toward each other.
George III and Trump share the same fate in this reading. They are the baggage people leave on the shore when they finally decide to cross.
WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
This isn’t abstract. Here’s where I’d invite you to start.
Watch the Brooks lecture. Let his arc from resentment to humanism sit with you. Notice where you feel it resonating in your own life.
Attend the rallies if you feel called, but go as an act of moral formation rather than opposition. Go to choose higher ground, not to fight over lower ground.
Reflect on where resentment lives in you. It finds hosts on the left and the right. The question isn’t whether you’ve been touched by it. The question is whether you have enough space to let it go.
And protect that space fiercely. Your time, your rest, your relationships, your imagination: these are not luxuries. They are the conditions under which transcendence becomes possible. They are your Atlantic Ocean.
Room to be Human, coming later this year, is my attempt to make that argument in full. It’s about time poverty, yes, but underneath that, it’s about what becomes available to us when we stop letting manufactured scarcity keep us small.
The colonists found each other across an ocean. They built something that changed the world.
We’re closer to that moment than the noise would have you believe.
The baggage stays on the shore.
If this resonated with you, I think you’ll find my forthcoming book, Room to Be Human, genuinely useful. Follow along here and keep an eye out for it later this year. In the meantime, my previous book, Better Places, traces my own journey — from a resentment-driven scarcity thinker to someone learning to harvest abundance and compassion instead.
