Something’s Gotta Give (Part 2)

In Part 1, I laid out the cause-and-effect tracing why public policy discourse in Georgia (and honestly, across the country) produces the kind of dysfunction we can all point at but nobody seems able to fix. If you haven’t read Part 1, go do that first. I’ll wait. Seriously. This builds on it, and if you skip ahead, you’re going to feel like you walked into the second act of a movie and have no idea why everyone’s upset.

Something’s Gotta Give (Part 1)
Click Here to View the CRT

Good. Now that you’re back, you saw that the tree traced a pile of observable dysfunction — ideologically aligned writers tearing each other apart in public, the same policy question cycling through different actors for decades without resolution, thoughtful people walking away from public life — back to a single root cause:

People accumulate negative life experiences that reinforce a feeling of abandonment and isolation.

Those experiences create emotional patterns. Those patterns drive intuition. That intuition enters the political arena — an arena with almost no barriers to entry, enormous cultural weight, and a zero-sum structure — and produces specific, predictable, traceable dysfunction.

That answered the first question: what’s broken?

Now the harder question: why does it stay broken?

I have a thinking tool for this, too. (I know, I know — “of course it does.” Bear with me. These tools exist because they work, and this one is particularly satisfying.)

It’s called the Evaporating Cloud.

The CRT uses logic that shows “if this, then this….” all the way from the root. The Evaporating Cloud uses logic that shows “in order to have this, I must have this…” That might sound like the same thing, but it’s not, and the difference is where the power lives.

When you say “in order to achieve X, I must do Y,” there’s always an unspoken because underneath it. In other words, you make an assumption. Usually one you’ve never examined because it feels so obviously true that questioning it seems absurd. The purpose of this tool is to surface those assumptions, lay them on the table, and test them. When one of them turns out to be wrong — and at least one always is — the conflict it was holding in place dissolves.

It evaporates. The tool’s name isn’t just clever…

Here’s the cloud I built from the tree. Let me walk you through it piece by piece, because once you see the structure, you’ll start recognizing it everywhere we experience our politics. It even explains last month’s HOA meeting that somehow turned into a blood sport. I mean it: everywhere.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE CLOUD DIAGRAM

The Objective

Public discourse that produces policy outcomes protecting rights and improving quality of life for everyone.

That’s not aspirational. That’s the stated purpose of self-governance. Every political actor — left, right, center — claims this as their goal. I don’t see any disagreement on this from Turner or Shepherd, either. The disagreement is never about whether this is the objective. It’s about how to get there. And more importantly for our purposes, it’s about why we keep failing to get there when everyone claims they want it.

But the objective is not enough. We have guardrails, otherwise we’d just act in ways in which the ends justify the means. Nobody believes in that utilitarian approach, though. We don’t want beatings to continue until morale improves. So, we have two necessary requirements to meet that objective.

The First Requirement: Authentic Participation

In order for public discourse to produce good policy, authentic participation from all groups in society must occur.

This isn’t optional. We live in a pluralistic society. Policy affects different groups differently. If a policy harms Group C and Group C doesn’t stand up and say “hey, this is bad for us,” then there’s no mechanism by which that policy can account for their experience. It’ll be incomplete at best. At worst, it’ll actively damage the people it was supposed to serve.

And I want to be specific about what “authentic” means here. It means people voicing their actual experience and perspective. Not performing allegiance. Not reciting talking points. Not filtering their input through what their group expects them to say. Real experience. Real perspective. Offered genuinely so that policy can account for how it affects real people.

The Second Requirement: Clear Thinking

In order for public discourse to produce good policy, clear thinking must occur — ideas evaluated on their merits, root causes investigated, assumptions questioned regardless of who proposes them.

Also not optional. Without cause-and-effect thinking, policy addresses symptoms. Without evaluating ideas on merit, the discourse produces positional assertions that can’t converge into anything durable. The Current Reality Tree demonstrates in painful detail how this gets eliminated from the current system. But the necessity of it is straightforward: if you’re not thinking clearly about the problem, you’re not going to solve the problem. You’re going to manage symptoms and call it governance.

And here’s the kicker: both requirements must be met simultaneously. You need authentic participation AND clear thinking to meet the objective of good public policy that protects our rights and improves our quality of life.

Authentic participation without clear thinking gives you a room full of genuine but unexamined perspectives that can’t be synthesized into coherent policy. Everyone feels heard. Nothing gets solved.

Clear thinking without authentic participation gives you technically rigorous analysis that’s blind to the lived experience of the people it affects. The spreadsheet looks great. The policy misses the mark.

Now. Here’s where the conflict shows up. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

What Authentic Participation Actually Requires

In order for people to participate authentically — to voice their real experience, including experiences of harm, fear, and vulnerability — they must feel psychologically safe. They must trust that speaking honestly won’t get them abandoned, rejected, or frozen out.

This is not a weakness; this is Tuesday. People who feel unsafe don’t open up. They perform. They say what they think the room wants to hear. They protect themselves. You do it. I do it. We all do it. It’s human.

So what do people do? They build structures that provide that safety. Communities form around shared values. Groups coalesce. People find others who see the world similarly and build relationships within those groups. Standing develops. Belonging takes root. And those structures — the party, the caucus, the faction, the network — become the mechanism through which people feel safe enough to engage in the arena at all.

The action this produces: protect the structures that provide belonging, safety, and security.

What Clear Thinking Actually Requires

In order for clear thinking to happen, people have to practice what I described in Part 1 as diagnostic discipline — an ongoing evaluation of whether you’re blaming rather than investigating, asserting certainty without evidence, hiding behind complexity, or just accepting dysfunction as the cost of doing business.

This requires you to accept being wrong. Evaluating ideas regardless of who proposed them. Following the logic wherever it leads, even when — especially when — it leads somewhere uncomfortable for your team.

The action this produces: practice diagnostic discipline — question everything, including the group’s assumptions, and accept that you and your group might be wrong.

So let’s revisit the full logic of the cloud…

Our objective is for public discourse to produce policy outcomes that protect our rights and improve quality of life for everyone. In order to have that public discourse, we must have people authentically participate in the public discourse in a way that shares experiences in our society. In order to authentically participate, we must build and maintain structures that allow people to safely participate with authenticity. Also in order to have that public discourse, we must think clearly about the outcomes of our policy decisions. In order to think clearly, we must demonstrate diagnostic discipline regardless if it makes us feel comfortable.

…and therein lies the rub. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where you knew the honest answer would cost you your seat at the table, you already know exactly what I’m talking about.

If I protect the structures that provide belonging — maintain allegiance to the group, defend our positions, don’t rock the boat — then I can’t simultaneously practice unrestricted diagnostic discipline. The discipline requires going wherever the logic leads. The protection requires stopping before the logic threatens the structure.

If I practice full diagnostic discipline — question every assumption, including my group’s sacred cows, follow the logic even when it threatens our position — then I destabilize the very structures that make people feel safe enough to participate in the first place. I pull the rug out from under the psychological safety that authentic participation requires.

Both requirements are necessary to achieve the objective. Both actions appear to satisfy their respective requirements. And the two actions can’t coexist. And that conflict, a conflict we just accept as a truism in our pluralistic society, keeps the root cause alive. This is why the accumulation of those negative experiences in our lives find a not-so-healthy outlet in politics and become worse. A structural impossibility at the foundation of how the system operates is why our anger festers to that point where we yell about how wrong other people are.

But here’s the thing about an Evaporating Cloud…

If both requirements are genuinely necessary — and they are — then the conflict can’t be real. A genuine dilemma between two necessary conditions would mean the objective is impossible. And we know it’s not impossible because we’ve seen it achieved.

Georgia’s criminal justice reform in the early 2010s happened because a genuine crisis created conditions where people questioned assumptions, investigated rather than blamed, and allowed authentic participation from people whose experience had been excluded from the conversation. Hell, our own Constitution and each of its amendments are proof of that. Both ways prove the objective can be genuinely met.

So if the conflict isn’t real, at least one of the assumptions holding it in place must be wrong.

Let me show you the assumptions. Every arrow in the cloud has them — unspoken “because” statements that make the necessity feel inevitable.

Why does authentic participation require protecting the belonging structures?

Because people carrying negative experiences need to feel safe to participate. Because the political arena offers belonging faster and more accessibly than almost anything else available — low barriers to entry, cultural validation for showing up, immediate social reinforcement the moment you pick a side. Because if that structure is destabilized, people lose the quickest route to the safety they need. Therefore, protecting the structure is a prerequisite for participation — not just a preference.

Why does clear thinking require diagnostic discipline that threatens the structure?

Because without it, unexamined intuition enters conversation as positional assertion. Because positional assertions can’t be evaluated on merit — they’re expressions of allegiance, not products of investigation. Therefore, clear thinking is impossible without the kind of questioning that includes questioning the group itself.

Why do the two actions seem mutually exclusive?

Because questioning the group threatens your standing. Because threatened standing means potential exclusion. Because for someone whose fastest path to belonging runs through the structure, exclusion doesn’t just sting — it echoes the original experiences of abandonment that brought them to the arena in the first place. Therefore, protecting the structure and practicing unrestricted diagnostic discipline cannot coexist.

Read those again carefully. Because one of those assumptions breaks the cloud wide open.

Go back to the first set — the assumptions about why authentic participation requires protecting the belonging structures. There’s one in there that does almost all the heavy lifting:

The political arena is the only place where belonging is quickly accessible.

Not necessarily the only place belonging exists. But the fastest. The most immediately available. For someone carrying patterns of abandonment and isolation, the arena offers something almost nothing else does: immediate entry, cultural validation, and a ready-made community that tells you where you stand the moment you show up. You don’t have to build relationships slowly. You don’t have to be vulnerable over time. You just pick a side and you belong.

If that assumption is true, the cloud is a genuine dilemma and we’re stuck. If the arena really is the fastest path, and if the alternatives are too slow or too uncertain or too emotionally demanding to compete, then people will always choose protecting the structure because the cost of losing it — abandonment — will always feel more urgent than the benefit of clear thinking — better policy. Game over. “That’s just how politics works.” Accept it and move on.

But is it true?

I can tell you from my own experience: no.

I spent over two decades in the political arena. For a long time, it was where a significant part of my sense of belonging came from. And I won’t pretend it wasn’t fast. I showed up, I picked a side, I had a community. The arena gave me standing, identity, purpose. It was efficient belonging.

When I left — not in some dramatic exit, but through a gradual recognition that the structure had stopped reflecting the values I originally brought to it — I had to find belonging the harder, slower way. Family. Real relationships. Community built on something other than political allegiance.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t efficient. But here’s what happened: once belonging was resolved outside the arena, the arena lost its power over me. I could question freely because my emotional safety wasn’t hostage to the structure. I could follow logic wherever it led because being wrong about a political position no longer felt like being abandoned. I could commit to clarity instead of committing to allegiance, because clarity and belonging were no longer in competition.

The positive experience of genuine belonging outside the arena is the injection that breaks the assumption. The slower path turned out to be the more durable one. And the more durable it became, the less the arena’s speed mattered.

But there’s a deeper layer the cloud reveals, and this is what makes the conflict so stubborn even when the assumption is wrong.

Go back to that first requirement: authentic participation. People must feel safe enough to voice their real experience. The structures in the arena claim to provide that safety. But look at what the Current Reality Tree actually shows about those structures.

The win-protect cycle turns belonging into defense. The transactional architecture makes standing dependent on allegiance rather than honesty. The sorting mechanism systematically removes people whose belonging is grounded elsewhere and retains people whose belonging depends on the structure.

These are not structures designed to support authenticity. These are structures designed to reward the performance of allegiance. They provide a feeling of belonging — you’re accepted, you have standing, you’re part of the team — but only as long as you don’t question the team in ways that threaten its cohesion.

The moment you do — the moment you practice exactly the kind of diagnostic discipline that the second requirement demands — the structure withdraws its protection. Your standing drops. You’re treated as naive at best, disloyal at worst. The belonging was conditional all along, and the condition was: don’t think too clearly.

Which means the structures aren’t actually satisfying the first requirement. They’re providing a simulation of psychological safety that collapses the instant it’s tested by genuine investigation.

Think about that for a moment, because it’s important.

The system convinced its participants that a false path to safety is the best path available. You seek safety in the structure. The structure provides something that looks like safety. But it’s contingent on the very inauthenticity that prevents the objective — good policy for everyone — from being achieved. You’re safe as long as you perform. The moment you’re authentic, you’re out.

The arena doesn’t just offer the fastest path to belonging. It offers the fastest path to the appearance of belonging. And the speed is part of the trap, because it means you discover the conditions too late — after you’ve already built your standing, your identity, your relationships on a foundation that punishes the very honesty the system claims to need.

That’s why the root cause persists.

Not because the conflict is irresolvable. Because the arena offers belonging faster than the alternatives, and by the time you discover that the belonging is conditional on inauthenticity, you’ve already invested too much to walk away easily.

If that assumption holds, we’re stuck forever. Protecting the structure and thinking clearly will always be in conflict, and the system will always choose protection over clarity, because for people carrying patterns of abandonment, safety will always feel more urgent than truth.

If that assumption falls — if people discover, through their own lived experience, that belonging can be found in places that don’t require them to stop thinking clearly — the conflict evaporates. Not because clear thinking stops being uncomfortable. It’s always uncomfortable. (Trust me. It’s my job.) But, the discomfort no longer carries the threat of abandonment. You can be wrong and still belong. You can question and still be safe. You can follow the logic wherever it leads and still go home to people who love you regardless of where it took you.

That’s the setup for Part 3.

The injection isn’t a statutory policy proposal. It isn’t a reform to party bylaws or legislative procedure. Those will definitely follow, but they’re not where the leverage is.

The leverage is at the level of that assumption: the arena is the only place where belonging is quickly accessible.

In Part 3, I’ll lay out what changes when that assumption breaks — what the system looks like when enough people resolve belonging elsewhere and bring diagnostic discipline into public discourse not as a threat to their safety, but as an expression of it. Grounded in the same cause-and-effect logic that built the tree and the cloud.

But as with Part 1, I’m going to ask before I prescribe.

Does the cloud hold?

Is the conflict I’ve described the one you experience when you engage with political discourse — that tension between protecting your place in the group and following your honest assessment of what’s true? Is the assumption I’ve identified — that the arena is the only place belonging is quickly accessible — the one that keeps people in it? Or is there a different assumption underneath, one your experience would surface that mine hasn’t?

The methodology improves with more perspectives. The cloud is open. The assumptions are named. And the question is the same one it’s been since Part 1:

Why does this actually stay broken — and does it have to?