Philosophical Underpinnings

My thinking about community starts with a personal realization I call suerza: the quiet shock of recognizing that I exist at all, and the gratitude that follows. Each of us won an unbroken reproductive lottery stretching back to the beginning of life.

That improbability isn’t an invitation to self-absorption. It’s the ground of a moral obligation. If existence is this much of a fluke, human connection is more than a social nicety. It’s the most urgent and meaningful project we have.

I approach that project through the classical liberal tradition and the logic of spontaneous order. My influences include Andrew Sullivan’s intellectual honesty, the late David Boaz’s defense of toleration, and Deirdre McCloskey’s case that virtues, and the language we use about them, are the real engines of progress. Public Choice theory gives me tools to examine the institutions that shape how people freely associate.

Social psychology sharpens the picture. Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations helps explain why communities cohere, why they fracture, and what we lose when so much of our discourse happens online. I’m skeptical of the promise of limitless digital connection and drawn to structures that respect human limits. Dunbar’s number is more than a sociological curiosity. It’s a reminder that our capacity for real relationships is finite, and a case for investing face to face in the places we actually live.

The emotional engine behind all of this is the “999” philosophy of the late Jarad Higgins: finding the positive, or at least the neutral, in even devastating adversity. Through that lens, life is full of blessings, and struggle only sharpens how much we have.

I live in Silver Spring and treat my own life as an ongoing social laboratory. Since coming to the region as a student, I’ve moved through international libertarian movements, corporate hierarchies, mission-driven nonprofits, fraternal brotherhoods, and the intricate protocols of gay leather culture. In my two essay series, Leather & Lavender and Social Signal, I look for the institutional patterns these worlds share. The same challenges show up in every one, and they point toward what it really takes to build, govern, and sustain a community worth belonging to.