I am a family therapist, and lately I have been wondering whether our culture has begun to resemble a family in chronic distress.
What if Hope Is Contagious too?
Not because we disagree. Families disagree. Democracies disagree. Healthy systems contain tension.
What concerns me is the way we are disagreeing, and what seems to happen to our thinking once we become afraid.
In distressed families, people often become sophisticated analysts of one another. A husband can explain precisely why his wife behaves the way she does. She can provide an equally compelling developmental history explaining him. Parents know what is wrong with the teenager. The teenager has accumulated substantial evidence about the parents.
Here is what makes these systems so difficult: they are often not entirely wrong.
The problem is not inaccurate analysis. The problem is that analysis has stopped serving change.
I have started to wonder whether we are doing culturally what distressed families do relationally.
We have become skilled at analyzing what is wrong, tracing who caused it, identifying who benefited, and accumulating evidence about the people we believe are responsible. Some of this is essential. History matters. Power matters. Injustice matters. Understanding how a problem developed is often necessary to changing it.
But deconstruction has a purpose. Eventually it is supposed to help us find somewhere to intervene.
Without that movement, analysis becomes a sophisticated form of helplessness.
Consider something as tangible as the Colorado River and Lake Powell. We could spend the next decade arguing about who created the problem. Agriculture. Developers. Golf courses. Population growth. Climate change. Federal policy. Western water law. Grass in the desert. States taking more than their share. Decisions made generations ago.
There is useful information inside those arguments. There is also a point at which we have to ask a more frightening question: what are we going to do now?
That question is frightening because blame has an emotional advantage. It locates agency somewhere else. Solutions return some of that responsibility to us.
What Happens to Us Under Threat
There is a reason this pattern feels familiar to a therapist.
Human beings are social mammals. Our nervous systems are sensitive to one another. Fear spreads through groups. So does anger. An anxious family can begin organizing itself around threat even when no single person intends to create that system.
As threat increases, our thinking becomes more protective. Complexity becomes harder to tolerate. Ambiguity feels less comfortable. We become more certain about ourselves and more reductive about other people. We look for evidence that confirms what we already fear.
This makes sense biologically. If something is trying to eat us, a nuanced consideration of its developmental history is not the executive function survival requires.
The problem is what happens when survival-oriented cognition becomes an enduring way of understanding the world.
A distressed couple can enter this loop. One partner becomes frightened and protective. The protective behavior feels threatening to the other partner, who becomes protective in return. That reaction confirms the first partner’s fear. Soon both people are producing the evidence the other needs to justify the behavior that keeps the system distressed.
The feedback loop becomes more powerful than either person.
Our larger systems seem increasingly capable of the same move. And a pattern that lives at the level of a country cannot be treated one person at a time; the intervention has to reach the system that keeps producing the behavior.
Threat leads to vigilance. Vigilance leads to enemy identification. Enemy identification generates more evidence of threat. More threat produces more vigilance.
And because we are social animals, we entrain to the systems around us. We learn what deserves attention, what earns status, what everyone else appears to fear, and the emotional vocabulary of our group.
Eventually we become practiced at a particular way of knowing. Who did this? Who is dangerous? Who can I trust? Which side are you on? What evidence proves what I already believe?
These are not useless questions. Sometimes we need them. They are simply insufficient for solving complex problems.
We Have Become Very Good at Coordinating Contempt
There is something peculiar about the technological moment in which this is happening.
We have built astonishing systems for connecting human desire to commodities. I can decide I want an obscure object, locate it somewhere on Earth, pay for it in seconds and have it appear at my house.
We have also become adept at connecting human anger to other human anger. Our technologies can identify grievance, aggregate it, recommend more of it, sort us into groups around it and provide endless opportunities to demonstrate allegiance to whichever interpretation has captured us.
We are very good at coordinating consumption. We have become very good at coordinating contempt.
What we have not built with comparable seriousness is an architecture that connects the desire to be useful with something useful that needs doing.
I do not believe anger is the only thing capable of becoming contagious.
What If Solution Orientation Is Contagious Too?
“Positivity” can be an irritating word. It can suggest smiling at things that deserve grief, or thinking pleasant thoughts while Lake Powell dries up.
That is not what I mean. I mean something more demanding.
What if agency, collaboration and solution orientation can become socially contagious in the same way that fear and outrage can?
We already know something like this happens in families. Families can become better at fighting. Repetition makes everyone faster at detecting insult, defending themselves, predicting betrayal and retrieving old evidence.
But families can practice something else. They can become better at repair. Better at recognizing activation. Better at curiosity. Better at tolerating uncertainty. Better at remaining differentiated while connected. Better at asking what is happening between us? before deciding what is wrong with you?
Those capacities become easier with repetition too.
This is one of the ideas underneath a system I have been developing called Dialectic and Deconstruction Solutions, or DDS.
DDS begins with deconstruction because understanding causation matters. But the purpose of deconstruction is not to find the person who deserves our contempt. It is to identify the most navigable place to intervene.
Then comes dialectics.
A solution that helps someone usually costs someone something. That fact is easy to avoid when we are advocating for the thing we want.
If preserving the Colorado River requires different water use, somebody is going to lose something. Farmers may have to change irrigation practices. Municipalities may have to constrain development. Homeowners may have to reconsider what kind of landscaping belongs in a desert. Communities may have to change practices around which people have organized their lives.
Someone is going to be pissed off.
That does not necessarily mean the solution is wrong. It means the solution has created the next problem.
This is one of the most important ideas in DDS: every solution creates another problem.
Build desperately needed housing and we may increase traffic, water demand and school enrollment. Build renewable energy infrastructure and somebody may reasonably object to transmission lines crossing a landscape they love. Create a beautiful recreational trail and nearby residents may inherit parking problems, crowds and development pressure.
We often discover the new problem and retreat as though its existence disproves the solution. But there are no interventions without consequences because there are no isolated systems.
The question is not whether a solution creates loss. The question is whether we can see the loss clearly, decide whether it is proportionate, mitigate what can be mitigated, and remain resilient enough to solve the next problem rather than returning to paralysis.
That requires a different kind of humility. It means giving up the fantasy that good solutions are the ones where everybody wins. Sometimes maturity means saying: this is better, and it still hurts someone.
Then we stay. We listen. We adapt. And we keep solving.
From a Method to a Platform
DDS already exists as a methodology. I have been using large language models to run complex problems through it and develop detailed solution blueprints. I built SolveSomething.com as a rough scaffolding to demonstrate the idea and make those blueprints visible.
The distinction is important: the DDS platform I envision does not exist yet. I am a therapist, writer and systems thinker, not a software engineer. What I have built demonstrates that the methodology works. What remains to be built is the technology that could connect the methodology to collective participation.
That is where large language models create a possibility we have not had before. For the first time, we have technology capable of holding and navigating enormous amounts of interconnected human knowledge. The question is whether we can use some of that capacity not merely to answer individual questions, but to connect collective intelligence to collective action.
Imagine that a community wants to build a bike path from Steamboat Springs to Steamboat Lake. Ordinarily the idea quickly becomes one enormous problem: who will build it, and where will tens of millions of dollars come from?
DDS deconstructs the project. There is route planning, parcel mapping, easements, engineering, environmental review, ranch access, bridges, construction, grants, philanthropy, maintenance and public oversight. The bike path is not one problem. It is a network of smaller ones.
Now imagine those components living on a platform. The route has been mapped. Seventeen easements are secured and six remain. A bridge needs engineering. One section qualifies for grant funding. Private capital has been pledged for another. The maintenance endowment is only partially funded. And beside each unresolved component is a simple invitation: I can help.
An engineer offers expertise. A landowner offers an easement. A corporation funds a construction segment and receives transparently negotiated recognition. A university provides research. Government carries the regulatory authority that properly belongs to government. A retired public administrator notices that another community solved an almost identical procurement problem twenty years ago.
Nobody has to solve the whole thing. People need a way to find the part they can carry.
This is why I would love to see an organization with serious technological capacity – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or another group working at the intersection of AI and human collaboration – help develop what I cannot build myself.
Not another social network. Not another petition site. Not another crowdfunding platform. A living map of interconnected problems and solutions.
The Platform Would Have to Survive DDS Too
There is an irony here. DDS creates problems.
A platform designed to democratize problem-solving could become a place where popularity masquerades as expertise. A system connecting private capital to public projects could allow wealthy contributors to acquire inappropriate influence. A platform designed to reduce bureaucracy could become its own bureaucracy. A methodology designed to honor complexity could become so complex that nobody wants to use it.
Good. Those are the next problems.
DDS cannot claim that every solution creates another problem and then exempt itself from the principle.
Who verifies expertise? Who determines which projects belong? Who protects dissent from being dismissed as obstruction? Who prevents a large donor from becoming more politically powerful because they can resolve expensive components? Who decides when the unintended consequences of a solution have become serious enough that the original intervention needs to change?
Those questions do not invalidate DDS. They are why dialectical thinking belongs inside it.
The goal is not a machine that tells us the correct answer. It is an architecture capable of holding more of reality while helping us do something responsible within it.
Solutions Create Solutions Too
There is another side to the fractal nature of problems.
Problems create problems. Solutions create solutions too.
A community that figures out how to build a bike path has not merely acquired a bike path. An engineer has met a public official. A foundation has discovered a nonprofit. A corporation has learned how to contribute without controlling. Residents have practiced disagreement without requiring paralysis. The community has learned something about grants, easements, environmental review, construction and collaboration.
Those relationships and capacities remain after the asphalt dries. The next project does not begin at zero.
Something similar may happen psychologically. Collaboration produces relationships. Relationships can increase trust. Trust can reduce threat. Reduced threat increases cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility makes dialectical thinking easier. Better thinking produces better solutions. Successful solutions increase agency. Agency makes participation more attractive.
That is a feedback loop too. The fractal runs in both directions.
This is why I am interested in solution-building not simply as a civic technology but as a cultural practice.
Human beings adapt to the systems we inhabit. Build an economy organized around consumption and we become skilled consumers. Build technologies that reward outrage and we become skilled producers and distributors of outrage. Build political cultures organized around opposition and we learn to experience citizenship largely through what we are against.
Those may not be immutable features of human nature. They may be practiced capacities.
Collaboration is a capacity. So are curiosity, resilience and hope. So is the experience of looking at something difficult with other people and thinking: we can probably figure this out.
Perhaps that is what feels so barren about much of our current public life. We are constantly recruited into opposition while being offered few meaningful ways to participate in creation.
Human beings need more than enemies. We need consequence. We need belonging. We need some experience that our presence here can be useful.
I do not believe DDS can solve everything. That would violate almost everything DDS is designed to teach. Some problems really are constrained by money, technology, geography or irreconcilable values. Some solutions will fail. Some compromises will prove intolerable. Sometimes the responsible conclusion will be that we do not yet know what to do.
But there is an enormous difference between a problem humanity cannot solve and a problem whose people, knowledge and resources have never been effectively connected.
We have spent a great deal of ingenuity learning how to help one another consume, compete and fight. I would like to see what happens if we become equally sophisticated at helping one another solve.
Because fear is contagious. Anger is contagious. Hopelessness is contagious.
We are social mammals. There is no reason to assume those are the only things that spread.
Hope may be contagious too.
