From Authoritarian Harm to Clarity of Purpose
Looking Beyond Resistance: What if Our Collective Pain is Pointing to the Better Future Worth Fighting For?
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There’s something quietly extraordinary about these kinds of gatherings. They don’t make headlines, but they move history.
I was in Boston recently for the Profound Autism Summit, a two-day gathering of about a thousand parents and professionals focused on the needs of individuals with profound autism — those who need 24/7, lifetime care.
For decades, disability advocates have met in rooms like this to share information, build networks, and organize for survival. They’ve turned personal struggles due to unsupportive systems into collective power and strategy, resulting in every major disability right or policy we now have: special education, SSI, Medicaid waivers, supported housing, and others.
Gatherings like this are the engine rooms of social movements — where shared hardship becomes fuel, and clarity of purpose turns the rudder.
These families are experienced at navigating relentless, concrete harm — bureaucratic delays, housing instability, Medicaid cuts, staff shortages, existential fear about what happens next. They keep going not because they’re fearless, but because they know exactly what they’re fighting for and they fear what will happen if they stop. The stakes are clear.
What stayed with me is the idea of worry and hardship stemming from systemic harm as a kind of directional signaling tool. And it raised a question I want to explore here:
What if our collective anguish and fear in the face of authoritarian aggression can be used as a strategic compass?
The Authoritarian Harm Complex as Navigation Tool
There’s a phrase that shows up across organizing traditions, trauma recovery, and values-based psychology: you hurt where you care. The idea is simple: pain often points to purpose. Patterns of harm can trace the outlines of our most deeply held values. And, if we’re paying attention, they hint at the better future we want to build.
Resistance is not enough. Naming what we’re against only gets us so far. Sooner or later, we have to get clear about what we’re for.
The Authoritarian Harm Complex, (detailed in the text box) is my term for the layered, cumulative effects of deliberate authoritarian disruption — targeting not just systems, but our sense of meaning, safety, connection, and agency.
The patterns of the Authoritarian Harm Complex can become a directional tool. By tracking how harm accumulates, we begin to see where our core commitments are most under pressure — and what desired future those values are pointing us towards.
What if we used that insight as a source of strategic orientation and guidance?
The profound autism movement offers one example of how people have already turned hardship into strategic direction. What if we could derive that same clarity of purpose from the broader harms being inflicted through authoritarian disruption?
Strategic Values Emerge From the Harm Complex
Strategic values guide us to what matters most in a disorienting landscape. We uncover them by examining the flip side of harm because the places that hurt often point to the commitments we refuse to abandon. This helps us locate ourselves, find clear purpose, and decide what positive future we’re working toward — not just what we’re resisting.
What follows is what I see when I flip the Harm Complex around and ask: What values are revealed by the fact this pattern of harm cuts so deep?
The goal is orientation. Many values relate to more than one type of harm, and some harms target multiple values. For each value, I’ve flagged the harm domains that seem most connected.
1. Steady Care and Long-Term Commitment
The value of staying with what matters — people, responsibilities, and communities that require ongoing care, especially when systems fail.
Harm Complex Connection: Material harm, bureaucratic abandonment, service rationing, institutional neglect (esp. HCBS, Medicaid, housing).
2. Truth You Can Stand On
A commitment to shared reality, honest language, and narrative clarity — because knowing what’s real is a basic condition for making decisions, taking action, and holding power to account.
Harm Complex Connection: Narrative and epistemic harm, disinformation, weaponized ambiguity, gaslighting.
3. Being Seen with Full Dignity
The right to be recognized and respected without explanation or compromise — especially in the face of erasure, scapegoating, or identity-based harm.
Harm Complex Connection: Cultural and symbolic harm, identity-based targeting, exclusion from public space or policy discourse.
4. Trust That Holds Under Pressure
The belief that we can still show up for each other — and that our survival depends on mutual obligation, not individual self-sufficiency.
Harm Complex Connection: Relational harm, isolation, fragmentation of social networks, loss of mutual aid and civic trust.
5. Safety You Don’t Have to Earn
A foundation of physical and structural security, where people can live without constant fear, chaos, or the exhaustion of contingency planning.
Harm Complex Connection: Physical and somatic harm, civic instability, economic precarity, procedural injustice, legal unpredictability.
6. Integrity That Won’t Be Compromised
The inner alignment between what you believe and how you act — even when the cost of that alignment grows heavier under authoritarian pressure.
Harm Complex Connection: Moral harm, vocational harm, internalized authoritarianism, enforced silence in workplaces or communities.
7. Room for All of Us
A deep commitment to inclusive pluralism — the idea that difference isn’t a threat to be managed, but a core strength to be defended.
Harm Complex Connection: Cultural harm, narrative exclusion, performative “diversity,” scapegoating of marginalized identities.
8. Shared Ownership of What We Build Together
The belief that public systems and resources, from health care to housing to infrastructure, belong to all of us, and should be governed for the common good.
Harm Complex Connection: Privatization, erosion of public infrastructure, institutional betrayal, vocational harm in hollowed-out sectors.
9. Memory That Won’t Be Rewritten
A defense of truthful history and collective memory — so that we don’t lose the lessons, lineages, or legacies that connect us.
Harm Complex Connection: Narrative harm, historical distortion, curriculum bans, cultural erasure, symbolic harm.
10. Voice in the Decisions That Shape Our Lives
A commitment to democratic participation and deliberation — not just in theory, but in everyday life where decisions are made and power is held.
Harm Complex Connection: Civic harm, procedural exclusion, voter suppression, institutional illegitimacy, loss of democratic channels.
11. Language We Refuse to Surrender
The refusal to let language be stolen, manipulated, or turned against us — the ability to describe harm clearly and claim truth on our own terms.
Harm Complex Connection: Narrative harm, institutional gaslighting, distortion of language in law, media, and leadership.
12. Relational Power and Resilience
A belief in the strength we generate by standing together in crisis and acting together with purpose. Community is not just a source of care — it’s a form of power.
Harm Complex Connection: Relational harm, bandwidth overload, vigilance fatigue, movement fragmentation, despair, disempowerment.
13. Protecting What Comes Next
A long-view commitment to future generations — refusing collapse, nihilism, or short-termism in the face of overlapping crises.
Harm Complex Connection: Existential harm, despair narratives, climate collapse, anti-education policy, moral disorientation.
14. Rest That Restores Your Humanity
The right to stop, recover, and return to yourself — especially when your ability to act with integrity depends on restoration, not depletion.
Harm Complex Connection: Somatic harm, moral injury, vocational exhaustion, internalized authoritarian work ethic.
15. Vision That Outlives the Crisis
The ability to imagine futures beyond collapse — and to build toward them even when nothing around you rewards that kind of hope.
Harm Complex Connection: Purpose harm, collapse of narrative coherence, existential fatigue, disorientation, movement despair.
These fifteen values don’t describe a movement philosophy that already exists. They point to a future we haven’t yet defined. Much current resistance is built around what we oppose, and rightly so. But if we want to survive this era and shape what comes after, then we also have to start naming what we’re committed to creating.
From Harm to Direction
We began with families at the autism meeting — a movement that has spent decades working to secure care, dignity, and continuity under difficult conditions. And what their example shows us is this: some goals are so essential that you join with others to transform society into something more just and caring.
Because resistance alone isn’t enough. Naming strategic values makes visible the societal changes we’re eager to build. It also gives us language and a framework for real discussion, disagreement, and shared meaning-making.
Strategy begins not with a plan, but with conviction: knowing what you won’t tolerate and what you insist on making real.
Strategic values don't just point the way. They are the soul of strategy.
Epilogue
I’ve been thinking of this set of strategic values as a kind of “strategic humanism” — not a fixed doctrine, but a values-based framework for staying human and building forward under pressure. I’m still testing the name. But the pattern is there. We know what we’re defending. And maybe, just maybe, we’re beginning to name what comes next.
If this post resonates, I’d love to hear what additional values it surfaces for you or what feels missing. This isn’t a finished product. It’s a shared field guide we’re building together.
In future posts, I’ll explore how these values can serve as organizing principles, not just insights—anchoring the kind of strategy that moves beyond defense into durable transformation.
Where This Work Leads
This blog is part of a larger project called Progressive Strategy Now which is more than just my blog’s title. It is my attempt to meet the moment, a growing collection of resources and consultation to help mission-driven people and organizations stay human and stay strategic while navigating moral injury, institutional destruction, and the lived realities of authoritarian harm. If this post gave you words for something you’ve been carrying, you’re in the right place. This is one dispatch in an ongoing series.
Stay human. Stay strategic. Shape tomorrow.
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Strategies for Staying Human in the Face of Authoritarianism
If you’re looking for practices, tools, and deeper reading to help you stay grounded under pressure, this growing list is for you. It includes some of my previous posts and a section for other resources. These are starting points for staying human in hard times.
My Posts
What if staying human is one of the most powerful and most unappreciated forms of resistance? Shaping tomorrow and defeating tyranny takes more than big protest events and macro strategies.
The Harms Are Cumulative. Your Overwhelm Is the Goal. Let’s Get Unstuck
Trump and Musk weaponize chaos to exhaust our capacity for resistance. Recognizing the patterns of harm gives us the framework to protect our humanity and reclaim our strategic power.Befriend Yourself: A Strategy for Staying Whole While They Dismantle Everything That Matters. Trump and Musk want to disappear you into a cell of despair. Kindness to yourself is how you stay human—and begin your escape.
When They Gut Your Mission: Start Here…. You’re still standing. That means you get to choose where to go next.
Blogs I recommend
Invisible Threads. Veteran journalist Kate Woodsome is pioneering coverage at the intersection of democracy and mental health.
The American Pamphleteer. “Because freedom won’t fight for itself—but together, we sure as hell can. Subscribe for bold, unfiltered takes on resisting fascism, building real community, and living with guts in chaotic times.“
Other Resources
ACT for Moral Distress, online course by Dr. Jaimie Lusk. “Navigate moral distress with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a powerful evidence-based treatment that allows us to hold our pain while taking valued actions.”
In Tumultuous Times, Think Like a Hostage. “Guidance given to hostages can foster psychological flexibility in tough times.” Very clever article by Dr. Jaimie Lusk.
Please drop additional suggestions in Comments
My Consulting Services
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Message me to start the conversation.
***From Progressive Strategy Now, a publication of Paul T Shattuck LLC. The views expressed here reflect my personal analysis as a researcher and consultant, and do not represent the positions of any employer, clients, or affiliated organizations.
This is really good.
Your 80 'tiny moves' have been something of a life saver, too, I'd have to think not just for me, but for many. Some first rate resources and blogs here too.
If there's one thing that stands out from all this, it's that people - whatever our background, experience, or particular challenges - do what we have to in order to survive. Sometimes physically, yes, but also in terms of spiritually, emotionally, or merely being able to function.
I know what you mean by experimenting with terms, and we probably think alike in not being interested in one size fits all. A (warrior? fighter? crusader?) for social justice, of the spiritual kind seems to describe where I'm coming from these days, and I did not arrive at this automatically or overnight. Although I certainly agree with the need to be strategically human - as well as spiritual, I'll just add here.
Good thoughts but I think simpler language would appeal to a wider audience. What are the basics that a majority of people, including perhaps the non-wealthy Republicans, can agree on? 1 person, 1 vote? Qualified experienced people should be at the heads of key departments? Education should be free and not dictated by the government? Democracy means we can talk about issues respectfully with people whose ideas differ from ours? We should honor the alliances that have protected us for 80 years? We should have clean air and water? Americans should help those who cannot make it without help? Free to be you and me? Don't cut Social security to give tax cuts to billionaires? Not too many issues at first,not too radical , just to get on a path toward national healing from this trauma. We need to welcome DJT voters who realize they've been had into the tent.