This Moment
On Learning, Late, to Pay Attention
Friends,
There is something in the air. Most of us feel it, even those who have not yet found the words for it. It is not the ordinary discomfort of political disagreement, the kind that has always been part of democratic life and that a healthy republic can absorb without lasting damage. This is something different, something heavier, more unsettling, and, if we are being honest with ourselves, more frightening. It is the awareness of something large and essential shift beneath our feet, the way a traveler on firm ground suddenly becomes aware that the earth itself is moving.
I want to try, in this space, to describe what I believe that something is. I want to do so not with partisan fury, because there is already more than enough of that. I want to approach it instead with the kind of steady, clear-eyed attention that the moment demands, and with the help of some of the deepest thinking our civilization has produced. What we are living through is not merely a political crisis. It is a philosophical and spiritual one as well, and I think it can only be understood clearly if we are willing to look at it through both lenses at once.
I digress briefly, to say something by way of preamble, about where that perspective comes from for me, because I think it matters. My professional life was spent at the overlapping pursuit of public service as civic obligation, public finance, and academic study. But that life ended in 2000, and what came after has shaped everything I now believe about the world and our place in it. I passed through a long and difficult period: years of depression, of being, I now understand, severely over-medicated by well-meaning psychiatrists, and then years of self-medicating by drinking too heavily until, by my own honest reckoning, I had become an alcoholic. It was my brother Mark, together with my four children, who gently gathered the courage to redirect me toward help. I spent seven weeks at a private rehabilitation facility, not just a twelve-step program, but one that offered something more suited to where I was. A psychologist there conducted three sessions of EMDR therapy with me, each lasting sixty minutes. What I can tell you about those sessions is not what I said during them, because I do not know. I was not narrating my experience from the outside. I was living inside it, moving through memory without the conscious distance that would have allowed me to place what I was feeling in any larger frame or context. The words, whatever they were, emerged without my directing them. Only the psychologist, holding the full view from where she sat, had the ability to understand what was unfolding. That is why, when she told me at the close of the third session, stepping outside the usual protocol between therapist and patient, that working with me had been a blessing to her, I had no contextual basis for understanding what she meant. I received her words, but I could not yet see what she had seen. I was discharged a few days later. My life had changed. I realized the extent to which it had changed only by living it every next day. By experiencing it differently.
That was 2011. In the fifteen years since, I have spent several hours of nearly every day reading theology and philosophy. Not to find a religion, but to find what is true. What emerged from that reading, and from living alongside it, is something I would describe this way: I no longer carry a sense of the Christianity I was raised with, or of any institutional religion, as an organizing framework. What I carry instead is an awareness of the world and the universe that runs closer, I believe, to what Albert Einstein meant when he used the word God, than to anything a formal creed has ever offered me. It is a sense of relationship with the world I move through, with the people and things I encounter, and with whatever mysterious order underlies the whole of what is. I have tried, over these fifteen years, to convey that sense to my four children not through argument but simply by living it. That is the vantage point from which I write.
The facts of this moment are remarkable, and they deserve to be stated plainly. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, nearly one quarter of the world’s nations are currently undergoing democratic backsliding, what scholars call autocratization.1 What is new and alarming about this wave is where it is centered. Six of the ten countries newly identified as moving toward autocracy are in Europe and North America, among them Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.1 These are not fragile, newly minted democracies. These are the countries that, for better or worse, wrote the playbook on constitutional governance.
Within the span of a single year, the United States’ score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index declined by twenty-four percent, dropping the nation’s world ranking from twentieth to fifty-first among the one hundred seventy-nine nations measured.1 The V-Dem report notes that the United States has lost its classification as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than five decades. The rapidity and severity of that decline, the report concludes, is without precedent in the modern study of democratic backsliding.1
Freedom House, which has tracked political rights and civil liberties around the world since 1973, reports that global freedom declined for the twentieth consecutive year in 2025.2 Fifty-four countries experienced deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties during that year, while only thirty-five registered any improvement.2 Freedom House identified the United States as one of the free nations that experienced among the steepest declines. The indicators that fell most sharply were those pertaining to media freedom, freedom of personal expression, and due process, and those declines were registered not only in autocracies but in democracies as well.3
Here at home, the formal institutions of legal scholarship and the organized bar have responded with unusual directness. The New York City Bar Association issued a comprehensive report in December 2025 concluding that the President and his administration have engaged in what it called “an ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust,” documenting specific patterns of executive conduct falling into six constitutional categories, from the abuse of command authority to the personal enrichment of the presidency.4 A follow-on report issued in March 2026 went further, arguing that what had been episodic had become structural, and calling on Congress to act immediately.5 The Brennan Center for Justice has documented in parallel the systematic subordination of independent regulatory agencies to White House control, a project carried out through executive orders requiring those agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, to submit their work for presidential review and to align their policies and priorities with the White House.6
The public has not been passive. On March 28, 2026, organizers estimated that eight to nine million Americans participated in “No Kings” demonstrations across more than 3,300 sites in every state of the union, making it the largest single-day protest in the recorded history of this republic.7 These were not fringe gatherings. They drew participants from cities and small towns alike, from both parties’ traditional constituencies, and from countries abroad. They were a people telling their government, with their feet and their voices, that something fundamental is being violated.
I have been reading an essay about Albert Einstein’s understanding of God, or more precisely, about what Einstein meant when he used that word, because he used it in a way that most people do not expect and that the conventional religious traditions do not easily accommodate.8
Einstein rejected the personal God with clarity and without apology. “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation,” he wrote, “whose purposes are modeled after our own, a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.” 8 And yet Einstein was no atheist. He found the militant atheist as intellectually arrogant as the fundamentalist, dismissing both as people who had mistaken certainty for wisdom, people who had adopted a conclusion to relieve anxiety rather than following inquiry wherever it led.8
What Einstein believed in, reverently, deeply, and with the full weight of a mind that had spent a lifetime trying to decode the architecture of the cosmos, was the mysterious order of the universe itself. He described it as “the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”8 He described the human condition with this image: “We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”8
I find this image profoundly relevant to this moment. There is a force at work in this universe. It does not issue press releases or hold rallies. It does not wave a flag. But it is a force that, I believe, bends, however slowly, however imperfectly, toward order, toward meaning, toward what is good. Einstein felt it in the laws of physics. I feel it in the persistent, unkillable human impulse to resist what is false and to reach for what is true. The evidence of that impulse is precisely what we are witnessing in the streets.
Here is where I want to bring in the thinker who has shaped my own philosophy more than almost any other. Martin Buber was a twentieth-century philosopher and theologian whose masterwork, I and Thou, first published in 1923, remains one of the most searching accounts of what it means to be a human being in genuine relation to other human beings and to the world.9
Buber’s central insight is this: there are two fundamentally different ways that a person can engage with the world. In what he calls the I-It mode, we relate to others, to people, to institutions, to nature itself, as objects. Things to be categorized, used, managed, processed, or discarded. 9 The other person, in the I-It mode, is not truly a person at all. They are a function, a demographic, a case number, a file. The I-It mode is not, Buber acknowledges, entirely avoidable. There are moments in any organized society where the transactional, the administrative, the instrumental is simply necessary. But he warns with great force that a world governed entirely by the I-It relationship becomes dehumanized, deadened, and ultimately incapable of the kind of authentic community on which any civilization worthy of the name must rest.9
The alternative is what Buber calls the I-Thou encounter. In this mode, I meet you not as a category or a function, but as a whole being, irreducible, unique, carrying a depth of inner life that I can never fully comprehend but that I am obligated to honor.9 The I-Thou encounter is, in Buber’s description, a sacred space. It is mutual. It requires presence, not performance. It acknowledges that the other person’s reality is as real and as weighty as my own. And it is through these encounters, through the genuine meeting of one whole human being with another, that we touch what Buber calls the Eternal Thou, the presence of something larger than ourselves in human life.9
Now look at what we are living through, and ask yourself: which of these two modes best describes the governing philosophy of this moment?
When a human being is stripped from their home in a pre-dawn raid, separated from their children, and processed through a detention system as though they were inventory to be sorted, that is the I-It relation in its most brutal institutional form.4 When allies who have stood beside this country through decades of shared sacrifice are told, in the blunt language of a transaction, that they must pay more or be abandoned, that too is I-It thinking applied to the bonds that sustain civilization.5 When independent institutions, courts, regulatory bodies, the free press, are treated not as vital organs of self-governance but as obstacles to be routed around or subdued, the entire architecture of democratic life is being reduced from a Thou to an It.6
Buber’s warning, issued a century ago to a Europe that was already beginning its descent into something terrible, reads today not as history. It reads as instruction.
There is a third voice I want to bring into this conversation, one that may surprise some readers but that I have long found indispensable: Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar and theologian who gave Western civilization perhaps its most rigorous account of what human beings are actually for.
Aquinas built upon Aristotle, who taught that all human action is directed toward some end, some goal, some purpose, and that beneath all the lesser goods we pursue, comfort, wealth, status, security, there must be an ultimate good, a summum bonum, a highest good that is sought for its own sake and not merely as a means to something else.10 Aristotle called this highest good eudaimonia, human flourishing, the full realization of what it means to be human. Aquinas carried this framework further, insisting that the ultimate end of human life is not merely earthly happiness but the deepest possible union with the good, the true, and the beautiful as they find their ground in something beyond us.10
What I find so powerful in Aquinas, and so applicable to this moment, is his insistence that you cannot serve two highest goods.10 There cannot be two summa bona, because a good cannot be the highest if it has an equal. The organizing principle of a human life, and by extension the organizing principle of a political order, must ultimately be evaluated by what it places at its center. What is the thing that everything else is in service of? What is the animating purpose, the real one, not the declared one, of the exercise of power?
When I apply that Thomistic question to the actions of the past weeks and months, what I find is that the highest good being served is not the common good of the community, not the summum bonum of a people governing themselves toward their own best possibility. What is being served, as the evidence accumulated in the formal reports of the bar association and the independent research institutes makes plain, is a concentration of power in a single office and a single will, bending every institution of public life toward that singular end.4 5 6 Aquinas would have recognized the pattern. He would have named it for what it is: the substitution of a lesser good for the highest one.
So let me return to where I began: that something in the air.
I think I can now say more precisely what it is. It is the collective, largely inarticulate awareness of millions of people, here and in the democratic countries of the world, that what is at stake in this moment is not merely policy. It is not a dispute about tariffs or tax rates or regulatory philosophy, important as those things are. What is at stake is something more fundamental: the question of whether the organizing principle of our common life will remain the I-Thou, the recognition of every human being as a bearer of irreducible dignity, or whether it will contract, systematically and deliberately, into the I-It.9
The anxiety that the surveys document, the protests that fill the streets, the legal challenges that crowd the federal dockets, these are not signs of a society that has lost its moorings.1 2 7 They are signs of the opposite. They are evidence that the Thou still lives in us, that the summum bonum is not so easily extinguished, that the mysterious force Einstein described, the one that arranges the library and sways the constellations, is still pressing through human beings who are not yet willing to be reduced to It.8
Einstein cautioned against both the arrogance of false certainty and the paralysis of mere reaction. 8 Buber taught that all revelation is summons and sending, that every authentic human encounter is an act of resistance against the deadening world of objects and transactions.9 Aquinas reminded us that the search for the highest good is not an abstraction. It is the very engine of a well-ordered life and a well-ordered civilization.10
This moment is serious. Anyone who tells you otherwise is not paying attention, or has reasons for not wishing to. But seriousness is not the same as despair. Eight to nine million people in the streets is not despair.7 It is a people insisting, with their feet and their voices and their presence, that the Thou still matters. That the library still has an order. That the highest good has not been repealed by executive order.
I believe they are right. And I know that belief is, in itself, a form of the same force, the one that moves through the cosmos and through the human heart alike, pressing always, however slowly, however imperfectly, toward what is real and what is good.
Kind regards… /glc
Gary L. Cottrill writes from Charleston, West Virginia. He spent his career at the intersection of investment banking, public finance, and civic life. He is still, as Einstein said of himself, looking up.
Notes and Sources
1 V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026: Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline Unprecedented. University of Gothenburg, March 2026. Lead author: Professor Staffan I. Lindberg.
2 Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy. Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, March 2026.
3 Freedom House, “After 20 Years of Global Decline, These Basic Freedoms Have Been Hit Hardest.” Freedom House, March 18, 2026.
4 New York City Bar Association, The Abuse of Presidential Power and Breach of the Public Trust. New York City Bar Association Rule of Law Task Force, December 18, 2025.
5 New York City Bar Association, The Crisis Deepens: Congress Must Act Now to Address Escalating Abuses of Executive Power. New York City Bar Association Rule of Law Task Force, March 2026.
6 Brennan Center for Justice, “The Extreme Legal Theory Behind Trump’s First Month in Office,” February 18, 2025; and “Lawsuits Reveal the Administration’s Attacks on Congressional Power,” May 12, 2025. Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law.
7 Reuters, “Anti-Trump Rallies Hit Thousands of U.S. Cities for ‘No Kings’ Protest.” Reuters News Service, March 28, 2026.
8 Thomas Oppong, “Einstein Believed in God. But What He Meant by That Will Unsettle You.” Medium / Personal Growth, March 28, 2026. Primary quotations drawn from Einstein’s published writings as cited therein.
9 Martin Buber, I and Thou. Originally published in German, 1923. English translation by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae, Questions 1-5, “On Man’s Last End.” For a scholarly treatment see the entry “Thomas Aquinas: Moral Philosophy,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Christopher Anadale iep.utm.edu.