We are building a harm machine.

The harm machine is growing, and it is hungry. It needs people. It eats them.

The harm machine doesn’t care who those people are, or what they’ve done. It doesn’t care how it hurts those it eats. The harm machine just wants food.

The harm machine also needs people to cooperate with it, to serve it. It wants people who like exercising power over others, people who enjoy hurting people, people who feel best when they can dominate others against their will. Those people will build and serve and feed the harm machine. At the very least, the harm machine needs people who won’t speak up and oppose the machine or those who serve it.

The harm machine needs fear too, because it needs justification. It needs fear, and anger, and violence, and the feeling that you and your life might be torn apart. That’s because the harm machine needs you to believe that we MUST feed more people into it. It needs that violence and fear so that it can be justified, because without such a justification why else would we keep a monstrous machine that eats us?

The harm machine needs us to forget that we are all just food. The harm machine needs us to forget that it might eat us next.

Some people think they know how to use the harm machine, how to direct it. These people think that the harm machine is useful, necessary even, for getting rid of people that they don’t want. These people think they can use the harm machine to control those who don’t want to be eaten next. These people believe that they know how to feed the right people into the machine in order to shape the world a little more to their liking.

These people tell us that they will use the harm machine to protect us. They tell us that the harm machine will get rid of our enemies, and that the harm machine will not hurt those of us who are good. They tell us that we should serve the harm machine and build it bigger, so that these people and the harm machine can protect us from everything we find scary or ugly or bad.

I doubt these people realize they too serve the harm machine. I doubt they imagine that they might be eaten in turn.

We can remind others that the harm machine is a monster. We can starve the harm machine. How?

Make every attempt at justifying the harm machine look ridiculous. Spread the word about the danger of the machine, and how it is growing. Tell how the machine’s servants have fed it with people they swore were safe from it. Point out the lies of the machine’s servants… and laugh in their faces.

The harm machine’s servants, and those who appreciate the harm machine, want to feel strong and powerful and justified. They want to feel safe. Take those feelings of strength and power and justification from them by reminding them that you, and many others, think the machine’s servants are laughable. Shame them. Take their justification away and make the machine’s supporters feel safe by being playful and laughable yourself. Be nonviolent. Make the machine’s servants look like buffoons and bullies when they get mad at you.

Remember that the machine needs your fear. It needs that fear to control you, to prevent you from acting against it. It needs that fear to convince us that we should support it against those who may scare us.

You can fight that fear. Reach out to your local community—all of it—to help others. Do not spread fear by creating villains. Find ways to aid and reassure, and to be outspoken in your opposition to the harm machine.

In truth, this harm machine is not new. It is very old.

We have been building this harm machine for a long time. We have had many different harm machines over the years. Sometimes we take them apart, make them smaller and less hungry, less easy to use against so many people. Yet every time people build a new one, they pick up the old parts still lying around and use what is on hand.

We can strip down the harm machine. We could even dismantle it. This will not be easy.

The harm machine and its servants will cling to the power we have given them over the years. They will remind us that we are safer with them, and that we would be in danger without them. In some cases they may even be right.

But there are better ways to do most of what the harm machine offers us. We need not empower those who long to abuse others. We need not destroy people’s lives. We need not kidnap people off the streets, or rip them from their beds, or ship them to foreign countries, or simply make them disappear.

We can, we must, do better.