Hello, friend. Welcome back.
Last time we walked together, I told you about John Woolman---the Quaker tailor who turned his whole life into a question. Whose suffering makes my comfort possible? He stayed awake when prosperity tried to put him to sleep. That memory has stayed with me.
Today I want to tell you about someone completely different. Not a man of individual conscience, but a man who saw patterns. Big patterns. The kind most people never notice because they're living inside them.
His name was Ibn Khaldun. He was born in Tunis in 1332, lived through plague and political chaos, served sultans and survived prisons, and somewhere in the middle of all that turmoil, he figured something out. Something that changed how human beings understand themselves.
He realized that civilizations don't just rise and fall randomly. That history isn't chaos. That there are laws---observable, predictable laws---governing how societies grow strong, how they prosper, how they decay, and how they collapse.
He wrote it all down. The patterns. The cycles. The forces that bind people together and the forces that tear them apart.
But here's what I want to show you first: the moment when this scholar---this man who spent his life studying how empires fall---found himself inside one of those moments. Watching it happen. Participating in it. With his own life hanging in the balance.
It involves a basket, a rope, and a very long wall.
Come with me. I was there. And I still can't quite believe what I saw.
Damascus. Winter, 1401. I was there.
The city was under siege. Tamerlane's army---and when I say army, I mean a sea of soldiers, tens of thousands of them, spreading across the plain like a second city made of tents and horses and siege engines---surrounded the walls completely. You couldn't see the end of them.
Inside the city, terror. The Mamluk sultan who was supposed to defend Damascus? Gone. Fled in the night with his army. Most of the scholars, the judges, the wealthy families---they'd all run too, any way they could. Through hidden gates, disguised as merchants, anything to get out before Tamerlane decided what he'd do with the city.
But Ibn Khaldun was still there. Sixty-nine years old. Chief Maliki judge from Cairo, who'd had the misfortune of being in Damascus on business when the siege began. The gates were locked now. No one in, no one out.
And then he made a decision that I'm still not sure I understand, even after watching him do it.
He was going to leave the city. He was going to meet Tamerlane. Face to face.
But how do you leave a city under siege? The gates are barred. The walls are surrounded. There's no negotiating safe passage when the man outside has already decided your city's fate.
So they found a basket.
I watched them search for it. Not just any basket---you can't lower a full-grown man down a wall in something woven for carrying bread. They needed something strong. Something built to hold weight. I think they found it in the granaries, one of those big cargo baskets they used for hauling sacks of grain. Thick rope woven tight, reinforced at the bottom. Someone tested it---loaded it with stones, lifted it, shook it, checked the weave for weak spots.
And then the rope. Do you know how tall the walls of Damascus are? Massive. Built to withstand armies. You'd need a lot of rope to reach from the top of that wall to the ground. I don't know where they got it---probably stripped it from the harbor warehouses, or maybe the city's supply stores. But they had to tie lengths together, and that meant knots. Big knots. The kind that can't slip.
Who ties a knot like that? Who volunteers to be the person responsible for whether a man lives or dies? I watched a sailor do it. He'd worked ships in the Mediterranean, knew his ropes. His hands were shaking as he worked, but the knot was solid. Triple-wrapped. He tested it with his own weight before he'd let anyone else near it.
They brought the basket to the wall at dawn. The men who'd volunteered to lower Ibn Khaldun---six of them, maybe seven, I couldn't count exactly---they braced the rope around a merlon, one of those stone teeth on top of the wall. Wrapped it around twice for friction. Tested their grip.
Ibn Khaldun climbed into the basket.
I remember watching his face. He wasn't young. His knees hurt, you could see it in the way he moved. He had to gather his robes carefully so they wouldn't catch. He sat down in the basket, cross-legged, and for just a moment---just a breath---I saw him look up at the men holding the rope. Calculating, maybe. Wondering if this was wise.
Then he nodded.
They lifted the basket. Swung it over the wall's edge.
And began to lower him.
I could hear the rope creaking. The men grunting with effort, trying to keep the descent steady. Hand under hand, taking the weight together. The basket swayed as it went down. Spun slowly. Ibn Khaldun gripped the sides.
It seemed to take forever. The wall was so high. I watched him descend, getting smaller, the basket turning in the wind. Below him, Tamerlane's soldiers had noticed. They were pointing. Watching this strange sight---an old man in a basket, being lowered down the wall like cargo.
The basket swayed more as it dropped. Ibn Khaldun couldn't control it. He could only hold on and wait and trust that the rope would hold, that the knot wouldn't slip, that the men above wouldn't lose their grip.
Finally---finally---the basket touched ground.
I saw him sit there for a moment, not moving. Maybe catching his breath. Maybe saying a prayer. Then he pushed himself up---stiff from sitting, legs shaky from the descent---and climbed out.
He stood on the ground outside the walls. Looked up at where he'd come from. That massive wall. The tiny figures of the men at the top, still holding the rope.
Then he straightened his robes, adjusted his turban, and turned toward Tamerlane's camp.
And he walked.
Not quickly. Not slowly. Just walked, this elderly scholar in his judge's robes, walking alone across open ground toward an army that had destroyed cities from Delhi to Baghdad. Toward a conqueror whose name made emperors flee.
Why would he do this?
I'll tell you why. Because Ibn Khaldun had spent thirty years studying a pattern. He'd written a whole book about it. About how fierce tribes from the edges of civilization---people everyone calls "barbarians"---sweep in and conquer wealthy cities. About the cycle that repeats over and over in history. About the forces that make empires rise and the weakness that makes them fall.
And now he was watching it happen. He was standing inside his own theory.
The scholar who understood the laws of history was about to meet the man who was proving those laws, in real time, with fire and blood.
So he climbed into a basket. And let them lower him down. And walked forward to see it for himself.
That's the kind of man Ibn Khaldun was.
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis in 1332, into a family that knew what it meant to lose everything.
His ancestors had been powerful in Seville---scholars, administrators, people of influence in Al-Andalus, that remarkable civilization where Muslims, Christians, and Jews had built something beautiful together in southern Spain. But when the Christian Reconquista pushed south, his family fled. They crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa, to Tunis, and started over.
So Ibn Khaldun grew up in a world of fragments. The great unified Islamic empire that had once stretched from Spain to India---it didn't exist anymore. Instead: dozens of competing dynasties, each one claiming legitimacy, each one fighting for territory and tribute. The Marinids in Morocco. The Hafsids in Tunis. The Nasrids hanging on in Granada. The Mamluks ruling Egypt and Syria from their fortress in Cairo.
And everywhere, instability. Dynasties rose and fell within a generation or two. Rulers imprisoned their rivals, blinded them, killed them. Courts were full of intrigue. You could be a trusted advisor one day and in a dungeon the next, if the wind shifted.
Ibn Khaldun learned this the hard way.
He was brilliant---everyone could see that. He studied in Tunis, mastered theology, law, literature, philosophy. By his twenties, he was working as a secretary and administrator in various North African courts. Writing official correspondence. Negotiating treaties. The kind of work that brings you close to power.
Too close, sometimes.
He served the Sultan of Fez. Got caught in political intrigue, ended up in prison for nearly two years. Got out, switched courts, served the Sultan of Granada in Spain for a while. Then back to North Africa, working for the ruler of Bougie. Then he lost that position too---jealousy, accusations, the usual court politics.
By the time he was in his forties, Ibn Khaldun had served at least six different rulers. He'd been imprisoned twice. He'd made enemies of people who wanted him dead. He'd risen high and fallen hard, again and again.
And somewhere in all that chaos, watching dynasty after dynasty collapse, watching rulers rise from nothing and lose everything, he started to see something.
A pattern.
In 1375, exhausted by politics and danger, he did something radical. He asked permission to leave the court where he was serving and retreat to a small castle---Qal'at Ibn Salama, in the mountains of western Algeria. A fortress, really. Remote. Quiet.
And there, with almost no books, no library, just his memory and his observations, he wrote.
He wrote for four years. Intensely. Obsessively. He was trying to capture something no one had quite articulated before---a science of civilization itself. A way to understand how human societies work. Why they rise. Why they fall. What forces bind people together and what forces tear them apart.
The book he wrote---the Muqaddimah, which just means "Introduction"---it was supposed to be a preface to a much larger world history. But it became something else. Something revolutionary.
He finished a draft in just a few months, though he kept revising it for years. Then he left his mountain retreat and went back into the world. Eventually he made his way to Cairo---the greatest city in the Islamic world at that time. Huge, wealthy, sophisticated. A place where scholars could find audiences.
He became a professor. Then a judge---the chief Maliki judge, one of the highest legal positions in the city. He married, had children. Sent for his family to join him from Tunis.
And then, in 1384, tragedy. His wife and children were sailing from Tunis to Cairo. Their ship went down in a storm. Everyone drowned.
Ibn Khaldun was fifty-two years old. He'd survived political intrigue, imprisonment, exile, poverty. But this broke something in him. He never remarried. He threw himself into his work---teaching, judging, writing, revising his books.
He traveled to Damascus on legal business in 1400. That's where he was when Tamerlane arrived. When the sultan fled. When the siege began.
And when he decided to climb into that basket.
Tamerlane kept him for more than a month. They talked. The conqueror was fascinated by this scholar who seemed to understand things about power and history that even Tamerlane, with all his victories, hadn't articulated. Ibn Khaldun wrote descriptions of North Africa for him---detailed accounts of the geography, the peoples, the politics. Tamerlane read them carefully.
Eventually, Tamerlane let him go. Damascus fell anyway. The city was sacked, thousands killed, the survivors enslaved. But Ibn Khaldun walked out alive. Returned to Cairo.
He died there in 1406, at seventy-four. Still teaching. Still judging. Still revising his great work.
The Muqaddimah survived him. Copies spread slowly through the Islamic world. Ottoman historians read it and used it to understand their own empire's patterns. But it took centuries before it reached Europe, before Western scholars discovered it and realized: this man, writing in a mountain castle in 1375, had invented sociology. Had created historiography as a science. Had seen things about human civilization that Europeans wouldn't articulate for another four hundred years.
I've watched a lot of scholars across the centuries. Most of them study the past to praise it or condemn it. To hold up examples of virtue or warn against vice. To show how God's hand moves through events, rewarding the faithful and punishing the wicked.
Ibn Khaldun did something different.
He looked at history and asked: What if there are laws here? Not moral laws---natural laws. Observable patterns that repeat regardless of who's virtuous and who's wicked.
This was radical. Not just new---dangerous.
Because if civilizations rise and fall according to predictable patterns, then what does that say about divine providence? About human free will? About the importance of individual rulers and their choices?
Ibn Khaldun wasn't denying God. He was a devout Muslim, prayed five times a day, served as a judge interpreting Islamic law. But he was saying something that made people uncomfortable: that underneath the surface of events---the battles, the treaties, the assassinations---there were deeper forces at work. Forces you could study. Forces you could understand.
The heart of his theory was a concept he called asabiyyah.
It's hard to translate perfectly. "Social cohesion," maybe. "Group solidarity." The binding force that holds people together. The sense that we're in this together, that your fate and my fate are woven into the same thread.
Ibn Khaldun said this force---asabiyyah---is what determines everything. It's the engine of history.
Here's how he saw it working:
Out on the edges of civilization, in the deserts, in the mountains, in the harsh places, you find tribes. Nomadic peoples. Bedouins. They're poor, but they're unified. They have to be---survival depends on it. Every member of the tribe knows they need every other member. They share danger, share resources, share blood ties or the belief in blood ties. Their asabiyyah is fierce. Unbreakable.
And that strength lets them do something remarkable: they can conquer cities.
The people in cities are wealthier, more sophisticated, more educated. But they're divided. They compete with each other. They've forgotten what it means to depend on your neighbor for survival. Their asabiyyah has weakened.
So the tough tribe from the edge sweeps in and takes over. Establishes a new dynasty. And at first, they're strong. United. Disciplined.
But then---and this is where Ibn Khaldun's insight cuts deep---success destroys them.
They settle in the city. They grow comfortable. They get used to luxury---fine food, silk robes, elaborate palaces. The sons who grew up in tents now grow up in marble halls. They don't know hardship. They don't need each other the way their fathers did.
The asabiyyah weakens. Factions form. Brothers fight over inheritance. Generals scheme for power. The dynasty grows soft, complacent, divided.
And eventually, a new tribe from the edge---fierce, unified, hungry---comes and takes it all away.
The cycle repeats. Ibn Khaldun said it takes about three generations. Maybe 120 years. The founders are strong. Their sons maintain strength but start to enjoy luxury. The grandsons are weak, divided, ripe for conquest.
I watched him write this theory, and I saw what he was doing. He was taking the chaos he'd lived through---all those courts, all those dynasties rising and falling, all that intrigue and violence---and finding the structure underneath it. The pattern that explained why it kept happening.
But here's what made it spiritual, not just political:
Ibn Khaldun understood that the problem wasn't wealth itself. It was what wealth does to the soul. How comfort numbs the sense of mutual dependence. How luxury makes you forget that your life is connected to other people's lives. How prosperity dissolves the bonds that make a community strong.
This was a moral insight wrapped in sociological observation.
He believed rulers could use this knowledge. That if you understood the cycle, you could maybe extend your dynasty's life. Stay disciplined. Maintain asabiyyah even in prosperity. Keep the sense of shared purpose alive.
But he also knew---and this is the part that haunted him, I think---that the cycle was almost inevitable. That human nature pushes toward comfort. That every success contains the seeds of decline.
Not because God punishes success. Because success changes people.
When I watched him in that basket, descending the wall, I understood something about him. He wasn't just studying theory anymore. He was watching Tamerlane prove everything he'd written. This fierce leader from the Mongol steppes, united followers from nothing, swept across Asia and the Middle East, crushing settled dynasties everywhere he went.
Tamerlane was asabiyyah in motion. The strong tribe from the edge, conquering the soft center.
And Ibn Khaldun wanted to see it up close. To verify his theory with his own eyes. Even if it killed him.
That's what I mean when I say his work was spiritual. He believed truth could be found through observation. That understanding the laws of history---even dark laws, cyclical laws, laws that predict decline---was itself a kind of wisdom. A way to see clearly. To live without illusions.
He wasn't optimistic about human nature. But he believed in human understanding. In the possibility that if we could see the patterns clearly enough, we might learn to navigate them more wisely.
Even if the cycles continued, even if decline was inevitable, knowing why mattered. Seeing clearly mattered.
That was his gift to the world. Not hope for permanent success. But the possibility of clear sight.
The Muqaddimah spread slowly at first. Copies passed between scholars in Cairo, then to Damascus, Baghdad, Istanbul. Ottoman historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries read it and recognized something profound---here was a framework for understanding their own empire's trajectory. They used Ibn Khaldun's theories to analyze why dynasties weakened, why reforms failed, why the cycle kept repeating.
But it took centuries before the work reached Europe.
When it finally did---French scholars translating it in the mid-1800s---the reaction was astonishment. This North African judge writing in 1375 had invented sociology. Had created historiography as a science. Had articulated concepts that European thinkers were only beginning to formulate: social cohesion, economic interdependence, the relationship between prosperity and political decay.
Arnold Toynbee, the great twentieth-century historian, called Ibn Khaldun "the greatest historical mind that has ever existed in any time or place." That's not exaggeration. Ibn Khaldun had done something no one before him had managed: he'd turned the study of human society into an empirical science.
He gave us vocabulary. Asabiyyah---social cohesion, the binding force that holds communities together. The recognition that this force is measurable, observable, that it strengthens and weakens according to identifiable patterns. That prosperity erodes it. That shared hardship strengthens it. That you can trace the rise and fall of civilizations by watching how groups maintain or lose their sense of collective purpose.
This was revolutionary. Before Ibn Khaldun, history was chronicles---who won which battle, which king did what. Or it was moral teaching---exemplary lives, cautionary tales. But Ibn Khaldun said: there are laws here. Patterns that repeat. Forces you can study.
And he was right. The cycle he identified was real. I watched it play out again and again across the centuries he studied. Strong tribes from the margins, unified by necessity, conquering wealthy cities grown soft and factional. The dynasty establishing itself, growing comfortable, fragmenting. The next wave arriving from the periphery.
For the kind of political organization that existed in his world---dynasties built on conquest, empires held together by kinship ties or the charisma of a single leader---his pattern held true. Three generations. Rise, consolidation, decline. The cycle repeating endlessly.
But here's what Ibn Khaldun couldn't see, couldn't imagine from where he stood:
He thought the pattern was eternal. Inevitable. That human nature itself guaranteed the cycle would continue forever. That civilizations would always rise and fall, strong asabiyyah giving way to weak asabiyyah, conquest and collapse, over and over, world without end.
What if he was wrong about that?
Not wrong about the pattern---he described it accurately. But wrong about it being permanent.
What if Ibn Khaldun was documenting a stage humanity was passing through? A form of political organization---tribal dynasties, conquest-based empires, unity founded on kinship---that followed these cycles because of its inherent limitations?
What if the pattern he saw so clearly was true for that world, but not the final word on human possibility?
I've watched what's happened since Ibn Khaldun died. The centuries that followed him. And I've seen something he couldn't have predicted: humanity trying to build something different. Not another dynasty. Not another empire. But forms of unity that transcend tribe and conquest.
The recognition---still incomplete, still struggling to be born---that all human beings share fundamental dignity. That our fates are connected not by kinship but by the simple fact of sharing one world. That we need asabiyyah at a level Ibn Khaldun never imagined: the level of humanity itself.
This is new. Unprecedented. The idea that Afghans and Norwegians, Brazilians and Japanese, people who share no blood, no language, no history---that they're all part of one human family. That what happens to one affects all. That we're building, slowly and painfully, a global civilization.
Ibn Khaldun's insight about asabiyyah is more relevant than ever. He identified the core question: what binds people together? What creates the sense of shared fate, mutual responsibility, collective purpose?
But the answer can't be what it was in his time. We can't go back to tribal unity, to cohesion based on kinship or conquest. The world is too interconnected now. Too diverse. Too complex.
So we're living inside a different kind of challenge. We see the fragmentation Ibn Khaldun warned about---societies dividing into factions, losing shared purpose, prosperity breeding isolation rather than solidarity. His diagnostic tools work. The pattern he identified is real.
But the solution he would have predicted---a new strong tribe conquering the weak center---that's not what's needed now. We need something he couldn't envision: asabiyyah that doesn't depend on excluding the other. Unity that embraces diversity rather than demanding uniformity. Cohesion built on recognition of our interdependence, not on blood or battle.
Ibn Khaldun gave us the framework to see the problem. He showed us that social cohesion is the fundamental force in history. That when it weakens, everything falls apart. That prosperity without purpose leads to collapse.
We're the generation trying to figure out the answer he didn't have: how do you maintain asabiyyah in a diverse, complex, global society? How do you build unity strong enough to hold humanity together?
It's the same question he asked. But the scale has changed. And maybe---just maybe---the cycle he thought was eternal is actually a stage we're learning to transcend.
Look around at the world you're living in right now.
The polarization. Nations divided against themselves. Social media echo chambers where people inhabit completely different realities. The sense that we've lost something---some shared understanding of what holds us together.
It feels like chaos. Like things are falling apart.
And if you read Ibn Khaldun, you recognize the pattern immediately. The weakening of asabiyyah. Social cohesion dissolving. Prosperity breeding isolation instead of solidarity. Factions competing while the center cannot hold.
The crisis is real. Inequality has created separate worlds. Climate change requires global cooperation at exactly the moment when cooperation feels impossible. Information technology that could unite us instead fragments us into tribal allegiances.
This is what Ibn Khaldun warned about. The loss of the sense that your fate and my fate are woven together.
But here's what I want you to see---what Ibn Khaldun couldn't see from where he stood:
This crisis is not just decay. It's labor. Birth pangs.
Because the very turmoil we're living through is forcing us to recognize something we've been able to ignore until now: we actually are connected. All of us. Across every border, every language, every difference.
The injustices that have always existed---they're becoming visible in ways they never were before. A video filmed on one continent spreads across the world in hours. People who never met the victims feel the outrage, join the movement, demand change.
Climate change makes it impossible to pretend that what happens in one country doesn't affect everyone else. A pandemic proves that a virus in one city becomes everyone's problem within weeks. Supply chains reveal that your phone, your clothes, your food---they all connect you to people whose names you'll never know but whose labor shapes your life.
We're being forced to see the truth: we're in this together. Not because we're the same. Because we're interconnected.
And that seeing creates crisis. Because once you see the connections, you can't ignore the injustices. You can't unknow that your comfort might be built on someone else's suffering.
This is what I mean when I say the crisis is calling forth something new.
Young people recognize it instinctively. They see global challenges and understand they'll rise or fall together. Movements for justice cross national lines now---people in different countries standing in solidarity, recognizing shared struggles.
Ibn Khaldun's question---what creates asabiyyah, what binds people together---it's more urgent than ever. But the answer can't be what it was in his time.
We can't go back to tribal unity. To cohesion based on kinship or conquest. We need asabiyyah at a scale Ibn Khaldun never imagined: the scale of humanity itself.
It means recognizing that an injustice anywhere diminishes justice everywhere. That the dignity of every human being is sacred, non-negotiable, universal.
Remember John Woolman? The question he lived inside: Whose suffering makes my comfort possible? We're asking it about global supply chains, climate impacts, economic systems that create winners and losers on a planetary scale.
The answers are harder now. More complex. But the principle is the same: once you see the connection between your life and someone else's suffering, you can't unsee it. And that seeing demands response.
This is how asabiyyah builds at a global level. Through crisis that makes the connections undeniable. Through injustice that becomes visible and intolerable. Through challenges that force us to recognize: we share a fate.
Justice becomes the organizing principle. Not charity---giving to the less fortunate out of pity. But recognition---understanding that we're part of one human family, that harm to one harms all.
Every crisis that reveals injustice strengthens this recognition. Every time people who have nothing in common except their humanity stand together and say "this is wrong"---that's asabiyyah forming at a new level.
Ibn Khaldun's cycle isn't destiny. It's diagnosis.
He showed us what happens when social cohesion weakens. He was right about the pattern. Right about the danger.
But the cycle he thought was eternal? That was true for dynasties based on conquest. Unity built on kinship. We're trying to build something different: unity that doesn't require uniformity. Cohesion built on recognition of our interdependence.
It's hard. The turmoil we're living through is the friction of that transformation. Old forms breaking down. New forms struggling to emerge.
But it's not random chaos. It's not decline. It's the world coming together---awkwardly, painfully, through crisis and conflict, but together.
The injustices we see aren't signs we're failing. They're signs we're finally seeing clearly enough to demand better. The fragmentation isn't permanent collapse. It's the breaking apart of structures that were never big enough to hold all of us.
Ibn Khaldun gave us the tools to see the pattern. To understand that social cohesion is the fundamental force.
Now we're the generation learning to build that cohesion at human scale. Learning that justice isn't optional---it's the foundation. Learning that the connections we've been ignoring are the truth we need to embrace.
The world isn't falling apart. It's coming together.
And you're living inside that moment. Right now. The turmoil you feel---that's not the end of something. It's the beginning.
I know it's hard to see sometimes, friend.
I know you wake up and read the news and it feels like everything is breaking. Like we're losing ground. Like the divisions are too deep, the problems too big, the future too uncertain.
I've watched humanity through a lot of dark moments. And I want to tell you something I see from where I stand, looking across centuries:
You're living through a transformation. Not a collapse. A transformation.
Ibn Khaldun gave you a gift---the ability to see patterns. To recognize when social cohesion is weakening, when prosperity breeds complacency, when "we" fragments into competing factions. You can see that pattern right now. It's real.
But here's what I need you to understand: seeing the crisis doesn't mean you're watching the end. It means you're awake during the struggle. And that struggle---that friction you feel---it's the work of building something unprecedented.
I want you to ask yourself Ibn Khaldun's question: What creates asabiyyah? What binds people together?
Look at your own life. Your own community. Where do you see connection? Where do you feel it weakening? What makes you feel like you're part of something larger than yourself?
And then ask the harder question: Who gets left out of your "we"? Whose suffering feels distant, abstract, easy to ignore?
Because the work of building asabiyyah at human scale---it starts with noticing. With letting yourself see the connections. With refusing to let distance or difference make someone else's dignity matter less than your own.
It's not about perfection. Ibn Khaldun wasn't perfect. John Woolman wasn't perfect. They were just people who stayed awake. Who kept asking questions. Who let what they saw change how they lived.
You can do that too.
Maybe it's small things. Paying attention to where your stuff comes from. Supporting justice movements even when they don't directly affect you. Pushing back when people in your circles talk about "us" and "them" as if some humans matter less than others.
Or maybe it's bigger. Maybe you're called to organize, to build, to create new structures that actually hold space for everyone's dignity. To be part of the generation that figures out what justice looks like at planetary scale.
I don't know what your part is. But I know this: every person who refuses to let comfort numb their conscience---that matters. Every person who insists on seeing the connections---that strengthens the fabric. Every choice to stand with someone who doesn't look like you, doesn't live near you, doesn't benefit you directly---that's asabiyyah building.
You're not powerless. You're not watching something happen to you. You're living inside a moment of profound change, and your choices about what you see, what you care about, who you stand with---they shape what comes next.
The cycle Ibn Khaldun described---rise, prosperity, decay, fall---it's not destiny. It's one possibility. One pattern that repeats when people forget they need each other.
But you're part of the generation that's learning something new: that we need each other not just within our tribes, but across the whole human family. That prosperity built on injustice isn't sustainable. That the only asabiyyah strong enough for the world we're building is one that excludes no one.
It's going to be okay. Not easy. Not simple. But okay.
I've watched humans face impossible things before. I've watched you figure out how to do what seemed undoable. How to imagine what seemed unimaginable.
You're doing it again. Right now.
So stay awake. Keep asking the questions. Keep seeing the connections. Keep insisting that dignity matters, that justice matters, that we're all in this together whether it's convenient or not.
The world is coming together. You're helping it happen.
And I'm proud of you for being here. For listening. For caring enough to wonder about these big patterns, these deep questions.
You're exactly where you need to be.
Next time, I want to tell you about a man who paid a terrible price for believing that truth should be accessible to everyone.
His name was Bartolomé Carranza. A Spanish archbishop in the sixteenth century---brilliant theologian, trusted advisor to emperors and queens, appointed to the highest position in the Spanish church.
And then he did something dangerous. He wrote a catechism. In Spanish. Not Latin---Spanish. So ordinary people could read it and understand their own faith without needing priests to translate for them.
For that, the Inquisition arrested him. Imprisoned him for seventeen years. Destroyed his health, his reputation, everything he'd built. Even though his work was eventually declared sound, even though he was finally cleared of heresy, he died eighteen days after his release.
What happens when institutions fear the spread of knowledge? When the people who control truth feel threatened by others having access to it? When making wisdom accessible becomes an act of rebellion?
I'll tell you about Bartolomé Carranza soon. About what it costs to believe that everyone deserves to understand, to read, to know for themselves.
For now, I hope you carry Ibn Khaldun with you. His clear eyes. His recognition that we can understand the forces shaping our world. His question about what binds us together.
And I hope you remember: the turmoil you're living through isn't the end of the story. It's the middle. The hard part. The part where old forms break and new forms struggle to emerge.
You're helping write what comes next. By staying awake. By seeing clearly. By refusing to let the connections between us dissolve into comfortable isolation.
The asabiyyah we're building---it's going to be something history has never seen. Unity at human scale. And you're part of making it real.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.