Editor’s Note: I’m returning to Japan for the next couple weeks, but I’ve written some pieces ahead of time. Thank you for reading.
Albert Camus, writing in occupied France in 1942, called it la peste, or The Plague. He meant the literal disease in the novel, but he also meant something else, and he was clear about it later. He meant the slow corruption that takes hold inside ordinary people when the world around them goes wrong and they decide to live as if it hadn't. He meant the soft accommodations. The quiet adjustments. The way a person can sit at a café in a city under occupation and convince themselves they are still themselves.
I thought about Camus after our recent trip to France, where we sat in a beautiful outdoor cafe one evening. I imagined Camus and his anguish over living under occupation by Nazi Germany. It is hard for most Americans to imagine a country where you one day walked freely and now you did so only under a so-called protective eye. It is that much harder to consider like Camus did that it wasn’t only the occupation that was damaging, but that many of the French capitulated and went along as if nothing had changed.
Could we be experiencing a similar takeover?
Every day brings a new sleight to our norms. A journalist in Minnesota was arrested at her home in January for reporting on a protest. Last month, eight anti‑ICE protesters were zealously sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison for a 2025 action outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas. One of those sentenced to 100 years, Benjamin Hanil Song, was a U.S. military veteran and alleged leader of the group, according to reporting by CNN.
The White House now publishes a weekly list of journalists it considers offenders, with their names and faces, on an official government website. The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, told a late-night comedian's network it could do things the easy way or the hard way.
Imagine the United States censoring humor.
Federal officials are enforcing prejudicial standards openly, supporting corporate consolidations that benefit less democratic outcomes, and threatening anyone who gets in the way, whether reporters or comedians or members of the opposition party or even former supporters who failed some loyalty test the day before.
Health care is being gutted. Public services are being broken on purpose. The cost of being alive keeps rising. And underneath all of it is the larger project, which is to make the idea of being American mean something much narrower and meaner, and to make that meaning permanent.
That is the regime. That is the plague outside the window.
What Camus understood is that the plague is not the worst thing. The worst thing is what the plague does inside the people who survive it. The worst thing is the cancer of the soul. The slow, silent metastasis of small accommodations that, taken together, change who you are and what your country is about.
I have started keeping a private inventory. Not a political one. A personal one. I am writing it here because I think other people may need to keep one too.
Be mindful of the ritual without the meaning. When you go through the motions of a faith, or a politics, or even an education without questions, that is the cancer. When the ritual carries only itself, something has gone hollow inside it.
Be mindful of the longing that requires looking away from reality. If your dream of a comfortable retirement, or a secure life, or a quiet street, and it depends on not seeing what is happening to someone else's retirement or security or street, that longing is a sickness. It is not retirement you are longing for. It is permission to be apathetic.
Be mindful of thinking without reading. The mind that ruminates without any inputs is the mind being slowly replaced cell by cell by the malignancy. Thinking is not the same as having thoughts. Thinking requires some friction. It requires the discomfort of an idea you did not already hold. If you find you have lots of opinions and very few books open, that is the cancer.
Be mindful of the freedom that costs other people their freedom. Real freedom has a price you pay yourself. Cheap freedom is the kind you buy by reducing someone else's. If you are free because someone else is silenced, you are not free. You are comfortable inside someone else's cage.
Be mindful of rumination instead of contemplation. Rumination is the loop that goes nowhere. Contemplation is the loop that goes somewhere. One feels like thinking and is not. The other feels like nothing and is everything.
And be mindful of the encouragement withheld. There is almost always a person you could call. A son. A friend. A colleague who is having a week. The text takes thirty seconds. The cancer is in the thirty seconds you find a reason not to spend.
None of this is in the news. None of this is what the regime is doing to me. This is what I am doing to me, while the regime is doing what it is doing, and the two things are connected because the regime is counting on it. Authoritarianism is not a political program. It is a wager about who you are willing to become when you are tired. The wager is that you will become less active. Quieter. More careful with your words. More generous with your accommodations of unjust things. More miserly with your encouragements and your corrections. The wager is that, eventually, you will stop thinking because you were tired of the noise.
Camus' answer was not heroic. He did not call for resistance fighters or martyrs. He called for the people who, in the middle of the plague, simply kept showing up to do their work and name what was happening, and refused the small daily corruptions that would have made it easier. That is the whole book. That is the whole point.
The journalist in Minnesota is still under indictment. The list on the White House website still gets updated. The President’s family is infiltrating and profiting off of public connections. The country we promise our kids is not dead yet, but there has to be enough of us who refuse to become the kind of people the regime needs us to be in order to take it.
So I keep working. I read the things that make me uncomfortable, even angry. I send the text. I write the words. I try and tell truths. I notice when my freedom may be costing someone else theirs. I notice when rituals go hollow.
The plague is outside festering right now, and it will become cancerous on our hollow insides if we let it.
How societies promote cooperation (Aeon). Reader Pat sent this one over, and it lands. We cooperate to survive but compete the second no one is watching. It explains why transparency underpins everything we call trust.
The Baptist preacher who fought for church-state separation (NYT Magazine). The forgotten champion of church-state separation was a Baptist preacher, John Leland, which tells you how far today's theocrats have drifted from the faith they keep waving at us.
America's 250 years of not practicing what it preaches (Foreign Policy). Every generation of American leaders has sold the world on freedoms it was not practicing at home, and Foreign Policy's look at the 250th anniversary makes the pattern impossible to miss.
The radical right has bet everything on one idea, that belief comes in exactly one shape, with one rulebook and no exceptions. This profile of an up-and-coming Texas Senate candidate is a perfect example. It dehumanizes a man by dehumanizing everyone who is LGBTQ, and it leans on the worn claim that any of that is a choice. Spend ten minutes outside a bubble and you know better. What gets lost is the older, stranger story. Jesus did not arrive to hand out more rules. He arrived to release people from them, from the rituals and tribal passions that keep getting mistaken for faith. Two thousand years later the institution still confuses conformity for spirituality. And here is the part that matters most. None of it has anything to do with whether your government works. It is a small issue for small minds. Do not get trapped.
The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.
creedwash (noun) — the laundering of cruelty, bigotry, or raw power through the language of faith, so that dehumanizing someone comes out sounding like devotion.
"The profile was pure creedwash, contempt in Sunday clothes handed to the reader as conviction.”
“America doesn’t just whitewash its sins anymore; it creedwashes them, issuing glossy statements of faith in freedom while quietly expanding the fine print on who actually qualifies.”
Etymology: creed + whitewash.
By the time you read this, I’ll be in Japan, a long awaited return after thirty years. I hope to have some new thoughts to share in the future from “sharpening the saw” as Stephen Covey used to say. Until then, keep up your reading habit, keep your imagination fresh, and always strive to be a good human.