Holy Shift

How vertical morality rises in times of unraveling, & empathy as a cultural counter-spell

Every era has its telltale signs of unraveling. Endings do not always arrive with fire; they begin with a thinning, a fraying, a sense that the old stories can no longer hold the complexity of our lives. What once felt solid starts to feel too small. Polarities sharpen. People cling to certainty with a kind of Holy desperation. You can feel when a cultural cycle is breaking down, when meaning begins to crack from the inside out.

These endings are never just political. They are psychic. They show us what we have outgrown: ideas and structures that once organized life but can no longer contain an evolving human reality. And when a culture outgrows its worldview, power rarely softens. It tightens. Freedom, inner or outer, has always threatened systems built on control.

It is in moments like these that what Michael Meade calls vertical morality rises. Vertical morality is, at its core, a response to the anxiety of change. It offers a clean formula for goodness: follow the rules, obey authority, do not step out of line. It promises relief from the messiness of human freedom. Goodness becomes something bestowed from above, granted, measured, and policed.

When this worldview takes root, moral life begins to resemble a ladder. There are those above and those below, those who belong and those who don’t, those deemed worthy of compassion and those treated as expendable.

Vertical morality thrives in times of uncertainty because it promises clarity and safety. But that safety comes at a cost: a slow disconnection from our own humanity in service of defending hierarchies that were never built to include all of us. Instead of looking inward for truth or outward toward one another, we learn to look upward for permission.

And when a culture leans too heavily on this vertical frame, the connective force that links us to each other and to meaning slips out of view. Everything becomes polarized. Everything becomes literal. Everything becomes war.

But vertical systems do not simply fade when they stop serving the soul of a culture. They defend themselves. Psychologists call this an extinction burst: the last frantic thrashing of a dying pattern. It gets louder, harsher, and more rigid.

This is where we begin to recognize our own moment in history. The backlash. The doubling down. The insistence on binaries in a world that is inherently complex. The rise of authoritarian posturing disguised as certainty. These are the signs of a paradigm losing its grip.

Because the more people awaken to the harm of dominance, the more dominance fights to survive.

So what do we do when we are standing in the middle of something so vast?

Many of us oscillate between two poles.

On one end we feel the grief, anger, and exhaustion of confronting something that feels immovable. What can one person do against the weight of it all? There is an honest despair in that. And, if we stay there, agency collapses.

On the other side is the push toward activism and advocacy: important, necessary, yet often presented as an individual burden. And we have to ask: who benefits when systemic harm is framed as a problem you’re meant to solve alone?

That’s how individualizing narratives work: they shift responsibility for structural wounds onto individuals, while the system remains largely untouched.

When advocacy is framed as “speak louder, do more, carry it all,” without support, community, or collective strategy, it becomes another form of vertical morality: you’re “good” if you do enough, and failing if you can’t keep up.

Both poles are traps.

The work is Both/And.

We honour the grief and refuse to collapse into helplessness.
We let the anger clarify our values and metabolize it into action that aligns with the world we’re building.
We refuse to other the “other”, even those caught in the machinery of harm, and we draw firm boundaries around what love will not excuse.

And, we refuse to dehumanize the people shaped by the very forces we are resisting while letting love set clear boundaries on what it will and will not tolerate. This is not neutrality. It is the disciplined insistence on staying human while fighting for humanity.

Horizontal morality, the antidote to the vertical, asks us to measure goodness not by obedience but by connection, responsibility, and care. It shifts the question from Who do you obey? to Who are you in relationship?

This is where systems begin to shift, not through isolated heroics but through the relational work of many people remembering their humanity at the same time.

And that remembrance begins with empathy as a cultural counter-spell. Empathy keeps the world from collapsing into hierarchy. It keeps us from collapsing into despair. It keeps us oriented toward a future where power is shared rather than imposed.

A future wired not vertically but relationally.