An Open Letter to the Skeptic

You are probably already skeptical of this.

Good.

That skepticism is not a problem. It might be the most valuable thing you carry into this conversation. Because what we are about to discuss does not need your agreement. It needs your honesty. And skeptics tend to be honest in ways that true believers sometimes are not.

So let's be honest together.

I Know What This Looks Like

From the outside, a project called EVERYONE that talks about belief and possibility and the future of humanity looks like it could be any number of things you have seen before and rightly dismissed.

It looks like it could be a self-help brand dressed in cosmic language. It looks like it could be another "change the world" pitch from someone who has never had to worry about rent. It looks like it could be spiritual bypassing with a nice logo. It looks like it could be the kind of naive idealism that sounds beautiful in a keynote and evaporates the moment it contacts reality.

I understand why you would think any of those things. Each of them has been true of something else. The space of "hope projects" and "meaning projects" is crowded with well-intentioned work that does not survive contact with critical thinking.

So here is my first commitment to you: I will not ask you to turn off your critical thinking. I will ask you to apply it more, not less.

The Argument You're Already Making

Let me articulate the skeptical position as it deserves.

Humanity is facing a convergence of existential and structural crises. Climate change, AI alignment risk, nuclear proliferation, democratic erosion, institutional decay, technological disruption, inequality. These are not abstract future risks. They are happening now, measurably, with accelerating feedback loops.

The systems producing these crises are enormous. Global capitalism, geopolitical competition, technological momentum, evolutionary psychology. These are not systems that respond to inspiration. They respond to incentives, power, and structural constraints.

Against these forces, the idea that "belief" could meaningfully change outcomes seems, at best, insufficient. At worst, it is a distraction from the hard, material, political work that actually needs to happen.

Furthermore, history is full of movements that promised to unite humanity and delivered cult dynamics, exploitation, or collapse. The bigger the promise, the more suspicious we should be.

I have heard this argument. I respect it. And I agree with most of it.

Where I Agree

The crises are real. I will not argue otherwise.

The systems producing them are massive and resistant to change. Correct.

Inspiration alone is insufficient. Also correct. Belief without action is just a feeling. Action without strategy is just motion. Strategy without power is just a plan. All of this is true.

History's record of "unite humanity" projects is mixed at best and catastrophic at worst. Yes.

The space is full of grifters. Yes.

Your skepticism is an intelligent response to real patterns. It is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition. And I would rather have it at the table than any amount of uncritical enthusiasm.

Where I Diverge

Here is where I think the skeptical position, as currently held by most thoughtful people, contains a structural error. Not a logical error. A strategic one.

The skeptical position correctly identifies that belief is insufficient. But it then makes a leap: from "insufficient" to "irrelevant." And that leap is wrong.

Belief is insufficient the way oxygen is insufficient for fire. You also need fuel and heat. But try starting a fire without oxygen.

Every material change in the world required people to first believe the change was possible. Not as a guarantee. As a precondition. The abolition of slavery required people to believe a world without slavery was achievable before they could coordinate to create one. The scientific revolution required people to believe that systematic inquiry could reveal natural laws before they could build the institutions that made it happen. Every civil rights movement, every technological breakthrough, every shift in what a civilization considers normal, began with belief preceding evidence.

This is not inspirational rhetoric. This is how change actually works, historically, documented, repeatedly.

The skeptic who says "belief doesn't change anything" is empirically wrong. Not morally wrong. Factually wrong. The historical record is clear: collective belief has been a causal factor in every major transformation of human civilization.

The real question is not whether belief matters. It is whether belief is sufficient. And the answer is no. It is necessary but not sufficient. Which means abandoning it is abandoning one of the necessary conditions for the change you want.

The Game Theory

Let me put it differently.

You are a rational person. You evaluate positions based on their likely outcomes. So evaluate this one.

Scenario A: You maintain that belief in a different future is naive, and focus exclusively on material, structural, political action. Others share your view. Collective belief in possibility continues to erode. Material action happens but struggles to achieve the coordination and sustained effort that complex challenges require, because the people doing the work keep burning out and the public keeps disengaging. The trajectory continues roughly as projected.

Scenario B: You maintain that belief in a different future is naive. But enough other people disagree, believe anyway, and create the conditions for transformation. You benefit from their belief without having contributed to it. Free rider problem, but workable.

Scenario C: You consider the possibility that belief is structurally important, hold your skepticism alongside that consideration, and engage. Your skepticism makes the work better because you insist on intellectual honesty, resist magical thinking, and demand that belief translate into action. The movement benefits from your rigor. You benefit from the movement's energy. The combination of believers and skeptics produces something more robust than either could alone.

Scenario D: Enough people maintain Scenario A that collective belief continues to collapse. The material interventions happen but cannot achieve the scale or coordination required. Things continue to deteriorate. Everyone, including the skeptics, bears the cost.

If you are being rational, Scenario C dominates. Your skepticism is most valuable inside the conversation, not outside it. You lose nothing by engaging and the possible gains are significant.

What I Am Not Asking

I am not asking you to feel hopeful. Hope is an emotion. It comes and goes. It is not a reliable foundation for anything.

I am not asking you to stop thinking critically. Critical thinking is exactly what this work needs more of. The last thing the world needs is another project that surrounds itself with yes-people and collapses the moment someone asks a hard question.

I am not asking you to trust me. Trust is earned through demonstrated integrity over time, not through compelling prose.

I am not asking you to join anything. There is no membership, no initiation, no in-group.

I am not asking you to agree with the thesis. You can disagree with every word in this letter and still be exactly the kind of person this work needs.

What I Am Asking

I am asking you to consider one proposition and evaluate it on its merits:

The collective loss of belief in the possibility of a different future is itself a causal factor in the continuation of the current trajectory.

Not the only factor. Not the biggest factor. One factor. Among many. But a structurally important one, because it sits upstream of effort, coordination, and imagination.

If you can hold that as a possibility, even tentatively, then we have something to work with.

If you cannot, I would genuinely like to hear why. Not as a challenge. As a question. Because the best way to test this proposition is to expose it to the strongest counterarguments available.

Why Your Skepticism Matters

There is a dynamic in most hope-oriented projects that you have probably noticed and that probably contributes to your distrust of them.

They attract believers. The believers reinforce each other. Critical perspectives are experienced as threats to the community rather than contributions to its integrity. The project becomes an echo chamber. The echo chamber becomes brittle. The brittleness becomes a liability. And when reality inevitably delivers a setback that the community is not equipped to process, the project fails.

This is predictable. This is preventable. And the way you prevent it is by building skepticism into the foundation rather than treating it as a problem to be overcome.

Your doubt is not the enemy of this work. Self-delusion is the enemy of this work. Intellectual dishonesty is the enemy. Magical thinking is the enemy. Charlatanism is the enemy.

Your doubt is the immune system.

The Wager, Restated

Here is the bet, stated as plainly as I can.

If we give up on the possibility of a collective turn, we guarantee failure. Not eventually. Immediately. Because the coordination required to address existential risk cannot emerge from a population that has already decided it is too late.

If we do not give up, the future remains open. Not guaranteed. Not likely. Open.

The rational move is to keep the future open. Not out of feeling. Out of logic. The cost of belief is low. The cost of non-belief, if non-belief contributes even marginally to the outcome it predicts, is catastrophic.

This is not faith. It is a wager. And the asymmetry is clear.

A Final Honest Word

I do not know if this will work.

I do not know if humanity will coordinate in time. I do not know if the forces driving collapse are too powerful, too entrenched, too accelerated for any intervention to matter.

I do not know.

But I know what happens if we don't try. And I know that pretending certainty about the future, whether optimistic or pessimistic, is intellectually dishonest.

We are in territory that has no historical precedent. A species with exponential technology and insufficient collective wisdom, aware of the mismatch and arguing about what to do about it. This has never happened before. Which means extrapolating from past data to predict outcomes is exactly the kind of reasoning that intelligent people find compelling and that may turn out to be precisely wrong.

The future is not determined. It is being determined. Right now. By what we do and what we refuse to do. By what we believe and what we refuse to believe.

I am not asking you to believe this will work.

I am asking if something in you is unwilling to guarantee that it won't.

If so, that is where we start.