The three things that change the world

Last week I was walking along Waller Creek here in Austin with a friend who’s a priest. He was working through a sermon for that evening — about race, class, and solidarity — and we’d drifted into the Latin word munera. It’s one of those words that sits underneath more of the world than you’d expect. It gives us municipality: the community that shares obligations. It gives us immunity: the condition of being exempt from them. And it gives us commons: what belongs to everyone because everyone tends it.

We talked about that for a while — what it means that the same root holds both solidarity and its exclusion — and drifted into thinking about what causes change. We talked about Marx and Mao and then my friend shared an idea gifted to him by his mentor: that there are three things that have change the world: witness, friendship, and art.

I’ve been turning this over since. Each one requires you to be changed by what you encounter. A witness who remains untouched isn’t witnessing. A friendship that doesn’t alter you isn’t friendship. Art that leaves you exactly where you were isn’t art. All three demand vulnerability. All three are acts before they are stories.

That last part matters. There’s a version of progressive politics that believes the task is to tell better stories — that if we narrate the world differently, we’ll get a different world. I understand the impulse, but I think it gets the order wrong. Witness, friendship, and art don’t work because they change the story. They work because they change you — through doing, through being, through experience — and the story comes after, if it comes at all. The transformation is in the encounter, not the telling.

This is what I want to write about here.

I’ve spent twenty-five years working in food systems, political economy, and social movements — from South Africa to Brazil to India to the American Midwest. I’ve written books about why half the world is starving while the other half is sick from what it eats, about the absurdity of how we measure value, about how colonialism lives in our bodies. I’ve made documentary films about people trying to live as if they belonged to the same community as everyone else. I’m finishing a new book, about how the systems that shape what we eat also shape how we think and what we’re capable of feeling.

But this Substack isn’t the book. It’s the thinking around it — and well beyond it. Some of what I’ll write here touches the book’s themes: the politics of attention, ultra-processed food, the movements building alternatives in the ruins of the current system. Some of it will be about feminist mathematics, trip-hop, comparative constitutions, the ethics of political humor, Tourette’s syndrome, what different countries chose to protect in the first article of their founding documents. I’m interested in how the world holds together and how it comes apart, and I don’t think you can understand either without moving between scales and disciplines and moods.

So expect witness, friendship, and art to show up here through. Some of what I share will be writing. Some will be video or audio. Some will be encounters with other people’s art that changed how I sense the world. The point isn’t to produce content. It’s to keep trying to be changed, to practice solidarity, and to invite you into that process.

A post will arrive in your inbox once a week or so. Everything is free. If something sparks a thought, I’d love to hear it — I can’t always reply individually, but I read everything.

Thanks for being here.

Raj

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