Social change doesn’t happen because people are persuaded to be better. It happens when groups realise they cannot achieve their goals without each other. Not “I should help you because it’s right” but “I literally cannot get what I want unless you also get what you want.” This interdependence – not empathy, not representation, not even justice – is the structural mechanism that makes movements succeed and stick.

Why atomized interest-maximization fails:

Most political rhetoric assumes we’re in a zero-sum game. If you win, I lose. If immigrants get resources, citizens get less. If women advance, men fall behind. If rural areas get investment, cities pay for it. This framing makes every advance by one group an existential threat to another.

But this model misunderstands how power actually works. The groups that seem to be “winning” in zero-sum competition are usually just getting crumbs while the actual pie gets smaller. White working-class Americans who resent diversity initiatives have watched their real wages stagnate for 40 years – not because of DEI, but because labour has no power. Rural communities that resent urban “elites” are dying from lack of healthcare, infrastructure, and economic opportunity – not because cities are thriving, but because policy has abandoned both. Women who “lean in” still hit the maternal wall because there’s no childcare infrastructure, which also prevents men from being present fathers.

Every group, pursuing its narrow interest in isolation, loses. Because atomization is how power gets concentrated. When workers compete with each other over scraps, management wins. When regions compete for investment, capital wins. When identity groups fight over symbolic representation, institutions get to avoid material redistribution.

The interdependence matrix:

Real progress happens when groups realise their goals are structurally linked:

Workers can’t win higher wages if immigrants are exploitable. If undocumented workers can be paid illegally and deported if they complain, they undercut everyone’s bargaining power. You don’t need to like immigrants. You need them to have rights, or you’ll never have leverage. Your self-interest requires their protection.

Men can’t have fulfilling family lives if women can’t have careers. In a system where women are expected to sacrifice professional ambition for caregiving, men become sole breadwinners, trapped in jobs they hate, with no time for their kids. The “traditional family” that supposedly served men actually imprisoned them. Women’s economic independence creates the conditions for men to have actual choices about their lives.

Cities can’t thrive if rural areas collapse. Urban prosperity depends on food, energy, water, and waste disposal – all provided by rural infrastructure. When rural areas are economically gutted, they become politically radicalised and vote for parties that gut urban investment. You can’t have a functional city in a failing state. Your prosperity requires theirs.

White working-class Americans can’t get healthcare if Black Americans don’t. The US resisted universal healthcare for decades partly because it would require equal treatment across racial lines. So instead of “healthcare for whites only,” you got “expensive healthcare for everyone, plus massive precarity.” The racial exclusion you thought protected you actually prevented the social infrastructure you needed. Solidarity wasn’t charity – it was the precondition for your own security.

Businesses can’t grow if their workers are too poor to buy products. This is Henry Ford’s old insight: pay workers enough to afford cars, and you create your own market. But applied broadly: if wealth inequality means most people are in precarity, who buys your goods? Who has stable housing to start businesses near? Who educates the workforce? Extreme inequality doesn’t just hurt workers – it eventually collapses the market itself. Your profit requires their purchasing power.

The majority groups can’t maintain democracy if they permit minority oppression. Any mechanism you build to subordinate one group will eventually be used against you. The surveillance state built to monitor Muslims gets used on protesters. The voting restrictions aimed at Black communities are used in poor white areas. The erosion of legal protections for trans people creates precedent for eroding everyone’s medical autonomy. You can’t firewall injustice. The tools of oppression are promiscuous.

Why this isn’t about persuasion:

Notice that none of these require changing hearts. You don’t need to convince the racist that racism is wrong. You need to show them they can’t get healthcare, wages, or housing security in a racially stratified system. You don’t need to convince men that feminism is righteous. You need to show them they’re trapped in a gender system that prevents them from having the relationships and freedom they actually want.

This is why contact theory and media representation, while real, are insufficient. They’re trying to build empathy, which is fragile and reversible. Interdependence builds necessity, which is structural and durable.

When movements win through persuasion alone, they’re vulnerable to backlash the moment people stop feeling generous. But when movements win through interdependence – when the other group’s success becomes a precondition for your own – the change is locked in by self-interest.

The infrastructure insight:

This is why movements become durable when they become “boring infrastructure.” It’s not just normalisation. It’s that infrastructure that encodes interdependence.

When schools are integrated, white parents have a self-interest in ensuring poorer schools are well-funded (because they’re the same schools). When healthcare is universal, rich people have a self-interest in ensuring that poor people’s healthcare is good (because infectious diseases don’t check bank accounts). When unions include immigrants, workers have a self-interest in ensuring immigrants have legal protection (because otherwise they undercut wages).

The infrastructure phase is where interdependence becomes material. Not symbolic, not cultural – structural. You literally cannot achieve your goals without a system that works for everyone.

Why backlash is predictable – and why it fails long-term:

The backlash phase happens because atomised groups correctly perceive that interdependence threatens their ability to compete for scraps. “If immigrants have rights, I lose my wage advantage over them.” “If women have careers, I lose my monopoly on breadwinning status.” “If minorities vote, I lose my electoral edge.”

All true. In the short term, zero-sum competition gives you a relative advantage. But only relative. Your absolute conditions still get worse. Because while you were fighting immigrants for pennies, capital extracted billions. While you were fighting for status, policy eliminated your job security. While you were fighting minorities for votes, politicians gutted your healthcare.

The backlash succeeds tactically but fails strategically. You can delay interdependence, but you can’t escape it. Because the problems that hurt you – economic precarity, healthcare collapse, climate chaos, infrastructure failure, democratic erosion – cannot be solved atomistically. You cannot individually bargain your way to clean water. You cannot personally negotiate away a pandemic. You cannot opt out of economic collapse.

The practical implication:

This reframes coalition-building entirely. It’s not “we should all get along” or “everyone deserves dignity” – though those are true. It’s “you literally cannot achieve your material interests without me, and I literally cannot achieve mine without you.”

Which means the political task isn’t convincing people to care about others. It’s making visible the interdependencies that already exist but are obscured by the rhetoric of competition.

Show workers that their job security depends on immigrants’ rights. Show men that their freedom requires women’s economic independence. Show white communities that their healthcare requires universal coverage. Show rural areas that their prosperity requires urban investment. Show the majority that their democracy requires minority protection.

Not as moral arguments. As a structural analysis. “Here’s why you can’t get what you want unless they also get what they want.”

Why this is harder than persuasion – and why it works better:

Making interdependence visible is more complicated than making empathy appeals because:

1. It requires systems thinking, not individual stories
2. It threatens existing relative advantages, even if absolute conditions improve
3. It demands coordination across groups who’ve been taught to see each other as enemies
4. It makes the real power structure visible (the actual zero-sum game is between concentrated power and everyone else)

But it works better because:

1. Self-interest is more durable than altruism
2. Material incentives are harder to reverse than cultural norms
3. Infrastructure changes persist even when attitudes regress
4. Once groups coordinate, they have actual power instead of just moral claims

The test:

Every successful movement passes this test: Can you explain to someone in the “advantaged” group why they literally cannot achieve their goals without the “disadvantaged” group succeeding?

• Civil rights: White prosperity requires Black economic participation and political stability
• Labour: No worker has bargaining power if any worker is exploitable
• Women’s rights: No gender is free in a rigid gender system
• Disability rights: Everyone becomes disabled eventually (age, accident, illness)
• Climate: No one can buy their way out of atmospheric collapse

When you can make that case materially, not morally, you’re building power. When you can’t, you’re building a culture war.

Conclusion:

“We literally can’t win what we want without each other” isn’t inspirational rhetoric. It’s a mechanical description. The system is set up so that atomised groups pursuing narrow self-interest inevitably lose to concentrated power. The only counter-strategy is recognising that your self-interest and their self-interest are structurally the same interest, obscured by cultural divides that serve power.

This doesn’t require you to like, trust, or even understand each other. It requires you to recognise the payoff matrix you’re actually in. And once you see it, solidarity stops being charity and becomes self-preservation.

The groups that figure this out win. The ones that don’t keep fighting each other for crumbs while the table gets sold out from under them.