Pete Davis

JOIN OR DIE — our film about community in America — is now streaming on Netflix 🍿🎳

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DC Friends — you don't want to miss this talk by @elias_crim on Sunday at 12:15 at St. Matthew the Apostle -->

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Two quick "money where your mouth is" policies to dare Trump to veto: 1) Minimum wage to $20 and peg to inflation (giving over 30% of American workers a raise) 2) $5,000 Child Tax Credit, Fully Refundable (material support to over 60 million kids)

Shadow work

Shouted out @_ericblanc's great article on “What Evangelicals Can Teach Us About Organizing” in the latest FESTIVAL episode. Full episode is here: newsletter.petedavis.org/p/f… Eric’s article is here: laborpolitics.com/p/what-eva…

My tribute to Wendell Berry from this week's episode of FESTIVAL: There is a hatch through which you can escape all that’s false about this world: all the status games and addictive screens, the news cycles and passing fads, the abstract systems exhausting us with their data on how we are good or bad, up or down, in or out. The escape hatch isn’t anywhere particular—rather, it’s everywhere particular. It appears when you decide to start loving any given particular place, as a particular place. The realm you are escaping is the realm of abstraction—being a unit among units, deploying resources among resources, browsing options among options. The promised land you seek is the land to which you make a promise—to treat it and all that comes with it as the particular, wonderful, concrete things they actually are; to take up your role as a member of it. Now it’s not exactly right to call this an escape hatch, because when you climb through it, you’re doing the opposite of escaping. The world we are trying to escape is a world designed around escapism—its flashy novelties are here to distract us from feeling our needs and facing our limits. When you climb through the hatch, you finally stop escaping—by sticking around somewhere, you now have the stability to be who you are, with all your grief and shame, quiet hopes and dogged vices. And in the humiliation of accepting that, you surrender the lie that the old world sold you—that you don’t need one another, that your lives aren’t bound up in each other’s. It’s also not true that climbing through the hatch frees us from all that’s false about the world. People are still people, and you are still you. But they’re now people you can work with, at a scale you can work with. Free from screens and narratives that flatten and separate, you can “convocate” with the real neighbors around you—you can weave threads of your callings together into a shared calling, and then participate in the natural drama and joy of living out that vocation together. In the world on the other side of the hatch, you’ll find everything from this world—but you will find it inside out. You’ll still care about what they’re doing in Washington, but you’ll get there by following your neighborhood creek upriver to investigate what they’re dumping in the headwaters. You won’t give up on big dreams, but you will understand that you trade sight for scale: that you lose your bearings when names become numbers, eyes become maps, and friendships become laws. You’ll still care about people around the world, but you’ll learn to love People by first loving a person. And you’ll laugh at the most beautiful joke I’ve ever read: O when the world’s at peace and every man is free then will I go down unto my love. O and I may go down several times before that. The man who opened the escape hatch for me and millions of others was Wendell Berry, the farmer prophet of Port Royal, Kentucky. For his life and work, I am immensely grateful. newsletter.petedavis.org/p/f…

Reflections on You Can See Everything (2026) Individual morality is the last line of defense for a good society. But it isn’t the only one, and perhaps not even the most important. Healthy civilizations don’t rely on individual virtue alone. As Peter Maurin put it, the goal is to build a society in which it is easier to be good. What could this look like? A lively ecosystem of institutions, each checking and compensating for the vices of the others. The startup prides itself on checking the vice of bureaucratic inertia. The heroic Founder captains a pirate ship to sail away from the status quo and reach the New. But every virtue casts a shadow. Sailing beyond the status quo becomes lawlessness. Reaching for the New becomes delusions of grandeur. A loyal crew becomes an us-vs-the-world cult. And along the way, the truth must be fudged so reality doesn't spoil the mythmaking. The story of Theranos is an example of the ecosystem working…eventually. Journalism, tort law, criminal law, and the professionalism of whistleblowers compensated for the vices. Perhaps this would have been faster if other institutions — collaborative scientists, sober investors, serious statesmen, active regulators, wise friends — were healthy enough to demand the type of openness that commons require and corporations resist. But they weren’t healthy — and startups have a short-term interest in making them less healthy. This is what is warned about in books like Walzer’s "Spheres of Justice" or Sandel’s "What Money Can’t Buy": the dangers of letting one sphere of society (like startups), with its own particular rules and logic (build and profit at all costs), colonize other spheres. Here’s an example. “You can see everything” is a principle of open and academic science. Academic scientists, ideally, share their experiments and data with each other so that others can try to replicate and build on their work. “You can see everything” is not a principle for corporate science, where secrecy is an advantage. When you think about institutional ecosystems, you ask questions like: What happens when more science moves from the open lab to the closed one? Our institutional ecosystem is even sicker today, so we put too much pressure on the last line of defense. Everything comes down to the person in front of us: Are they good or bad, honest or dishonest, sincere or insincere? It’s a question present in every age, but how much now rides on it — and how obsessively we parse it — is a symptom of our time.

Come celebrate the Ivan Illich centenary with us at Johnny Pistolas in DC on Thursday, September 24th at 7PM: partiful.com/e/SEGno7w6vHgub…