Crying in Walgreens & how ideology follows behavior

On anti-depressants, big tent organizing, and Luigi Mangione

Modern Bohemia, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1924)

I am sitting in my car in the Walgreens parking lot, nauseous, dizzy, and crying. There’s a man flailing his arms and screaming at everyone walking into and out of the pharmacy, having his own mental health crisis, and I feel a kinship with him.

I gave myself a window of three weeks to transfer my medication across state lines after I moved across the country. This is my third trip to Walgreens, and each time they have lost my prescription transfer request form. I ask for an emergency three-day supply and the pharmacist looks at my file which tells him I haven’t filled my prescription at a Walgreens in several years and tells me he doubts it will be approved by my doctor. I explain that it’s because I switched to a family pharmacy, and isn’t there a database to look that up or something?

I’m being forced into withdrawal by bureaucracy, and I’m treated as if I were a criminal for medication that’s not abusable.

The disgust and anger towards health care corporations boiled over publicly after the murder of United Healthcare’s CEO. Think pieces, memes, jokes, heartbreaking stories of treatments foregone and loved ones lost for the sake of profit.

My insurance company has previously denied a 90-day supply, and I’m on my last pill. I cut it in half. I take each half two days apart to buy myself more time. The girl I’m dating offers me a bottle of her old medication. Another friend gives me his; it’s not the exact dose but it’s close enough to decrease my withdrawal symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, nightmares, nausea, dizziness, anxiety.

I consider quitting the medication altogether out of spite. But the spite easily melts into sadness, and I’m crying again.

The hours after Luigi Mangione was identified gave us a flood of information about his ideological incoherence as people dug into his Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and even Goodreads. He was interested in artificial intelligence, Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and AOC and seemed to lean both libertarian and techno-utopian. He struggled with pain.

He made his motivations quite clear from the bullets he used to the manifesto he wrote. And we’ve been witnessing a swell of emotion from the public at the hypocrisy of what does and doesn’t count as murder.

Similar to self-immolation, committing murder is an individual direct action rather than a collective one. The former is violence against self, the latter is violence against the other. Regardless of where you believe that violence falls on the question of morality or strategy on the path to justice, we know that individual actions won’t get us to the world we need.

This feels like a profound failure of our movements to create pathways and clear roles for folks who feel such deep anger, and are highly motivated to act on it, into our long-term work.

I believe, very strongly, that people aren’t either good or evil. Most of us hold deeply complicated ideas and opinions simultaneously. In my workout class earlier this week, my trainer asked us the ice breaker question “if you had to be stuck on a deserted island either alone or with your biggest enemy, which would you choose?” I didn’t have to think about it; I will always choose the human regardless of who it is, even the people who have deeply hurt me. Plus we would have several decades ahead of us of repair, conversation, and growth. I’m reminded of a colleague from the South who pursued couples therapy with someone her age who was a descendant of the family who had owned her family as slaves. It took years, but it was healing for both of them, she explained to me. Nobody can understand their bond after that kind of work, but they’re friends now.

This kind of reparative work is not for everyone, nor does it have to be. But as organizers, we have to think deeply about what containers we create on the path toward liberation.

In movement spaces, this is sometimes called (criticized) “big tent” organizing. Sometimes people within this framework argue that we should focus on values alignment rather than identity; that we need to recruit people based on values, and reject people whose values we don't share. But this thinking falls into the fallacy that people have strong, unchangeable, moral cores. Life, and humans, are more messy than that.

To be clear, this isn’t about converting racists or bigots. It’s also not about watering down our commitments to appeal to “centrists.” It’s about how loosely people actually hold their politics and how there aren’t really centrists in the first place.

Social psychology, history, and neuroscience tell us that ideology follows behavior, not the other way around. The most basic evidence is the existence of cognitive dissonance, the idea that people experience discomfort when their behaviors contradict their beliefs, and the most common resolution is to change their beliefs to align with their actions. Taking this idea further, we also know that our brain develops reward pathways for behaviors that result in positive feedback (emotional or social) and influence us to shift our beliefs to align with those behaviors.

My friend who works in climate policy was tormented during the last two weeks about whether or not to take a job at Tesla. After being laid off from his job, the policy team at Tesla actively pursued him for a senior role. Scarcity and fear-based thinking led him to believe that this was the best option for his career, despite his distaste for Elon Musk. Many of us around him urged him not to take the job citing moral, cultural, political, and religious reasons. Do you really want a fascist as your boss? Do you want to lend credibility to an authoritarian takeover of our country? But the thing that pushed him to decide to not take the job was asking a stranger at a climate conference for advice: what do you think, how would you react to me if we were meeting each other and I told you I worked at Tesla? The stranger thought for a moment and told him “the stench will follow you everywhere.”

After he told me his decision, we were standing on a sidewalk saying goodbye to each other. “I love you, I’m proud of you, now go kick a Tesla,” I said. There was a woman locking her bike up to a street sign a few feet from us who overheard this and exclaimed, “everyone should go kick a Tesla!” This is the kind of social pressure that works. These are the rewards we need to give each other.

There’s also the question of identity. Henri Tajfel outlined a theory that explains how people change their beliefs to align with the groups they belong to and especially after participating in actions with those groups that reinforce their collective identity. This shows up over and over again in protests—individuals who come to marches, actions, and protests become more ideologically aligned with the movement after the action rather than their ideology driving them to show up to the action.

The best case study we have of this phenomenon is the pro-life movement. Sociologist Ziad Munson found that people adopted strong ideological commitments to anti-abortion values only after participating in pro-life activities such as attending a rally or volunteering to yell at people walking in and out of abortion clinics.

The biggest indicator for someone showing up to an action isn’t their politics but an invitation from a friend, a sense of obligation to their community, or simple curiosity.

Over time, people’s participation in anti-abortion actions shaped their ideology and reinforced their identification with the pro-life movement. Social networks shape our beliefs. The groups that we are in provide emotional and intellectual reinforcement.

As leftists and organizers, we need to give people the opportunity for action whether or not their “values” or “politics” seem to be aligned with ours on the surface. There’s a lot of flexibility if we allow for it.