I spent many years as a poor single mom, so I know how demoralizing it feels to work as hard as you can, do what you’re told is right, and still have to buy less food to pay the electric bill. I assumed my struggle was a personal failing, and that if I just worked harder and earned a promotion or a raise, things would turn around. Through luck, they did. For so many others, the hardship continues decade after decade.

Years later, while researching collaborative and inclusive leadership in worker cooperatives for my doctorate in leadership studies, I wondered why this more equitable business model, with roots reaching back to at least 1761, was not more widespread. In a cooperative, workers share ownership, profits, and decision-making. In traditional corporations, a few people at the top typically hold decision-making power, the majority of the profits, and shares of ownership in their companies.

That led me to ask why some people in power, who have more wealth than they could use in many lifetimes, never feel they have enough. My answer became a theory: people who exhibit Dark Triad traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) are prevented from meeting their basic psychological needs, so they feel compelled to insatiably chase substitutes such as wealth, power, and prestige. [Read the full idea]

Then I read Peter Turchin’s research on the cycles of national integration and disintegration that societies pass through over time. His work made me ask whether the Dark Triad pattern I had been studying in modern elites appeared in earlier eras of U.S. history, and how far back it went. I learned that it begins with the arrival of the colonists. The history of the Dark Triad pattern caused one book to expand into four.

In addition to describing the pattern among powerful elites, these books offer a way forward. Understanding how an economy is structured is the first step toward changing it, which is why the series ends with Book 4, on how ordinary people have risen before and what a society where everyone can thrive might look like.

I wrote these books for my students, my neighbors, my family, and other Commoners, the ordinary people who work for a living, and have heard the same story I did from those who benefit from it: that our hardships are our own fault and that the forces behind them are natural. If these books help you see your situation as the result of a system people built, one that people can change, then my work has done its job.

Raven

The Dehumanizing of Commoners, Book 1 of the Commoners Rising series, is expected in October 2027. [Join the mailing list] for updates and a preview chapter.