Folk the System: Caring for One Another in Hard Times
When institutions and governments fail, people already know how to care for one another, and we can build our lives around that knowledge instead of waiting to be rescued.
Every generation, everywhere, believes it is living in exceptional times, and in some ways, that is true. Yet there are threads that bind us to past generations, and those threads are far less exceptional. Every generation faces hard times: political, economic, or both.
In a world carved by violence and into borders, we have been divided into imagined states, often as uprooted and displaced people. We are told, again and again, that governments will take care of us. And again and again, every generation learns the same lesson: they do not.
So what can we do?
We can take care of ourselves and one another. We can place our trust not in politics or promises, but in being there for each other. We, the folk, are capable of creating new folkways rooted in care, kindness, and shared effort far beyond the imagined borders and politics that divide us.
New Folkways
William Graham Sumner defined folkways as the customs and practices of a group that arise unconsciously through the repetition of small, everyday acts. Over time, these acts form the foundation of how people relate to one another. Put simply, folkways are the ways we live and live with each other.
If there is a common thread running through these ways of living, it is struggle. Struggle is one of the ingredients in the soup that makes up our folkways. Anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote that “sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle,” and often it is shared struggle that gives shape to our sociability.
Too often, our response to struggle is isolation, and that isolation is dehumanising. This is where we must choose differently. During hard times, we can band together and choose care, kindness, and community over withdrawal, competition, and pride.
It is easy to feel as though we are surviving from one disaster to the next, whether those disasters are natural or manmade, including political ones. This is the logic of disaster politics: to keep us uneasy, off balance, and isolated.
Rebecca Solnit offers an alternative when she writes that “horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire, and are each our sister’s and brother’s keeper.”
This reminds us that we have a choice in how we respond to disaster and struggle. We can allow fear and isolation to take hold, or we can turn toward one another. Choosing one another, again and again, is how care becomes durable. Caring for each other must be the foundation of our new folkways.
Care as Strength
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
— Dorothy Day
The first step in caring is paying attention. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that “paying attention is a form of reciprocity.” To care is to pay attention, to notice the needs and wants of others, and to respond accordingly. Care begins with awareness. It is the folk science of knowing when and where love, help, and presence are required.
For María Puig de la Bellacasa, care is neither innocent nor limited to our immediate circles. She writes that “care is everything that is done, rather than everything that ‘we’ do, to maintain, continue, and repair ‘the world’ so that all, rather than ‘we,’ can live in it as well as possible.” Care, in this sense, reaches beyond the familiar. To care fully, we must pay attention not only to those closest to us, but to the wider world we share. However, paying attention does not always mean forcing others to pay attention to us.
In her essay “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”, María Lugones describes a form of care that does not try to control or change people. She says that caring for others means learning to step into their world, instead of expecting them to live in ours. She calls this world-travelling. It means paying attention to how others experience life, even when that experience is different from our own.
Lugones writes, “Without knowing the other’s ‘world,’ one does not know the other, and without knowing the other one is really alone in the other’s presence because the other is only dimly present to one.” In other words, if we do not try to understand the world someone lives in, we may be physically near them but still deeply disconnected.
Care, in this sense, is not about fully understanding everything about another person or forcing them to explain themselves. It is about showing up with openness and respect. It is about standing alongside others while accepting that parts of their lives may remain unfamiliar to us. To care is not to erase difference, but to stay in relationship despite it.
Care is strength, both collective and individual. Kindness is the outward expression of love. It is how care appears in daily life. Care is what makes kindness dependable.
Care is not only about coping during hard times. It is about investing in a future where kindness, bravery, and love, rather than neglect, fear, and hate, guide our ways of life. Care is reciprocal, and reciprocity is power.
Folk the System
To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.
— bell hooks
If our folkways are founded in systems of care rather than systems of neglect, isolation, and extraction, then love stops being an ideal and becomes a shared responsibility. It becomes something we practice in how we show up for one another, how we organise daily life, and how we respond when things fall apart.
To 'folk the system' is to refuse arrangements that leave people to absorb harm alone. It is to soften hard systems by rebuilding them around care, kindness, and mutual responsibility. It is choosing to act as if our lives are bound together, because they are.
'Folking the system' is a soft revolution, where softness is not weakness, but flexibility, resilience, and the ability to endure. Like water, it does not fight every obstacle head on. It flows around what blocks it, wears down what cannot move, and finds new paths when the old ones are closed. It is the strength to bend without breaking, to adapt without losing care, and to keep going together.
To 'folk the system' means trusting what people already know how to do when institutions fail. It means paying attention, showing up, and sharing the work of keeping one another going. It is not about purity or perfection. It is about practice, repeated until it holds.
This is how love becomes durable. This is how care becomes power.
A Diversity of Tactics and Folkways
There is no single way to practice care, and there should not be. Folk live under different conditions, face different risks, and carry different responsibilities. What is possible or safe for one person may be impossible or dangerous for another. A system of care that demands sameness will always fail the most vulnerable.
'Folking the system' requires a diversity of tactics. Some people show care quietly, through listening, feeding, fixing, and staying. Others speak loudly, organize publicly, or take risks to confront harm directly through direct actions. Some folk work within existing structures to change them from the inside. Others refuse those structures altogether. All of these responses can be expressions of care.
Care does not require an agreement on tactics. It requires respect for difference and an understanding that many forms of action are necessary to meet many kinds of harm. A soft revolution does not move in a single line. It flows in many directions at once, adapting to the shape of the ground it moves across. It is an expressive insurgency.
This diversity is not chaos. It is resilience. When one approach is blocked, another finds a way through. When one voice is silenced, others carry the work forward. No one is required to do everything. No one is disposable. Each contribution matters because it emerges from real lives and within real limits.
To 'folk the system' is to refuse the demand that everyone act the same way. It is to make room for many paths toward care, so that people can participate without being forced beyond their capacity. This is how movements endure. This is how care remains possible under pressure and the violence of politics and governments.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A soft revolution does not begin with grand gestures. It begins in ordinary life.
It looks like paying attention to who is struggling and responding before they have to ask. It looks like sharing food, tools, time, and knowledge without keeping score. It looks like slowing down when someone cannot keep up, rather than leaving them behind.
It looks like choosing repair over replacement, patience over punishment, and presence over performance. It looks like making room for rest, grief, difference, and failure without shame.
'Folking the system' means building habits that make care normal rather than exceptional. It means setting things up so people are not forced to be heroic just to survive. It means refusing systems that thrive on isolation, and strengthening the small practices that help people stay connected.
These actions are not dramatic. That is their strength. Repeated over time, they become folkways. They become the quiet infrastructure that carries people through hard times and into better ones.
Folk politics, folk the system! Careful care and kindness can carry us on.