Welcome to Gilead Unified School District.
No, no — seriously.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a good analogy for a liberal community like SFUSD, which has already done the hard emotional work of imagining theocratic capture.
Unfortunately, the real question Tuesday night’s Board of Education meeting embodied and projected was this: What if the real theocracy we need to fear isn’t the one we’ve been conditioned to fear? What if our worst and most manipulative adult behaviors in the room have already been passed down to our children? What if the call is coming from inside the house?
Margaret Atwood’s Gilead is based on the American right. But what we saw on Tuesday night was that there are other forms of bigotry and intolerance that can grow and harden out of the left side of the spectrum as well — and these too can cause a devastating theocratic capture of civil society if we abandon our ability to be vigilant in defending the democratic norms and values we claim to believe in.
In observing adult behavior in the board meeting room, I was both astonished and frightened to see how SFUSD has devolved from a high-trust institution to a low-trust society. Honestly, just watch the video.
It’s made me reflect on what it means to live and work in a high-trust versus a low-trust society.
High trust is the foundation on which every human good is built. It’s the essence of democracy. It’s also the essence of the education SFUSD claims to value.
High trust is not a precondition for some goods — it’s the precondition period. Remove it, and you don’t get a blank slate for something better. You get a specific, well-documented kind of hellscape.
Trust is social capital in its most literal sense — it is a productive asset that compounds over time. When people trust strangers, institutions, and contracts, they can:
– Cooperate with people they don’t know personally
– Make long-term investments (in businesses, in education systems, in children, in infrastructure)
– Delegate to specialists rather than doing everything themselves
–Take risks that have positive expected value
– Resolve disputes without violence or fear
Each of these capacities multiplies the others. A society where you can trust a stranger to honor a contract, a doctor to give honest and objective healing advice, a teacher to teach rather than indoctrinate, a judge to rule impartially, and a neighbor not to steal from you is a society in which you can build a life and raise your children in safety. It is a society in which competence accumulates across generations.
And this is not a minor advantage — it is the difference between chaos and functional democracy. As we saw clearly on Tuesday night.
Many years ago, political theorist Francis Fukuyama gave this a very clear articulation: the wealth of nations correlates not just with physical and human capital but also with what he called the radius of trust — how far beyond your immediate family and tribe you can extend cooperative behavior. High-radius trust societies can build large impersonal institutions; low-radius trust societies are trapped in familialism, clientelism, tribalism, and corruption.
Based on what we saw on display Tuesday night, SFUSD has embraced its devolution from a high-trust, inclusive educational institution to a low-trust, asymmetric theocracy. It has surrendered to a single narrative on offer and anybody who can be accused of straying from it (whether honestly or falsely) will be ejected from the meeting room — immediately, forcibly, and quite literally.
A low-trust school district is no longer neutral — it has a characteristic pathology:
–An unquestionable theocracy captures governance. Human capital stops accumulating. Diversity of voices disappears. How will students learn to listen and cooperate in civil societies? The Board of Education’s answer Tuesday night was that they won’t. They will instead be trained in how to manipulate the system to achieve dominance rather than to achieve learning.
–Transaction costs explode. Every exchange or decision is now based on mass mobilization, externally funded activism, and hard-power enforcements. Academic activity shrinks. Recitation of prewritten scripts dominates public displays.
– Only the violent thrive. Without institutional enforcement, power reverts to whoever can project enough force to dominate the curriculum and the governance structure. This means mafias, warlords, political machines, and patronage networks.
– The poor and the disfavored suffer most. Those with sufficient funding for their point of view can artificially create dominance displays that overpower public trust. Those with great wealth and limited patience can opt out of the system altogether — through private schools, private security, gated communities, personal lawyers, and social networks that enforce contracts informally. The poor and the scapegoats cannot. They are most vulnerable, most dependent on public institutions, and least able to exit bad situations
– Exit beats voice. Anyone with options leaves. Brain drain accelerates the decline.
Based on what we observed Tuesday night, this social structure is no longer theoretical in SFUSD — it describes large parts of the world right now and it describes SFUSD’s current localized collapse of trust.
Watch the video for yourself.
And then talk to your family and neighbors about whether this is the society you are working to build for our children.
