As you’ve probably heard, UN scientists recently warned that we have eleven years to avert climate disaster. We face a civilizational crisis that can only be solved by unprecedented action on an unprecedented scale. To avert this crisis, we must begin to see our fates as linked and make good on that insight. The culture of the atomized individual has brought us to the brink. Our obsession with wealth and power has turned out to be the path to destruction, of our habitat and ourselves. If we want to find a way forward, we must adopt a fundamentally different vision of human enterprise and shared endeavor.

Fortunately, one such model is hiding in plain sight, a framework that must play a central role if we are going to equitably address the biggest existential threat we have ever faced. It dates all the way back to ancient Rome, but in contemporary political discourse, it doesn’t surface all that much beyond certain left-leaning activist circles where people often end their emails with the sign off “in solidarity.” The idea of solidarity describes the ways in which we are bound together and how we can act, in concert, to change our circumstances.

Not that it’s all that easy to spot and harness the idea of solidarity in the wild. Indeed, our culture is currently awash in semblances of solidarity that, even when well-intentioned or laudable, fall short of the real thing. Consider common appeals to allyship and altruism; such locutions convey a sort of optional quality, a moralistic tone, and unreliable trendiness. They are invitations to be a good and generous person, rather than the necessary expressions of our interdependence. They’re thus woefully unequal to the task of sparking concerted mass action on the scale we now urgently need.

Meanwhile, high-profile aspiring leaders, such as billionaires Howard Schultz and Mike Bloomberg, prefer to speak of “empathy” and “helping others.” While again laudable as a personal quality, empathy tends to fall apart entirely as a precept for democratic political mobilization. Simply put, there’s a profound disparity of social power embedded within its practice. As employed by the Schultzes and Bloombergs of the world, it signals a constellation of feelings that members of our power elite are able to beneficently lavish on the less affluent and more oppressed. (And of course these same powerful political actors tend to express nothing but contempt out of the other side of their compassionate mouths for anyone trying to alleviate poverty by taxing their fortunes.)

People of means have long preferred charity—and its institutionalized counterpart, philanthropy—to solidarity. Under the virtuous-sounding guise of charity, the rich and powerful can bestow kindness from on high, without feeling implicated in or responsible for the systems that produce poverty and oppression in the first place. As Anand Giridharadas reveals in his bracing 2018 book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropy is structured so as to leave the distinction between the giver and the receiver intact. In this deeply retrograde dynamic, donors and patrons reap uncritical plaudits for their generosity without prodding the discourse toward any serious discussion of the sort of change that might produce a fairer society in which billionaire philanthropists no longer exist. (Billionaire Robert F. Smith’s recent commitment of approximately $40 million to pay off the student loans of Morehouse College’s 2019 graduating class was a touching random act of kindness, but that money could have been invested in grassroots organizing and lobbying to fight for free higher education as a right, not a gift.) Solidarity, in contrast to charity and philanthropy, isn’t one-sided. It is a form of reciprocity rooted in the acknowledgment that our lives are intertwined.