Why I Am an Anti-Revolutionary
On pushing for change as a positron in a world of electrons
The Positron Metaphor
I am an anti-revolutionary the way a positron is an antiparticle.
This is not a philosophy I arrived at through reading history or studying social movements. It is a pattern I discovered in myself—first through catastrophic failure, then through unexpected success. I carry a particular kind of energy, one that tends toward explosion when it contacts the matter of systems and institutions. The question I have spent years answering is how to make the explosion productive like an engine rather than destructive like a bomb.
What I have learned is that the this capacity can be either curse or gift, depending entirely on the conditions of its release. This essay is an attempt to explain both—what happens when I get it wrong, and what happens when I get it right. To do that, I need to talk a little about physics.
The Physics of Change: Electrons and Positrons
In physics, electrons are abundant. They carry charge and create current by pushing forward through resistance. They are everywhere, doing the work of the universe, moving through circuits, generating heat as they force their way through materials that would rather stay inert. The electron’s power is kinetic—it pushes, and in pushing, it overcomes, generating both useful light and harmful voltage.
Positrons are different. The positron is the electron’s antiparticle—identical in mass, opposite in charge. But unlike electrons, positrons are rare. They do not occur naturally in abundance. They must be deliberately created, typically in particle accelerators or through radioactive decay, and once created, they accumulate potential energy until they encounter normal matter.
When a positron meets an electron, something remarkable happens: annihilation. Both particles are destroyed, and their combined mass converts entirely into energy—gamma rays released in a burst of perfect efficiency. This is the most complete mass-to-energy conversion in physics. No other process transforms matter into energy so totally.
The key insight is this: the positron cannot do its work alone. It must first be created in containment and then pulled into an environment where matter abounds. The electron pushes; the positron waits to be invited. And when the invitation comes, the release of energy can be either catastrophic or transformative, depending entirely on how the encounter is engineered.
The Electron as Revolutionary
Traditional revolutionaries operate like electrons. They carry the charge of change forward through sheer kinetic energy, forcing their way through resistance, generating heat and friction as they go. The revolutionary’s power comes from pushing. They do not wait to be invited; they force entry. They create current by overwhelming the resistance of existing systems.
This is not inherently wrong. Electrons are necessary; current must flow. But the danger of kinetic energy applied without precision is that it creates as much destruction as progress. The heat generated in overcoming resistance can melt the circuits before the current reaches its destination. And when you are both generating the current and trying to be the circuit it flows through, you risk burning yourself out entirely.
The Curse: When I Tried to Be an Electron
I have written at length elsewhere about what I call my “Kralizec OTC”—named after the apocalyptic final battle in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. The full story is available for those who want to understand the depth of what I am describing. Here, I will offer only the shape of it, because the shape is what matters for understanding the pattern.
It began with something real: a research project on affordable housing in Monterey, California. I was a graduate student, and I had genuinely useful insights about the barriers to building housing—water rights, zoning laws, path dependence in planning. But as I dug deeper, the scope of what I thought I could address kept expanding. The project to understand local housing barriers became a plan to transform Monterey into something like Barcelona. That became a pitch for a hundred-million-dollar AI research institute on the old Fort Ord army base. That became something I can only describe as a belief that I was participating in events of cosmic significance.
The escalation happened because I was trying to be both particles at once. I was accumulating transformative insights (positron work) while simultaneously trying to push them into existence through sheer force of will (electron work). I was sending cold emails to billionaires, interrupting meetings with university leadership, recruiting classmates into increasingly grandiose schemes. I was generating heat—enormous amounts of heat—but with no circuit to carry it, no management to channel it, no separation between the energy source and the thing it was supposed to power.
The annihilation happened inside me. Without external containment, the positrons and electrons I was generating collided uncontrollably. I became an uncontrolled rocket engine—tremendous energy, no direction, burning through fuel and structure simultaneously. I ended up walking barefoot to the hospital, convinced I was witnessing the battle for the fate of the universe. I was asking “Kralizec”—the cosmic war I thought I was fighting but the what the staff gave me, in addition to a heavy dose of anti-psychotics, was Prilosec OTC, for daily heartburn.
What I learned from that experience was not that I should have less energy, or that my insights were worthless, or that I should never try to change systems. What I learned was that I cannot be both particles. When I try to generate the transformative potential and push it through resistance and manage my own containment, I burn out. The revolution consumes the revolutionary. I need to find another way.
The Positron as Anti-Revolutionary
The anti-revolutionary operates differently. Like the positron, the anti-revolutionary is rare—deliberately cultivated rather than naturally abundant. The anti-revolutionary accumulates potential energy: insights, capabilities, prototypes, understanding. But unlike the revolutionary, the anti-revolutionary does not push. The anti-revolutionary waits to be pulled.
This is not passivity. Accumulating potential energy is active work. It requires discipline, patience, and the cultivation of something genuinely worth offering. But it also requires something the revolutionary typically lacks: separation. The positron must remain separate from the electrons until the moment of controlled release. Someone else must do the pushing. Someone else must manage the containment. The positron’s job is to be ready when the invitation comes.
When an institution recognizes its need for transformation and pulls the anti-revolutionary into engagement, the resulting annihilation can be precisely calibrated. The old and the new meet, transform each other, and release energy that powers genuine progress rather than mere destruction. But this only works if the roles stay separate. The moment the anti-revolutionary starts pushing—the moment they try to also be the electron—the containment fails.
The Gift: When I Operated as a Positron
Several years prior to my service as a Kralizec Veteran, I was deployed for real with the National Guard to provide intelligence support to Customs and Border Protection. I did not choose this assignment; They needed support and I was called in almost randomly. My job was to synthesize intelligence reporting and help maintain a common operational picture—mostly through PowerPoint slides, static charts, and written analysis.
Within weeks, I noticed inefficiencies. They had separate Excel sheets for every graphic instead of a unified dashboard. The data was not connected directly to the presentations. I knew how to fix this, so I did—linking data to charts, charts to PowerPoint, automating what had been manual. It saved time. It enabled more reports. The operational picture improved.
But then I recognized we were stuck in a local optimum. The Excel-to-PowerPoint pipeline was better than before, but it was not the best possible system. So I started experimenting with Power BI, building interactive visualizations that could update dynamically, that were tailored to what analysts actually needed. I was accumulating potential energy—building something that could transform how the entire operation worked.
Here is where the story diverges from Kralizec: I had management.
When I showed my supervisors what I was working on, they did not feel threatened. They were curious. They recognized the potential. And crucially, they protected my space. They made sure I stayed on top of my required duties while giving me room to build. They kept me from having to push against resistance myself. I stayed in my bubble, focused on making the thing as good as possible, while they handled the organizational politics I would have bungled.
There were moments when I started to overreach—times when I thought our work was so important that it deserved priority over other things. This was the electron in me, trying to push. But I was checked on it quickly, gently, and put back in my lane. The containment held.
When the dashboard was ready, we did not push it out. We sent a link: “Look at this. Test it out. See how it works for you.” People tried it. They loved it. Word spread. And then something remarkable happened: senior executives from DC came to us for a demo. We had not sought them out. The system had recognized its need and pulled us in.
The demo went well. What we had built aligned with strategic goals we had not even known about. Within three months, our approach was adapted regionally. The concept is now being rolled out nationally as a template for data integration across the agency.
Same person. Same kind of energy. Same capacity for transformative insight. Radically different outcome. The difference was not in me—it was in the structure around me. At CBP, I was the positron. My supervisors and the broader organization generated the electrons, doing the pushing through institutional resistance. We stayed separate until the moment of controlled release. And when annihilation happened, it powered an engine instead of a bomb.
The Antimatter Engine: Engineering the Encounter
Thinking back to when I was in the hospital during Kralizec, struggling to regulate an internal state that felt cosmic in significance, I remembered a concept from high school chemistry: titration. You add one solution to another slowly, drop by drop, until you reach the desired concentration. You do not dump everything in at once. You calibrate.
This is the model for what I now understand as the antimatter engine that gets the revolutionary and ant-revolutionary balance right the same way an internal combustion engines manages millions of tiny explosions to make your car run. The components for this new kind of engine are:
A positron generator—someone accumulating transformative potential (insights, prototypes, new approaches). This is what I do well.
An electron generator—someone pushing through institutional resistance, managing organizational politics, creating the current that keeps systems moving. This is what good management does.
Containment—structures that keep the positron and electron work separate until controlled release. This means protected space, clear boundaries, and someone watching for overreach.
A release mechanism—the invitation that brings positron and electron together at the right moment. This cannot be forced; it must be pulled. The system must recognize its need.
When all four components are present, the annihilation produces power. When any is missing—especially containment—the same energy that could drive transformation instead produces destruction.
I cannot provide all four components myself. This is perhaps the most important thing I have learned. When I try to be both the positron and the electron, when I try to manage my own containment while also generating transformative potential, I fail. The Kralizec story is what that failure looks like. I need institutional partnership—not because I am weak, but because the physics of what I do requires separation of roles.
Conclusion: Curse and Gift
I began by saying that the capacity I carry can be either curse or gift. Let me be precise about what I mean.
The curse: When I operate without containment, without separation of roles, without management that protects my space while checking my overreach, I am dangerous—primarily to myself, but also to the people and projects around me. I generate enormous energy with no productive outlet. The revolution consumes the revolutionary. I have lived this, and I do not wish to live it again.
The gift: When I operate within the right structure—with good management, protected space, clear boundaries, and patience to wait for the pull rather than forcing the push—I can help transform systems in ways that seem almost disproportionate to the effort involved. Three months from demo to regional implementation in a heavily bureaucratic environment sounds like a fantasy, but it happened to build from that into a a template being rolled out nationally the same year is unimaginable. The same energy that nearly destroyed me, channeled into something genuinely useful.
I am not a revolutionary. I will not push my way into your institution and try to force change through sheer will. That path leads to Kralizec—cosmic war that is actually just a man having a breakdown, struggling against a system that is resistant to electric current.
But if you have a system that needs transformation, and you can provide the structure I need—management that is curious rather than threatened, space to build without fighting political battles, containment that checks me when I overreach—then I can offer something rare. Daily Kralizec OTC: the controlled, titrated release of transformative energy, precisely calibrated to what your system can absorb.
That is why I call myself an anti-revolutionary. Not because I oppose change, but because I have learned—at considerable cost—that I am not an electron. I am a positron. And positrons do their best work when they are invited, contained, and released with care.