Dr. Stacey Patton

10/28/2025

Be very clear, Y’all: the current government shutdown isn’t just political theater. It is biological warfare disguised as budgeting.

The right is engineering stress at a population level. Hunger, housing insecurity, wage precarity, thousands of cut federal positions, ICE raids, troops in Democratic strongholds, and racial terror are all coordinated tools of behavioral control. Chronic deprivation keeps the body in survival mode and the mind locked in the present. It’s not apathy we’re seeing from folks, it’s neurochemistry. When people are constantly fighting for food, housing, safety, or rest, the capacity for protest shrinks. And that’s how power feeds itself by keeping everyone else hungry.

That’s why every system of oppression starts by attacking the body by triggering hunger, exhaustion, overwork, sleeplessness, fear. If you can dysregulate a nervous system, you don’t need to police the mind because the biology will do it for you. Today’s policies, from SNAP cuts to mass incarceration, are just the modern upgrades of that same somatic control.

Understanding all this through neuroscience helps us see injustice not just as ideological, but as physiological. It lives in our cells, our hormones, our stress responses. It’s inherited epigenetically, reinforced socially, and triggered politically.

For generations, we’ve misunderstood this because we’ve been taught to believe oppression is only about laws, votes, and ideas, when in truth it’s also about biology. Western culture has trained us to separate the mind from the body, to treat suffering as moral failure instead of physiological fact. We built movements that tried to reason with power while ignoring what power was doing to our nervous systems. Systems of oppression survives by convincing people that hunger, exhaustion, and anxiety are personal weaknesses rather than engineered states of control.

The cost of that misunderstanding is enormous. It means communities burn out faster, activists collapse from stress, and liberation movements confuse adrenaline for endurance. It means we keep fighting for justice with dysregulated bodies, using the master’s tools while running on empty.

Which also means resistance must be biological too by restoring safety, nourishment, rest, and regulation. Because a regulated nervous system is a revolutionary one. A fed, rested, healed people can imagine, organize, and build the kind of world that chronic deprivation was designed to prevent.

But make no mistake: the people engineering this suffering understand the biology, too. Hunger has never just been an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism, it’s been one of its most reliable instruments.