# Nobody Has to Be Thrown Away The plan was to fill an entire beach with concentric circles. Jenni and I had the time-lapse camera set up on the sand, a second camera up top, two phones, a mixer, a spotter to relay directions — and the audience was going to call down to us while we ran around dragging rings into the beach, finishing with a big M in the middle for McGill Media. Then the whole thing came apart in stages. The broadcast camera would not pick up the lines in the sand at all. Fixing that meant hauling a pro camera up and adding another tangle of cable to a rig already full of it. We got the time-lapse working, got the audio working, got the phones and the mixer working, and then the internet went. I was genuinely crestfallen. I said on the air that I had considered throwing a fit and not showing up at all, because I had wanted the pretty concentric circles and I did not get them. So I described the drawing instead, and the figure landed better than the drawing would have. That is worth noticing on its own: the thing I was trying to show people was never really in the sand. It was a model, and a model travels in a sentence. ## Why I Built the Rings I did not invent this out of nowhere. I built it because of a failure in my own teaching, and I want to name that failure plainly. +For years I told people to get rid of people. I used harder language than that. I said take out the trash. And the advice was often correct in substance and almost always wrong in form, because of what it did to the person receiving it. It bugged their conscience. They felt guilty. They did not want to leave anybody behind, and when the only instrument I handed them was expulsion, a great many of them chose to keep enduring the exposure rather than do a thing that felt like cruelty. I had given them a switch when what they needed was a dial. The concentric rings exist to solve exactly that. Picture a center point, like the sun, with rings running outward from it, and the people in your life as satellites in orbit at various distances. Some are close in. Some are further out. You already do this — you let certain people in and you keep certain people at a distance — and you have been doing it your whole life without a name for it or any deliberate control over it. Giving it a name makes it adjustable. And once it is adjustable, the extremist version of the advice becomes unnecessary. People hear *that person is a bad influence* and jump straight to the conclusion that someone has to be cut off entirely. You do not have to get rid of them. That is extremist thinking, and it offends most people's sense of fairness and decency for good reason. You can move somebody out a ring. Or two, or three, or six. {{A relationship does not have to be ended to be adjusted, and almost none of them do.}} ## The Ring Is Set by Your Capacity, Not by Their Character The most useful thing in the model took me the longest to understand, and it concerns what the distance actually measures. +Moving a person to a greater distance in your life looks like a verdict on them, and that appearance is what stops most people from doing it at all. It looks like a declaration that they are toxic, that they failed some test, that you have finally decided what they are. Sometimes it is exactly that. Usually it is not. Very often it has nothing to do with disliking the person at all. Your priorities are elsewhere. You do not have the bandwidth. You are carrying something that takes everything you have, and the available supply of attention and patience and recovery time is simply smaller than the demand on it. The people who get upset in that situation are not upset that you dislike them. They cannot handle the separation that comes from you doing what you actually need to do. Stated that way, the ring assignment is a fact about your current load rather than a verdict on anyone's worth. {{Proximity is a setting rather than a verdict.}} And that reframing is what lets a person act without lying to themselves, because the guilt that paralyzes people comes almost entirely from the sense that they are passing sentence on another human being. Nobody is being sentenced. Somebody is being placed at the distance you can currently sustain. ## Distance Is Reversible The orbital figure survives in my teaching, rather than something tidier, because of one property that a door does not have. A ring is not a final position. When you are stronger, when you have more margin, when you are no longer vulnerable to the particular thing that was costing you, you can move that person back in. One ring, or two, or four. The gradient runs in both directions, and nothing about moving somebody out this year commits you to keeping them there. Most of the fear people have about adjusting their relationships is really a fear of irreversibility — that an honest act of self-preservation today becomes a permanent exile they will regret later. It does not. The orbit is a current state, not a sentence passed, and the whole point of building the model out of rings instead of a door is that rings have no latch. So the honest instruction is to take inventory. Look at who is actually in close, and ask what each of those proximities is doing to you, and be willing to be wrong in either direction. You will find people who have been sitting at a distance for years because of something that stopped being true a long time ago. ## What Proximity Costs When You Get It Wrong The reason any of this matters is that proximity is not neutral and it does not bill you later in one lump. It bills you continuously. +Sustained closeness to someone corrosive does measurable work. It drags you down, kills creativity, erodes self-confidence, and wears at your immune system — it makes you physically weaker, more prone to getting sick, slower to recover. And then there is the second-order effect, which is the one almost nobody accounts for: being worn down makes you more susceptible to the next person. Predatory behavior that would have bounced off you at full strength can land once you are depleted, and people who would never have gotten anywhere with you individually can get somewhere with you collectively, because the attack that fails against your best self succeeds against your diminished one. {{Exposure does not ask permission, and it does not stop accumulating because you have decided to be strong about it.}} That is also why the field argument matters more than the character argument. If somebody is genuinely toxic and you are standing inside their field, you are getting the toxicity in your own being. You are not exempt by virtue of being the healthier party. It is not the case that they are toxic and you are not; you are in the field, and the field does not check which of you deserves it. ## Where the Gradient Ends Now the limit, because a model this generous is dangerous without one, and I have never pretended otherwise. The rings are for people in your life. They are not for enemies, and the two require completely different instruments. Everything above is built on the assumption of good faith somewhere in the arrangement — a difficult person, a draining person, a person who has not yet become what they could be. For that whole enormous category the answer is graduated distance, patience, and reversibility, and a remediation step before anything else: give them a fair chance to remediate, name the boundary clearly, get them a real opportunity to change, and make your best effort so that you can say honestly that you did everything. If they will not comply after that, you leave. Not out of contempt. Because the terms were offered and declined. But there is a second category, and it does not get the rings. An arrangement built on deception, which exists to extract from people and has no good in it at all, is not a satellite to be relocated. My own method with these is slow on the front end and absolute at the back. I go along for a while, digging through it, genuinely trying to find the greater good I might be failing to see, because that is usually where I am — assuming there is something here I do not understand. And once I establish there is no greater good in it, even when I hold a direct personal stake in the loss, and even when people I care about will take losses too, I will destroy it. Not out of vengeance. Not out of any appetite for persecution. And I want to be exact about what gets destroyed, because the distinction is the entire ethics of it. I do not like calling serial killers evil. I do not like labeling people psychopaths and narcissists. I believe people are largely created by the things that made them, often beyond their own ability to heal themselves, which makes most of them victims in a real sense. So the target is never the person. {{An extractive arrangement will simply produce another person to run it, which is why the structure and never the servant is the thing worth destroying.}} The scheme, the contract, the mechanism itself — that is what comes apart. I will only go along for so long, and then I am going to fuck some shit up. Held together, those are not two philosophies. They are one gradient with a terminus. Keep as much as possible reversible, give people far more room than feels comfortable, index your distances to your own strength rather than to your judgment of anybody's soul, and understand that a mercy with no endpoint is not a mercy at all. {{A mercy that never terminates is not mercy; it is an open account somebody else is spending.}} Most people will never need the far end of this. Almost everything in an ordinary life is solved by moving somebody out one ring and getting on with the work. That is the whole reason I built it. --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## Related blogs - [[blog/20240817 - Becoming Too Expensive to Harm|Becoming Too Expensive to Harm]]: the pricing argument underneath the distance — predation runs where its return exceeds its cost. - [[blog/20170722 - The Atmosphere of Our Identity|The Atmosphere of Our Identity]]: the field a person stands inside, and why proximity transmits before anyone consents to it. ## Related Livestream Lessons **Directly related.** These broadcasts supplied the material cited in this piece and are documented with timestamps in the source notes below. - [[livestreams/Generosity, Compassion, and Becoming a Witness for Another Life - Livestream#The Remediation Offer and Its Expiry|The Remediation Offer and Its Expiry]] *(Oct 8, 2015)*: a fair chance to change, named boundaries, and a departure that follows from declined terms rather than from contempt. - [[livestreams/Relationship Boundaries and the Freedom to Create - Livestream#Graduated Proximity as an Alternative to Expulsion|Graduated Proximity as an Alternative to Expulsion]] *(Jan 9, 2019)*: orbital distance as an adjustable setting indexed to present capacity, replacing the binary of keeping or cutting off. - [[livestreams/Deception, Exploitative Contracts, and the Courage to Leave - Livestream#Why the Structure Is the Target and Not the Person|Why the Structure Is the Target and Not the Person]] *(Jan 21, 2019)*: the terminus of the gradient, with the arrangement rather than its servant identified as what gets destroyed. **Indirectly related.** These broadcasts carry the same mechanisms without being cited in the body, and each one has its own developed lesson. - [[livestreams/New Beginnings and the Relationship Contracts That Protect Our Energy - Livestream#The Contract You Negotiated Without Noticing|The Contract You Negotiated Without Noticing]] *(Dec 22, 2015)*: every relationship runs on terms that were set verbally or silently, and an unstated contract ends in chronic complaint rather than renegotiation. - [[livestreams/Refusing to Become a Toxic Dumping Ground, Part 1 - Livestream#Ring Movement as a Reinforcement Schedule|Ring Movement as a Reinforcement Schedule]] *(Feb 1, 2016)*: the first teaching of the rings, with distance as an operational sequence of small subtractions and attention as the reinforcer being withdrawn. - [[livestreams/Strategic Disengagement, Non-Attachment, and the Whole Self, Part 2 - Livestream#Disengagement Without Demonization|Disengagement Without Demonization]] *(Jun 1, 2016)*: giving up and strategic disengagement look identical from outside, and only one of them leaves a door that still opens. - [[livestreams/Concentration, Decision, and the Recovery of Agency - Livestream#Naming an Adversary Is the Precondition of Acting Against One|Naming an Adversary Is the Precondition of Acting Against One]] *(Jul 26, 2016)*: an adversary left unnamed gets mistaken for a flaw in oneself, and naming exists to produce a plan rather than a performance. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Agency Under Constraint|Agency Under Constraint]] - [[wiki/Boundary|Boundary]] - [[wiki/Dose-Response Relationship|Dose-Response Relationship]] - [[wiki/Exposure|Exposure]] - [[wiki/Binary Opposition|Binary Opposition]] - [[wiki/Behavioral Contagion|Behavioral Contagion]] - [[wiki/Threshold|Threshold]] - [[wiki/Trust|Trust]] > [!quote]- Broadcast source notes > **Primary broadcast: [[livestreams/Relationship Boundaries and the Freedom to Create - Livestream|Relationship Boundaries and the Freedom to Create]] (January 9, 2019).** This is the beach broadcast, and the demonstration never happened. Bryant and Jenni had rigged a time-lapse camera on the sand, a second camera above, two phones and a mixer, with a spotter to relay the audience's directions while they dragged concentric rings across the whole beach and finished with an M for McGill Media. He teaches the figure anyway, by describing the drawing he could not make. > > 1. **14:41–17:07:** Bryant walks through the plan and then the failures in order — the broadcast camera will not pick up the lines in the sand, fixing it means another pro camera and more cable, the time-lapse and audio and phones and mixer all come up, and then the internet goes. He says he considered throwing a fit and not showing up at all, asks whether they should attempt it again in the future, and declares himself crestfallen over the pretty concentric circles he did not get. > 2. **26:12–27:35:** Bryant sets up the model, referring back to an earlier broadcast on concentric rings. People in a life are satellites in orbit, like planets around the sun, some good influences and some bad, and he attaches the familiar claim that a person becomes the average of the five people they spend the most time with. > 3. **28:35–29:12:** The anti-binary correction, stated directly. People hear the concept and jump to needing to get rid of the negative influences. "Well you don't have to get rid of them. That's kind of extremist thinking." Instead, move them out a ring or two into an orbit slightly further away. He notes that expulsion offends most people's sensibility of fairness and decency, which is precisely why they refuse to act. > 4. **29:40–30:07:** Bryant names the cases that warrant distance — people disruptive to peace of mind, to goals, to inner tranquility — and the dial he offers runs out a ring or two or three or four or five or six. > 5. **30:07–30:32:** Reversibility. "In the future when you're stronger and you're not as vulnerable to their negative and toxic energy, you can move those people back in a ring or two or three or four." He closes the passage by telling the audience to take inventory of who is close. > 6. **51:05–51:31:** The cost of a wrong proximity, listed as physical rather than emotional: it drags you down, kills creativity, erodes self-confidence, wears at the immune system, makes a person physically weaker and more susceptible to disease. Then the second-order effect — depletion makes a person more susceptible to other predatory people, who can gang up where "maybe their attack wouldn't work if you were at your best." > 7. **52:17–53:41:** Bryant gives the origin of the instrument and the teaching failure behind it. He used to tell people to get rid of people, using metaphors like take out the trash, and it bugged their conscience; they felt guilty and did not want to leave anyone behind. He also names the case that is not about dislike at all — priorities elsewhere, no bandwidth, and people upset not because you dislike them but because "they can't handle the separation of you doing what you need to do." The rings exist so a person can move somebody out "without feeling bad, because they're not really getting rid of them. They're just putting them out another orbit." > > **Related broadcast: [[livestreams/Generosity, Compassion, and Becoming a Witness for Another Life - Livestream|Generosity, Compassion, and Becoming a Witness for Another Life]] (October 8, 2015).** > > - **55:27–56:19:** Answering a caller named Valerie, Bryant gives both the field argument and the remediation protocol. On the field: if someone is really that toxic and you are standing in it, "you are getting that toxicity in your own being… It's not like they're toxic and you're not. You're in that field." On the protocol: give them a chance to remediate, a fair chance to get into therapy, draw the boundaries, and if they do not comply you have to leave — make your best effort first so that you can say you did everything, and then get gone. > > **Related broadcast: [[livestreams/Deception, Exploitative Contracts, and the Courage to Leave - Livestream|Deception, Exploitative Contracts, and the Courage to Leave]] (January 21, 2019).** > > - **57:03–58:49:** The terminus. Bryant says he wants to help reform people "but only to a certain degree," and that he cannot be trusted with a lie — he will go along for a while while digging through it, assuming there is a greater good he has not yet identified. Once he establishes there is none, even holding a direct personal stake in the loss and a stake in losses for people around him he cares about, "I will destroy it… not out of vengeance." In the same passage he refuses the moralizing frame outright: he does not like labeling people psychopaths and narcissists, dislikes persecution and mean-spiritedness, and holds that people are largely created by what made them, often beyond the ability to heal themselves, which makes them victims in many ways. The passage ends with the plain version: "I'll only go along for so long, and then I'm going to fuck some shit up."