As an American living abroad, I’ve just sent in my postal vote. For a moment I allowed myself the heady feeling of civic pride in that portentous moment of every democracy:  casting your vote for a new leader. I thought of all the lovely presidential slogans I’d heard over the years, all promising major transformation: The New Frontier; Yes, We Can; It’s Morning Again in America; A Bridge to the 21^st Century; Make America Great Again.

Yes, I thought.  This time things will be better.

And then I snapped awake and recognized that my choice – anybody’s choice – might shift things a little here or there. But it would not change anything fundamental about what is going on in our societies.

I belong to a number of online groups, and I just read a WhatsApp thread from one of them, with an impassioned plea from an African American to vote against Donald Trump, because she wouldn’t feel safe with him in the White House. Her feelings were purely understandable - she and her family were being verbally abused and threatened for publicly canvassing for Harris and her family had suffered prejudice all her life.

Then another member piped up to explain why, as a gay immigrant who regularly feels unsafe living in Los Angeles, with police coverage down and gun crime rocketing, he is voting for Donald Trump.  The unsaid but ostensible reason is that he will be safer under what he believes will be a Republican law ‘n order regime.

Both are right, of course, about feeling deeply unsafe, but I’m not convinced that voting for either candidate will Make America Safe Again.

What it will do is make America even more divided and therefore a great deal more dangerous than it is right now. Veteran US pollster Frank Luntz confirmed on TV last night that this was possibly the nastiest political contest he’d ever witnessed, with shocking threats and epithets thrown by each candidate and their followers at the other side.

Lutz is less concerned about the outcome of the vote than what will happen to America after the election and a few months down the line, when mobs of the losing side take to the streets.

As we place all our hopes on one or another candidate to fix the economy, or immigration, the foreign wars or culture wars, we’re overlooking the greatest, most threatening war of all: the deep societal wars fanned by these campaigns.

All of us live by the mistaken notion that the crises in our midst can only be addressed from the top down. But the change that is necessary — the one that will truly solve most problems in our individual lives, our society and indeed our world — is not a new president or a change in policy, but a fundamental change from the bottom up — from ordinary individuals making individual changes that ultimately cause a contagion of change in their neighborhoods and workplaces.

The late Herbert Gintis, an economist and behavioral scientist at the University of Massachusetts, discovered that the culture of any community is not set in stone.  All it requires is a small group of individuals committed to strong reciprocity to “invade” a population of self-interested individuals and turn the entire thing around.

“Even if strong reciprocators form a small fraction of the population,” he said, “such a group will then outcompete other self-interested groups, and the fraction of strong reciprocators will grow.”

Gintis is saying that both selfishness and altruism spread easily, but that altruism is the more contagious impulse.

To stop the greatest threat we face, the renting of the very fabric of society, there is only answer: to put community, front and center.

Humans need to belong more than we need to breathe.  Connecting across these divides is more important than this or that candidate, this or that law.

We have the power to create the deepest and lasting change from the bottom up in small groups because we possess the most powerful weapon of all: the power of our collective thoughts.

I am starting an Intention Revolution: to heal you, the people all around you and our fractured societies.

In the coming weeks and months I’ll show you how to start a revolution in your own backyard.

Are you in?