Breaking the Trance of “Them” – Ethics for Empowerment

Excuse me, but I really don’t want to hear about “them” anymore. I don’t care about the documentation, the track record, the history, or how well someone makes the case that “they” are the source of the problem. 

I’m done. No more “they.” No more “them.”  No more blame. No more victimhood. In the long run, blaming simply doesn’t work.

So if we take discussions of “them” off the table, where does that leave us? What do we do?

Step 1: Begin with personal introspection. 

Adding to a conversation, whether through a letter to an elected representative, a meeting at a diner, or even a post on social media, is an action. Voting is an action. Campaigning and protesting are actions. Making purchases or donations are actions.

To be fully empowered in our actions, however, we must ask: Why am I doing this? What are my motivations?  What are the likely outcomes?  

Answering such questions is not as easy as it sounds.  Human motivations are complex. For example, am I puffing up my sense of self with feelings of righteous indignation? Am I using ridicule to diminish others? Am I experiencing uncomfortable feelings and looking for a catharsis or a sense of group affiliation to assuage these feelings? When faced with the latest outrage, pain or grief in the news, am I projecting rage, pain and grief from my personal life that I am unwilling to deal with more directly? Am I deliberately trying to arouse a defensive posture in another for my own selfish purposes? And I voting this way because I think it means I'm a good person? If I'm donating, who am I trying to help? What is my real agenda in choosing an affiliation group?  Do I just want to belong, rubbing shoulders with people who agree with my opinions? Do I need to feel “better-than?” Am I itchin’ for a fight?

The uncompromisingly honest digging required to answer these questions is a formidable task, but it’s essential if we are to act with the highest degree of integrity we are capable of at a given moment. Personal empowerment begins here. This is more than enough of a task to occupy a person for a very long time. This time is not wasted because personal empowerment absolutely has to begin with the self.

Step 2: That said, since the laboratory for our introspection is housed in the larger structure of our life experiences, it is also possible and ultimately necessary to extend this depth of scrutiny to our own affiliation groups, which may include one’s faith community, profession, business organization, political party, advocacy groups and ultimately one’s own nation. In other words, we must begin with ourselves in Step 1, and only after establishing ongoing engagement in that step can we expand to those groups that comprise our extended sense of identity through association. 

In political discussions, for example, members and leadership of our own parties must face the heaviest scrutiny and be held to the highest standards. This is the most empowering stand one can take, because these are the people we vote for and who rely on us for support. Likewise, it is ultimately the organizations we work for, not some other ones, that we affect most directly. It is ultimately those advocacy groups we donate money to that we can ask tough questions of. And it is ultimately our own government, not the governments of other nations, that we can most immediately call to account.

Step 3? The next logical step, it might seem, would be to begin looking at the behaviors of groups with which we have no affiliation. But a curious thing happens as we move from the ‘I’ and ‘me’ in Step 1 and the ‘we’ and ‘us’ in Step 2 to ‘they’ in Step 3: We lose most of our influence.  

Despite this fact, my observation is that political discussions in social and other media typically invert the order of these steps, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, they start at Step 3 and don’t budge off it. This is dangerously disempowering. Although the perpetual imbroglio of news and social media may serve someone’s interest, I do not feel it serves mine. Most frustrating of all has been how my natural tendency not to move beyond Step 2 if I can avoid it leads to confusion when conversing about anything in a discussion dominated by a Step 3 mindset. 

My natural tendency is to hold my own party, my own nation, my own profession to higher standards. These are the things I identify with, these are the groups I belong to, and these are ultimately the things that reflect upon me most closely. When a person I vote for acts without integrity, I take it much more personally than when a person I would never vote for does so. When I see developments in one of my own professions – education – that appear to hurt children, I feel a much greater affront than I would if I were not a longtime teacher myself. And when my own nation acts with callous disregard for life, I take this much more personally than I do similar actions of other nations.

However, introducing this kind of thinking into discussions centered on “they and “them” reliably leads to misunderstandings. When, for example, Democrats talk about the humanitarian catastrophe of Bush 43’s invasion of Iraq, and I bring up the 40,000 estimated dead, waves of refugees and open slave trade that followed in the wake of Obama’s military actions in Libya, or an estimated 600,000 dead in Syria, people will say, “We’re not talking about that! We’re talking about this!” Then quickly, since it appears I have criticized a Democrat, people who identify as Democrats themselves will jump to the conclusion that I must vote Republican.  

Well, no, I generally do not vote Republican. And that’s exactly the point: I never voted for George W. Bush. As an American, I picketed (my sign read "War Destroys the Winner") and joined peace vigils in protest against those impending wars, so I did in some sense take that president’s actions personally. However from a purely political perspective, Bush and his party are a “they” to me. Because of this, I took much more personally, was much more disappointed, and indeed felt complicit in President Obama’s atrocities and gross malfeasance. Since I donated to his campaigns, I felt that he killed thousands of people, including children, with my personal backing. And this was in addition letting Wall Street fraudsters off the hook, green-lighting the GMO agrochemical agenda, rolling back civil liberties, expanding drone warfare and the surveillance state, viciously attacking whistleblowers, giving big pharma and the insurance giants free rein over US healthcare, militarizing local police departments with weapons of war, and many other things I hoped he would not do.  

But this perspective seems utterly foreign to many. From the perspective of the Step 3 mindset I so frequently encounter, if I criticize a Democrat I must be a Republican. If I shrug off Mueller’s indictments of Russian operatives and instead shine a light on the long train of US-sponsored assassinations, coups d’etat, military invasions, and support of terror organizations rebranded as “moderate rebels” or “freedom fighters,” I must not be a patriotic American. The simple fact of the matter is, as a US citizen, I felt complicit in the latter crimes, which incidentally far exceed in gravity those of Russian Internet trolls. So yes, I take them far more seriously. It’s my job to prevent such things in my affiliation group, even if that “group” is a nation of 330 million.

I grew up in the 1960s, when the phrase "America: Love it or leave it" was directed toward those who wanted a government whose actions aligned with their values, Southeast Asia being the focus of the many of the protests and debate at the time. The protesters, in case anyone has forgotten, turned out to be correct: The Vietnam war was a terrible mistake. 

Stuck in the trance of "they" and seduced by the relative ease of finger-pointing, one can easily forget that the tiresome chore of holding ourselves and our affiliation groups accountable is the only path toward personal authority and real power. This has practical consequences. When members of a political party or profession look the other way at the misdeeds of their fellow partisans or professionals, it hurts the profession, and it hurts the party. Perhaps the most devastating result of the personal and collective failures in our moral housekeeping is that our individual and collective lack of integrity leave us open to to external invasion and internal subversion. We become our own enemies. A lack of integrity invites dis-integrity, and ultimately, disintegration.

Conversely, consider what would happen if a US political party rooted out all its own corruption and started honestly serving the people, speaking the truth, and protecting the Constitution. My guess is, it would be unstoppable. Tapping into and motivating nonvoters rather than squabbling over “likely voters” would utterly reshape the political landscape.

From the forgoing, one may start to grasp how the currently fashionable politics of scapegoating is ultimately disempowering. The fundamental thing we need to do to change this dynamic is to focus, individually and through our affiliations and associations, on Steps 1 and 2. That in itself is enough to shift the balance of power. The process starts with inquiries about ‘I’ and then moves on to consider the larger spheres of ‘we.’ When faced with divide-and-conquer tactics, the winning strategy is to build a stronger self and a bigger ‘us.’ 

Of Splitting Oak and People (and How to Prevent the Latter)

Over the years, a number of oak trees around our house have died or lost substantial limbs. Given that we occasionally enjoy a fire in the fireplace, the question became how to ready the wood for burning by cutting and splitting the logs. Cutting to length is easy enough with a chainsaw. Splitting is a bit harder without a hydraulic splitter. Since I don’t have one, I decided to go low tech and use a splitting maul.

It didn’t take long into learning how to split wood by hand before I realized that it was a lot easier to split a log when it was upside down, that is, when the orientation of the log being split is inverted relative to how it was in the living tree. (See photo.)

 
I’m guessing that the inner structure of the wood grain is optimized to resist the pull of gravity. This makes sense, from the tree’s perspective. The tree wants to remain whole and resist splitting. Since gravity pulls consistently in one direction, the tree will structure itself to be most resistant to splitting in that direction. So, to make hand splitting easier, I turn logs upside down, especially when there are branches and other knotty, difficult-to-split features in the wood. 

People are much the same, only it works on a subtler level: we split more easily when our values are inverted. 

Like trees, people attain their full stature when the inner structure of our values supports our wholeness, creating an inner resistance to splitting. Honesty, courage, and compassion are three values that require wholeness to operate. In turn, they reinforce our wholeness as they are cultivated. Invert any of these values and people start falling apart. They split. 

Invert all three, that is, dress up dishonesty, cowardice, and cruelty as virtues, and personal fragmentation is certain to follow. There seems to be a tremendous push right now to do exactly this. 

Looking at values through the lens of permaculture, my observation is that honesty, courage, and compassion functionally support one another as design components in the dynamic of a living person: Try being honest – fully honest – without courage. Try being truly compassionate without both honesty and courage. Try being courageous in productive, life-affirming ways without having your courage informed by both honesty and compassion. 

Such attempts invariably fail, because these values are functionally related to one another. Operating together within us and between us, honesty, courage, and compassion weave a grain that is resistant to splitting and protective of our wholeness, both as individuals and as a society. They help us stand tall and strong, like trees, and to support one another, like a forest. However, because each of these values both requires and generates wholeness, to the extent that any of them is weakened or inverted, individuals or societies will be more prone to splitting. 

This is deep-level permaculture, and it has political implications. 

Let’s assume for the moment that there are people in this world whose operating strategy is to divide and rule. If the analysis above holds true, then it makes sense that as our values are inverted, people will be more prone to splitting and, en masse, more pliant to the rule of others. 

 
How do we notice if we’re upside down on the splitting stump? Turns out it’s surprisingly simple: Take note of any messaging that attempts to invert these values, and observe the responses. The messaging can be internally generated or externally generated, so we can pay attention to our own thoughts, speech and actions as well as to the messages and behaviors of politicians, religious or business leaders, media, and advertisers. 

 
If a message or behavior suggests that truth doesn’t matter, or that we should be afraid, or that it’s okay to hate others or disregard their subjective experience, then that message is attempting to invert the values of honesty, courage, and compassion. Again, observe the messaging. You'll probably see values-inverting messages deeply woven into the prevailing social narratives, then parroted around by adherents of those narratives. 

To counter this, an empowering step is to look at the messaging we ourselves are generating. What signals and messages are we sending to ourselves through our own thoughts and actions? What are we transmitting to others? Are we vectors for honesty, courage, and compassion... or for something else?

So if you’re wondering how so-called progressives got to a place where they no longer complain much about war and war crimes, torture, genocide, nuclear proliferation, or civil rights abuses, or on the other hand how self-professed free-market neoliberals tolerate and even defend endless taxpayer subsidies for profitable industries-- there’s a clue. As individuals and as a whole, the population is breaking as values invert: where courage would prevail, we are riven by fear, where honesty would give us clarity, we are rendered schizoid by deception, and where compassion is needed we are broken by animosity. 

First our values are inverted. Then we split. As this continues, we don’t have the wholeness in us to resist further splitting. At that point, we’re just waiting to be taken to the fire. 

Alternately, we can right ourselves. We can notice where our values have become inverted and choose instead to reassert the values known to support life. As we do, we’ll notice that we are not mere logs inverted on the stump of humanity, waiting to be split, but part of a larger, living tree.