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Transformational Politics |
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by Tom Atlee
As we move into the next presidential election year, I’d like to share some thoughts about transformational politics – starting with four categories of political effort and their associated inquiries:
GROUP ONE: Efforts to change the policies and politicians we don’t like:
• How can we get the public to realize the criminal craziness of so many of the people in charge?
• How can we get people with transformational worldviews elected to office? – or at least get rid of the criminals and crazies who are running the show now?
• How do we advocate our progressive/transformational agendas in the existing political system?
• How do we activists work together more effectively?
• How can we use the Internet to fundraise or lobby more effectively for our candidate or issue?
GROUP TWO: Efforts to heal the ways politics and governance have been abused and degraded
• How do we make elections more dependable and fair?
• How do we get adequate investigations of official lies, conspiracies, and abuse of power?
• How do we get left and right, black and white, and other polarized sides talking well together?
• How do we use the Internet to enable everyone to vote on everything?
• How do we reduce the influence of money in politics?
• How do we bring more peacefulness, compassion and spirituality to our embattled politics?
GROUP THREE: Efforts to make activism more holistic, evolutionary, and systems-conscious
• How should we exercise our care and compassion in a world where 90% of human suffering and environmental destruction is caused by human systems? Can we really do it without serious work to change those systems?
• How can we be effective activists or change agents in a complex living system like a society, in which “chaotic” dynamics make prediction impossible and generate side-effects and messiness? What does it actually mean to be effective?
• What lessons can evolution – nature’s 13.7 billion-year process of creative change – teach us that we might consciously use to transform social systems?
GROUP FOUR: Efforts to make our political and governance system, itself, more wise, holistic, and evolutionary
• How do we co-create social systems and cultures that can consciously evolve themselves and the civilization they are part of?
• What interventions would actually be of comparable magnitude to the crises we face, and how might we use them well to make a more sustainable world for future generations?
I realize the approaches in Groups One and Two are vital and an advance over what we have right now, and I’m happy that these efforts are being pursued. Yet as I watch the policy (and presidency) pendulum swing back and forth, I sometimes feel we are on a treadmill, or like Sisyphus forever pushing his proverbial boulder up the hill, only to have it roll down again. It is getting a bit late for that kind of process.
In 1985 I wrote an article “Who Owns the Game?” in which I bemoaned the way the peace movement seemed forever to rush around trying to end wars that the powers-that-be would repeatedly start. I noted that Gandhi had not just made nonviolence into a powerful, coherent strategy for change, but had changed the playing field on which Britain and the Indian independence movement played out their competition. Gandhi made it so that whenever the British did what usually worked for them, it backfired, and served the Independence movement. Today, our status quo power systems have largely learned how to digest nonviolent action without really changing very much. What would we have to do now to do what Gandhi did over 60 years ago – change the game?
I am saddened as I watch hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of person-hours, and immeasurable amounts of precious care and attention being spent on activities that do not fundamentally change our political and governance systems. Even a fraction of that, invested in true transformation, would make political action a radically different and more productive experience.
WHAT I SEE NOW
Most existing advocates of compassion focus on the victims of human systems, attempting to ameliorate their suffering or enlighten them about how their own minds play a significant role in generating their suffering. Very few compassionate activists act on the assumption that changing destructive and oppressive systems is today essential to the exercise of effective compassion.
Most activism assumes linear causality – the ability to go from A to B and know that B is clearly a good place to get to. This kind of linearity and certainty is uncharacteristic of complex living systems like societies. When we push specific outcomes like an elected candidate or certain legislation or a specific solution to a social or environmental problem, we start to run into complexities and dark sides and a frustrating level of messiness. Things get watered down, or co-opted, or we find the inspiring candidate was not so hot after all, or the legislation had some messy “side effects,” or the next administration reverses the solution we were so proud of or... things just don’t unfold like we planned. Seldom do I hear activists asking, “Does this mean something about how we should be practicing our activism, that could actually empower us?”
Most “conscious evolution” initiatives focus on the evolution of consciousness or celebrating our awareness of ourselves as conscious manifestations of evolution, and pay scant attention to the evolution of social systems. When we think about it, though, everything we do and don’t do is playing a role in how our social systems are evolving already, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not. It isn’t a matter of being evolutionary. Humans already are the dominant evolutionary force on the planet, if only by driving hundreds of species to extinction and developing remarkable new technologies. The real issue is how conscious and intentional we are and could be about our evolutionary impact.
Most “spiritual activism” focuses on bringing compassion or enlightenment to activism, rather than asking what would compassionate or enlightened political or governance systems look like, and what might we do to bring them into being.
HOW DO WE TRANSFORM CONSCIOUSNESS?
Among cultural creatives and transformational activists, there is sometimes debate about whether we should be transforming consciousness or transforming systems. My take on this dichotomy is that consciousness shapes social systems and social systems shape consciousness – in a giant feedback loop. Given that, what should our change strategy be?
I find myself biased towards starting with changing systems. Here’s why:
So many of us have put so much effort into changing ourselves and, as valuable as this has been for our own peace of mind, relationships, and sense of connection and service to the world, I am not convinced that the shifts in our awareness and behavior have been truly of comparable magnitude to what the earth and future generations need of us.
On the other hand, I see millions of people’s consciousness being shaped every day by PR and advertising, by paranoid national security policies and unemployment, by new technologies, by involvement in meaningful community activity, by conversations and stories, and by the structures and procedures of everyday life dictated by tradition, policy, and the nature of our shared physical infrastructure. So I’ve wondered if we can identify high leverage interventions at the whole-system which would, if they were effectively instituted, transform the consciousness of millions.
WISE DEMOCRACY AND CONVERSATION
I have seen high-quality conversations among diverse people raise their level of consciousness far above what they displayed in their everyday lives. My work on “wise democracy” has been about plugging such conversations into our political and governmental systems. The fact that the participants go home afterwards and slide back towards their former individual consciousness is not a problem. They’ve had their impact on the policies and actions of the system, which can then shift the consciousness of millions of other citizens upwards.
But it seems to me truly significant that currently there is nowhere in our system where a legitimate, inclusive-of-all-viewpoints, even vaguely wise collective “voice of the whole” – or voice of “We the People” – can be dependably heard. Any innovation (such as the Citizen Initiative Review being promoted in Oregon, http://www.healthydemocracyoregon.org/about_CIR.html) that made such a voice visible would soon raise the question: “Why isn’t a legitimate, wise voice of the whole visible – and indeed empowered – in all public forums and governmental functions about all issues?”
Having such a voice present in the system changes everything. With it, the whole picture, the real complexity, can be worked through so that the whole community can wake up to what’s happening and what’s possible. Without it, we are left with a battle between parts of the whole, determinedly undermining each other while trying to give their special gifts of partial truths masquerading as whole truths.
I truly believe that properly designed dialogues could produce the kind of powerful, workable solutions and insights we need. And empowering those dialogues – making them official parts of our collective decision-making process – would profoundly shift the way our whole society behaves.
I’m hoping that as more and more people become disillusioned with politics-as-usual and activism-as-usual – and realize that being conscious evolution means taking responsibility for evolving not just ourselves but our social systems – there will be compelling, effective conscious-evolutionary approaches to systemic change.
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