Alternative Editorial: The Need For Space
Not all of us are football fans, but during the World Cup 8.1 million Britons (out of global 18.7) million people tuned in to watch England draw with Wales, compared to record highs of 2 million for Match of the Day. It seems we are drawn to the global competition, more than the regional one. Numerically, more of us can identify with a nation than a town.
Yet watching and participating in this global event has little to do with geopolitics: we don't think of governments negotiating when we squirm and cheer our way through 90 minutes of play. This is the drama of competing belongings: my nation against yours. My beliefs, culture and comfort zone, versus the rest.
For some nations, winning on this stage is like becoming visible for the first time. The tears of joy on the faces of the South Koreans, when they went through to the second round for the first time in a World Cup, spoke volumes. Quite unlike the roars of triumph that English fans might express in the same situation: no less emotional, but for quite different reasons. While many find it incomprehensible that so much is invested in this experience (the average England fan will spend £8,750 if their team gets to the final), this global opera won't be quelled.
This love of feeling and meaning is a scarcity in the lives of workers of all kinds, who give the best part of every day to earning just enough to survive. It's tragic how much this multi-billion pound industry relies on fans purchasing tickets (and travel!) they can barely afford, to access emotions missing from the lifestyle they are trapped in. But having experienced those moments of power and possibility - a win or a loss - nothing changes for them other than a deepening addiction to the game.
Each fan becomes an analyst, a strategist, an expert on flow of play and data: skills with no prospect of further employment. Instead, a frustrated desire for greatness that cannot be met by the nations or towns we support. Imagine if we could help such emotion find purchase in new ways: where that desire to be part of something aspirational could be the energy for change.
Of course, politics has long been aware of the role of emotions in drawing attention and nudging behaviour. So much so that canny operators - of which Dominic Cummings is only the most recent and visible - design their successful campaigns entirely around finding and meeting the emotional needs of voters. One might say that such cynical manipulation has done more to make us distrust our emotional responses to possibilities than invest in them.
At the same time, it's remarkable how un-emotional our zones of citizen action tend to be.
When invited to think about the multiple crises that our society faces - climate, inequality, loss of well-being - we think mostly about the problems that need fixing. Climate is approached as a scientific challenge, backed up by policy decisions on behalf of the people. Social justice looks like a field of competing attitudes that need correcting and policing by activists. Well-being, particularly mental health, increasingly sounds like a pharmaceutical race to the top: who can invent the best pill to contradict the effects of our lifestyles?
Too often when we meet as citizens, we allow the effects of our broken politics to define our own agenda. When the market economy leads to homelessness, we focus on housing. We have competing policies on ownership and make mortgages the axle of our lives around which the family economy turns. Meantime, we make small numbers of beds available for vulnerable people but force them to beg for the £25 they need to stay dry overnight. If everyone achieved a bed for the night, nothing will have changed about their ability to thrive in society. There's much more to change than fixing the material deficits.
Is that at least one of the reasons so few people get drawn to politics? They can't see themselves as problem fixers and have little interest in becoming 'ambulancemen for capitalism', as one old social worker once described themself to us. At the same time, without the permission of the people, politicians can't go ahead with offering solutions to the problems they created. Particularly in old-school political systems, a party can have a manifesto, but they must 'win the people over' by other means. Charisma, wild promises and yes, emotional manipulation. It's a trap.
This is not a problem for politicians alone. Civil society also has an attraction challenge. Not enough people have the capacity to become carers for the most vulnerable in our midst, or responders to our shared environmental challenges, even if it is obvious that their own lives in the community will benefit directly. Problem solving without sufficient resources is worse than a thankless task. Arriving at a clear analysis about what's needed to change a dysfunctional system, without the resources to act upon the dysfunctions, causes frustration and bitterness.
There is generally more community uptake when there is participatory budgeting on offer, in which people generally prove compassionate in their decision making. That suggests it's not a lack of care, it's a lack of agency that holds people back. However, the sums of money offered from local councils to enable participation are always desultory. Hence, little attraction and low participation.
What if we changed the mind set and looked at the urgent task ahead not as a list of problems to be solved, but as the challenge of becoming a more agentic community, more generally? What could that mean? Firstly, it means shifting our attention from the idea that we are, collectively, our problems. Or that a better life is defined by the absence of problems. When we feel powerless, even simple problems appear unmanageable: when powerful, we take them in our stride. When confident, we relish every challenge as a chance to be in action.
This journey from weak to strong is not easily effected (without affect) and if we try to approach it from the problem mindset, we will find it difficult to progress. We do not need fixing or correcting; we are not lacking. However, we need to change the context for action and create new possibilities for agency. How do we capture that feeling of potency that football fans feel on the terraces in our communities as we gather? How do we enable a 'winning mentality' when we dream of better futures? And then move that into action in the places we live?
In our experience, watching others and experimenting ourselves in this field, the first priority is to create and hold space - meaning a safe place in which anyone can speak and be heard on their own terms. On the one hand, this allows individuals to step away from their daily experience of the public space in which they are categorised—harnessed for narrow work purposes and emotionally manipulated to consume needlessly. We start to bring in more of the qualities of the private space - warmth, intimacy, authenticity - when we gather. For some this invitation to show up as their whole selves is immediately liberating; it can bring forth all sorts of desires and visions that are routinely suppressed.
Secondly, when lightly facilitated, space allows people to step into relationship with each other in ways they previously couldn't. Two people meeting for the first time, in friendly and generative conditions, open up worlds between them. Many doing that, regularly as a community practice, begins to generate a culture of possibility.
In our collaboratories we have three stages of development: friendly gathering, imagining the future and initiating community agency networks (CANs). The third stage, when it includes the diverse elements of the community, can give rise to a new economy: people bartering their skills or developing new markets for original produce. Increasingly we see communities committing to autonomous energy production, even their own broadband networks. Incidentally, co-ownership is essential to the energy for participation.
Giving individuals the space, the time and a container to return to themselves, to move into relationship with each other, creates social capital – and that’s the kind of trust that makes movement possible. People begin to see each other as the resource they need to feel agentic. Instead of feeling alienated and powerless, they begin to feel the networks around them as the conditions in which they can become creative and see outcomes.
None of this depends upon a centralised power driving the process, instructing people to become the bits of a machine someone else designed. Instead, it begins with people acknowledging themselves as having emotional needs - for belonging, status, achievement, autonomy - and designing spaces to meet them in balanced ways. This can be a collaboratory, but it can also be a festival, a marketplace, a school or a football club. As long as the gathering has the intention of becoming relational and generative in some way.
It's just like a good party, where you not only had a laugh but met some great people too - you're glad you went and you'd go again. You felt something you wanted to be part of.
That's a win on anyone's terms.
