Alternative Editorial: The Roots of Our Powerlessness
What do Occupy Wall Street, the events in Tahrir and Tiananmen Square, Nelson Mandela's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Extinction Rebellion have in common? According to Dr Gabor Maté, speaking at the Harvest Kaplankaya gatheringj last week, these were all events we were able to read about in our mainstream news - because those in power knew they would make no difference to the current socio-economic-political system.
Maté is more known as a trauma specialist than a political commentator. However, at a panel event entitled 'Western Civilization: What to Keep and What to Kill, speaking with Jamie Wheal, Wade Davis, and Indra Adnan, Maté was compelled to speak out. He challenged the largely European audience to acknowledge their ignorance about the atrocities committed by colonial and imperial powers in the past and present - Africawar, South America, Middle East, Afghanistan, Indonesia. And for this he blamed a Western education system, continuing to collude with a global media system, that keeps us all in the dark and hence unable to address the real problems of the age.
At the same time, the panel argued, this might be described as an era of people across the globe waking up to their previous occlusion. Aren't all the movements named above evidence that people in all parts of the globe are now being educated in new ways by the information flowing through the public space? Is our inability to progress more that there aren't enough numbers to make a difference?
Maté's earlier talk and later workshop offered deeper explanation, tracing our inability to take action back to our lack of emotional nourishment as children; our absence of agency arises from our insecurity. Some of this comes from pressure on the Mother to ignore her children crying, in favour of being more 'productive' with her time. As a medical doctor, he also witnesses the much higher rate of auto-immune disease amongst women than men—a reflection, he suggests, of the social pressure on women to suppress their own needs, in favour of those who make demands on her.
Ultimately, Maté says, we all suffer. Life is so often a tragic battle between our desire for more attachment and the drive for more authenticity. Wanting to be part of the in-group - where all the resources are - versus the spiritual compulsion to be your true self.
Given the complex needs of every individual in a world that constantly nudges - and often forces - us to conform to the prevailing norm, it becomes very hard for those waking up. For example, when an underprivileged person finds out for the first time that they have not been on a level playing field from birth onwards, it does not instantly equip them to make a difference to their situation.
Even when a government is openly committed to 'levelling up', we find we have no equipment to hold them to their promises. We are constantly choosing between making a noise about our insights, inviting backlash, and staying quiet.
It's little wonder that we now have so many situations where those demanding change find themselves separated out from the mainstream. And as Maté described, it's in the interest of the established powers to point at those who dare to speak up as extraordinary, rather than as part of a collective, growing awareness of our failings. This encourages a culture war between those now waking up to the urgent need to move on—and those driven by the need to conserve our settled way of life, still seeking the security we were deprived of since birth.
So are we doomed to self-sabotage, as Mate describes? Or are there other options for our global society to re-design the public space, in ways that might help us transcend these competing needs? Can we return in some way to our earliest promise of being nurtured, so that we can grow to heal the rift between the need for belonging and autonomy? Can we do that in ways that don't compromise our collective need to advance in the face of the multiple crises?
No matter what some of the human potential gurus were saying at this Kaplankaya conference, it’s not enough to wake up into a world of chaos and infinite possibility. Like any living entity, we need incubators for our healing and containers for our relationships, so that they can integrate and find traction in the socio-economic life of our respective countries.
Building and integrating our internal and external infrastructure is not likely to come from the top downwards. Governments are too entangled in the need to keep our economy growing to meet the demands they themselves generated. It's no accident that we have become machine-like, responding to the prompts of the public space to keep working 8-10 hours a day, for comparatively little reward, at the expense of our own mental and physical health. Even those with successful careers find themselves on a treadmill, addicted to the consumer logic that is burning the planet.
However there is plenty of evidence that within our communities, people are designing healing spaces that also have agency in the wider world - which we describe generically as community agency networks (CANs). These are not simply communities mobilised behind fixed agendas. Instead, they are gatherings subtly designed to give participants enough space to name their own needs and contributions. In so doing, they name and generate the kind of infrastructure of support that allows individual and collective agency to arise.
Some of us reading will be very familiar with the growing phenomenon of CANs - Neighborocracy in India, Transition Towns, Ecovillages, Fearless Cities, Strong Towns in the USA, Mondragon, Cooperation Jackson, the Cleveland project and many more. And maybe some will recognise the underlying patterns of their architecture - networks, distributed power, relational intelligence - as the way that communities have always worked, through imitating natural webs.
However, for all of us to become able to move towards this kind of regenerative model and culture, it will take more than observing others returning to these essential resources and developing them cosmolocally. Remaining passive in the face of the urgent need for change - even when we see alternative ways of acting together becoming available - is evidence that we are still in the trance of the old system. We choose belonging to the mainstream over the challenge of becoming more authentic.
How can we attract more people faster to develop their response-ability and take a leap into a new way of seeing and being together? One part of this task is to connect the CANs together and exponentially enhance the power of their shared tools and methods, adding to the global commons. Another part is addressed by developing a new media system, capable of carrying the feel of this new form of agency, developed on the ground, into our virtual meeting places.
Only then can the people waking up find the containers, communities, networks and architecture capable of processing their passions into transformative change. Imagine if each wave of waking up - every social justice moment from Martin Luther King's " I have a dream" to the Arab Spring to Fridays for the Future - had added to the numbers of people now actively developing their cosmolocal agency in towns and cities everywhere? Where would we be now?