3.5 Discipline 3 - live into dilemma
We are dilemmic beings.
And I wish we weren’t, because our dilemmic nature causes us so much trouble and suffering.
If I had a magic wand, I’d wave it and change us into simpler creatures such that all our life decisions would be easy no-brainers.
Except that’s not true because I’m torn. I so very much want things to be easier for us and yet…
Right in the heart of human dilemma is something I would not want to give up.
I’m going to tell you what that is, but first, let me explain what I mean by dilemma.
The dictionary says…
A dilemma is when you have to make a choice you don’t want to have to make.
For example, you’ve got two options and both are bad, but you have to pick one.
I’m thinking of a guy I knew in college, who right after he graduated got a draft notice. This was in the era of the Vietnam War. He had three options.
1. Go into the army and fight. But he believed the war was immoral, so how could he do that?
2. Refuse the draft and go to prison for 2-5 years. But that scared him because he knew how bad incarceration is for people. So how could he do that?
3. Fly to Toronto, relinquish his US citizenship, and become a Canadian. But this meant leaving behind his family and friends. And how could he do that?
He chose option 3 as the least bad one, and made a good life for himself up north. But it was a forced choice and not one he wanted to make.
A dilemma can also be when you have two good choices but you can’t have both.
I’m remembering Sandy, a woman I knew who was in love with two men at the same time. She said…
“I want to be two people so I can spend my life with each of them. I want this so badly that sometimes I think if I concentrate on my desire hard enough, it might actually happen.”
She finally picked one and committed to him, but she hated having to make that choice.
That’s what the dictionary has to say about dilemma.
Our genome, though, has a whole lot more to add. We were originally your typical competitive, self-centered species, and that’s because DNA, the basis for life, is inherently competitive and self-centered.
But over time, we evolved into a social-group species. We learned how to cooperate with other people in our group at a very sophisticated level. And that became the key to our success.
Thing is, though, we didn’t leave self-centeredness behind…
We layered social cooperation on top of it.
And that left us with a fundamental, dilemmic conflict at the core of our behavior.
Many, many species are not dilemmic. They don’t have to make difficult decisions. They just do their thing in a straightforward way, propelled by instinct.
But for us humans, decision-making can get complex and contradictory and exceedingly difficult.
And that’s because of our core dilemma…
Me versus we.
We each have to decide how to respond to the following questions every day…
Who do I put first, myself or my group?
How much do I cooperate? How much do I compete?
How much do I give to my family and my tribe? How much do I take from them?
Sometimes these decisions are easy. There are times when it’s very clear that if you give to your group, your group will be stronger and you’ll be personally better off along with the group as a whole.
Yet, while that particular decision might be easy…
Nothing gets rid of the underlying dilemma.
So tomorrow, you might have to deal with a me-versus-we decision that’s not easy at all.
The sweet spot
If we put me and we at opposite ends of a continuum, then…
Right in the middle, right in the heart of the dilemma, is the sweet spot.
Family relationships are on this continuum. At one end is the me-extreme where I focus totally on what I need and not at all on what the family needs.
At the other end is the we-extreme, where I put my family’s needs first and ignore my own personal needs.
And right in the middle of the continuum is the sweet spot of togetherness. That’s where me and we are in deep partnership, and neither one is sacrificed to the other.
We can locate communities along this continuum, too. For example, there were hippie communes back in the 60s and 70s that had a self-indulgent culture. The idea was for each person to get what they wanted all the time. And if you didn’t get what you wanted it was okay to blackmail the group with emotional acting out, like throwing a tantrum.
These particular communes were me-centric. The primary value was the individual. Which was fun in the moment, but didn’t work over the long term. Since people did not take care of the group as a group, most of these communes imploded.
At the other end of the continuum are small religious communities which are we-centric. The Amish are an example of this. The benefits of such a community are considerable. When you need help, the whole community is there for you.
But you pay a price for this. You have to suppress yourself. The community tells you what to wear, how to think, and what your relationship to God should be. You have to follow the book of rules, the Ordnung. You only go to school till the eighth grade, so many professions are ruled out.
There’s a way in which life at either end of the continuum is easy, in that…
You don’t have to make complex moral decisions.
You go with the flow of the culture. Or adhere to the rigidity of it.
If you chose to live in the middle of the continuum, in the sweet spot, your life will be much more challenging, because you will be wrestling with lots and lots of dilemmic decisions. But in consequence, your life will be a far richer adventure.
In the sweet spot…
You do your best to maximize both me and we at the same time.
You’re trying for 100% personal freedom and 100% belonging to the group. Which is rarely achieved but worth going for.
The sweet spot is the place where intimacy comes alive because…
To make intimacy work, I need to care about me and you and the relationship in equal measure.
This is not about finding a formula to follow, but about engaging with moral decision-making, calibrating between the demands of me and the demands of we again and again because…
The sweet spot is dynamic, so you have to keep finding it.
Let’s take a look at a super simple example from the world of activism to see how this works.
Imagine there’s a nonprofit called the Health Independence Project. It’s dedicated to teaching everyone how to take charge of their own well-being so they don’t have to be so dependent on a profit-centered health care system. They’ve just finished a major, 50-page report to accompany the launch of their newest program. Six staff worked on the report and it’s time to decide how to give credit.
If the director puts the report out under her name alone that would be me-centered.
If it was decided not to include any individual names, but just give credit to the organization as a whole, that would be we-centered.
The sweet-spot resolution would look like this…
We’d like to thank Luisa for the research that led to this report, Gabriella for the writing, Hilaria for the layout and illustrations, Santiago for designing the program itself, and Raul for the accompanying videos.
A special thanks to Dolores, our director, who has championed each of us personally and challenged us to do our best work, and who has helped us discover our synergy as a team, and realize that together we are way more than the sum of us as individuals.
And finally, thank-you to all the supporters, Board members, and former staff who have contributed to making Health Independence the organization that it is.
Next let’s look at two examples which are more complicated, and are both in the realm of personal relationships.
Wrestling a dilemma into a resolution
Imagine you’re a single mom and you live with your 13-year-old daughter, Ashlyn, in a small town an hour away from a mid-sized city. At dinner on Friday night, Ashlyn surprises you…
“Let’s move to the City.”
Your first, but silent reaction is…
No way. I’m a single mom with a demanding job and you want me to pick up and move, and how much will that cost, and how disruptive will it be, and I’m rooted here where I grew up.
But then you catch yourself…
Hold it, I’m being reactive. Let me be proactive. Let me investigate this.
So you ask Ashlyn…
“Why do you want to move? I thought you liked it here.”
“I do like it here, but if you want to go to the High School for the Arts, you have to be a legal resident of the City. And I want to go to that high school.”
You’re still in the mood to quash this, except you see a light in her eyes you’ve never seen before. So you ask her why art matters so much to her, and she tells you…
“At first I struggled with my art class this year. I thought I had no talent. But I’m getting better. In fact, over the last few weeks, Ms. Ducharme has been raving about my drawings. She went to the School for the Arts and she’s been telling me about it. She thinks I could get in.
“And I’m happiest when I’m doing art. I’ve heard people talk about finding themselves, and I think this is what they mean, the way I feel about drawing and painting.”
Now you’re remembering kids you knew growing up who found what they loved early on—sports, math, writing, music—and you saw how happy it made them. You never had that, but you want it for your daughter.
But wait, you’ve got a worry. Is this just a passing fancy? So you propose the following to Ashlyn…
“You’ve got a year and a half till 9th grade when you can start going to this school, but how about if we get serious about this? How about if we make sure that art really is your first love before we do something as drastic as moving? What if you sign up right now for one of the Saturday classes they have for kids at the Art Museum in the City?”
“Yes! I want to do that. And it’s fair to test me to see if I’m really going to stick with art, but I’m sure I will.”
And now you realize there’s something else that worries you about moving, so you make a request…
“You know the City is not as safe as our little town. Would you be willing to take some self-defense classes here, starting right away?”
“Elana goes to a dojo and I’ve seen her in her gear and it looks really cool, so yes, I’ll go.”
“You know, I really believe in self-defense for women and girls, but I’ve never done anything about it myself. How would you feel if I took adult classes at the same place? Would that be embarrassing?”
“Not at all. And maybe we could practice together sometimes at home so we’d get better faster.”
And then one more thing occurs to you…
“I’ll bet the School for the Arts has shows and exhibitions. How about if we start going to those, so you get a chance to meet some of the kids and hear what it’s like going to that school?”
“Wow, yes! I’d really like that. I want to meet as many other art-geeks as I can.”
So now you’re on a roll when Ashlyn surprises you again…
“Mom, we’re talking about what I want, but would this move work for you?”
“Thank you so much for asking me that. And I don’t know. But can I sleep on it and let you know tomorrow night?”
“Of course.”
And you don’t actually sleep on it. You think about it, furiously, all that night and into the next day…
What about me, indeed? I know I can’t move to the City if it’s only about Ashlyn. I would do anything for my daughter, but I know if I sacrifice my happiness for hers, I’ll end up resenting her and that will wreck our relationship. I have to make this work for me, too.
So you take a good hard look at your life and realize you’ve been coasting. You’re in line to be the next ED at the nonprofit where you work. And Robert is aging, but his job is his whole identity, so he might never retire. Are you willing to wait maybe ten years, or longer, to step up?
Then you realize what you really love is leading a team, and you have a team of people you love working with. But Robert is a micro-manager, he keeps interfering with your team.
A phrase pops into you mind, “A leader who develops leaders.” That’s who you are, that’s who you want to be. You don’t care about your job title. In fact, you’re not interested in fundraising and administrative work. You just want a team that’s really your own.
So you decide that while your daughter is checking out art, you’re going to check out the nonprofit community in the City. The annual Nonprofit Day Conference is coming up in a month. You make a plan. You’re going to skip the workshops and spend time talking to people, as many as you can, especially EDs, asking them about their work and their organizations, and see who you find who’s sympatico and who in a year or even sooner might want to hire a leader who develops leaders.
Now you’re suddenly appreciating Ashlyn like crazy, because of how she’s taking charge of her own life, but also because she’s interrupted your hapless coasting. You’re going to take charge, too.
What we see here is a mom and daughter embarking on an adventure together. They’ve resolved a dilemma that could have put them at odds. Which probably would have happened if the mom had simply put her foot down and said, “No, we’re not moving, period, end of discussion.”
But let’s remember that these two have only resolved this one episode of me versus we. The basic dilemma is still at the center of their relationship, as it is in all familial relationships. And this underlying dilemma will never be removed. These two will have many more occasions to work through many more episodes together.
Happily, though, each episode they wrestle their way through will grow them and give them a better chance at success the next time.
Now let’s switch gears. I’ve been talking about the sweet spot in the middle of the dilemmic continuum. But there’s no guarantee of sweetness or a happy ending…
The midpoint of the continuum can be a place of tragedy when no resolution can be found.
Let’s look at an example.
An unbearable dilemma
Tracey and Hunter have been happily married for five years but now Hunter brings up an issue they haven’t talked about before…
“We’re not getting any younger, Tracey. It’s time to make a plan for the next phase of our marriage, having kids.”
“Whoa, what?!”
“Kids, little tykes that turn a couple into a family.”
“But I’m not ready to have kids.”
Here’s the situation for Tracey. She’s a writer. Over the past three years she’s started to meet with success. She’s getting her short stories placed in magazines. Rejections are rare now. And her debut novel has just been published to raves from just enough reviewers to be able to call it a winner. And to sign a contract for her next book with a decent advance.
So when Hunter presses her, here’s how the conversation goes…
“When do you think you will be ready?”
“Oh god, Hunter, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t imagine that I’m ever going to want to have babies. My books are my babies. I’m living exactly the life I want to live.”
“How can a book match a baby?”
“For me it just does. But what about you, how important is it to you to have children?”
“The most important thing ever. I’ve always dreamed of having kids, having a real family of my own.”
“Oh, sweetie, my heart is breaking. I didn’t know that. And suddenly I feel like the floor is falling out from under me. How did we go so long not knowing this about each other? This is so painful.”
“You can say that again. I thought you knew how I felt about kids.”
“But we never talked about it. Oh, what a mistake we’ve made. We fell crazy in love so young and we were so right for each other in so many ways, but we never did our due diligence.”
“Due diligence? What’s that mean? It doesn’t sound very romantic.”
“It’s not. It’s pragmatic. It just means taking a cold, hard look at the long term considerations for our marriage. Like where each of us is at with kids.”
“I just assumed that marriage meant a family.”
“And I assumed marriage just meant marriage. This is shocking. What do we do now?”
“I’m making enough money that you can be a stay-at-home mom and do your writing in your spare time.”
“But I need big blocks of time for my writing.”
“Okay, then we’ll hire a nanny so you can write three days a week.”
“That’s a great idea, and thank you for thinking of that, but if I was going to be a mom I’d need to be a 100% mom, an amazing mom, not a part-time, half-hearted mom.”
“Maybe quality time would make up for quantity time.”
“But there’s something more. I’m scared that if I chose to be a mom for your sake, that I’d resent you for taking my writing away from me. And maybe I’d resent my child, too, and that would be the worst thing ever.”
“Yeh, that would not be okay.”
“And what about you? What if you gave up on having a family? Who would you resent?”
“Well, you, of course, for denying me what I want most. And your writing, I guess, which to date I’ve loved. I’d probably resent the hell out of that, too.”
“Understandable.”
“But you used to be a part-time writer, back when you were teaching at the college and coaching.”
“But I was teaching writing and coaching writers, and all that contributed and made me better at my own work.”
“Mothering might put you through changes that would make you a better writer.”
“That’s true. That happened for my friend Janae. But I’m not willing to roll the dice, because what if that doesn’t happen for me? And, see, the thing is I’ve already found my formula for success.”
“What does that mean?”
“Look at my reviews. What do they say?”
“That your characters are imaginative and compelling. But what they comment on most is the depth of your characters. One reviewer said the depth was breathtaking. Another one said she fell in love with your characters. Another one said you seem to have affection for each of your characters, even the bad guys.”
“I think those reviewers are accurate. And that depth they talk about is something I can get to only because I can spend long hours five days a week, being a hermit, putting myself under a spell, going deep and staying deep. No interruptions, no pressures, no other big concerns to weigh on me.”
“But then you take the weekends off.”
“Yes, that’s my recovery time. That’s what gets me ready to dive in again on Monday morning. If I had a child, I’d never get recovery time.”
“Isn’t there any compromise you’d be willing to make?”
“I don’t want to. My writing is so me I can’t imagine giving it up. And especially since I’ve spent years working hard to get as good as I’ve gotten.”
“When you put it that way, I’m really happy for you, but this scares me about us.”
“You’re good with kids. You spend time with your friends who have kids. Could it be enough for you to be an honorary uncle to a bunch of kids?”
“No. I do lots of fun stuff with those kids, but I want the hard stuff, too. Being up in the middle of the night, dealing with them when they’re being a pain in the butt, taking care of them when they’re sick.”
“You want the hard stuff?!”
“Yes, I do, because I want to be a real dad.”
“Oh god. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I love you so much, I can’t imagine my life without you.”
“And me, too, you. But I can’t imagine my life without kids of my own.”
What are their choices?
Tracey could give up her writing, or Hunter could give up having kids. But what would that do to their relationship? Whoever gave up their dream would resent the other one who meanwhile, in stark contrast, would be living the life they love.
Or to keep things equal, they could both give up their dreams. But can you imagine?
Or they could both find new dreams that are compatible. But would it be possible to find new dreams that would match what they have now?
Or they could split up and go find new partners. And break their hearts in the process.
Even when Hunter and Tracey make their final decision, they still won’t be done with the dilemma. There will be years of longing for the life not lived, and second guessing, and hurting behind whatever loss they choose to suffer. There will be pain that maybe time will heal, or maybe it won’t.
The killer dilemma: How good our evil has been to us
We’ve taken a quick look at how dilemma operates in the personal lives of individuals. Now let’s look at dilemma at the level of our species.
And at that level, the core dilemma of me versus we becomes…
My tribe versus your tribe.
Or…
My tribe against all other tribes.
Which it seems to me has a lonely feel to it.
As activists we need to know the game we’re in. And if we’re organizing humans, if we’re building movements to try to transform human society, that means we’re in the human game. Which is dominated by an evil paradox.
What’s been the source of our success? It’s…
Our tribal nature.
The key to which is our ability to pull together into super-cooperative groups. Look at the difference between us and chimps our nearest living relatives. Our cooperative powers are exponential compared to theirs.
But then let’s ask this: What’s the key factor driving us into extinction? The answer is…
Our tribal nature.
Our cooperation has boundaries. Tribal culture is compulsively divisive. Historically our tribes have been exclusive not inclusive. And that’s why we haven’t been able to pull together as one united and cooperative global tribe.
As the crises we’re facing multiply, as the danger we’re in deepens, as things get worse for us, what do we do?
We regress.
When we get scared we regress into tribal fundamentalism.
Which means that as things get worse we respond in a way that makes them even worse.
When we regress, our groups turn against each other instead of joining together.
Add all this up and it becomes clear that…
What made us is now breaking us.
Our triumph and our defeat have the same source. And this is…
The core dilemmic tragedy of the human species.
And the dilemma gets more complex…
When our own tribe is threatened by other tribes, we pull together internally in a more disciplined cooperation to defend ourselves.
When things are quiet and the threat level is low, we get lazy about our cooperative discipline and drift into more competition with other people within our home group. I try to get more attention than you. I try to gain more status than you.
So inside our tribes, there is dilemmic calibration going on all the time…
How much do I cooperate with my group?
How much do I compete with other members of my group for benefits within my group?
And the same is true in the relationships between tribes. Tribes are not always competitive. We humans are good at building alliances. And sometimes two allied tribes merge into one.
But for the most part our alliances are provisional. When they stop benefiting us, we cut off ties and retreat back into our tribal identity and a former friend becomes an enemy again.
A good example of this is World War II. When we talk about our allies, we include the Soviet Union. But early in the war, the Soviet Union made an alliance with Nazi Germany. Then the Germans attacked the Soviets and they joined in with the United States, Britain, France, and others.
But we were uneasy allies. The alliance was useful for winning the war, but trust never ran deep. Our leaders were scared of communism. They worried about the Soviets occupying other countries in Europe after the war, which is what happened.
So the minute the war was over, suddenly we turned against our former friend, the Soviet Union, and became best friends with our bitter enemy, Germany.
When we think about the evil we humans do to other humans, we’re talking about things like warfare, genocide, exploitation, and oppression.
We’re talking about evil that comes from our compulsive, divisive, competitive, even sociopathic tribal nature.
And so…
The source of our success is also the source of our worst evil.
This paradox—or dilemma—is one of the things that makes the human species as torn and conflicted and tangled and crazy as we are.
When you go down to the bottom of our OS and see it for what it is, and come face to face with our tribal fundamentalism, the primary source of human evil, you find that…
Such knowledge is a hope-killer.
And when you get to know our dilemmic nature, right down to the bottom, you discover that…
This knowledge, too, is a hope-killer.
And there we are, kicked out of the Eden of Hope with no way back in.
And this is why so few people want to talk about our dilemmic nature…
Happy-talk gurus don’t bring it up because it’s not something that can be handled with easy steps.
Books on community organizing don’t discuss it because the authors don’t want to make organizing look any more daunting than it already is.
Experts on evolution don’t address it because they want people to embrace evolution, to believe in it, appreciate it, and admire it. But once you learn that evolution is killing us, how can you not hate it?
Living into dilemma
I’ve just given you a heavy dose of bad news. I’ve shown you that digging into our dilemmic nature is difficult and depressing.
So why do it?
Because in the heart of human dilemma, in that conflicted, difficult place…
You get to upgrade love.
It’s there that…
You get to wrestle with the worst of being human in order to bring out the best.
How do we do that wrestling? First, we need to know that our dilemmic nature is locked into our genome, so…
There’s no way we can root it out.
Which leaves us with two choices. We can simply deny that we’re dilemmic, and pretend our way through life.
Or we can master the art of…
Living into dilemma.
Why do I say, living into?
Because we can’t master the dilemmas themselves. We can’t bend them to our will. We can’t make them go away. But we can respond to them, forthrightly, proactively, even aggressively.
And by living into, I mean living into the heart of dilemma. When we do that we get to do two things at once. We get to…
Upgrade our own personal ability to love.
But then we also get to…
Upgrade love itself.
Which means…
We get to make of love something way better than the default evolution has given us.
And in consequence…
We get to love ourselves better than evolution has ever loved us.
The fact that we’re a dilemmic species is itself dilemmic. It’s both bad news and good news. Which might sound even-handed., but it’s not.
Because…
The bad news is so much worse than the good news is good.
Yet…
The good news, that we can use the dilemmas in our life to upgrade love, this good news just within itself, is so very, very good.
In the end, we’re left to wrestle with this contradictory reality, that in the heart of dilemma is where…
Hope dies.
But it’s also where…
Love finds new life.
Full-dilemma activism
Next I’m going to take a serious look at key principles for pulling together coalitions made up of different groups.
There aren’t any easy steps here, because coalition building, the real thing, involves dilemmic decision-making.
In our country, we’re obsessed with easy steps for everything, including the most challenging things. I think this obsession is in part simply because we’ve got a bias for avoiding pain and hard work. Which is no big surprise.
Dealing with our dilemmic nature is hard work and it can be painful. Which are two good reasons not to do it.
But this presents a problem for us activists. Because we can’t transform our society or the global community unless we deal directly with the dilemmic dimension of humanness.
There’s a lot of appeal to following a set of easy steps in our organizing and movement building. But if we’re only taking easy steps, that keeps us stuck in the shallows.
Formulaic activism can’t take us deep, not deep enough for transformation. The only thing that can do that is…
Dilemmic moral labor.
Which is demanding. Rewarding, too, very much so, but first, demanding in a way nothing else is.
So let me make a recommendation. For those of us who choose to follow the path of moral labor, let’s do it with a two-part attitude.
Let’s…
Embrace the heart of dilemma.
Because it’s real.
While…
We kick the butt of dilemma.
Because it needs to get kicked.
Dilemma: Home-group versus coalition
The deciding challenge for humankind is this…
Can we turn our tribal past into a trans-tribal future?
And the answer is, no we can’t. Not on a global level.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try on a personal level. Or in our activist organizations and networks.
Why not do what we can to reduce suffering?
Why not bring out the best in us?
Why not do everything we can to take the best possible care of ourselves and each other?
And…
Why not break the spell of tribal fundamentalism?
Trans-tribalism is a noble phrase. It’s a lofty, visionary ideal. But if we want to put it into practice, we have come back down to earth to some hard realities?
Let’s do a quick review. If we want to take on this challenge of trans-tribalism, we have to take on the most consequential human dilemma which is…
Me versus we.
But we need to take it on at the tribal level, which is…
My tribe versus your tribe.
Or…
My tribe against all other tribes.
Which means…
My tribe against my species.
One of the startling facts of human evolution is that we’ve always identified with our band or tribe or nation, but we have not ever identified in any primary, preferential way with our species.
When we feel scared or threatened, our first impulse is to retreat even deeper into our tribe, because it feels like security, it feels like home.
And so…
The idea of a trans-tribal society is a pale, intellectual vision.
While…
Tribalism is a vivid, visceral compulsion rooted deep in our genes.
Which means…
We’ll never fight for our species in the same fiercely instinctive way we fight for our tribes.
Except that statement needs an amendment. As a species, we won’t fight our species. But as individuals we can.
Does trans-tribalism mean that we have to leave our tribes behind and turn humankind into one global, glutinous, mass?
Not so, because…
We need our tribes.
We need them to be a place where we can be known personally and deeply. We need them to be the place where we can make some of our best contributions. And where we feel a special kind of safety and security. Especially the safety to do serious self-development work.
But at the same time, we need our tribes to be the place where we can differentiate away from a society that runs on tribalism.
We need our tribes to have fluid boundaries. We need them to be…
Inclusive instead of exclusive.
We need them to engage with other tribes in…
Coalition building.
But what does “coalition” mean?
I’m definitely not talking about casual coalitions. Like when a group of organizations go to the state capital for a lobbying day to promote a piece of legislation together, and they need a name for who they are so they call themselves a coalition. But that name means very little.
What I’m focused on here is committed coalitions, where groups of people who are significantly different from each other come together in common cause and…
Make a deep commitment to each other that will sustain over time.
By this definition, a coalition is not a hobby or a decoration or an accessory. Instead, coalition building becomes a necessity.
If you’re a hope-based activist…
You need to master coalition building, because if we want to have a chance at saving ourselves, it’s absolutely necessary for groups of us to come together in coherent, tenacious, permanent cooperation.
If you’re a post-hope activist…
You need to master coalition building, because the better we are at coming together in common purpose, the better we can take care of each other on our way out. Which is the post-hope mission.
But now there’s a special fact we need to take into account…
Coalitions begin with the best of intentions, but most of them break down.
Often leaving bitterness in their wake.
What’s the problem? The assumption that good intentions are enough.
Which sounds like this…
Me and the people in my group are good people with good hearts. We have the best of intentions. What more do we need? We’re cool.
But the smart and strategic way to approach coalition building sounds like this instead…
Coalition work is so hard for us tribal human beings that if we want to engage in it, if we really care about being successful, then we need to prepare ourselves. Deeply and well.
This means we need to develop our abilities. We need to back up our good intentions with solid practices.
We need to differentiate ourselves from the typical offhand, perfunctory way that groups go about coalition building. We need to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that we’re making a serious, sustained commitment to the other members of the coalition.
And I think we get to count rigorous preparation as a special kind of love.
Preparation: Demonstrating commitment to the relationship before we ask for the relationship
What does it take to be coalition-ready?
To answer this question, I’m going to lay out a specific situation. But this is a very simple case designed to illustrate ways to deal with the challenge of reaching across divisions.
Coalition building in the real world can be much more complex, so much so that the story could fill a novel-length book. I’m not kidding.
Here I’m only giving you a beginning taste.
So let’s start. Imagine you live in a mid-size city of 100,000 people in Midwest farm country. In the past year there’s been an influx of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They’ve moved into the poorer section of town known as Eastside where there are lots of apartments.
You live in the part of town called Westside where there are mostly single family homes and long-term residents who are mostly white and middle-class. You and a progressive group of friends started the Westside Community Center three years ago. Now you want to focus on the issue of immigration. So you decide to propose working in coalition with the Eastside Community Center. And the conversation goes like this…
WCC: Hi, we wanted to say welcome to our city and we’d like to see our two Centers work together for a better future. What do you think?
ECC: What are you bringing to the table?
WCC: Good intentions!
Now imagine you’re part of the ECC. What’s your response?
Next let’s look at a very different proposal from the WCC…
WCC: We’d like to propose that the ECC and WCC work together to make a better future for our city. As more immigrants have been moving in, we’ve been seeing more discrimination and there’s been an eruption of hate speech in some of the local media.
We want this to stop. We want to see new people integrated into the community in a welcoming and supportive way.
We’re interested in finding out what you would need in a coalition partner. If we were working together, what would you want us to do? And what would you not want us to do?
But first, we’d like to tell you how we’ve prepared ourselves so far to be coalition-ready.
Our first year, we focused internally. We developed our organizing abilities. We studied the politics and history of our city, and the key players.
And we worked on our relationships with each other. We developed a culture of mutual support. We worked out a way to handle conflict so we could have sincere differences of opinion about strategy and priorities yet come together around an action plan we could all support.
In our second year, we took on small issues so we could build our political skills. We worked on potholes and streetlights, on summer jobs for youth, and we set up programs for kids and teens at our Center, so they’d have interesting and constructive things to do on the weekends.
At the same time, we formed our own study club, and read two books on human evolution, so we could understand tribalism, the pros and cons. Then we read three books on American history with a focus on how our economic and political institutions have exploited masses of people and caused untold suffering.
In this past year, our third one, we jumped into electoral politics. We ran two people for City Council. One got elected, one didn’t. But now we have two progressive people on the Council, a 100% increase. And during the election, we learned a lot about working with a wide range of groups in a cooperative way.
Now, as we start our fourth year, we believe that immigration is the issue we need to work on, because we’ve seen how hard it is for new people to move into our city and make a home here.
For the past three months, we’ve been running a book club for ourselves where we read and discuss memoirs of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
If you’re willing to work with us, we’d like to start our relationship by proposing that we pay people from your communities to come talk with us about your experiences moving into this city. We’re thinking about a series of four all-day meetings on Saturdays starting next month.
Again, imagine you’re from the ECC. How does this invitation sound?
Maybe there’s still more you might want from the WCC, but at least this group has been serious about preparing itself to work in coalition.
And, really, who does this? Have you seen it done? Have you experienced it? Does it seem unreal? Impossible?
Imagine how would feel to do this depth of preparation you could make a confident and substantial invitation, instead of an off-the-cuff, half-baked proposal.
And here’s something encouraging. The more prepared you are…
The less scary it is to reach across divisions.
Preparation: Doing your home work, or work on your home-group
Just because we call something our “home-group” doesn’t mean that everything there is happy and wonderful.
It’s important not to forget that there’s significant internal work that groups need to do, like work on their relationships with each other, to become coalition-ready.
Groups of people who are very similar in demographics and life experience can nonetheless struggle with problems and conflicts. And tribes can have jostling sub-tribes within them.
One of my early experiences with activism was joining a chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the Midwest in 1968. We all talked happily of our shared mission—to humanize the world. The great majority of us were middle class white kids.
But the chapter was all torn up with vicious personality battles among the leaders. These guys hated each other more than they hated the exploitive corporations we were supposed to be working to stop.
During meetings, the rest of us sat there in silence as shell-shocked witnesses. On the way home after the meeting, we engaged in distressed gossip.
As you can imagine, this house divided was never able to do anything constructive, let alone try something as demanding as coalition building.
Here’s another example. I recently visited a small city that considers itself one of the leading progressive places in the country. I sat in on a town meeting.
During the first hour, person after person got up to express their vision for the future of the community. Everyone was in synch with everyone else. Each speaker received enthusiastic applause. Hope filled the room.
Then came the break.
Then we got back together to make the joint action plan, and that’s when all hell broke loose. Speaker after speaker seemed to have the same emotional stance…
My plan is the only plan worth considering. I have the answer and that means you don’t. And if you disagree with me, then I get to shoot your ideas down, not just by discrediting the ideas but by shooting you down personally. Because if my plan is clearly the best possible progressive proposal, and you disagree with it, you’re guilty of being disloyal to the progressive cause and then why should any of us trust you ever again?
This was a remarkable tutorial on how to fracture a community. No chance of coalition building here.
I found this town hall enormously disheartening.
It might be depressing to look at internal divisions within your group and see that there’s some serious hard work you’re going to need to do to heal them. But if you do that work, guess what…
You get a double win.
Not only does your home group become a much more nurturing and happy place to hang out. But in doing your internal work on divisions, you’ll be so much more capable when you work to transcend the divisions between your group and another group.
You’ll have much less anxiety. Confidence will radiate from you. It will come across to the members of the other group and they will likely trust you more quickly.
Preparation: Dealing with privilege
One thing that wrecks coalitions is a significant difference in privilege and power between the groups in the coalition.
So what’s the problem with privilege?
I remember hearing Bernice Johnson Reagon of “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” give a speech about coalition building. She had been a member of the Freedom Singers during the Civil Rights Movement. She had travelled throughout the South singing and organizing. She had been through the fire.
Here’s what I remember her saying…
Of course we all need our home base, a place of safety, but if that’s all we’ve got, we’ll get wiped out. That means we have to build coalitions with other groups.
Then she added a sentence I’ll never forget…
But working in coalition will just about kill you.
It can be that hard.
Is it always that hard? Of course not. But doing civil rights organizing was dangerous work. And the burgeoning relationships between Black organizations and white groups that wanted to be allies were very challenging and trust was not easy to build or maintain.
For activists the question of privilege is definitely dilemmic.
One solution is for those who have more privilege is to…
Give it up.
But that’s not so easy. Because privilege is built in. And it’s enforced by society. It’s not just a personal thing that an individual carries on his own and therefore can dump on his own.
For example, I know when I walk into a room, everyone looks at me and sees a middle-class white guy and that means I’m going to automatically get treated differently than if I was Black or female.
Even before anyone knows anything about me personally, before they know if I’m a good guy or a bad guy, they start relating to me in a preferential way. So my privilege precedes me even when I don’t want it to.
And there’s a deep, dilemmic conflict when it comes to privilege. You’re human. You’ve got an operating system in you that tells you to grab every bit of privilege you can, take every possible advantage, and hold onto it for dear life, because it can make a very big difference in terms of survival.
And to do this not just for yourself, but to be responsible to the welfare of your family. The more privilege you have the better off they’ll be.
So in our country, in our time, to turn against privilege means you’re going against the grain of both evolution and your society. And that’s a very big deal.
If we can’t just drop privilege, what’s the answer?
We can…
Use our privilege to put a stop to privilege.
We can make this a fundamental part of whatever activism we do.
Liberation Theology has some good advice for us on this score. One of the basic tenets of its practitioners is the…
Preference for the poor.
Or we could say it this way…
Preference for those being hurt the most and for those most in need.
And this means that when it comes to building coalitions across significant differences between groups…
Those with more privilege and power need to do more preparation to earn trust and make the coalition work.
Those with advantage need to get very clear about the trade they’re making. In the short-term, of course they want to hold onto privilege, even increase it. But in the long-run, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do for human survival.
Again, here’s a dilemmic challenge. Do we surrender to our evolutionary drive for advantage? Or do we make a moral choice to fight for a better version of humanness than our OS has given us?
Preparation: Choosing to make our coalitions conditional
Unconditional love gets all the good press. But think about that it actually means. No conditions. None at all.
So anything goes. You have to love that other person no matter how much they hurt you. They can lie about you, berate you, control you, and destroy your self-esteem, but you still have to love them. That’s what the gospel of unconditional love commands.
For example, a battered wife should love her abusive husband no matter what—right up to the day he murders her.
I like conditional love instead. You’re free to love people, but if they hurt you, mistreat you, or exploit you, you stop. You set limits. You take a moral stand against abuse.
Enforcing conditions is good for us—when we’re enforcing conditions that make love healthier and stronger.
But what about the abuser? Setting limits is good for him, too. Why would we think that letting him get away with abuse would be good for him?
Maybe he gains some power over others, and maybe he’s able to take advantage of them, and maybe he likes that. But none of that is good for his soul.
There’s no justifiable reason to collude with hurtful uses of power.
And by the way, it seems to me that there’s a magic aura around “unconditional love.” As though it’s some kind of salvation. But if we have to sacrifice our safety or our moral values for it then what’s it worth?
And the thing that makes me the most skeptical is…
How many more people want to receive unconditional love than want to give it.
So, the way I see it…
Conditional relationships are the best.
And similarly…
Conditional coalitions are the best.
You can’t say yes to just anyone who wants to join your coalition.
For example, imagine you’ve got an active and effective Progressive Community Council in your town and you’re starting to develop some serious political power. Then along come the officers of the local Business Consortium, made up of business that mistreat their employees. And these officers tell you they want to be part of your Council. In fact, as citizens of this town, they demand to be included.
Do you do the nice-guy thing and tell them yes? Do you grant them membership because you’ve got an ideological commitment to inclusiveness?
What if you know the Consortium members want to get into your Council so they can have a vote and exert influence from the inside and stir up internal trouble and slow you down because they want a free hand to keep exploiting the working people in town?
How could you say yes to that?
There’s a lot of talk these days about listening sessions where you get together with people who have very different points of view than yours. And listening can be good, it can be really good.
But it’s not enough. Not if the other group is hurting people and after the listening session nothing changes and they go on hurting people.
The same thing with the push for more civility in our politics. Civility would be nice. But that’s not what comes first. How people are being treated comes first. Exploitation is still evil even if it’s “civil,” even if the exploiters are cultured, well-spoken, and unfailingly polite.
However if the Consortium did want to have a listening session with you, you might decide to tell them your conditions…
If you do the work it takes to quit being exploiters, including the personal transformation work, not just quit doing deeds of exploitation and running systems of exploitation, but become the kind of people who could never carry out exploitation again, we’d be very glad to invite you into our coalition.
Joining a coalition does not mean you compromise your values. For example…
We don’t have to be inclusive with people who are exclusive.
If you believe in deep nurturance, if your activism is powered by that, then you need any coalition you join to be powered by that, too.
Which means you need to find kindred spirits. You need to see that any group you’re thinking about partnering with is…
Ardently committed to deep-nurturance activism as its core value.
Or is eager to learn about it so they can begin to live by it.
Conditions matter. And they can be challenging.
Unconditional relationships are not dilemmic, you just do what the other person tells you to do and you don’t object or take a stand for yourself.
By contrast…
Conditional relationships are dilemmic.
Because you’re always negotiating the relationship, the me and the we of it, so that it becomes as mutually nurturing as you can possibly make it.
And the same is true for coalitions.
Preparation: Two people are not the same as two peoples
We live in a mass, multicultural society, we’re living in close proximity to very different kinds of people.
So what happens? Sometimes people fall in love across divisions. Or commit to friendships across divisions. People of different races, religions, classes, political parties, etc., are putting love first, and group identity second.
And some of their families, still caught in the traditional tribalism, oppose this, and reject their sons and daughters for this transgression.
But at the same time, this crossing of boundaries is unstoppable. Love is an incredible force after all. And so is friendship. And this might seem like a hopeful development. And it is.
This is one way in which modern mass society is sabotaging tribalism. And these mixed relationships might make it seem like our society is moving strongly into trans-tribalism.
But here’s a caution…
Just because two people can love each other, does not mean that two peoples can.
A dozen Palestinians and dozen Israeli Jews can spend ten days going through an intense, searing process together at a retreat center, and can transcend traumatic boundaries to create deep friendships. And this feels very hopeful.
But getting enemy peoples to transform themselves enough to commit to each other’s welfare in a sincere and sustainable way is magnitudes more challenging.
So while developing individual relationships across divisions is good preparation for doing coalition building, it’s not sufficient.
Making a new home
Let’s put the steps of coalition building into a chronological order:
1. Each tribe prepares itself internally, developing a sustainable, cooperative togetherness.
2. Each tribe prepares to connect with a specific other tribe or tribes.
3. Two or more prepared tribes connect and form the coalition.
4. Each tribe continues to develop its ability to contribute to the coalition.
5. The coalition, as a unified entity, engages in self-development as a coalition, and keeps getting stronger over time.
And now what’s possible?
This successful coalition becomes the new home-group.
Which means this coalition can go in search of other coalitions to network with—in service of creating an even bigger and better home.
Dilemma: How much do we challenge each other? How much do we support each other?
Here’s a simple rule of thumb…
Not enough challenge, your life goes to sleep on you.
But…
Too much challenge, you shut down.
What each of us needs is not too much and not too little, but the amount of challenge that is…
Just right.
We need the amount that will grow us and make us stronger and more willing to keep doing the work of growing tomorrow.
But finding that right amount isn’t always an easy task. And sometimes it’s…
Downright dilemmic.
For example, let’s take a look at what it’s like to be a teenager.
You want to be independent, in charge of your own life, and free to make your own decisions. You want to be recognized as a grown up even though you aren’t there yet.
But at the same time…
You want to be able to come to your parents at any time for security, comforting, and even…babying. But without having to acknowledge that’s what you’re doing.
And despite your drive for independence, sometimes taking on the challenges of moving into adulthood get daunting, and you need your parents to push you—in a supportive way—but you need a push.
So in summary…
You want to be independent and you want to be taken care of.
And your mood may shift from one of these to the other from day to day, or from minute to minute. And sometimes, you want both at the same time in a single moment. And you don’t know how to choose.
Next let’s look at what’s it like to parent a teen through adolescence. Your experience is also dilemmic, like…
How much do you support your teen and how much do you challenge him?
How do you make sure you don’t hold him back, but at the same time make sure you don’t hurry him along too quickly.
You’re constantly calibrating, trying to get to the just-right sweet spot again and again.
You know that your teen needs to have the freedom to take risks and make his own mistakes, and you want to give him that freedom. But at the same time, you want to make sure that the risks he takes won’t do permanent damage if things go wrong. You want him to make minor, non-fatal mistakes instead of major ones.
And you want to be able to stand strong when your teen, in his attempt to separate from you, turns against you, rebels, and maybe with unwarranted hostility and flailing anger. But how much of that can you take? And what limits do you need to set?
So now what we’ve got is a dilemmic teen and a dilemmic parent trying to create…
A dilemmic duet.
And make it harmonious.
Adolescence asks a lot of both teens and parents, an awful lot. What does it give back?
On too many days, not very much.
So often teens and parents are winging it. Which means they have no strategy, and don’t have the kind of help or guidance they need, so they just do the best they can, making it up as they go.
There are teens who go through adolescence without any real understanding of what it is they’re actually going through.
And there are parents who read the easy-step books on how to be the perfect parent. But…
Their teens haven’t read those books and don’t know they’re supposed to be easy-step adolescents.
What if teens and parents got strategic, though? What if they took the deep-nurturance approach to adolescence? What might be possible?
What if both of them understood the momentous challenge that adolescence is, and how dilemmic it is, and what if both decided to do serious self-development work to prepare themselves to meet that challenge?
And what if…
Instead of going through reactive rebellion, teens learned how to do healthy, proactive differentiation from their families?
And what if parents differentiated, too?
What if both found their own separate, sold ground to stand on, from which they could come back together in a stronger, more mature relationship.
And what if parents could have simple, direct, transparent conversations with their teens?
It’s okay if you want to be independent and be taken care of at the same time. That’s called a dilemma. And it goes with the territory of adolescence. It’s not your fault if you get confused or feel overwhelmed. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just that evolution didn’t make it at all easy to be a teen.
And guess what? I’m wrestling with dilemmas, too. Sometimes I don’t know how much to let you fly free and how much to keep watch over you. Sometimes I don’t know how much to challenge you and how much to support you.
I’ve decided that I will always do my best for you, but I’ve also decided that it’s okay for me to not always know what’s the right thing to do. And that’s not my fault, because evolution didn’t make it at all easy to be the parent of a teen.
So look at how we’re both wrestling with big dilemmas. And you know what this means?
We’ve got common ground.
How many parents could say such things to their teens? How many teens could handle hearing such things? I’m guessing not very many.
And maybe this is more fantasy than reality, but still, I like imagining such conversations, because think how much richer and happier adolescence would be if we were able to do it in a conscious, deep-nurturance way.
And what if teens and parents, at least some of them, at least those engaging the heart of dilemma together, could…
Switch from being adversaries to being advocates for each other.
What if, instead of teens rebelling against their parents…
Teens and parents could join forces to rebel against evolution.
Talk about fun!
Nikki working her way into a serious dilemma
We are dilemmic beings. Which means…
We have dilemmic relationships.
And live in dilemmic communities.
So now let’s take on the question of how much we as activists challenge our communities, and how much we support them. And to what end.
Imagine Nikki, a young woman in her final semester at college. She’s going through a big change in her life…
It’s only been three weeks, but I don’t believe in hope anymore, and I’m trying to figure out what to do about it. I’m a very active person so I thought I’d look into activism. Can you help me out with some advice?
I’d be very glad to talk with you, but first I’d be very interested in hearing how you happened to lose hope, if you’re willing to tell me.
Oh, sure. I was in my speech class and we were doing the section on debating. So me and Jerome were assigned to argue that it’s over for us as a species. Other students commiserated with us, that we had to be the bad guys, but I was fine with it, because I like a challenge. And I’m very creative. I like turning things upside down and inside out to make discoveries.
I worked hard to prepare. I read what I could. I got myself in character. And I was very convincing, if I do say so myself. Jerome and I won, hands down, but afterwards I just sat down in my chair, staring at nothing.
Jack, who’s sweet on me, came over and said, “What’s wrong? You look shell shocked. Let me take you over to the Student Union for an Orange Crush.”
Talking with him, I figured out that I had been so good with my arguments that I convinced myself. I had gotten into character and couldn’t get back out.
That night when I went to bed, I thought I’d wake up depressed. But in the morning, I jumped out of bed and I was really mad, because I don’t know what a post-hope person is supposed to do with herself all day.
So I want to ask you about options. I’m good with people, so what about community organizing?
I’d be happy to tell you about the three main options.
Great!
But, Nikki, first we need to make an upfront contract.
What’s that?
A deal about how we’re going to have this conversation.
Explain.
Chances are you’re going to find some of what I have to say very challenging. That’s because activism asks a lot of you. It just does. There’s no way around that.
But at the same time I want to make sure that I’m supporting you at least as much as I’m challenging you. So if at any point, you begin to feel stressed, or notice yourself shutting down, please tell me. Then we can switch into support mode for as long as we need to until you’re ready to get back to the challenges.
What if I’m freaking out but can’t find the words to explain myself?
Just say, “I’m freaking out.” Or say, “Yikes!” and I’ll take that as my cue to switch to pure support mode.
Okay, but what if I don’t freak out?
That’s fine, too. I’m getting the sense that you have a lot of moxie.
That’s kind of an odd, old-fashioned word.
Yes, but I like it. It means spunk and audacity, but with a playful spirit.
Okay, then I like it too. And I think we’ve got our contract, so let’s go. Tell me my options.
Option 1. You could become a sacrificial-savior activist.
I’ve never heard that name before, but I know what it means. That’s a perfect description of my Aunt Jamie. She’s run her nonprofit since before I was born. I admire her for her good heart, but I don’t want to live like her. She has her victories now and then, but mostly her life is a grind. We don’t get to see her very often because she’s always working.
So I’m ruling out Option 1. I don’t like the sacrifice part, and besides that savior part means you have to believe in some kind of salvation and the point is that I don’t anymore. What’s Option 2?
Matter-of-fact organizing. You don’t entertain any fantasies of saving the world. Instead you go to work every day simply to make things better. You make adjustments, alterations, steady improvements. And you rope as many community members as possible into joining you in this work.
Two months ago my cousin, Gina, said something to me that took me aback. But in a good way. She said, “I notice that wherever you go, whatever’s happening, you make things a little bit better. And whoever you’re with, you nudge them to be a little better version of themselves.”
Did you recognize yourself in her acknowledgement?
It was really nice to hear that, and yes, I did recognize myself because I like making things better.
So maybe Option 2 is right for you. Let’s test out the idea. Imagine yourself in an activist nonprofit, where you go to work every day and diligently make things in your community a bit better.
Oh…
And now imagine it’s fifty years later and you’re at your retirement dinner, and as people are giving speeches about you, you cast your mind back through your memories of those five decades, and…
NO!
No?
No and no and no and no. Forget Option 2. That’s too tame for me. I want better than “better.” I think people might be surprised at how much radical I have in me, but I do. Little bits would not be enough. On any given day I can be satisfied with bits. But not for my whole life. I need more. So get me to Option 3. And I hope to god I like it.
There are three names for Option 3. Take your pick or use all three. I call it transformation-organizing, and OS-organizing, and dilemmic-organizing.
Explain.
Transformation because you’re asking the community to go beyond making adjustments or reforms and actually transform itself. You’re going to push for them to upgrade the OS of the community.
Thus, OS-organizing.
Yes, and when you go deep like that, you’re going to run head on into the dilemmic nature of our human communities. And that means trouble.
Take me there.
To do the work of transformation means you’re going to become immersed in lots dilemmas all at once. You need to become a kind of aficionado of dilemma. Here’s what I mean…
If you’re the parent of a teen, knowing when to challenge and when to support him is hard enough. But when you’re an activist working with a whole community, you’re talking about hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people, all at different stages of maturity, some needing lots and lots of support, some needing big challenges, and what they need can change from day to day.
And if you’re calling on a community to transform its OS, you’re going to be asking a lot of them. You’re going to be asking that the community, as a community, engage in substantial self-development. Painful self-development. And so even if the community is eager to get the rewards of transformation they may resist doing the work it takes to get those results.
And if you step into leadership and ask for people to do that work, how will they feel about you? They might want you to push them to a better place but resent you at the same time for pushing them.
And you may feel called to push for transformation but at the same time hate it when people push back on you.
So you have your own personal dilemma about doing Option 3 and the community has its dilemma. Double trouble.
And then think about this. Transforming the OS of the community means upgrading the fundamental human OS, and that means taking on the challenge of becoming a coalitional community, where groups become very good at reaching across divisions and learning to live as advocates for each other.
And this is something people want, because without it, our species won’t make it, but at the same time it goes against the fundamental tribal grain of being human.
Yikes! By the way that’s my code word.
Yes, it is. So okay, Nikki, we’re pausing. Take a breath. And another. Remember what we’re doing here. We’re just taking a look at possibilities. You don’t need to decide anything right now. You get to take your time to make any long-term decisions. And please know that even though you can’t get the dilemma out of transformation organizing, there are ways to live into dilemma. Which we can get to later.
Okay. Thanks. I’m ready for more.
There are bunches more of dilemmas for activists, but let me just tell you about one more for now.
Whew!
No, don’t say whew, because this is a big one.
Transformational-organizing is the most hopeful kind. Sacrificial-savior organizing talks big about hope, but it runs on despair, so there’s no hope there.
For us to survive as a species we would need to transcend our human OS. We’d need to do better. So that’s that path of hope. And hope is a radical thing. So it can only be credible if we take drastic, urgent, radical action. Which means transformative action.
But to do transformational work, we need to confront our dilemmic nature, and that’s the death of hope.
So the truest path to hope is also the path that kills hope before we get there.
Could there be a worse dilemma for an activist?
If it’s that bad, why do any of this? I’m thinking maybe your advice for me will be to just forget activism altogether and go have as much fun as I can have entertaining myself.
Could you do that?
No. But I’m beginning to wish I could.
I understand. But here’s the most important thing I have to tell you. If you engage with the heart of these activist dilemmas, there are rewards.
Live into these dilemmas and they will grow you like nothing else. They will give you relationships that have a depth that nothing else can give you.
And they will give you a sense of pride, that you are doing the deepest kind of activism in the history of the world.
And you are taking a personal stand against evolution, which has set us up for so much suffering.
So those are the things to hold onto since I can’t hold onto hope?
Yes, simple things, but profound.
This seems like a journey that we can’t get very far on.
Exactly. A good way to put it. And it’s true that we might never get beyond the first stage of this journey, but just crossing the threshold into this journey is an amazing thing. To be the kind of person who can do that. To have that experience of being so very human and so radically transcending humanness at the same time.
Yikes and yikes.
Okay, enough with the challenges.
Thank god.
How about a treat?
Yes!
The core principle of transformative activism is that you don’t ever do it alone. First things first, and the first thing is that you get to find kindred spirits, and you get build great relationships with each other, and you get to be there for each other when the work gets hard. And when it’s time to celebrate, too.
Okay, that makes me happy. I really want to meet kindred spirits.
And what if you just do that for the foreseeable future? Put any decisions about the specific work you want to do on hold.
Yes, I think I’ve been pressuring myself to come up with an answer to my life, now that it’s suddenly so different.
Dealing with dilemma is the bedrock of activism, and yet, I don’t know of any book for activists on dealing with dilemma. Isn’t that something?
There are books and workshops on so many things, like fundraising, supervision, strategic planning, accounting, and so forth. It’s quite a list. But none on how to work with the dilemmic nature of human beings when you’re doing community organizing. I think that’s a sign of how hard this is. How does it strike you?
Well, it makes me think if veteran organizers struggle with even addressing our dilemmic nature, then me being a novice, I can give myself a break.
Yes! I love hearing you say that.
Can we have more conversations?
Yes. It would make me very happy to stay in touch.
And can I use my code word again if I need to, which I probably will?
Absolutely. Anytime.
Dilemma: How much truth do we tell? How much do we hold back.
This is closely related to the dilemma about how much challenge versus how much support, but it needs its own discussion.
If we don’t tell the whole truth about how bad things are, then…
People will coast along in denial.
They’ll be passive and complacent when we need them to be fired up and taking action. They’ll drift along in happy fantasies of salvation.
If we tell people too much truth…
They’ll shut down in a frozen paralysis.
And that will be a disaster just like denial. Especially if they stay shut down and never recover.
So we activists need to find a way to tell people…
Not too much, not too little, but just the right amount of truth.
Which means we’re now back in the territory of dilemma. Because what is that right amount? And what if it changes from day to day?
And then there’s this. When we’re talking about a community or any large number of people, different folks are in very different places when it comes to the amount of truth they can handle.
So how do we talk to large groups of people without having contradictory effects?
It seems to me it’s not fair to play hit and run. By that I mean, it’s not fair to slam people with the truth, with the cold facts, the distressing facts, and then bail on them.
If we’re going to talk publicly about the danger the world is in, the danger that we humans are in, then let’s hang in there with people.
Let’s help them find a way to deal with that truth personally and emotionally.
And…
Let’s help them find their personal pathway into deep-nurturance activism.
Let’s always couple truth telling with strategies people can use to stay proactive, so they don’t collapse into despair.
Dilemma: Are you my enemy? Or do we have a common enemy much more dangerous than either one of us?
To wrestle with these questions, I’m going to use the example of abortion.
Here’s the kind of conversation I have with people struggling with a dilemma. Wendy begins…
I’ve agreed to go to one of those “Listening Sessions” next week. My sister is organizing it. I’m bringing five pro-choice women and my sister is bringing five pro-life women.
So you’re on opposite sides.
Very much so.
Why is she doing this? Wait, Wendy, I didn’t even know you had a sister. You never talk about her.
Her name is Diana, and I don’t talk about her because it’s too painful.
Why is that?
When I was 22 I had an abortion, and my sister berated me and called me a murderer and slammed the door of my apartment as she left.
Wow.
I was hurting so bad, and she was so cold. And, see, we were best friends right through high school, so it was really hard to lose her like that.
So why do you think she’s organizing this session?
I don’t know. I’m hoping she might be opening to a reconciliation. But maybe she and her posse are coming to gather me back into the fold.
So you’re ambivalent about attending?
Oh, yes. First because I’ve been to listening sessions, and so what if we hear each other but say all the same old things.
I run our pro-choice campaigns and education programs at work, for god’s sake, so I’ve read tons of fundamentalist literature and listened to lots of pro-choice talks on YouTube. I know all their arguments. I don’t want to spend an evening hearing the same stuff rehashed.
What would make the evening worth it to you?
If we could find some common ground. And if I saw my sister opening to me even a little.
Which would look like what.
I’d want her to know who I am, that I’m a complex person, and the stuff her church—the same fundamentalist Catholic church I grew up in—tells her about people like me is just not true. I believe in women having the right to choose, I want them to be able to have an abortion if they need it, and I needed it, I wasn’t ready for a child, not even close. I’m still not.
But even though I defend the right to choose, I hate abortions. My sister delivered her attack and then bailed out on me. She was just gone when I needed her. What she doesn’t know is that I cried for three weeks after my abortion. I saw the amnio. I made the mistake of giving my baby girl a name.
And it’s not over. Every year on my due date, which I think of as her birthday, I imagine what Emily would be like another year older, what she would look like, what she would like doing, how her personality would be developing. And I wonder what it would have been like to be her mom.
So I’m not done with the abortion. One night of passion without birth control, one mistake, and I’ve paid for it and I’m still paying for it. I guess most of all, I’d like my sister to have some compassion for me.
What about her calling you a murderer?
See, that really hurts, it gets to me, because, though I refuse to call myself a murderer, I did kill that embryo. That’s something we pro-choice people don’t deal with forthrightly, we kind of side step it.
Is that common ground with your sister?
It could be if she were to understand it the way I do. I can say, yes, I killed a fetus, my fetus. There was a life growing in my and I terminated it. That’s so, so serious. And that’s why I hate abortion. But I also hate forcing women to have children they are not ready for or can’t afford. I hate turning women into breeders, so they never have a life of their own.
So a dilemma.
You bet. And it drives me crazy. And I don’t know what to do with it because I don’t want to tell my sister she’s right.
And yet…
She’s not wrong. But there’s got to be more to it. But I’m feeling stuck and you’re someone who thinks odd thoughts…
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
A good thing. That’s why I’m coming to you. Help me get out of this trap.
Okay, I’m starting to cook up some odd thoughts. How about if we go back to the very beginning, back to the source?
Let’s go.
I want to ramble for a bit, Wendy, but I do have a point in all this. When we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about the larger issue of reproduction and when we’re talking about reproduction, we’re talking about evolution, because reproduction is the main purpose of evolution?
Creatures strive to survive in order to reproduce, and that’s the main driver of evolution, to send your genes into the next generation.
So when we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about one of the most fundamental issues for biological beings, like us humans. No wonder it stirs up such feelings. How we handle reproduction is a life and death issue for us, as it is for any species.
Now a bit of history. In the past nature has done our birth control for us. It limited our population. Babies and moms died in child birth. Disease and accidents carried away lots of people. And droughts. And locusts. And competing tribes.
But we’ve overridden nature. We have better food and safer conditions and modern medicine. So now we need to take responsibility for controlling our population ourselves.
I used to work with this guy, Bertolini. He and his wife were good Catholics, and just before I left that job, they had their tenth baby. Their tenth!
I can’t imagine.
I got out a piece of scratch paper and did the math. If each of their children had ten children, and those children the same, and so on, by the time they got to the tenth generation there would be ten billion Bertolini descendants.
That’s ten Chinas!
It’s more people than are alive on earth right now. Just from one family’s lineage. And what if lots of families did the same. Earth couldn’t support those numbers.
So if nature doesn’t control our reproduction and we don’t control it either, in short order we will have extreme overpopulation.
Which is what’s happened in the last two hundred years. A population explosion. You’ve likely seen that graph of our numbers climbing slowly and suddenly the line veers upward at a steeper and steeper angle. And here we are adding multiple billions of us within the span of less than a hundred years.
We’re not taking good care of the people we already have, so how do we imagine that we’re going to be able to take care of very big numbers of additional people?
I see where you’re going with this. Overpopulation leads to mass death.
Famine, mass migration, warfare, failed states. And that means if we don’t practice birth control, the consequence is going to be death one way or another. Either the individual death of fetuses through abortion, or the death of large numbers of people as a result of overpopulation. Maybe even the death of our species.
When you say it like that, it makes me feel kind of negative about evolution. No, it makes me really angry. Like we’ve been set up for trouble. Evolution has put us in the middle of a dilemma with no easy answers.
Birth control isn’t an easy answer?
It would be if everyone had the discipline to practice sex responsibly. But look at us, we’re a sex-crazed species. That discipline is not easy. The #1 thing on the internet is pornography. People get into so much trouble because of sex. Like me when I was 22.
It’s so easy to jump into bed with someone, your brain flooded with hormones, without a thought about the consequences. The drive to reproduce is such a powerful drive.
And on the global level we’re not even close to getting control of our numbers.
Back to Diana. Where do you want to place blame?
Hmm. Here’s what I want to say in answer to that. I’d rather hate evolution than hate my sister. And I really, really want my sister to hate evolution, too—instead of me.
So what common ground are you finding?
We share a common enemy—evolution.
And both of us hate abortion.
And I’m a fierce supporter of education on birth control. That could be common ground if my sister chooses to join me there.
But no matter what, being able to see our common ground in a new light means that even if she still calls me a murderer, I will not demonize her in return. I can trust in myself that I will not do that. Not ever.
Do you think Diana might be dealing with any dilemmic contradictions like you are?
Let me think about that. Her church is opposed not just to abortion but to birth control. Their point of view is that if you block the sperm from the egg, that’s next door to murder. You’re preventing a life that would otherwise come into being.
Yet, I’m as sure as I can be that my sister practices birth control. She’s only got two kids, and about five years ago in an unguarded moment, she said she was done and wasn’t going to have a third.
So there’s a contradiction for her. She’s a loyal member of the church, yet if she is as I think she is, violating a key tenet, that must cause her turmoil.
And then there’s this contradiction. Birth control is the best way to prevent abortions. And here’s her church insisting that abortion is murder, but refusing to take the most effective action they could take against that kind of murder.
She can stay in the church if she practices birth control. She can get away with that. But she can’t preach what she practices. She couldn’t do what I do and organize programs and go out and teach birth control. If she did she’d get kicked out. I wonder if she feels that as a contradiction?
Okay, new plan! I’m going to call Diana and ask her to meet with me this weekend, just the two of us.
What will you say to her?
I miss you so much, can we talk? Can we look for some healing between us? Can we look for common ground? I think we’ve got it, I think we can find it. And there are some personal things about me I want to tell you that I haven’t told you before. And then there are some questions I’m aching to ask you. Will you meet with me this weekend?
Anything else you need?
No. I feel opened up and settled down. And thank you.
Final dilemma: The challenge of loving my species
Some years ago I heard a bubbly young woman say, “I just love people!” She was so delighted with herself that she was dancing on the balls of her feet as she spoke.
And as she went on talking, it was clear she was claiming to love everybody, all of humankind, all of us together.
Normally, I don’t pay attention to such breathless comments. But on that particular day, she got to me, and I realized that I don’t share her sentiment.
Of course there are individuals I love…
But I don’t love humans in the aggregate.
I’ve read too much history to find us lovable. I know too much about the evil we’ve done down through the millennia.
When I watch the news, it’s obvious that we’ve not transcended our history. Our present day is filled with mass exploitation and egregious suffering. And, given this truth about my species…
How am I supposed to find it lovable?
It doesn’t matter to me that there are individuals of remarkable brilliance living among us when in the aggregate we are acting so stupidly. We know so much about what we could do to save ourselves but as a mass, we seem powerless to take the actions we would need to take to survive…
We’re missing the necessary political will.
How brilliant of us to create nuclear weaponry. But how very stupid of us to do such a thing. And I find it impossible to love a species that is….
So brilliantly stupid.
I have to wonder about people who say they love humanity…
Do they really love the as-is version of us?
Can they really be that saintly? Or…
Do they only love the idea of loving us?
Anyway, that’s not me. I don’t take delight in us. We just simply do too much evil.
The other day, when I was talking with an old friend, he said…
I don’t care about human extinction.
Meaning, it doesn’t matter to him whether we survive or not.
I was shocked. And given how dark my view of the future is, I was surprised to find myself shocked.
And then I had to admit that there are days when I feel the same. Why agonize over a species that’s so intent on killing itself?
But I hate feeling like that. And I wish I could love my species.
And even on those days when I’m able to be at peace with extinction, I can’t make peace, not ever, with my fears about how I believe we will go out—in apocalyptic, nihilistic violence. Nothing can make that okay.
The more scared I get, the more earnestly I want us to fight for ourselves. I want us to throw everything we’ve got into the post-hope mission of taking the best possible care of ourselves and each other on our way out.
Could we at least please do that?
And even on my most down days, let a mother walk into the room carrying a little baby in her arms, or let a father walk in leading a toddler by the hand, and immediately my heart is back in action and more than anything, I want for us to fight for ourselves.
So for me…
This question of loving our species is profoundly dilemmic.
Suddenly I’m remembering a woman I met who said…
“I love my son but I don’t like him.
“He stayed with me after the divorce, so I don’t know how this happened, but he became his father’s son. He’s abrasive and rude and self-centered and rarely shows empathy for anyone.
“And yet he’s my son. And I remember that little boy that sometimes I still see inside him, and I have to believe he still has the potential to be so much better.”
I want to believe in the potential of us humans to be so much better than we are. But am I a fool to consider that?
Of course, we’ve got a loophole, an escape from the dilemma of trying to love ourselves as a species. And that’s exceptionalism…
Me and my tribe are special. We’re the role models. If everyone were like us, we’d all be okay.
The rest of you humans are the problem.
Exceptionalism puts a tribal boundary on love. And I know that works for an awful lot of people. I’ve even fallen into that kind of thinking in the past when I’ve told myself…
“We activists have the answers. We are the answer. If only all those other stupid humans would follow our lead.”
It’s easy to love your own tribe. That’s built into our DNA.
But there’s a terrible paranoia inherent in our tribal nature. If we believe that only the people in our own tribe are trustworthy, that means…
Every other person in every other tribe is to be feared.
This was bad enough in our hunter-gatherer days, when our worlds were smaller and we were only in contact with a limited number of other tribes. But now we’re in contact with a global population of billions.
If, apart from our own group, however we define that, everybody else on the face of the earth is our enemy, either currently or potentially, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people.
And if enemies and possible enemies make up the great, great majority of our species…
Why would we fight to save it?
We need to develop trans-tribal love, and genuine species-love, and we need this immediately and urgently. But this is a project that we as a species have not even started to undertake in any serious way.
So how can we live into the dilemma about loving our species?
We can do it through deep-nurturance activism. At least this is my personal response…
To go into the worst of who we are to bring out the best.
And to take that best and make it even better. This is one of the things I mean when I talk about upgrading love. This hard-working kind of love. This daily practice of deep-nurturance.
Think about the absentee father who says, “I love my children.” Then compare him to the mom who’s there in person day after day doing the work of caring for them. And being their advocate both in their best moments and in their worst moments.
And it surprises me to see that…
I’m now a much fiercer advocate for us humans than I was back in the day when I was so desperately trying to save us.
PS: My favorite book about dilemma doesn’t just talk about it but takes you deep inside one so you can experience it for yourself–along with Carly the 12-year-old protagonist…
Lynda Mullaly Hunt
One for the Murphys
Check it out if you want. It’s worth reading just for how good the writing is.
