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It’s becoming normal to carry a delusional sense of agency. “Huh?”, you may be thinking, “don’t we live in an age during which unbelievable human effort is required to fix the carbon mess we made during the golden age of capitalism? Shouldn’t we harness our huge egos for this purpose?”
Not exactly. Or, put more precisely, the question of the “scale” of agency is crucial here. We are so conditioned to inflated individualism that we do not think to broach the powers that be; we try to take things on alone rather than use collective pressure against corporations and governments. We seem to have traded in collective power and collective action against the worst offenders for obsessive focus on our own habits and lifestyle decisions.
There are plenty of political histories exploring this question sociologically. Psychologically, the answer may lie in a simple notion with complex consequences: it's easier to feel guilty than to admit powerlessness.
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This article sprang from a conversation about agency, the feeling of being “enough” (or its opposite), and how the presence and absence of this feeling are apparent in social justice movements and strategies. Where do peoples’ energy go when they are trying to address climate change or other wicked social problems? Where do we end up when individuals who are supposed to be sufficient unto themselves confront their powerlessness in the face of these? The toxic imperative to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," has morphed into the requirement to "fix the wicked challenges of the world...with your lifestyle".
Living in what the philosopher Han calls the “achievement society” means that the treadmill of consumption mirrors the treadmill of achievement. Whatever you want to buy that you think will make you happier or more complete usually results in a brief spurt of excitement and then a caffeine-like crash. The same goes with achievements: you think doing X will make you accomplished and then you do it and feel basically the same after a little enthusiastic lift. For Han, this is how discipline now works - as a society, we’ve forgone physical punishment for a punitive never-enoughness that makes our superegos vicious, terrible forces to be reckoned with.
What’s worse is that trying to counter these feelings by finding meaning and higher moral and ethical purpose bears the risk of transferring these dynamics to a higher level. This is how this same, punishing cycle comes to affect social justice and social change movements and groups. We see this in environmental movements that fail to stand on past successes, instead focusing obsessively on what needs to be done next - so much so that it’s hard to tell whether problems of the past (e.g. acid rain, toxic smokestacks) have been resolved or not! WTF happened with acid rain?!
Our appetites for feedback grow in the face of unclear definitions of success and moving goal posts, and this extends from an inner experience to a group phenomenon. In an ever more complex world, that appetite can’t be satiated. In dealing with climate change specifically this is a problem of information and tracking at its finest. Legislation governing relations between human beings (like voting rights, abortion rights, carceral politics, and labor politics) have equality between people as their aim. Those governing the relationships between humans and the natural environment aim at habitability. Accordingly, they are much harder to measure and more complex to track. It's not clear which predictions will pan out and in what time frame. The problem that defines our historical moment makes it especially difficult to celebrate successes and mourn failures. But ‘enoughness’ is also about recognizing these struggles as ongoing, with their pendulum swings, their requirements for maintenance and upkeep, and how even just keeping things ‘status quo’ entails massive effort. There’s no finality to be found here in the marathon of the good life. There isn’t enough clarity to satisfy this desire for enoughness in ourselves our our collective works.
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When it comes to the wicked problem of climate change, there’s a fog that is so daunting that it’s hard to imagine anybody up to the task. Yet, the narrative is “it’s on you”, “be the change”, etc. and yet the need to get rid of plastic bags isn’t changing. Are we running in place? There’s a deep individual / collective problem here and neoliberal ideology of strong individualism is clearly in play on both sides of the political spectrum. Something is broken, and perhaps a part of it is that, when taking stock of successes and failures, these tend to be activities that individuals do alone while they think about themselves. There are so many statistics and social markers that could be involved here but aren’t.
Parts and the whole problem at the mental layer: We need to be aware of when we are tempted to take responsibility individually when it extends far beyond us, yes. But also when we shy away from acknowledging that we are part of a systemic problem to which we contribute in various ways. It’s a difference between subjective and objective morality: just because you do not will something does not mean you do not contribute to it, by simply being. I think this is a key difference in understanding different reactions to BLM in the U.S.. Nevertheless, it’s often the case that when people get together to understand the systemic problems, think of the boatload of workshops about systemic racism, they tend to place energy into taking stock of what it is they are *secretly* willing, or attached to, that makes this continue (e.g. failing to make eye contact with your brown neighbors or supporting a business with a blue lives flag in the back room). Focusing on individual failings around openness to diversity will not address the way that laws perpetuate systemic racism. Self-flagellation becomes performative when it lacks strategic action to shift the broader systems.
We tend to look for our keys under bright lights when it’s obvious we have not lost them there. Why? It’s easier. It’s easier to get a quick win, to have the feeling of doing something personally, through our guilt, rather than sitting with the feeling of powerlessness. We tend to berate each other about what kind of diapers we buy or if we have tendencies to leave the lights on, when this sort of perfectionism actually distracts us from the fact that it’s Walmart who leaves their factory lights on all the time and puts plastics into the supply chain to begin with. Pressure can be placed on businesses. Pressure can be put on local governments in an exemplary way that creates an outgrowth or “trickle up” of the model resolution to an issue. There’s much better two way communication than there used to be, and even though this creates a lot of noise it also opens up the possibility of sending strong signals en masse.
Early hope that social capital, say, on Twitter, would be used to raise awareness of corporate no-nos, for example, calling out the use of palm oil, has been mostly eclipsed by calling out each other (the trickling down of cancel culture from only celebrities being cancelled to it embodying a broader imperative toward guilt and self-censorship for fear of being socially excluded).
What's the action to take? How can we be pragmatists in shifting this space? It’s not only that we haven’t been strategic, but we are undermined and therefore also less capable of seeing the big picture - fighting for little wins just to keep our sense of efficacy intact. Enoughness feels like the direct psychological consequence: poor at being together and undermined individually. The enoughness issue also feels propelled by consumerism and easy credit, making it harder to root our identity in place, relationships, beliefs, and work. It’s a floating anxiety. Enoughness may very well come from dislocation: not knowing what’s “mine” to care about when one has a hard time gaining footing and staying in a particular place. Also, championing causes seem to be valuable remedies for general postmodern identity crises created by the same.
On Twitter especially, one sees people defining themselves, not just by causes, but by their feelings about various causes: “I am my affect”. Enoughness is ramped up by competitive moralistic positioning, which is sad because that gets in the way of people just expressing their stories, the structure and activities of their everyday life. And when people do do that it feels like a breath of fresh air. Yes, I want to read your tweet about what it’s like at the checkout stand in a town outside of Dayton (or wherever).
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It seems as though we have a lot of energy for taking a tough love, whip cracking approach with ourselves and others and very little for acknowledging and appreciating small steps in the right direction. It’s interesting, really, because we have a lot of accumulated knowledge about the sort of care that works - clear feedback, unconditional positive regard, not withholding compliments and acknowledgment for the sake of wanting to push someone harder. All of this creates more endurance within individuals to move forward in the long run and is a well-established part of healthy human development. Too much or too little encouragement creates the dramatic failures that one cannot recover from just as much as it creates the treadmill successes. Again, so much of the solution is in clear goalposts and managing boundaries, and this clarity then gives rise to clear wins and upsets. So, if we know how to help people mature, then why aren’t we doing that?
One possibility is that honestly assessing successes and failures entails, well, acknowledging failures - that’s a part of what’s so scary. Fear of failure is often couched on its own terms as a ding to one’s social status or credibility, but what if this widespread fear of failure is also, perhaps more fundamentally, a fear of the unknown -- of not knowing what’s supposed to come next. What we need to examine is a loss of know-how here; a culture-wide forgetting that hinders our resilience.
Jumping back to Han, one effect of a culture that has moved from physical violence to emotional violence - the violence of negativity versus the violence of positivity - is that the clarity of redemption is lost. Culturally, we are awash in different attempts to find where it may have gone. It’s no small wonder that, thanks to BLM, much of the COVID-19 quarantine was spent thinking deeply about the grim police culture in the U.S. and how poorly it bodes for minoritarian groups’ access to redemption, rehabilitation, and of course, justice. No one wants to be left without a fair shot at being seen in one’s social context and without a fair shot at a chance to demonstrate their capacity to change, learn, and grow. After all, if we do not have routes to redeem ourselves despite failures, the cost of consciously evolving and trying new things (or, as above, simply walking-while-trans or jogging-while-black) becomes way too high.
When the clarity of redemption is lost, the wounds necessitate it become hazy too, making social and collective processes of healing more difficult. It’s almost as if the model of human growth that we implicitly use is borrowed from the financial model of embedded growth obligations: a linear upward trajectory. Hockey-stick growth for the moving goal-post win! The mental health industry really thrives on this - taking on the mantle of showing people that mistakes are okay. The therapeutic relationship tends to be used as a model for future relationships in which incidents, mistakes, and turns that were wrong in hindsight are recognized as such and unpacked rather than punished. While these relationships are often quite healing, the fact that they are cordoned off in the clinic for the privileged few stands as a twisted reminder of our cultural forgetting of how redemption works and why it’s important.
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At the very root of all of these issues, environment, social justice, everything revolves around healing these traumas that are individual and collective that we're all kind of acting out from in various ways. How, then, might we preserve and create spaces for people to explore their suffering in a meaningful way -- one that is divorced from suffering needing to be unique and, at the end of the day, individualized? Healthy individuation rather than individualism.
How can we open up conversations to get to the root, together, of why these movements are so attractive? What is compelling about the narrative to you? How is it personal? Then we can begin grieving together, seeing each other in our struggles, and then see our struggles as collective, as social in their very nature.
One Thrivable Society pattern we focus on is drawing attention to the scale of agency and its relationship to healing.
We play with an experiment to see what we generate by communicating about our lives using the scales Personal, Relational, Organizational, Systemic. What happens when things are held in these different boxes? How do our perspectives shift?
We open up questions like:
“Does this thing feel personal?” and “What can I personally do?”
“Am I in relation to others who have similar experiences?” and “How can I be in relation to others about this?”
“Is this something endemic to the organizations that you're a part of?” and “What can the shared social organism do about this?”
“Where is this operating in our local and global systems?” and “Where is there power to shift this in the system?”
Our wager is that the differences between these layers are useful. These heuristics are a way to produce insightful connections, but also to greet our modes of understanding as temporal processes: today it feels personal, but tomorrow I might suddenly recognize that this is something that in fact 80% of the women in my organization have experienced.
The important thing is that the lens of each level of scale brings out different angles, irrespective of what you think (or whether you think about) the ultimate truth of each lens. We hold them differently, and each of these levels ask different things of us. We aim toward a harmonic balance, understanding that the feeling of individual efficacy is both a boost and a screen; it should not overshadow the importance of making demands on the powerful and taking care of the collective. Together, let us weave the personal, relational, organizational, and systemic clarity and understanding to be enough already.