Social
Human beings are social creatures with multiple identities. Interpersonal interactions shape the quality of your life. Respect for everyone’s essential equality is critical.
The more others thrive, the more you thrive, and vice versa. Self-empowerment, mutual empowerment, and community empowerment are interdependent.
In America today, however, power is an aphrodisiac, status is paramount, and money is a way to keep score. Efforts to preserve the unequal concentration of wealth, power, and status characterize this society.
Gaining social status is a way to prove yourself — to others and yourself. Individuals rank others based on arbitrary characteristics — such as “attractiveness,” profession, level of education, accent, skin color, gender, clothing style, mannerisms, and accents — and discriminate based on that rank.
The result is widespread hyper-individualism, hyper-competition, corruption, decadence, selfishness, elitism, and arrogance. Oppressive top-down power suppresses natural human kindness, which generally finds expression only in limited ways.
Society encourages everyone to climb social ladders and look down on, exploit, and dominate those below for their own self-interest — or submit to those above. People constantly feel either superior or inferior. Many communities become exclusive; belonging to one community makes it difficult to belong to another.
As Jill Lepore reports, social media platforms apply “the science of psychological warfare to the affairs of ordinary life, a machine that manipulates opinion, exploits attention, commodifies information, divides voters, atomizes communities, alienates individuals, and undermines democracy.”
In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson documents how bosses are often dictators. In many workplaces, employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners, leaving them with little privacy and few other rights. And employers often extend their authority to workers' off-duty lives. Workers can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern.
Even those who strive to decrease social inequality often operate in paternalistic ways. They assume an air of superiority and fail to nurture mutual empowerment. Parents, teachers, trainers, organizers, bosses, spiritual leaders, social workers, and others don’t fully facilitate the empowerment of their subordinates. Their egos become too invested in their own superiority and roles. They aim to teach people to be like them. By the power of their examples, they suggest to others that gaining a higher rank is key to personal fulfillment.
Communities reinforce fear and anger, cultivate conformity, and nurture domination and submission.
As a result, grounded on brittle foundations, communities become tribes that scapegoat and try to dominate other tribes.
+++++
New approaches, many already manifest, as are these resources, can erode oppressive structures and beliefs.
Nonviolent communication can enable people to identify specific offensive or irritating actions and report how they reacted. In this way, they avoid demeaning labels.
“Calling in” with compassion can be an alternative to harsh, judgmental “calling ou,.” as Loretta Ross advocates.
Activists can confess more and profess less, as Van Jones recommended.
Collaborative leadership can replace authoritarian leadership.
Institutions can maximize peer learning, mutual support, client empowerment, and self-development, for the self is prior to and apart from the social conditions that shape it.
In “What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic,” Jia Tolentino reports that Nancy L. Rosenbaum aruges in Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America that both grassroots mobilization and top-down actions are needed. And Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell author, believes mutual-aid projects can have a lasting effect on consciousness after crises pass and projects close down.
Social institutions such as schools, faith communities, residential centers, treatment and rehab programs, and community centers can maximize peer learning, mutual support, client empowerment, self-development, and community engagement.
With strong partnerships on all levels, staff at programs with a regular client base can provide neutral assistance to help members/clients organize democratic teams that establish collaboration with and provide input to staff concerning their agencies’ operations — and organize their own independent activities.
This self- and community empowerment advances the holistic and systemic transformation of the entire society.
While learning from authorities, students can question them and form their own conclusions. Schools can incorporate family members and administrators into their community decision-making. Society can ensure all schools are more or less equally good. America can boost its financial commitment to public schools and substantially increase teacher salaries.
When regular classes are not in session at night and on weekends, schools can be vibrant community centers whose activities include life-long learning for adults.
Voluntary, attractive mental health and substance abuse programs that rely heavily on volunteer peer support can be readily available to those who want them.
Public meetings with concerned stakeholders, such as Roundtables focused on specific issues, can be run in a way that multiple sides of a situation are carefully listened to and anyone in the audience can ask respectful, clarifying questions.
Human beings want to live in communities with others who share core values and steadily push for greater democracy and mutual respect. This commitment to solidarity, cooperation, fair competition, and compassion has led Americans to “promote the general welfare” and move toward “a more perfect union.”
This worldview can lead to the establishment of democratic hierarchies that enable subordinates to hold accountable those in positions of power. Many unions, for instance, regulate management and members of some organizations elect their leaders, as Jo Freeman recommended in “The Tyranny of Structurelessness. “
Those with more status and power can support the formation of structures that nurture peer learning, collaborative problem-solving, and natural human friendships.
There’s no irreconcilable conflict between the individual and the community. The more others thrive, the more we thrive. The more we thrive, the more they thrive.
We can maintain a balance between self-centeredness and compassion. We can care for ourselves so we can better care for others. As is often the case, it’s not either/or but both/and.
Egalitarian relationships involve trust, compassion, and mutual respect. Parties give and receive more or less equally. They listen carefully and reveal themselves. When they disagree, they ask questions to better understand the other’s perspective. Conversations are dialogs, not a series of monologues. In group conversations, those who talk more step back and give space to those who talk less. Individuals learn from each other, support each other’s empowerment, and nurture supportive communities. Mutual relationships rooted in deep compassion contribute to widespread, fundamental transformation.
A network of such support groups could be the foundation for a holistic democracy movement.
The above linked resources support the arguments presented in this chapter.
The above linked tools, some tested and others untested, present methods that compassion-minded people can use to advance a holistic democracy movement, whether or not they identify with this movement and explicitly commit to mutual support for self-improvement.
NEXT: Personal