Sharing the technologies of reunion
Everything I do boils down to the way we relate to each other, ourselves, other beings and what’s around us. Inner and outer separation, or just the assumption of separation, makes us collectively create belief systems that serve to disconnect instead of connecting us (with ourselves, with others, with what’s around us). If you’re not with me on that, read any work by Charles Eisenstein. You can also immerse yourself into buddhism or whatever is based on the idea of interconnectedness.
Technologies of reunion
Many people have arrived that the point of re-understanding interconnectedness, and some complain “we don’t have the right answers and tools yet to solve the disconnect.”
I heavily diasgree — we do have the right tools. There are a lot of great answers out there that have been tried and tested. Eisenstein calls them the technologies of reunion, and they cover about every aspect of our lives. We know how to live in a way that is aligned with human wiring, it’s in small neighborhoods like in ecovillages and cohousing or in neighborhoods but organized into neighborhood communities. We know how to talk to each other as equals with a deep connection to our truth, yet with maximum self-responsibility for our feelings and needs: it’s non-violent communication (NVC, aka compassionate communication. We know how to garden with permaculture, we know how to restore human relationships in a non-punative way with restorative circles. We know how to detach from the stories that hurt us with Byron Katie and similar work. We know how to center our attention with mindfulness. Where does the gift economy fall? And alternative currencies? It’s not true that we don’t have the tools. We “just” have to use them and understand how they go together.
The context that supports us: systems, practices and community
So what does it take? The solutions are out there, and fortunately, they are starting to mature and to click into place. For example, many permaculture organizations and cohousing communities and democratic schools, just like neighborhood forums use sociocracy (see sociocratic permaculture, cohousing, schools), and sociocracy has been integrated with NVC. To me, this is the work that each one of us and all ‘thought leaders’ can do now: learn as many of those technologies of reunion, apply them, and understand how they go together and reinforce each other. How does Byron Katie’s work go together with NVC? How can we integrate mindfulness and permaculture? There are projects on mindfulness in schools, NVC in schools, permaculture in communities and in schools… people are on it! Weaving the technologies together is a big piece of work and it takes time and human minds to do it.
Any implementation of new systems and paradigms highly relies on community — to hold each other and lovingly remind us when we slip into learned mainstream patters. They also rely on practices and systems that make it easier to sustain living in a different paradigm. The reason I am heavy on systems and practices is because none of us (I assume) grew up in a context supporting these systems. My own kids grow up in a sociocratic cohousing community, with a transgender parent, an NVC trainer as stepfather and a mixed-race stepbrother. Some of them learned NVC in public school! They got a headstart, compared to the generation before them and 99% of their generation. But: their school is not democratic (or sociocratic) and they are heavily disconnected from nature, and they are frustratingly aware of the mess in which previous generations have left this planet. They are immersed in enough mainstream to demand for me to punish their sister when she hit them. I am not an ideological extremist, I know what real life is like. My point here is: adopting new paradigms in a world that does not support those paradigms is hard. We can’t have it all. Yet. For example, I tried to homeschool for a while but I failed with flying colors. I could not pull it off and I did not have the financial means or the like-minded support to make it a viable alternative to public school. Doing good as in invidividual in a system that does not support your values is virtually impossible.
That’s why understanding practices and systems is so important. Instead of having to think about every step we do, it is easier to find a habit that supports it. For example, for meeting culture — using as an example what I know about most about — we could make an effort and pay attention to every voice being heard. But it takes brain space to remember who has not spoken yet. So to make it easier and to create more flow, we do rounds as a default format. Everyone knows what a round is, we can use it as a reference point and we don’t have to think about “being inclusive” anymore because we know rounds will give us that. So rounds save brain space. In the same way, having a deck of feelings and needs cards in sight is a good system that will support you in making choices aligned with your values without having to pay attention all the time. There more of that kind of stuff is “new normal” around you, the easier it will be.
How to get there
Systemic change by creating critical mass
For a systemic change, the habits and systems need to be practiced in real life. by enough people. How can the technologies of reunion be found by many people so we can reach critical mass and make it easier for everyone?
I remember when I first got exposed to NVC, I looked around online and, besides being completely psyched by what I did read, I was also struck. It surprised me that something so brilliant, effective and doable had not spread wider and farther into the world, given how long it has been around. I took a mental note then. When I became a producer — and, in some ways, storyteller /marketer— of sociocracy, it was my turn to put out content so it could be found. And I became disgusted with myself.
Missionary practices for self-governance?
I did not like the “look at this cool thing” rhetorics I had to use to put the word out. How was I different from a missionary christian that has been enlightened and wanted to share it? How was I different from “effective management in 5 steps” or “how to give your team members the impression that they matter” blah blah? I was torn. It felt disrespectful to tell other people how to self-organize. I certainly did not want to use the marketing strategies that tell people they are flawed so we can sell them a product. Something in the whole thing seemed completely off. I realized that NVC, Eisenstein, commoning and sociocracy had the same problem around marketing: if you assume that people know what’s good for them because they are competent human beings, how could you tell them what to do? We want to respect others’ sense of agency but we also want them to change how they do things. I never really found a way out of that dilemma. It pops up in many places. For example, can a CEO prescribe self-governance? I find that a really, really tricky question.
So let’s say missionary, inherently power-over strategies don’t work. Shouldn’t we just wait until people figure out themselves that they might need help? True. We could just lean back and say, well, they will come when it’s the right time. Let it emerge. To fix the world, make sure you’re in a compassionate place with yourself and then things will come. But we’re reminded by Engaged Buddhism that being self-centered and living in a happy bubble is a privilege not everyone can afford. If others are in pain (and they are!!!) and I assume we are interconnected, then aren’t I responsible to help? Aren’t I holding back a potential cure for millions of people suffering at their work places every single day? How can I sit back and wait until they have suffered enough to do an internet search? And what makes us so sure that they will instead of blaming their suffering on something, or someone, else?
Now what?
I wrote this whole article just to get here. Welcome to the edge of what I am understanding right now. It’s the dilemma of “ignoring people’s agency to teach them about agency” that I want to talk about.
So let’s take it as a given that it’s our responsible to put our work out in the world. How do we do it?
While I was writing this article, a young woman sat down next to me in the cafe. (I am sure the universe sent her to have a burrito with me that day!) We started talking and I, half-jokingly, told her I was trying to understand what the world needed right now. She told me that if she had access to wealth, she would solve the water problem and protect water and access to water as a common good. Then she proceeded to tell me about coral reefs that they managed to print in 3d that attracted animals and plants and started to flourish. Using technology to restore and support ecosystems. Are figurative coral reefs the answer to get out of the marketing dilemma?
Ecosystems instead of marketing?
Marketing creates a separation (us vs. them, producer vs. consumer). Someone who understands informs someone who doesn’t understand. Someone who has a resource is willing to share the resource in exchange for something else. An ecosystem, on the other hand, is made up of peers, like a coral reef, where the skills and knowledge for and from technologies of reunions can flourish, as resources and people are attracted to a living space in which they can experience well-being and companionship.
Sounds like a great plan — however, a 3d-printed coral reef does not fall from the sky. Providing infrastructure is a constant battle against entropy. Everyone who ever started an organization knows that all too well.
What it takes is a system that is as self-repairing and self-maintaining as any natural system, drawing on common pool resources.(1) But the question is still how social technologies would spread within the ecosystem. Would people just teach each other? Then why don’t they now? Because if you look at it, we already live in an ecosystem where people cluster and exchange information (even if it’s just on facebook). But somehow it does not lead to the promised results. Why is that? I struggle to understand that.(2)
Being aware of overwhelm
The biggest collective challenge to implementing and spreading technologies of reunion right now is collective overwhelm. The irony is that being in the current system is stressing us more than living in the new paradims would. But because we’re so worn out by the collective loneliness and lack of alignment, we don’t have enough attention for the new paradigm. There are so many manifestations of injustice to resist, so many groups to be an ally to, so many frameworks to be learned. We can’t possibly do it all. Laureen Golden from Healing Our World shared with me that this overwhelm can be seen as an auto-immune response: even the best ideas (that would help us) will be rejected when we get overwhelmed. Our internal (belief) systems and the external systems that are supposed to support us will fight whatever is challenging our ideological and habitual status quo. We all know the guy who is so busy cutting down trees with a dull axe that he does not have time to sharpen his axe to be faster. It’s even worse: even if he suggested to sharpen the axe, his colleagues would hold him back, in fear that they would have to do it too. Overwhelm, to me, is the first sign of collapse because it compromises our capacity to be resilient and to adapt. We shut down, taking away any possibility to find a strategy out of it.
It’s not learning, it’s re-learning
Another topic that seems enlightening in this context is the fact that maybe the rhetorics of “you have to change your ways” and “what you’re doing is wrong/stupid” is not effective. Instead, it would be fun to think about it as re-learning. I do get a sense that children have a much easier time learning, for example, sociocratic processes.
I love that Charles Eisenstein called his most influential book “The more beautiful world your heart knows is possible” (emphasis T.R.). We know it’s possible, and we are wired for connection. I am sure this fact has a piece in the whole but I don’t know yet where it fits in. It would be an oversimplification to say that we are born knowing how to do group process because that’s not what I see. So there is a social technology to learn here, even if it might rest on principles that resonate with something innate. Maybe it’s like the universal grammar (=being wired for connection) that we are born with but we still have to acquire the language (=the concrete social technology). But I don’t know what to do with this puzzle piece.
Help me understand
Who wants to have this conversation with me, about all of this? Use the comment function below. I’d love to make some progress on my thinking! If you post links to resources, please take 2 minutes and write where/how you see the connection to what I wrote, just to make it easier for everyone to plug in. Name dropping or concept dropping only helps if a human mind helps us see the connection.
- What can practitioners of technologies of reunion do to help other people gain access to those technologies more easily, while keeping the autonomy and non-separation of all people intact?
- What’s up with collective overwhelm? Is it part of the picture?
- What am I not taking into account that would be useful to consider?
Later additions
- It has been pointed out to me that it’s not only about learning new things or “remembering” how to do things more in accordance with our inherent capacity to connect, but also about un-learning the things we have learned that are more aligned with dis-connect. This is not only relevant for explicitely learned skills but even more for everything implicit and unconscious. In teaching governance, I notice quite a bit that we all resort to our old power-over patterns when we’re under pressure. And we’re under pressure easily — time pressure, for example, let’s the most conscious and intentional groups fall off the waggon.
- Maybe together with un-learning, there is also the topic of trauma. Trauma cannot be underestimated on this topic.
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Ted is co-author on the sociocracy handbook Many Voices One Song (2018) and operational leader of the non-profit Sociocracy For All.
FOOTNOTES
(1) The effort closest to that, growing and replicating itself almost effortlessly almost like an exponential organization, are neighborhood parliaments. It started in India where they organized neighborhoods into small, tiered, interlinked forums, up to a national scale. The brilliant move is that they give agency back to where it belongs and where it occurs naturally: in the direct environment of the people and their shared decision making. Since they modify something that happens anyway — exchange on a neighborhood basis, they are extremely effective and require no budget. They can be replicated easily and is on the rise astonishingly fast.
(2) I have a feeling that this might ‘just’ be an instance of the tragedy of the commons? Then again, even if facebook were collectively owned by a platform coop, I have some doubts that it would be substantially different. Happy to be proven wrong on that!
