The N-Soul Problem

In a couple of recent posts I discussed the phenomenon of megaprojects - that is, those large-scale, costly projects which are undertaken by a society when all of its members become united in the pursuit of  particular goals which the megaprojects are designed to meet.  The pursuit of the goal embodied by the megaproject alters the lives of everyone in the society undertaking the project, because it requires each member of the society to make a sacrifice in order to contribute toward the goal.  Perhaps the earliest historical example of a megaproject is the Tower of Babel mentioned in Genesis 11:1-9.  More recent examples of megaprojects include the war economies which were arranged by the various governments which fought World War Two, as well as the rebuilding of some of those economies which occurred in the aftermath of that war.  The U.S. space program became something of a megaproject in the 1960's when President Kennedy set the goal of landing an American on the moon before the end of the decade.  A much more prosaic example of a megaproject is the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system under President Eisenhower during the 1950's.

I'd like to suggest that megaprojects play a key role in the wholesale transformation and advance of a society.  I'd also like to suggest that there are three important conditions which must be fulfilled in order for a megaproject to realize its full transformative potential:

1. The leaders of a society must be wise in their choice of the goal which a megaproject is supposed to meet;
2. The leaders must present the vision and goal of the megaproject in a way that unites the souls of the members of society behind that goal;
3. And, the leaders must be wise in organizing the contributions of each member of the society in fulfilling that goal.

It is at points 2 and 3 that trouble can come.  Point 1 is also a place of potential trouble - if the leaders of a society choose an unrighteous goal, eventually their project will fail, as the builders of Babel found out.  But I'd like to focus especially on the pitfalls contained in points 2 and 3.  The success of point 2 depends not only on the wisdom and persuasiveness of the leaders of a society, but also on all the members of the society itself.  For instance, if the members of a society are generally unselfish and willing to make contributions toward a greater good, they can be more easily united behind a good goal.  If, however, the members of a society are rabidly selfish and individualistic, then it becomes much harder for any leader to unite them behind the sort of transformative goal that requires an unselfish contribution from each member.  The success or failure of point 3 depends on the humility (or lack thereof) of the leaders of the society.  The leaders will have the greatest chance of success if they recognize that the people from whom they are asking contributions bring not only their material wealth and the strength of their bodies, but also their minds (or souls) - that is, their unique ideas and perspectives.  Those leaders who set a goal and then "hire" the members of their societies "from the shoulders down" as mere drones to fulfill the grand plan of the leaders may find their grand plan failing.

Now one way to destroy a society's ability to conceive and implement megaprojects is to destroy that society's ability to combine.  This is what happened at the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages of everyone on earth because their unified goal was evil.  But it is also possible for evil agents to confuse the ability of a society to undertake large-scale transformative projects of good.  How is this done?  Simply by teaching or persuading a majority of the members of the society to become selfish, materialistic, and individualistic.  This has been the trajectory of American society over the last four decades under the influence of right-wing American media.  It should be no surprise therefore that the ability of the U.S. to engage in transformative megaprojects has declined as well (at the same time that loneliness and alienation in American society has increased).  There is an urgent need for the kind of transformative megaprojects that can enable the United States to weather the 21st century challenges of declining resource availability, increasing environmental degradation, and a changing climate.  But rigid adherence to free-market ideology and excessive reliance on private-sector solutions is hindering the emergence of the needed megaprojects.  A case in point is the success with which the American Right attacked the Green New Deal.

On the other hand, there are the societies of China and Singapore, in which the coordination between the State and private industry is much tighter, and there is still a fair amount of collective spirit.  As a result, China has the most advanced urban infrastructure in the world, and leads the world in rapid transit technology including high-speed rail.  In fact, China is now a major exporter of high-speed rail technology.  Similarly, the Chinese higher education system is the result of intense, goal-oriented State strategic planning which has begun to produce universities which are among the most prestigious in the world.  (Consider Tsinghua University, for instance, which is among the top twenty universities worldwide according to one metric.)  This is occurring at a time in which many American universities are declining in world rankings due to a lack of public funding for basic research.  And the story of Singapore is no less impressive, as demonstrated by the article cited at the end of this post.  But a problem arises in more collectivist societies if the leaders of those societies become insecure and hence begin to assert an unhealthy level of control over the initiative of their private members.  Hence, Chinese President Xi Jinping's actions and policies have begun to threaten the megaproject of Chinese transformation begun by Deng Xiaoping.

So we have two ends of a continuum: on the one hand, rampant, laissez-faire individualism which prevents people from combining in any way to achieve goals larger than the individual, and on the other hand, a central control which quashes individual initiative and stifles diverse insights.  The United States lies on one end of this continuum and is declining as a result.  China under Xi Jinping has begun to move toward the other end of the continuum and has begun to suffer as a result.  Physicists and astronomers sometimes talk about the n-body problem - that is, the problem of trying to mathematically describe the motions of three or more bodies in orbit around a common center.  I'd like to suggest what I call the "n-soul problem" - that is, how to organize people into groups that most effectively undertake transformative projects for good.  Those who successfully solve this problem will do well.  

For further reading on megaprojects, see "Megaprojects for Megaregions: Global Cases and Takeaways" by John Landis and the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Strategic Nonviolent Resistance - What's It To Me?

Those who have read this blog over the last five years have been exposed to a large number of posts which deal with the subject of strategic nonviolent resistance by oppressed people against an oppressive power.  Those who have followed this blog for the last twelve months have been exposed to a rather detailed, in-depth analysis of a particular book on strategic nonviolent resistance, namely, From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) by the late Dr. Gene Sharp.  Each one of the posts in that analysis has involved a fair bit of weekly research - in some cases several hours for a single post.  That research was all performed on my own personal time, during a period in which I had many other responsibilities.  (In my last post I mentioned how good it feels to finally take time to clean and fix certain things around the house.  Those things got some serious neglect during the last year!)

Readers might well then ask, "Why did you take all this time to do this research?  Why did you embark on such an exhaustive analysis?"  Some of these readers (including a certain Aunt Tammy I know) may think they already have the answer from the general subject matter of my blog, and may tell themselves, "Oh, he's just a geek - he likes reading lots of books, and this particular subject just happened to catch his interest."  But that would leave unanswered the question of why I spent over $2,000 and 15 weeks of my life in 2019 to take a distance course in community organizing from Harvard University.  Upon finding out that I had taken such a step, some might say, "Oh, he's just an idealist - he's naturally drawn to activism.  Let's see if we can figure out his Myers-Briggs personality type..."  

But if you learned that I am an African-American, you might gain a few clues to the actual motivation for my study of strategic nonviolent resistance, and my attempts to organize it over the last few years among my people.  You might also gain a few clues as to why I have chosen to try to be an organizer in the first place.  In learning community organizing from the Harvard course, I learned that one of the first things an organizer needs to do is to tell his "story of self" to his audience, so that they might know what called the organizer to become an organizer.  I haven't yet told you the full version of my story of self.  Today you'll get to read it.  However, according to the Harvard course, telling my story of self is supposed to take no more than two minutes, and the version I am about to give you will take slightly longer than that.  (If you are a member of the Leading Change Network and you are reading this, please don't tell on me...!)  One other note: on my blog is a request that commentary contain only clean, family-friendly language.  For today's post and today's post only, I'm going to relax that policy just a bit.

*   *   *

 

I still remember when my mom told me to go into the front yard and fight a kid who was bigger than me.  It was on a summer afternoon between my 6th and 7th grade.  Our family had moved into our house the year before, and the house was located in a very white part of Southern California, and that was in the days when blatant racism was the norm in American society, and we were a Black family.  My dad – a military officer – had been stopped by the city police because he was walking through the neighborhood shortly after we moved into that house.  At the school I attended, I was regularly hit or slapped by other kids whenever I dared to speak up.  These kids openly called me a nigger to my face.  I felt powerless because my attackers were many and in many cases bigger than me, and I was only one person.  And most of the teachers were not helpful.  

During that summer, some of the more aggressive bullies used to play baseball in the vacant lot next to our house, and they would come right into our front yard and freely drink from our water hose without asking.  My mom knew who these kids were from my frequent complaints to my teachers and parents about them.  On this particular afternoon, my mom heard these kids insulting me after she sent me out to put the water hose away. What she heard pushed her over the edge, and she told me to go outside and fight the biggest bully.  “If you don’t fight him,” she said, “then I will whip you!”

I beat the kid twice – both the first time, and then after he had gotten his parents and his parents had gathered a mob of neighbors and they had come back to my house and my mom had come outside and hit his mom with a stick because she dared to put her hand on me.  The incident became for me a snapshot of the United States – a narcissistic, thuggish nation that trashed (and still trashes) other people in order to “make America great!”  And the fight showed me what I was capable of when I got really, really angry.  I discovered just how tired I was of being treated like a punching bag.

When I became an adult, I thought those unpleasant days were behind me, because I was able to put myself through college and start a career as a technical professional.  So it took me a long time – too long – to realize that the racism of American society had never really gone away.  It had just gone underground.  But six years ago the murders of unarmed Black victims by White cops exploded into the news.  When I read of Michael Brown lying dead in the sun for three hours – and that Darren Wilson was not punished – I saw how little Black lives actually matter to the people who run present-day American society.  I saw that there were worthless white supremacist bastards who had worked hard for decades to bring back the days when they could openly treat people of color as punching bags or as garbage, and who wanted us once again to accept being treated like garbage.

That has made me really, really angry – angry as hell.  Once again, I am being pushed to fight.  But this time I intend to both fight and win by building a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance among my people.  [Note: I did not say "nonviolence"!  Nor am I trying to be spiritual!  Rather, I read some books that taught me that this is the best way to win.]  Oppressed people begin to resist by building a new identity for ourselves based on our own self-determination.  This is is why I have chosen to start organizing my people for our own self-reliance.

*  *  *

So there you have it - my story of self.  And there you have the reason why every time I've read of some pig cop or group of pig cops shooting yet another unarmed African-American and getting away with it, I am taken in my mind back to that grade school fight.  Because that grade-school fight was typical of much of my childhood in this piece-of-garbage country known as the United States of America, this country which became great for a certain select group of people by trashing all the other peoples of earth.  You might well say that the incidents of the last several years have been rather triggering for me.  Those who suffer from PTSD will know what I mean.  And there you have the reason why the study of strategic nonviolent resistance - especially as presented in the writings of Gene Sharp - has held such appeal for me.  For Sharp's writings show how the power of oppressors can be disintegrated without the use of physical weapons.  Indeed, strategic nonviolent resistance - skillfully applied - is capable of regime change, as seen in Chapters 5 and 9 of From D to D.  I want to take strategic nonviolent resistance as far as I can possibly take it.

You may ask, Why?  Why go to such a radical extreme?  Because the events of the last decade have caused some irreversible tectonic shifts in the thinking of some of us who are members of communities of the oppressed.  We learned in our grade-school histories that the United States has been guilty of some really evil things in its bid to make itself great - yet we also learned that from time to time, there were seeming moves toward repentance.  The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation were such a move, the gains of the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960's were another.  But the last ten years or so have shown us that there is an irreducible, unrepentant core of ugly people within the United States who cling to their dreams of supremacy at all costs, people who will never be converted and with whom it is impossible to build "beloved communities" according to "Kingian nonviolence."  Instead, our policy must be informed by the most up-to-date best practices for dealing with personality-disordered people.  We know that those with malignant personality disorders will never change, so why build a strategy for coping with these people based on trying to change them?  Rather, as blogger Anna Valerious once wrote, we need to "distance ourselves from those who won't distance themselves from evil deeds."  

You may say, "How do you know these people can't be changed?"  My answer: because they haven't repented.  For true repentance, it's not enough to just shed a few tears.   There's something the offender must also pay.  When Darren Wilson, George Zimmerman, the murderer of Eric Garner, the murderers of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, of Breonna Taylor, of Elijah McClain, of Philando Castile, of Stephon Clark and of other victims like them are all taken off the street, rounded up and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, then it might become possible to say that the masters of our present society have changed.  When the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents who tore Latino migrant children from the arms of their parents and threw them into cages during the Trump years are themselves thrown into prison with no way out, we might begin to say that American society has begun to repent.  When the red-state Republican governments restore voting rights which they illegally took from people of color, then we might begin to believe that they are "bringing forth fruits in keeping with repentance."

Some last things.  There are those from the dominant culture who have studied strategic nonviolent resistance and have seen how devastatingly effective it has been in toppling hard-core repressive regimes in the past.  Some of the "scholars" from this group are now busily trying to screw up the teaching of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to cause the liberation struggles of the present and future to fail.  Their strategy depends on a belief that we who are among the oppressed are stupid and gullible.  They might wind up very disappointed.  For there will emerge a world - sooner or later - which is shared equitably by all the earth's people, regardless of race, skin color or national origin, a world in which there is no one group of people which enjoys ungodly privileges compared to everyone else.  You who are of the dominant culture can fight against the emergence of that world, and for a while it may even look like you've won - but the price you will pay is that you will go to hell.  Read Luke 16:19-31.

From D to D, Chapter 3 (Continued): Who Made Thee An Organizer?

 At aalis, magbabalik

At uuliting sabihin 

Na mahalin ka't sambitin

Kahit muli'y masaktan

Sa pag-alis

Ako'y magbabalik

At sana naman...

- from Nobela, lyrics by Christian Blanca Renia

(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts...  Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts.  So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music!  For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate.  However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)

This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators.  (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.)  I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes.  From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.

Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor.  Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals.  Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.

Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like.  Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition.  My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle.  In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States.  One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement.  For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue.  And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful.  Successful movements are organized by smart organizers.  The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement.  Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing).  So what kind of person is an organizer?

To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University.  Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership.  He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."  And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want."  Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling.  People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)

So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call?  And where do these called people come from?  To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:

THE LIMINAL

The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold."  The word can also be defined as, "on the edge."  In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group.  In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces.  Moses from the Bible is such an example.  He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River.  His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him.  (Exodus 1 and 2).  In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian.  In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.

Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt.  (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.)  But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother.  Thus there were two potential identities within Moses.  However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate.  The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself.  So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)

That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal.  This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South.  From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement.  Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).

And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer.  Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me.  I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7.  But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed.  An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now.  The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.

THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED

As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression.  But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here."  While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator.  So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!"  The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.  

But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals?  What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves?  Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers?  And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer?  That is the point of Havel's essay.  When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!"  So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!"  Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.

THE ACTIVIZED

A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers.  These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers.  And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors.  In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation.  Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power."  Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.  

The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation".  This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars.  But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer.  "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.")  This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed.  This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.

But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous.  Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line."  As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables.  And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship.  So the organizer must be patient and resilient.  (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...)  You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul.  But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier.  I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.