SupportingEmergentDemocracy

This is a short essay I wrote prior to the Giving Conference and originally published on my weblog at http://www.chriscorrigan.com/parkinglot

Philanthropy and the support of emergent democracy

I voted in a federal election here in Canada on June 28.

Like all elections, I stuffed my ballot in the box and a little voice said "Is that it? People have died for this?"

Elections are always anti-climactic. Thirty-five days of being bombarded by messages and courted by spin leading to one moment - barely one second - when we mark an X in a circle and are done with it, somehow unsure if our singular contribution matters.

Many Canadians did not vote today precisely because they feel too small to make a difference, even in an election like this where small margins will tilt the balance of power. We labour under the misconception that voting is all there is to democracy, that it is the fundamental act. To lose faith in the power of the franchise then is to let go of the last apparent connection to the levers of power. For most people, to quit voting is to give in. It is the last act of capitulation before the clamouring politicians.

As the old adage goes "if voting could change the system, it would be illegal." I happen to believe that voting IS important. But more important than voting is engagement because that adage is true: systemic change has nothing to do with voting. It has to do with citizens banding together to improve society regardless of government. Democracy is not about the freedom to vote: it is about the freedom and responsibility to act. It may be in fact that voting is the last freedom to be taken away. Witness the former USSR or much of present day China. Autocratic and totalitarian, these states nevertheless preserved the sanctity of voting even while all other societal freedoms had been stripped away.

No, democracy is not about voting, and democratic societies do not advance, thrive and evolve because people vote every few years. They evolve because people use the tools of democracy to create societies that thrive: free speech, freedom of association, freedom to move. These are the tools of civil society.

Creating and maintaining a truly open and democratic society is founded in the individual responsibility of people to "live in truth" as Vaclav Havel said. I've blogged this before, but it bears repeating. This is from Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World:

"By living within the lie - that is, conforming to the system's demands - Havel says, "individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system." A "line of conflict" is then drawn through each person who is invited in the countless decisions of daily life to choose between living in truth and living in the lie. Living in truth - directly doing in your immediate surroundings, what you think needs doing, saying what you think is true and needs saying , acting the way you think people should act - is a form of protest, Havel admits, against living in the lie, and so those who try to live in truth are indeed an opposition. But that is neither all they are or the main thing they are. Before living in truth is a protest, it is an affirmation."

-- Schell, p.196

This is the way we build and maintain democratic civil society.

Living in truth, emergence and giving

I want to pick up on this idea that living in truth is about looking around you and doing what needs to be done. It sounds so simple because it is democracy at a human scale, and yet it can initiate profound shifts in a society because human societies, even within totalitarian systems, are emergent.

When something sounds simple and yet seems to work in every case, it puts me in mind of Open Space Technology. My friend Harrison Owen, the man who created OST says that the essence of empowerment is figuring out what you want to do and then going and taking care of it. Focusing on this takes us out of the traps we create for ourselves when we say "someone should do something." Complaining is perhaps the most powerful way to disempower oneself because it puts you in a position of arguing with reality. Anytime we use the word "should" we are saying that reality is wrong. Arguing with reality has a psychological diagnosis: it's called psychosis. A psychotic society is plagued by both apathy and violence, as people either withdraw into futility or lash out against reality and try to force change.

For individuals, arguing with reality also creates a state where everything lives in the external world. We look outside of ourselves for both the source of problems and the solutions ("somebody should do something"). We abandon our own resources and skills and desires and give away our power to change anything. The antidote to this is Harrison's moment of introspection. Simply stop and say:

• What do I really care about?

• What can I do to take care of it?

Put in this light, these become very powerful questions on both a personal and a social level. They owe their power to two very useful features of human society. First, human beings respond to invitation. And second human societies are complex adaptive systems and therefore display emergent tendencies in which small acts of living in truth can propagate.

My partner MichaelHerman knows a lot about invitation, and he pointed me to this quote by Kurt Hahn, the man that founded Outward Bound:

"There are three ways of trying to win the young. There is persuasion. There is compulsion and there is attraction. You can preach at them; that is a hook without a worm. You can say "you must volunteer." That is the devil. And you can tell them, "you are needed" that hardly ever fails."

In fact that appeal never fails, because, done right, an invitation will attract someone TO something. Invitations ask the question "What do YOU want to do?" to everyone who hears them. Those who respond have already demonstrated a couple of profound features of democratic societies: choice and engagement. Those who choose not to respond stay out of the way. Invitations are a useful way of separating signal from noise. Finding even one other person to share in a project doubles everything. Finding the right person creates synergies.

Those synergies will propagate within human societies, groups, communities and nations because these systems are complex adaptive systems which means, among other things, they use feedback mechanisms and local action to display emergent properties. This makes human society, as messy and chaotic as it is, the perfect vehicle for propagating activities that provide benefits for the whole.

This is not to say that it is always easy. It is rather to acknowledge that living in truth need not be daunting. You don't need to have the big picture in your head. In fact doing so will probably lay you out in a catatonic state, unable to contribute anything. Small actions influence neighbours who provide feedback that can keep these activities going. For example, I am working with a group of Aboriginal youth who decided to start a foundation to support Aboriginal youth leadership. They knew nothing about how to do this, but they hooked up with a mentor from the Vancouver Foundation here in British Columbia who coached them on creating a youth in philanthropy endowment. Armed with that modest pat on the back, they went out and started talking about their vision and so far, in two months, they have raised $2500 towards the $10,000 they need to create their enterprise under the umbrella of the Vancouver Foundation. Small, local actions, supported by positive feedback spurs them on. And, more importantly, it is a tangible exercise in empowerment. They have generated their own solutions and are spreading circles out wider and wider, rippling an invitation out into society.

The beauty of emergent systems is that you can never be sure when one thing will tip. And so you have the option of taking two views of your work. You can resign in the face of overwhelming odds, or you can simply go about your work in manageable ways trusting that it could tip at any time. Taking the second path means bringing a mindfulness and attention to your work that automatically makes it the most important thing in the world. Once a few other people catch on to your passion, a movement begins to grow.

This finally points to one other characteristic of living in truth that I feel is important. To make an impact in human society, whether it is overthrowing a dictatorship or simply launching an initiative to improve things, the answers to Harrison's two questions must be true both for the individual and the larger society. Citizen engagement, democratic empowerment and living in truth works if you subscribe to the worldview that the self and the community are connected and that what is good for one is good for the other. In other words, you undertake personal responsibility for change because you know that it improves life for others as well.

This leads me to the Giving Conference that begins on Friday morning in Chicago and it leaves me with some tantalizing questions:

• How can we put altruism and giving to work in a way that recognizes the power of complex adaptive systems?
• What does it take to invite people to contribute to emergent solutions? To engage in work without any immediate payoff except the possibility that patterns will emerge?
• How can we cultivate trust in each other, in uncertainty and in optimistic futures to allow complexity to display its most important feature: openness?
• How can we build and support the personal practices that initiative living in truth?
• What are the implications of living in truth in a world that is keen to feed us lies?
• How can we harness networks to support each other so our signals aren't lost in the noise?

If you are coming to Chicago, let's talk about these things. If not, join us on the conference wiki and put your two cents in there. If you like, you can leave me a comment here, or pose some more questions that might invite us to move forward.

I'll report back on what emerges.