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Systemic
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References to “the system” are common in advertising, political commentary, popular culture, and elsewhere, but few people define what they mean by the phrase.
Wikipedia says, “A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole.”
This description leaves open the question of whether any one element controls or dominates a particular system. Concerning human societies, for instance, who rules? Who’s to blame? (read more) [posted in Systemic/Articles]
“Fluke” author Interview Transcript
”I grew up in the U.S., where I was sort of told you have to sort of just make your own path. This sort of individualist mindset, the American dream, and so on. And it's a culture that is extremely focused on control, right?
And I describe in the book how I was living, you know, what I described as a checklist existence. And I think when you start to think about the role of these forces that are sometimes arbitrary, accidental, and random, and also the chaos theory, the ripple effects of our decisions, it starts to liberate you a little bit, right? It starts to make you feel like, you know what, it's maybe OK if I don't have so much top-down control. And that's what I've internalized as a lesson from the book….
So, instead of imagining that we can have this top-down control, I think we have to have a little bit less hubris and also accept the limits of what humans can and cannot control.
Justice by Means of Democracy: A Review, Wade Lee Hudson
In her magnificent magnum opus, Justice by Means of Democracy, Danielle Allen affirms egalitarianism and criticizes domination. She proposes a “power-sharing liberalism” rooted in “difference without domination” and applies her analysis to the entire society: politics, the economy, and society. Nevertheless, her analysis falls short.
Allen affirms the development of
citizens’ ability to adopt habits of non-domination in their ordinary interactions with one another.… This would permit us to establish a virtuous cycle linking political, social, and economic domains in support of the kind of human flourishing that rests on autonomy, both private and public.
This attention to interpersonal relationships by a political scientist is rare and vital.
She defines difference without domination as social patterns that don’t involve any group or individual controlling another. She rightly asserts that protecting private autonomy is as important as safeguarding political liberties.
Allen recognizes the necessity to submit to legitimate limits “that come from laws, shared cultural practices, social norms, and organizational protocols.” These hierarchies, however, must “avoid an arbitrary or rights-violating exercise of power.”
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Transforming Dysfunctional Organizations: The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit, Wade Lee Hudson.
Power struggles weaken organizations, but hardly anyone addresses the divisive social conditioning that inflames the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Overcoming this divisive root cause can help fix dysfunctional organizations and build a systemic reform movement to transform society into a just and compassionate community rooted in democratic hierarchies.
Hyper-individualistic, hyper-competitive domination leads to exploitation and efforts to defeat “enemies” and punish scapegoats. Blind submission reinforces the status quo. The failure to distinguish between justified and unjustified domination/submission interferes with controlling adverse reactions.
Paternalistic human service professionals assume a superior, controlling, disabling attitude toward clients. Nonprofit housing corporations resist collaborating with tenant councils. Kind-hearted people-helpers seek ego gratification and social status. Teachers funnel knowledge into students’ minds in a one-way process. Traditional doctors and nurses treat patients as objects. Self-seeking trainers of all sorts hustle for money and praise. (read more)
The Scapegoat Trap, Wade Lee Hudson.
. . . The result is widespread frustration, and people often take out their anger on handy targets — a family member, their boss, a racial or ethnic group, powerful elites, the opposing political party, Donald Trump, or some other scapegoat.
I first encountered the notion of a scapegoat when I worked as an orderly in a psychiatric institution run by Dr. “Bob” Beavers, whose System Model of Family Assessment significantly impacted psychiatry. His study of family systems led him to conclude that families often vent their frustrations on one family member, which worsens the scapegoat’s suffering.
In the Bible, after the chief priest had symbolically laid the people's sins upon it, Hebrews released a goat into the wilderness, believing the animal would take with it all the sins and impurities of the community. But today, instead of a goat, it's a political opponent, a racial group, or world leaders who bear the brunt of society's frustrations. . . (read more)
Learning from the Obama Movement, Wade Lee Hudson
Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, the campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the worldwith compassion and justice one demand at a time. (read more)
The Ancient Patterns of Migration, Deborah Barsky.
Today’s hot-button issue is actually as old as the human race…. Since then, peoples of shared inheritance have established strict protocols for assuring their sense of membership in one or another national context. Documents proving birthright guarantee that “outsiders” are kept at a distance and enable strict control by a few chosen authorities, maintaining a stronghold against any possible breach of the system. Members of each social unit are indoctrinated through an elaborate preestablished apprenticeship, institutionally reinforced throughout every facet of life: religious, educational, family, and workplace. ..(read more)
Survival, Sustainability, and Solidarity: Recovering a Sense of the Sacred Reverence for Life and Creation, Randy Thomas.
Indeed, we are living in the midst of uncertain and transitional times. The life, fate, and destiny of “human civilization” and our planetary home as we have historically come to understand it is unknown. It is a time of challenge, crisis, and opportunity for all of us.
Former ways of thinking, feeling, acting, and being in the world no longer provide assurances of meaning, purpose, and direction. There is a general cynicism and malaise that the current leaders in our world are unable to provide the necessary guidance and moral integrity to help us navigate these tumultuous times. (read more)
Countering the Domination-Submission Paradigm, Wade Lee Hudson
The deeply ingrained, largely sub-conscious self-centered domination-submission paradigm permeates and undergirds modern society. The other-centered compassionate humanity worldview is a fundamental alternative. (read more)
Promoting the Compassionate Humanity Community, Wade Lee Hudson and Larry Walker.
Rooted in humanity’s highest traditions, the time-honored effort to relieve and prevent suffering is alive and well. In countless ways, ethical individuals and organizations spread compassion and promote justice as alternatives to society’s selfishness. These manifestations of a global compassionate humanity community tap into deep, innate, positive instincts, strengthen love and trust, counter hate and fear, and channel anger into positive action. These efforts use democratic partnerships to counter unjustified domination and blind submission. (read more)
There Is Joy in Struggle, Cornel West.
“What an honor to be here! What a privilege, what a blessing to salute the Class of 2019, Harvard Divinity School.... We know most of human history is a history of domination and oppression and exploitation and degradation. Most of human history is a history of hatred and contempt... As I look at myself, I can see the white supremacy in me. But oh, when I was at Charlottesville, looking in the eyes of those sick, neo-Nazi white brothers, gangsters, thugs, I didn’t lose sight of the gangster in me. READ MORE.
Shaming, Self-improvement, and Political Action, Wade Lee Hudson.
“In “The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld describes the problem: Absent structural change, self-improvement will be limited. A large network of supportive small teams whose members are aware of this problem could be one solution. In itself, this network could constitute structural reform, which Rothfeld seeks. It could also nurture a strong sense of community whose members, given their awareness of the Shaming-Industrial Complex, would logically pursue structural reform in other social sectors and, ideally, cultivate holistic and systemic transformation.” READ MORE
Cultures of Care celebrates people that practice collective care in unconventional and insurgent ways. Care is an essential, immediate and practical way to create belonging. Perhaps most vitally in our urgent times, at the heart of each profile you will find provocations that are seeds for reshaping society and how we relate to each other and the world.
Cultures of Care was initiated in the fall of 2020 as we faced a deepening pandemic and economic inequality, popular uprisings against state-sanctioned violence against Black people, an expanding border wall and a deluge of traumatic climate events. These conditions continue to grow today. In the chaos, isolation and fear of these multiple storms, we also witness beautiful points of shelter. These practices center an ethos of collective care in the face of multiple forms of overlapping othering and oppression. Some of these are new and emergent, like harnessing technology to adapt to social isolation. Others are long-standing, such as stewarding ancestral lands through fire. Most, if not all, are an evolving mix of new and old ways to practice collective care. Cultures of Care are practices that create belonging in the context of othering. A Culture of Care is an affirmative, generative form of resistance and adaptation….
How America Fractured Into Four Parts, George Packer.
“Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be... After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like (a) dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chance to rise created a new hereditary class structure... This hierarchy slowly hardened over the decades without drawing much notice… Meritocracy seems like the one system that answers what Tocqueville called the American “passion for equality.” If the opportunities are truly equal, the results will be fair… But it’s this idea of fairness that accounts for meritocracy’s cruelty. If you don’t make the cut, you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself… The social-justice movement is a repudiation of meritocracy, a rebellion against the system handed down from parents to children. ...
A way forward that tries to evade or crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities — the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government — is a road that connects our past and our future.”
Ezra Klein and Jane McAlevey: Who's to Blame? Wade Lee Hudson.
“Ezra Klein’s power analysis contradicts the analysis that Jane McAlevey presents in the “A master class in organizing” Ezra Klein Show podcast. According to Klein, the primary problem is “the machine” — not the “1%” or any particular decision-maker, as offered by McAlevey, the author of three books on organizing, including, most recently, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.” [read more]
Ezra Klein on “the Machine,” An Interview with Jill Lepore. “JL: In some big structural way in the book there’s a quite notable absence of villains. I wonder if you could talk about that as the explanation you came to, as a narrative choice. Why no villains? EK: … There are obviously people I think of as villains in the sense that even as they are following their incentives their values are values that I find toxic... Even so what I wanted to try to do here, the kind of book I’m writing, and I say this at the beginning, is I’m trying to tell you how a machine works.” [read more]
Intergenerational Alliances to Counter Silo Mindset, by Hector Garcia
We can address the inconsistencies in globalization, such as the Silo Mindset, irrational behavior, the appearance of a fragmented or non-existent reality, and desolation, if: we choose: a) to continue learning cooperatively and responsibly in the struggle for closer yet endless approximations to truth, b) to recover constructive and honest communication, and c) evolve towards greater maturity through paradigms, which can reveal cultural and natural interdependence as a priority on par with economic and technological interdependence.
The Growing Democracy Project, Michael Johnson.
“The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country. The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society.
The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means.” (read more)
You Can't Optimize For Rest, L. M. Sacasas.
“…There are two key points. First, our exhaustion—in its various material and immaterial dimensions—is a consequence of the part we play in a techno-social milieu whose rhythms, scale, pace, and demands are not conducive to our well-being, to say nothing of the well-being of other creatures and the planet we share. Second, the remedies to which we often turn may themselves be counterproductive because their function is not to alter the larger system which has yielded a state of chronic exhaustion but rather to keep us functioning within it. Moreover, not only do the remedies fail to address the root of the problem, but there’s also a tendency to carry into our efforts to find rest the very same spirit which animates the system that left us tired and burnt out. Rest takes on the character of a project to be completed or an experience to be consumed. In neither case do we ultimately find any sort of meaningful and enduring relief or renewal.” Posted in Systemic/General/Articles.
Cultivating a Moral America, Wade Lee Hudson
Imagine a moral America. Americans treat each other as they want to be treated and respect everyone’s equal value. If you live elsewhere, imagine the same for your country.
We love our country, live good, compassionate lives, care for others as we care for ourselves, avoid both selfishness and self-sacrifice, improve ourselves and the world, are politically engaged, live in harmony with Mother Nature, work to undo racism and all forms of oppressive domination, and nurture partnerships throughout society. (read more)
Everybody’s Protest Novel, James Baldwin.
“The protest novels...emerge for what they are: a mirror of our confusion, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream. They are fantasies, connecting nowhere with reality, sentimental;...
Our glittering, mechanical, inescapable civilization…has put to death our freedom… The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to...compulsive, bloodless dimensions... Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization... Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion... From this void — ourselves — it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation which can save us...
What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear,... But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community…” [read more] [to comment click here]
The Human Crisis, Albert Camus — “The SS and the German Officer no longer represented man or mankind, but rather...the triumph of a doctrine…
Inside every nation, and the world at large, mistrust, resentment, greed, and the race for power are manufacturing a dark, desperate universe... [with men] captive to abstract powers, starved and confused by harried living, and estranged from nature's truth, from sensible leisure, and simple happiness... They are no longer protected by mutual respects… We know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts...
... Put politics back in its true place, a secondary one... This world must...become the world of men and women, of fruitful work and thoughtful leisure… [Advance] the spirit of dialogue... All other efforts, however admirable, that rely on power and domination can only mutilate men and women more grievously... [read more]
The Making of the New Left, Louis Menand. “The movement inspired young people to believe that they could transform themselves—and America… These reminiscences may seem romantic. They are romantic. But they express the core premise of left-wing thought, the core premise of Marx: Things do not have to be the way they are. The nation was at a crossroads in the nineteen-sixties. The system did not break, but it did bend. We are at another crossroads today. It can be made to bend again.”
What Happened to American Conservatism? David Brooks. “The rich philosophical tradition I fell in love with has been reduced to Fox News and voter suppression... I’m content, as my hero Isaiah Berlin put it, to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party... The central conservative truth is that culture matters most; the central liberal truth is that politics can change culture.”
Amanda Gorman’s 2021 inaugural poem. “…We close the divide, because we know to put our future first, / We must first put our differences aside. / We lay down our arms / So we can reach out our arms to one another. /We seek harm to none and harmony for all. / Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: /That even as we grieved, we grew, / That even as we hurt, we hoped, That even as we tired, we tried, / That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious — / Not because we will never again know defeat / But because we will never again sow division….” [read more]
2020 Best Actor Oscar Acceptance Speech, Joaquin Phoenix — “We're talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.” [read more]
Being a Child: Prerequisite for the New Realm, Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake. “…”...Jesus’ message was a radical indictment of what existed, of the structures, institutions, tradition. The question who is or would be greatest in this new reality is logical in the traditional way of thinking about life and the hierarchy of human beings. Jesus needs them to think out of the box, for that is the only way the Realm will be manifested, lived. [read more]