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Over at the comments to this post at Wealth Bondage, The Happy Tutor issues an invitation to me, and it’s one I am thrilled to accept:

Today’s post, inspired as it is from The Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell will deal with the thought of Vaclav Havel, Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, and will end with a nice story about a Mohawk student at the University of British Columbia who discovered something very profound on Monday.

Now, Vaclav Havel, for those of you who missed 1989, was the leader of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia, one of a number of small and surprising non-violent uprisings in places like Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia (and recently Georgia) that toppled perhaps the world’s most notorious and violent totalitarian regime. In fact it didn’t so much topple the Soviet Union as cause it to melt away like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Havel, who wrote passionately about a politics he called “living in truth” (which is perhaps the best way to translate Gandhi’s satyagraha, by the way) crafted a politics along with other thinkers in Eastern Europe that made democracy emerge, but not before it issued a challenge to every single person.

Dig this:

If that doesn’t blow your socks off, check your pulse.

This is the first answer to being engaged: discerning that “line of conflict” within you that delineates the truth from everything else. It is inner work, and you have to use your gut to get it right. And then the next thing to do is to act. Not to act in large ways, but in small simple ways. Adam Michnik in Poland and Vaclav Havel and Georgy Konrad in Hungary didn’t set their sites on toppliing the Soviet power structure. They focussed instead on living in truth.

I have written a lot more about the imperative to do this inner work towards engagement in a paper called “Free to do our work.”

The second answer about what to do comes from Schell also, looking at the notion of cooperative power:

Waiting for democracy to emerge is not only boring, as the Tutor says, but also fruitless. Democracy emerges out of action, not the other way around. Yet once it comes into play it can sustain the spirit needed to keep freedom and power running. With one caveat from Arendt: “Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss.” (Schell p.220). Put another way, “use it or lose it.” And put yet another, more positive way by Tocqueville:

Tutor mentioned Cluetrain and one or two other things in some comments he left here, to which I will only add this: totalitarian regimes crumble when people withdraw their consent to be governed. Corporations fall when people stop buying their products or lose faith in the company. Enron, Nortel, WorldCom…gone. If markets are conversations and the company doesn’t want to talk, we can whisper behind it’s back. Whispers topple empires, not violence. More on this another time.

All of this brings me to my Mohawk friend and right down to a very concrete case of instant emerging leadership.

I convened an Open Space Technology planning session for the First Nations House of Learning at the University of British Columbia in October. Partners and friends and staff of the FNHL were invited to come and discuss ways in which the Longhouse (as it is called) can be used to facilitate activity on campus, in the academic world and in the community at large.

Doug, a Mohawk student who sits in an advisory capacity to the Longhouse, posted a group that dealt with connecting international indigenous students. He gathered a few interested folks around him and got the idea that indigenous students at UBC need to have a proper association, as a part of the Alma Mater Society.

I ran into Doug on Monday. He introduced me to the newly chosen President and the Secretary of the association. He said that once he decided to do it, it was easy. He was really surprised by how easy it was to organize. I suggested that maybe 95% of the work of doing something like that was getting over the stories we tell ourselves about “it can’t be done.” The other five percent is basically phone calls. Buttressed by their success in finally getting the society started last week, they have already started organizing events, activities and speakers, planning a radio show on campus public radio, and they are putting a special emphasis on making the society a place where Aboriginal students can come and try out leadership, practice the using their voices, even “live in truth.”

Don’t for a second think that this is a trite and cute action, an undergraduate forming a club on campus. What happened to Doug in noticing how easily the stories slip away when we refuse to believe them any longer was the essence of one person decolonizing himself. Now that Doug has done it, he has that capacity for life. He can never say that it can’t be done.

There is no need to wait for Emergent Democracy. Instead, we need to take a few simple acts, like tearing ourselves away from Sex in the City for a couple of hours and looking around us for the things that need to be done. Live in truth, pick up the phone, issue an invitation, and get to work. That kind of thing transformed world government in the 20th century, and it is exactly where our hope for action lies whether we are decolonizing our communities, unschooling our children, culture jamming our societies, or electing our candidates.