Good old whiskey river:

It’s another way to talk about what happened to my friend Doug.

When I think about Emergent Democracy, and I confess that I’m not well schooled in the theory, I ask myself, from whence does democracy emerge? And that is really the nature of the question that leads me to this thinking I have been doing about decolonization. I think that democracy emerges deep within the person – everything emerges deep within the personal – and it flows from a truthful and honest engagement with oneself. Living in truth is just this: understanding where that “line of conflict” really is within us and developing the capacity to choose and act on it when we are called to.

Ken Wilber has written extensively on this stuff, and I offer a quote from his classic Sex Ecology and Spirituality where he quote G and R Blanck, authors of Ego Psychology:

That independence from the external environment includes freedom from the cultural stories that tell us that we can’t do things, like overthrow totalitarian regimes. Becoming independent as a person leads to new connections that ARE the emergence in “Emergent Democracy.” And it seems to me that once that force is unleashed, change is almost a done deal. Or as Schell puts it:

Think about that. It starts with one thought, a thought that arises from a mind that has freed itself from the tangle of external “can’ts” and has jumped from mind to mind and heart to heart. That’s it. And so when the change comes, it seems like a dream, as Havel was fond of saying about his presidency. One day you are a pariah to the state, and the next moment you are president.

A comment left a Jon’s blog wirearchy illustrates the defeatist perspective that I’m talking about. The commenter writes:

Those are the kinds of stories that we have to free ourselves from. I mean that the author of these comments has to free himself from them. Worried about what other people are doing. This is what Schell means when he says that before living in truth is opposition, it is affirmation. That’s what Doug discovered. Action is possible and even easy, but it’s a lot of work to get past the frame of impossibility that we construct around ourselves to become, what the Blancks call “independent.”

But really, what choice do we have if we are to live in truth?

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.

In the process of redesigning my website I have added a couple of papers on power and freedom at the “Papers and Publications” page. Feel free to peruse.

Jonathan Schell is turning my crank these days. His latest book, The Unconquerable World is a stunning survey of the efficacy of non-violent action as it tore down the institutions of British and Soviet Imperialism in the 20th century.

What I’ve been getting out of the book is a bunch of springboards for my current thinking on freedom, decolonization, and organizational and community life. Starting today you’ll read a series of posts here inspired by Schell’s writing, and more often by the writing of his sources.

I’ll start here with a quote from Schell, which begins with four lines of verse from Kipling:

The image of the survivors being led away to school is absolutely heartbreaking. As you may know, in Canada, this took the form of residential schools in which First Nations children were herded and scrubbed inside and out. They were thoroughly indoctrinated in the ways of European Christian culture, from the language to the prayers and, most importantly, right down to the indoctrination into the very process of colonial life. The kind of process embodied by the archetype of the expert standing at the front of the room and the audience being empty vessels to be filled with the God given knowledge of the teacher. There was no acknowledgement that there was already an important understanding of learning, knowledge, leadership and expertise in First Nations communities, except perhaps in the negative; why try so hard to “cleanse” these kids if there wasn’t a powerful draw to an ancient and practical set of stories and knowledge that intimately tied these children to their land?

Ripping all of that apart, ripping kids from their families and their territories and ripping their psyches clean in two was a brutal act of colonial violence, the repercussions of which continue to haunt our communities to this day.

This collection of acts, in short, sums up colonization. Colonization CLOSES SPACE. It places limits around everything: fences on the land, permissions on behaviours, boundaries on language and cultural practice. To colonize, you must fence something in.

But I’m no pessimist. One can see that the long drive to colonize First Nations in Canada has resulted in some powerful openings. For if colonization is closing space, then freedom and liberation is opening space. And opening space is an irrepressible instinct. As Samuel Adams once said about the United States:

Truth be told we are seeing a renaissance in First Nations communities and cultures these days. It is not a colonial uprising in the traditional sense of the word but perhaps more interesting than that. It is a broad opening of space, living in truth, and evolutionary movement that transcends both traditional First Nations cultures and mainstream Canadian society.

This renaissance combines a powerful position of asserting Aboriginal title in traditional territories (supported by the Delgamuukw court decision of 1997) with the demographic certainty that within 20 years cities like Prince Albert, Saskatchewan will be majority Aboriginal, making more and more public governments in Canada accountable to Aboriginal populations (as the Inuit elected to do with Nunavut in 1999). There is both an assertion of uniqueness with a reach towards transcendence of the status quo. Powerlessness is seeping away through court decisions, demographics, economics and Realpolitiks.

All of this is supported by an emerging sense of leadership (link is a .pdf) and opening that I can feel in the broader sense. Certainly there are daily struggles to be won and lost but in general the project is well underway, and every gain sustains and feeds that that spirit that Adams wrote about 230 years ago: the human intolerance for remaining a colonial subject.

Linkage: