The iron fence around the head office of the Canada Life Insurance Company in Toronto. I painted this fence twice during my summer jobs in 1987 and 1988. It was the required shit job of the summer students who came to work on the building maintenance crew, assigned to us by an authoritarian jerk of a boss who made sure the painting happened during the hottest and most humid week of the summer. This was also the company that cruelly fired downsized my father four years later, which I mention below.

Cory Doctorow has a long piece today that centres on the theme of “the world moves on.” it is a survey of how the 21st century has gone, the concentration of wealth, the degradation of products, law, governance, environments and organizations. The rise of a fascist view of the world that divides us into those “born to rule” and those “born to be ruled.” It is a push to acknowledge that the real feelings we are all having that something is fundamentally broken is not just a nostalgic throwback. The idea of “Making * Great Again” is not that we go back to a time when it was great. It is that we go forward to a time which the persona that declares that intention is in charge of everything. And others are not.

I had a lovely call yesterday with a younger colleague, a person whose dreams and aspirations and talent propelled her into a relationship with power that helped to meet her desire to have an impact in the world. But she found herself trying to wrestle with the cost of that. What does it mean to get close to power, to have a hand in the policy that changes lives, to be involved in a tangible way to make the world better for many people? There is a cost to it, and I can relate. One feels as if one is selling a soul for the chance to grab some influence.

It strikes me as an interesting bifurcation. When I worked for the federal government in the 1990s I was part of a team of people that ran a very important third party stakeholder process which brought non-Indigenous voices and interests into the treaty process. I didn’t;t always like or agree with the people that I was working with, but as a representative of the Government of Canada I took my job seriously. We were doing the work of treaty making and not including the voices and intelligence of people who would be affected by those treaties was to do a disservice to the First Nations with whom we were crafting a sustained and historical relationship.

My colleagues all had different interests in our work. Some were generally distrustful of government to be able to represent citizen interests and they were motivated to ensure that third parties, especially business interests, were as involved as possible. Others were motivated by the history we were making and desired to be a part of something that was sustainable over time. Still others were deeply motivated to ensure that First Nations found themselves in a just and reconciling process and that the honour of the Crown was of the utmost importance. And some were just good public servants which meant they did what they were directed to do and did it well.

I left that job when someone senior to me told me that “I cared too much” about the work. I wore my passion on my sleeve which led to a disagreement with a new boss who didn’t have the lofty goals of my former boss and whose inattention to relationships and the historical nature of the work was lost behind her need to establish technocratic credentials. I hung out my shingle and went to work for Indigenouos organizations, non-profits and governments that were committed to the work of building communities and caring for people.

Several of my friends went the other way, into industry or saw out their careers in the public service. We had been held together in the common project of treaty-making, even though we had many different motivations and purposes for being there. I don’t know that anyone ever felt like they were selling their soul to do the work they did after they left. But they made choices to find them places they cared about and aligned them selves with that. There is always a tradeoff.

In speaking to my colleague yesterday we both shared a sense that over time our sense of impact had shrunk, perhaps to a more realistic size. We all have huge desires to make a legacy in the world, and it takes true encounters with power to find out if we have what it takes to do that. I am in awe with my friend who have successfully run for public office and formed important pieces of federal and provincial governments, or those who has started non-profits or advocacy organizations that have pushed the needle on public policy. I have done a little of that in my own way, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the local work I get to do, by which I mean what happens in the encounter with people who are confronting real particular problems, often with no solutions. I love sitting with 80 year olds in church halls talking about the future of their congregations and accompanying them in the transition. I love sitting with leaders who are exploring how to expand their ability to work with multiple voices and multiple perspectives. I love to watch our Bowen Island business community wrestle with what a local economy might look like in THIS decade. Or a social services agency who has the talent and connections to deliver good quality services in new ways becasue the context seems to drive them to impossible situations.

Cory’s piece names a dynamic that he associates with “conservatism” and its worth quoting in detail:

I collect definitions of “conservatism,” and one of my favorites comes from Corey Robin’s book, The Reactionary Mind. Robins asks how it is that we can call so many disparate, irreconcilable ideologies – various ethno-nationalisms, imperialism, financialism, patriarchy, Christian nationalism, libertarianism, white supremacy, etc – “conservative”? What binds all these views together?

Robin’s answer: the foundation that all these otherwise disparate views share is that some people are born to rule, while others are born to be ruled over. When these lesser people are elevated to positions of power, their inferiority creates a system of misrule, by which we all suffer. The best outcome for everyone is for us all to know our place and defer to our social betters.

That’s why conservatives are obsessed with affirmative action, DEI, and any form of anti-racism. For them, the discriminatory outcomes we see in the wild are natural, reflecting the in-born defects in the people at the bottom of the social order. That’s why, after every plane crash, every collision between a cargo ship and a bridge, every spectacular corporate bankruptcy, conservatives race to uncover the race, gender, religion and sexual orientation of the captain, the pilot or the CEO.

If the person who oversaw the catastrophe has anything remotely resembling a marginalized identity, then this is loudly trumpeted as confirmation that “diversity hires,” promoted above their station, are ruining our society and wrecking our bridges. Naturally, if the person in charge was a wealthy, well-born, straight white guy, that’s just proof that shit happens – it definitely doesn’t prove that white straight guys, as a class, should be removed from positions of power.

For conservatives, virtue is “whatever the people who are born to rule desire.” Hence Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservativism, “exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” It’s not a crime if the president does it. It’s also not a crime if your boss does it, or if a monopolist does it, or if ICE does it. It’s not a crime if the IDF do it, or if the Epstein Class do it. “Taxes are for the little people”:

Now I don’t think that’s necessarily “conservative” although it certainly captures a big wing of the current American conservative movement. I think it’s a description of fascism. But it nevertheless points to a feature of our current times that derives from the concentration of wealth a power: we are increasingly isolated from he levers of real power such that stuff we CAN is not stuff that can FIX whatever is happening.

Doctorow concludes with a kind of muted optimism that the way to be in this world is to be political. Join a union, join a political party, get political. Put your hands on the levers of power while we still have them:

Doing politics is hard. Hell, after all, is other people. It would be great if we could make change by changing ourselves, but that’s not how any of this works. The world has moved on, and you can’t save it. But together, we can restore the beams and beat back entropy. Hell is other people, but only because other people are so great but it’s so hard to figure out how to work together. We can do it, though. We did it with the post-war settlement, the 30 glorious years when we built the welfare state, regulated polluters and bosses, and kicked off the civil rights movement. We did it then, and we can do it again. We must.

I like his spirit. But I don’t know. I don;t know what to tell younger colleagues and I don’t know what to tell activists. Politics has become thoroughly enshittified. I have great respect for the people that run for office and chose to govern, especially in the local sphere, but the way politics is related to governance is constrained to serve the interests of the market, the “economy” and those that wield power in those places. That doesn’t mean I don;t think we should devote ourselves to one another and the things we believe in. And I do think we need more unions. The law is still somewhat intact which is why First Nations in Canada are coming in for so much attack. The powers that be know that Constitutionally protected rights throw a wrench in the works of global capital interests who wish to be as unfettered as possible to extract, ship and profit from resources that are located in territories in which First Nations exert a legal form of title. The law still matters a bit, at least in Canada. If I was a young person want ting make social change, I might go into law. I found myself donating to organizations like Egale that fight for the protection of human rights.

My father’s world was different to mine. I started my first real job the same week he was downsized from his, from a company where he had spent 26 years, where he had reached to ceiling of promotion and where he was happy to live out his life as a junior executive. He was escorted from the building at 6pm on a Friday night, because he had been working late. His sole piece of advice to me was “don’t give your loyalty away.” That served me well. Perhaps my advice to folks now is “don’t surrender your love, purpose or integrity.” But I done;t know ho you also make money doing that.

I think the world is different than it has been. Maybe you feel the same way. All I was able to offer my friend yesterday was a connection to someone I felt she might resonate with, and a willingness to just stay in the inquiry because she was so genuinely committed to doing good work in a full-hearted way, with incisiveness and discernment.

What kinds of things are you doing to find your way in it? What do YOU tell younger colleagues who want to do the work you do?