Development from Within
The Ethical and Psychological Dimensions of Ecological Development
Development from below needs to be complemented by a concept of "development from within". There is a clear psycho-social dimension in empowering environmental change. If people are going to get involved in social change processes they need non-monetary motivations, they may fear failure, the development of projects provides a host of possibilities for complex interperson psychological problems. The purpose of this article is to discuss these things - above all what the problems are and how they can be overcome.
Logistics: many small scale and dispersed changes versus centralised large scale change
The solution to the environmental crisis, if there is to be one, lies in countless millions of people taking actions in their immediate habitats, in their networks of relationships, with their friends, families and neighbours, to change the way they live. This cannot be catalysed without moving in the direction of people's motivations and this extensive change cannot happen without a deep effect on people's psyches. Above all if it is to happen at all it will require that people take more initiative in their local environments and that means a less passive lifestyle.
It is difficult to believe that millions of individuals or families could or will initiate the needed changes purely of their own accord as private initiative without catalysing mechanisms, without support and without motivation or incentive to do so. The transformation of society towards sustainable lifestyles by a more active citizenry is not going to be achieved merely by mass media exhortations by TV personalities and politicians to be more environmentally friendly in the way we live - nor by more and more programmes which show how the problems are getting worse but which leave us with no sense of what we could actually do tomorrow.
For states to support practical and constructive changes by millions of their citizens in their habitats requires a radical change of thinking and radical psychological adjustments. For thousands of years structures of social authority have evolved in which people expect to look upwards for solutions to collective problems. Politicians and leaders pander to this psychological complex which is rooted in the continued present in our psyches of our childhood attitude of awe to our parents. In cultures in which it is usual for children to be expected to be unquestioningly obedient and dependent, in which parents (and teachers) often take little or no account of their feelings, a huge proportion of populations find it difficult to be constructively assertive. They are unable to make initiatives for their needs without trampling on other people and feel unable to move confidently to take on the uncertainty of new activities in new settings. Anxiety because of fear of getting it wrong and being thereby vulnerable tends to make people look for parent figures to solve their problems for them.
As Adolf Hitler put it so succinctly "What good fortune for those in power that people do not think".
In times of crisis this mass psychology creates a longing for those psychopathic saviours like Hitler who step forwards claiming to have all the answers if only they are followed obediently. Such psychopaths have few real ideas of their own but hang on the coat tails of ideologies or channel mass frustration and fear against collective scapegoats. Friedrich Nietzsche, a victim of child abuse, made this philosophically respectable while Hitler and Stalin, also child abuse victims, are the twentieth centuries best representatives of the supposed 'Uebermenschen' in practice. (Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, New York, Doubleday, 1990)
What is needed at present is the exact opposite. A relationship between state and citizenry is required where it is recognised that the place for initiative and change must be passed downward. The psychological tendency to wait for instructions by those who are supposed to know better needs to be seen as one of the main social, psychological and cultural problems to be worked on. What is implied here is a need for the state to catalyse, enable, support, promote and foster, initiatives by and for its citizens in constructive transformations of their local environments. The role of the state is not to take over and control this process - it cannot do so. It can, however, co-ordinate it, and make it coherent, through its policy decisions (funding priorities, regulatory requirements etc.).
The danger in modern society is that impoverished communities will be unable to do transform their environments. It lies in environmental and economic disasters leading to social decomposition with communities rent by the conflicts caused by trafficking and paying for illegal drugs alongside a longing for those saviours with their simple paranoid messages about which scapegoats are 'to blame' for all societies ills. To prevent social decomposition leading to political destabilisation we need channels for people's energy in which they can be constructively empowered - gaining in the skills, organisation and place in a society that would, in the process, become more equalitarian.
Greater equalitarianism through support for people's initiatives from impoverished localities is message that will be heard with hostility or disinterest by some of today's political and economic leaders. Many politicians and social leaders have a psychological need to be seen to be a 'big person'. As explained elsewhere this often arises when one is made to feel small when one was small - it is a way of resolving an inferiority complex. This becomes a nuisance when it means others must be made to feel intellectually or morally inferior. This psychological complex of many of our political leaders will have to be eroded if our goals is to encourage and support millions of people to change their living environments. This vast process cannot take place without eroding the assumption that history is a story made by a few extraordinary people with everyone else functioning as bit players, extras and audience.
The crisis of motivation for ecological change
Current ideas about sustainable development, which adapt the ideas of orthodox economics and leave the initiative to the rich and powerful, have not solved the problem of motivations. If the main motivation in the economy is making money in competitive markets firms will make more if they avoid taking responsibility for their wastes and their pollution. The cheapest option is to sink a redundant oil platform at sea.
This dilemma of motivations arises from a version of sustainable development which involves mainly reacting to problems. Sustainable development is usually described as an attempt to modify, to qualify, to regulate and control another process - the economic process - which has a logic and dynamic all of its own. The chief players are businesses and politicians and civil servants who are supposed to regulate and influence them. As these politicians, civil servants and businesses try to get to grips with sustainable development they look at an ever growing and bewildering list of new tasks, issues, problems, and financial costs that they will have to bear on top of their existing work loads, in addition to their pre-existing agendas, add on to their cost structures.
Sustainability here is the brakes and the brakes are put on with reluctance. The motivation is not easy to find in this reactive 'end of pipe' version of sustainability. In this context it is difficult to make the idea of Sustainable Development seem to be anything else than a nuisance, something that has to be accepted, but which is never going to be seen as positive or attractive.
To get anywhere we have to turn this crazy logic upside down. We must make the environment the focus of development. The environment are the spaces and places in which we live. Instead of businesses as the leading actors, households and communities can be seen as the key players in redeveloping localities that are in decline and/or which have severe environmental problems. With the political will households and communities could be supported in various ways to play this role. This means social policy and environmental policy together guiding a development economic strategy at the local level.
The Greek work from which ecology and economy is derived is oikos, meaning home. Pro-active ecological development means developing and redeveloping our habitats with our families, neighbours, and friends in order to improve the quality of life, and cheapen our cost of living. Much of this can be done outside of paid work - much of this would be an investment of domestic labour whose goal would be making our habitats more comfortable and cheaper to live in (e.g. reducing fuel, food and water bills). Much of the activity can also be play and recreation. The more the better - for in our re-creation we do not ask for payment, and because we are free and relaxed we tend to be at our most creative and inventive. That is what we need - people enjoying themselves, inventively changing the essentials of their lives.
Recreation as re-creation and as re-generation.
We can change much in play, in hobbies and in leisure. In English the word recreation can be broken down into its two parts: re-creation. Recreation can re-create people and re-create places . It can recreate the economy and society.
Recreation, leisure or adult play is not the same as work because people get involved for different motives and with different expectations. One of the main barriers to doing new things is fear of failure and fear of being seen by others as inadequate. This fear of failure is greater in formal settings where efficiency and performance is more likely to be subjected to appraisal and judgement. In their hobbies and free time, beginners are unlikely to want such things. It is true that gardeners and other hobbyists can be fiercely competitive - they are proud of what they can do after many years experience. They may fear also that an inexperienced person may have a place that will be breeding and transmitting its weeds and pests to their plot. However, the competitive attitude is not so prevalent as it does not have roots in market competition.
When one is a beginner one cannot reach a high standard at first. Indeed unless there is space for people to feel relaxed about trying things, without a fear that what they are doing is being measured as to standards, and in a competitive process, then they may not start in the first place. The fear of failure can be reduced by several means. (1) Organising more of our activities as play and leisure; (2) Organising activities in groups so that successes and failures are shared and beginners are included in bigger projects learning before they make individual initiatives; (3) Being careful about how one describes what one is doing. If one describes one's aspirations in very ambitious terms then modest results are likely to be viewed as failures. If ones describes one's aspirations modestly then modest results are seen as success.
Later, what we learn in our modest collective leisure projects may enable us to function efficiently where efficiency matters more - in the mainstream economy. Many of the initial things we do are preparatory to that and we need to build a continuum, a gradual progression to keep our self confidence and morale in the process.
Fear of Failure - trial and error so that the 'errors' are not failures
To be empowered people must make individual and collective initiatives - as they act, if they are fearful that they will 'get it wrong' , if they are fearful that they will 'fail' in their plans and initiatives, then they will be dis-couraged.
Fear of failure can be a powerful discouragement to innovation - finding ways to minimise this fear, to en-courage rather than to dis-courage, is a proper topic for consideration in considering the psychology of sustainability.
Before new policy approaches, institutional forms, techniques or technologies are successfully developed there is an inevitable period of trial and error. One can rarely develop anything new without a process in which first crude attempts are refined and modified. There is an inevitable period of adjustment. What turns error into failure is that one is penalised in some way for not getting it exactly right at the start - one loses out in some way. Losses may be material or emotional and interpersonal. Losses are material when money and economic resources are involved. Losses are emotional when the continual attempt to initiate and innovate do not come to fruition and one becomes frustrated, disheartened, and begins to feel foolish or demoralised in front of other people. The gap between what one is trying to achieve, between one's stated goals and one's achievements stays too wide for too long. Visionary ideals are fine - but if one fails to deliver, after a time, disillusion sets in.
It has to be said that, at the start, there are relatively few that are prepared to start on untried paths. Animateurs who will risk giving it a try are few in number. A large majority are conformists because they do not want to risk what they have already, they are too close to the edge of survival to risk failure, they do not have the time or financial or emotional resources to risk it, and/or they believe that necessary change 'is the responsibility of government and authorities' not of citizens.
Ego Games
Initiation of the new is indeed risky. Unsuccessful innovators can be seen as cranks, eccentrics, failures - indeed they can become eccentrics. At the beginning of a process how can one know that one will be successful? The truth is that one cannot guarantee success. To initiate is to carry the risk of failure.
One reason for failure is that one may fall out with others. One becomes habitually angry and frustrated and tries to rescue one's self esteem after being frustration at being ignored by more orthodox people. One becomes angry with all those who will not back you because they will not risk doing anything out of the ordinary and one starts to become arrogant. Over time the agenda just becomes proving these people wrong, after time other people sense that what is at stake is that they are seen as intellectual and moral inferiors. This can be re-inforced if would-be initiators and innovators have unconscious motivations to make a name for themselves because they have a personality that is craving to be noticed. The intrusion of this personality trait into the development process can severely disrupt getting things done. People begin to fall out with each other because they feel that they are not being recognised and thanked enough, they are not getting enough attention. Real divisions of opinion and priority over real issues can become more polarised than they would otherwise be because there is another, underlying argument going on, namely, who is to be regarded as the intellectual and moral superior in the argument. This then prevents an ability to look behind the differing points of view for shared pictures which integrate all points of view and represent common strategies.
Sometimes the frustration of developing new things will make these kinds of conflicts worse. Often there are no solutions other than to learn what one can from what has happened, to turn away from conflict and try something else.
Pursuing follies to become wise
The English mystic poet and visionary William Blake wrote somewhere that if one pursues a foolish idea long enough then one will become wise. Presumably what he meant was that if one pursues a folly for long enough one will go from mishap to bad experience to misfortune. But if one open mindedly learns at each stage then one will learn a great deal by being so far off the beaten and well tried paths. Therefore, in the end, one will arrive at insights and new ways of doing things, that do work, and, perhaps, that no one else has ever thought of. (An example is to be found in the book One Straw Revolution where a precursor of Permaculture, the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka describes how he challenged the mainstream farming and orchard techniques in Japan. For a long time the results were catastrophic - eventually, however, he arrived at ecologically friendly and organic farming methods which equalled and exceeded those of petro-chemical based agriculture. If these results are not known it is because he does not have the PR machine of international agri-business).
What matters is not failure. What is really threatening is an inability to learn. True wisdom lies in the ability to change one's mind because one recognises the limits of one's knowledge i.e. that one may be wrong. Even more, wisdom lies in thinking again about words like 'wrong' and questioning whether they are sometimes misleading. Wisdom lies in the recognition that one's thinking will always be in need of adjustment, that this is a continual process and that one never has 'the right answer'. When one forms a view of 'how things are' to guide one's decisions and actions one must live with the fact that ideas, whether held by individuals or by groups of people, are constructs, they are creations of the human mind to help in our practical dealings with the world. But the creations of our minds ( our ideas and our theories of how things are) are often not adequate to the problems and tasks that confront us (which is how we should judge their worth).
Naive empowerment - how power psychology undermines collective decision making
Many problems are thrown up when empowerment is organised naively if one tries to 'empower the powerless' by simply elevating those without any experience of power into decision making roles. This can happen when organisations are trying to change or are trying to recruit new people who are not as familiar with how things work as the "old hands". Issues arise from (1) Different levels of competence in decision making; (2) Privileges associated with decision making; (3) Relationships between people assumed to have competence and skills - and those assumed to be without them; (4) Conflicts over prioritisation; (7) Conflicts over levels of commitment - who is the most dedicated; (8) Responses to feeling out of one's depth and the difficulties some people have with participative styles - wanting to be told what do; (8) Personality conflicts that emerge from unconscious motivations (like a desire to make a name for oneself, a craving for attention, admiration etc.).
Decision making competence
Taking decisions effecting other people involves exercising decision making expertise. One can harm others by one's decision making because one is an incompetent decision maker when one lacks the necessary expertise. This lack of expertise may be because one lacks the experience and qualifications to take the decisions. The words 'experience' and 'qualifications' are used here to have a very wide meaning. Experience will allow decision makers to 'orientate' themselves in the situations in which they find themselves, know what information they need to look for in order to form their judgements of what is happening, and what needs to be done. However, even very experienced people will sometimes find themselves in new situations where they have no past precedents to take decisions from. Nothing quite like that has happened to them before.
If we are to try to get hitherto powerless people, people with still limited skills, to try to take more and more part in decision making, it is into such new situations, with inadequate orientation, that they are often placed. Such people need a lot of non-manipulative support to participate. Developing such support arrangements raises yet other complicated issues.
The mere granting of entitlement to make decisions, for example when appointed to a job, or elected to a committee, does not necessarily mean that one has, or will acquire, the necessary expertise for that role. None of us are born with a ready knowledge of accounts, management and committee working. Nor are we taught at school how to balance time and personnel resources against needs - by prioritising objectives, or how to draw up a budget, a disciplinary code or a job description.
The privileges and abuses of decision making
'Good decision making' is, however, more than a 'technical' question of expertise, competence and 'skills'. For those at the receiving end of other people's decisions there is more to it than whether their masters and mistresses are 'good at their job of being the boss'. The position of power also typically involves a structure of inequality and privilege. The person 'with power' is typically able to get a higher income, greater status, prestige. They have the bigger offices, the best carpets, and the nicest view out of the window. Because they can control what others do, they can so arrange things to their own convenience. Other people have to make the adaptations to fit to their needs rather than vice versa.
In our society privilege, power, and prestige commonly go to those who possess forms of expertise needed by the most powerful groups in society. The idea that their skills should be paid for highly, is so much a part of 'common sense' that it seems 'obvious', and part of the natural order of things. In the Green movement, however, there is a view that such privileged, 'well-sped' life styles are the wasteful and polluting lifestyles that a 'part of 'the problem'. Challenging these lifestyles in practice has far reaching ramifications.
In 'common sense' terms there are a variety of well-worn phrases about power which express the idea that there is a limit, beyond which, the inequality and privilege that goes with power, and the measures used to extend and protect it, are socially unacceptable. 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely', 'Power must carry responsibility', 'The Arrogance of Power', 'The Abuse of Power'. The degree of this social unacceptability rather depends on who you are, and what your political philosophy is.
We should beware of assuming we will not get entangled in issues associated with the privileges and abuse of power. It has been my experience that in the chaos created in trying to elevate hitherto powerless people to the prestige of new decision making roles that some may sometimes find themselves hopelessly out of their depth in terms of their expertise to take decisions in those roles. I know this happens because I have been out of my depth myself....many times.
Powerlessness corrupts
This may have more lasting effects than a simple failure of such people to participate fully until they learn new skills. (And I do not doubt that they normally can). The last thing most people want, is to be seen making a hash of things. The possibility that they might be seen to be 'failing' in positions that, for the first time in their lives, had given them some dignity and status could be too painful. That could make such people feel small again, and a failure - something that parents, school teachers and other authority figures might have made them feel too often. So they might not listen to, or try to understand people who disagree with them. All disagreement can seem to be criticism and all criticism can be seen to be an accusation of failure, of 'getting it wrong'. In that context such people might be vulnerable to the temptation to instead see all the problems as residing in the incompetence, malevolence or perhaps jealousy or hostility of their critics. This will especially be so if their critics ways of relating their criticisms, have or appear to have, the usual condescensions of powerful know-it-alls. Fear of humiliation can blind people to the valid points others might be making.
Until decision making expertise is more generally dispersed throughout society; until more collective forms of decision making are developed; until decision taking no longer carries the same social status and privileges - it will be very difficult to eradicate the connection between the possession of expertise and having a big 'me-size'.
Me size was discussed in the first chapter. It is the estimate that people have of their own importance in the narrow social circle in which they live and work and in the wider social world. Idealistic organisations in which people, hitherto without any personal or social power, become involved in participative structures, can easily involve people in new roles that, instead of developing social solidarity and a sense of equality, may instead serve to rapidly inflate those people's sense of self importance over and against other people. If out of their depth in the actual practicalities of decision-taking, such 'me-inflated' people may then have recourse to the usual abusive techniques whereby power seeks to protect itself - censoring and persecuting critics, scapegoating other people to redirect anger against more vulnerable targets.
Unfortunately it is only when one has gained considerable expertise in the making of some decisions, that one can know quite how complex some decision making is. The acquisition of this experience and expertise usually puts people onto 'a good little earner' with a high status. They may then protect their privileged position and join the mainstream view that life is about money, power and consumption. They will have a vested interest in trying to use the complexities of decision making as their excuse for never sharing decisions or their privileges.
If sharing power, empowerment, is seen as a worthwhile thing then it becomes a processes which, like all other social processes, throws up problems to be solved. This is a learning process like any other - but we should not underestimate the difficulties.
Transferring expertise - some difficulties
Developing the expertise of decision making among hitherto disempowered groups is a topic in its own right. It might seem that all we have to do is for those who have it to teach those who do not. However, if we are realistic, as was said earlier, we must recognise that alas, many people's childhood experience of being taught has not been happy, they are not keen to 'go back to school', and not a lot of us are good teachers. Transmitting expertise from those who have it to those who do not is not a straightforward thing. It is fraught with a host of problems.
As was argued earlier this is because the claim 'to know better' is the point of view of all powerful people and is often associated in people's experience and memory with denial, privilege, abuse, being made to feel 'small'.
Empowerment means growth by those who had been powerless - and learning. When we grow we can draw a lot from other people's experience of the world. However for this to happen two conditions are necessary. Firstly it is necessary that the people with the relevant experience do not take control of the overall learning process away from the people learning from them. A continual 'know-whats-best-for-you' form of interference only hinders learning. It makes the learner feel small and inadequate and stops them following their own motivations and interests. Learning is best controlled by the learner. Secondly it is necessary that the people who, in the given context are in the role of learners, are prepared to acknowledge that the others have something to say, that from which they can learn. What sometimes hinders this happening is a sense of inferiority because the other uses their knowledge in a power way - or the learner expects them to. Just because people know more about some things, and have more experience, they are not superior people - it merely means they have gone further down certain roads of experience and can see things that others cannot. That might mean nothing more than that they are older. Instead of learning from people because they are superior we can learn from people because they have information, or a sense of orientation that we do not. These are not the same thing. It is important, but not easy, to acknowledge this crucial distinction. And it all becomes even more difficult if some people are wanting to be admired or 'looked up to' for the experience that they are disseminating.
Creating two way learning can help a lot here. Perhaps you do have something to show other people but do they have something that they can teach you? If there is and you go into the learner role the learning both ways is likely to be more relaxed as it becomes more equal. For example when one is an individual helping a craft or recycling group come into existence by helping with the accounts and constitution it helps if the group can pass some of their craft skills on to you. What prevents this happening is when the person doing the paperwork, writing and fancy talking roles assumes that they have the more important job and do not want to learn how to sew. This is beneath them. They are really there to help the others.
It also helps to communicate the idea that if others are in the role of learners it is OK, indeed much better, if they stubbornly force the person in the teaching or training role to re-explain themselves until they are understandable. The assumption we tend to pick up from teaching relationships is that it is a failing of the student if they do not understand. This masks the need for a feedback from the students to make clear to those in the teaching role when their lessons are not getting over- perhaps because they are going too quickly, perhaps because they assume too much prior knowledge, perhaps because they show annoyance when their flow is halted and disrupted, perhaps (if the truth be known) because they are trying to hide the fact that they do not understand the thing that they are trying to explain very clearly themselves.
Prioritisation conflicts
Conflicts over priorities will always arise when people organise things together in groups and organisations but people who are inexperienced may not even see the need to prioritise. There is always a limitation of resources - time, money, material. Plenty of people, newly joining organisations might have good ideas of what can be done by the organisations, by the committee that they have just joined - but may only dimly be aware of the notion of constraint.
One way in which this is typically manifested in the management of organisations is that people have more good ideas for work than they can possibly bring to fruition. For every twenty good ideas you might as well do nothing about 18 since you will never have time to get them done. Of the 19th idea, which is the best one, you can be guaranteed that it will take 3 times as long as you thought to get it done. The 20th idea will turn out to be too difficult. So you put your 20th idea in the pending tray and do nothing about it for a while. Eventually you forget the 20th idea altogether. I've done this lots of time.
There are people who have not learned about this. If they see a need - they feel that they must do something about it. Then if they also have an unconscious motivation to feel the superior of others they begin to think that everyone else are fools, lazy or indifferent if they do not rush around frenetically trying to meet the identified need.
But needs are infinite - and resources in office space, money, personnel, and time on committee agendas are limited. It is impossible to get everything done. Even where needs arise out of a planet threatening ecological crisis, out of suffering and abuse in other people's lives, out of the most monstrous social injustices, it is still true that there are only 24 hours in a day. The real questions is where do we draw the line? Which needs we can hope to respond to?
Divisions between 'earnest idealism' and cynical realism
In the context of addressing the problems of the world conflicts often arise over how hard people should work together. For example in organisations whose goals are equalitarian. Some people are enthusiastic to work through huge agendas every week and some people are not. If they are not it doesn't necessarily reflect their cynicism it might partly reflects their greater experience, and therefore expertise, in deciding what is achievable. It might also reflect their perfectly valid wish to have a life of their own at weekends, a right to take holidays, to not stay up all night working, a right to enjoy themselves.
But people can invest their egos in their good ideas - in consequence they can come to think that other people are unwilling to sacrifice themselves to the huge agendas because they are 'less ardent', 'less committed', 'just in it for the money'..... 'less morally virtuous '.
Movements devoted to important causes are liable to be susceptible to odd forms of egoism. An inequalitarian society creates people who wish to feel the superior of others, more important than others. This unconscious motivation for personal involvement can create a competitive struggle as to who can be the most self sacrificing in the service of the cause.
To change the world does necessitate self sacrifice and commitment. But this kind of competitive commitment with no place for rest and recreation can serve to create guilt and misery, sour commitments and destroy working relations with colleagues. Where such earnestness is triumphant it can create a miserable puritanical spirit to a movement or organisation. The movement or organisation comes to be seen by others as 'worthy' - and that word is not meant in an entirely positive way. Where such earnestness is resisted it can lead to the defeat of the 'self-sacrificers' in a form of rejection which involves covert and cynical inversions of their values by those who achieve this defeat. Either way, positive change is undermined.
Conflicts between the old timers and newcomers
Lots of community and voluntary activity takes place in small groups whose membership changes over time and new roles and activities are added to old ones as the project or organisation grows and evolves. The problem here is often that the organisation evolves in a form which suits best the original activities and members. Newcomers developing new fields of work can come to resent the way that the original members and their activities get first priority for the common resources that the organisation possesses. From the point of view the person who successfully got money for a van to transport materials for the garden part of an organisation it is entirely reasonable that it should be parked up by the garden. Later the fledgling building wing of the same organisation desperately needs a van to transport its materials and the assumption that the van should be parked where it is might cause conflict. Setting something going is much more difficult than maintaining the momentum of something already under way. Newcomers with new activities feel more under stress and might be more up-tight. There is likely to be a degree of chaos preceding the creation of a regular pattern of activities in the new part of the organisation and the new participants may take time to get confidence, settle down and gain experience. The older more experienced members with their different settled routine may resent the different feel this brings to the organisation - and the claims for support and time of management committee agendas. When one or two things go wrong and conflicts break out the time discussing them completely takes over the agendas. The newcomers, feeling little loyalty to the old group, might disappear and not come back. The point here is that conflicts like this seem almost inevitable. Mere goodwill and good communications will not solve everything and it is inevitable that things will go wrong.
The inevitability of things going wrong
Things also go wrong because decisions cannot be taken with as much information as one would like. Ideally decisions are shared with as many people as possible being consulted, after careful investigations and thinking about things at length. Often there is not time for that - so as like as not things will go wrong - and one has to accept that. All decision making takes place with insufficient information, in a 'cloud of unknowing', so one might as well accept that one will be wrong, and be relaxed about being "wrong". Creating organisation and projects in which people realise the inevitability of cock-ups is more important than creating organisations in which people boast about "pursuing excellence" - because the stress levels are lower and the longer term sustainability is higher. When people cannot achieve excellence (for example because of unexpected personal problems) the maintenance of goodwill and support for this person is an investment in the morale of the organisation which is felt to really exist for its members. The real problems arise however where some people want to pounce on others people's failings because they want to feel they are "better than someone else".
When things go "wrong" it is easy to assume that mistakes have been made. Sometimes one cannot tell whether this is true or not. When one takes a decision and sees the result of that decision one does not see the outcome of the alternative courses of action that were decided against. The results of those courses of action might have been even worse.....
In unequal societies powerful people want to be seen to get it right. If they get it wrong it invalidates their claim to power. From school onwards we are taught that our entitlement to recognition, to power, comfort and security is involved in getting things 'right'. Getting things 'wrong' means potential demotion. In consequence people are afraid to make mistakes and reluctant to admit them. They are afraid to do new things because they will be seen to make a hash of them....
Actually most problems arise when one insists that one is, or will be, right. The problems do not arise when we get it wrong. They arise when we cannot acknowledge that we might get it wrong, or that we have got it wrong. If you feel infallible and always superior in your decision making expertise then you will not listen to other points of view, and cannot be stopped from making mistakes which are obvious to other people. Then you will not listen and acknowledge how wrong things are. In consequence you will not change direction..... to move forward with hope to the next set of cock-ups.
But problems are almost bound to arise when people start rushing round unprepared to compromise on their point of view. When others seem less committed than they are, and thus morally suspect, it is seems even more inappropriate to compromise with them. When others get annoyed at the inflexibility of those who seem to be 'ardent crusaders' then rows break out. If there are rows then people rush around trying to convince everyone of how good their intentions really are. Rows rarely show people in a favourable light and thus compel extensive public relations activity in which the rowing individuals try and show that they are really acting for the best...
What makes collective decision making a nightmare is people who, confronted by other points of view will not compromise. They need to be seen to be 'right'. Then there are the problems arising from people who will not compromise on their priorities. In addition there are the problems that arise from people who need to be seen to be 'good', who rush around creating mayhem trying to prove, as in the Pop Song:
"I'm just a soul whose intentions are good, Oh Lord, Please don't let me be misunderstood."
These things are frequently behind valid championing of important issues. They turn decision making, in the context of unequal experience, and too limited experience by some, into a competitive struggle which precludes any real reciprocity, learning or compromise. Decision making gets bogged down in 'personality conflicts'.
Responses to not understanding what is going on
Many years ago I was in a small political sect and elected to its 'leadership'. I used to dread the monthly meetings. The reason was that for most of the time I had not a clue what was going on. I dreaded people asking me what my point of view was in a discussion I could not grasp. I dreaded having to vote on an issue I had no comprehension of. To be an inexperienced person in a situations like this can be most uncomfortable.
There are different responses when one finds oneself out of one's depth in this way. Firstly one can attach oneself to the security of being the follower of someone who exudes the confidence and certainty of knowing what is happening. Putting it cynically such gurus can talk any old rubbish as long as they are certain about it. Such leaders may believe their own ideas or sometimes be utterly cynical. If one has been fired by the idea that one has a right to have one's view taken into account, but cannot seem to put such a point of view together, it can become a very attractive option to follow demagogs. To do so avoids uncertainty. Their rhetoric can be felt to articulate one's frustrations against others and, in the process, one does not notice that one has no positive ideas of one's own.
In organisations and movements which are in deep trouble people can become the protégés of demagogs. Such saviours may have simplifying accounts of how things are which are attractive as pseudo-explanations of things. They can simplify by substituting for an explanation of how things are the easier message of who is 'to blame' for how things are. They can reduce complicated issues to the wickedness to be found in others - plus their own version of the 'know better' refrain. This replaces anxious questioning about the important issues, and a sense of being out of one's depth, with the more secure feelings associated with an angry (false) certainty about the people involved.
The other alternative to floundering is, of course, to drop out.
The security of being told what to do - letting other people get it wrong
A key problem of helping people find a sense of their own power and abilities is their desire to be passive and to be shown and told what to do. This is the antithesis of empowerment. Many people want the security of having a boss because they want someone to tell them what to do. People can only be truly re-empowered at their own time and own pace. It is a contradiction in terms for empowerment to be thrust upon people. A lot of people are not ready.
The problem of wanting others to tell one what one should do partly reflects the almost universal over-controlling parenting discussed previously. This makes if difficult for some people to take their own choices. Parenting that invalidates the child's feelings, of what it likes and dislikes, as a valid basis for choice, creates people who have lost access to the emotional responses that would make them 'their own person'. But the problem of passivity is not only down to this. It also reflects the fact that all new environments and situations can be anxiety provoking until one has orientated oneself in them.
If hitherto disempowered people find themselves in new roles and activities in which they are not yet orientated they will be liable to experience anxieties associated with being 'out of their depth'. People are often frightened of getting involved in projects and activities for good reasons. They do not want the anxiety of being in new roles, of trying to understand the new jargon in unfamiliar contexts, of being asked to take new kinds of decisions which they do not feel confident about. The people who may feel very confident about coming together to do some sewing to recycle clothes make a bid for money and suddenly find that they have to have a constitution with aims and objectives, an elected Treasurer and other officers as well as an Inaugural General Meeting. Suddenly what had been fun looks like hard work, a lot of red tape, and the real fear of taking on things where one might get out of one's depth and would be held accountable by funders. What if thefts of equipment occur for example?. A mountain range of tasks and new responsibilities like organising insurance looms up ahead.
If the people nevertheless tread this path then years later it is all easy stuff to them but to newcomers, as has been said before, things do not look at all clear or simple. The unfamiliar environment has its jargon, its initials, its theory and its knowledge of a network of involved people that the old hands know very well. Long term group members commonly do not grasp how difficult it is for newcomers to orientate themselves in the new environment. It is not impossible to think of how a new eco-society can be organised with people in participative roles but we have to give much thought to the apprenticeships to these roles by a focus on practical policy development.
Personality conflicts
Personality conflict is not much thought about - it is a phrase used to explain problems between people where all other explanations fail. In fact, personality conflicts are often the hidden way in which power conflicts are expressed. Underneath these conflicts are often structural issues - like the old hand - newcomer split.
The processes which determines our personalities are complex and were partly examined in the previous chapter where it was argued that power relations invalidate our feelings and thus create distorted people. To understand personality formation more clearly it might be helpful to restate that analysis in a slightly different way - by comparing an emotionally healthy start in life with an emotionally damaging one, then analysing what destructive personal strategies the damaging upbringing leads to.
With healthy parenting one is respected as a person in one's own right by one's parents - that means the expression of one's feelings are respected and are an integral part of one's communication with them. Feelings of anger and hate will act as a guide to defend oneself and move away from sources of danger - love and pleasure as an attractive force. As a child one's innate curiosity will help one to learn, the response to one's cries of distress will confirm that one matters. One will grow up with courage if one risks things at one's own pace, and can return to a real empathic comfort if one gets hurt. Because of full access to the range of emotions one will recognise suffering in others and see that hurting others only rebounds on oneself. Nor will one become an emotional doormat for others or expect others -e.g. parents - to be a doormat for oneself. The feelings of other people would also be recongised and respected and this would form the basis for healthy, equal relationships. One will not be frightened of relationships because one will know that if they begin to hurt one will trust oneself to try to sort them out, and if this is not possible to leave them. If one loses something, or someone, for whatever reason, one knows that one would feel the loss, grieve, and eventually get over it, because in one's life one would recognise this as a familiar situation.
This is not how things are for many, perhaps most, of us. Our full range of feelings are not accepted. The feelings and wishes of parents take precedence in a way that gives us no space, no authentic sense of ourselves. We are stopped from judging from our own feelings what we like and do not like. We might become a punch bag for parents to off-load their frustrations and aggressions. Or we become the vehicle for parental goals and aspirations - goals and aspirations which are, however, not our own. We may be abandoned when we cry in distress, lied to, and punished, 'for our own good' by people who say that they love us and that is the reason for their cruelty. Our parents may stop us growing up, becoming independent, taking our own decisions, because 'they care so much' and 'need to' control all our activities 'for our own good, for our future' - the sort of message that will obscure the real source of our frustrations, for how can one be angry at others for 'caring'? When the resultant confusions, or hate and rage, are expressed, either in the home, or displaced into the playground, this then it starts a new cycle of more punishment, rejection, indifference by the parents, teachers, police. Or, as with the 'young schizophrenic', odd behaviour leads to the doctor's visit called in by 'caring' and bewildered parents. It should be time to fly the nest for an independent life, but the young person has had his emotional wings broken.
Games played by emotionally damaged people
Later in life such damaged people will play different 'games' depending on their particular circumstances. If they have gone down a path that has lead to their criminalisation and/or psychiatrisation they may adopt an attitude towards the law or medical based professions, who earn a living out of their problems, (and experience themselves as 'good', powerful, with get a good salary into the bargain) of at least making these 'good people' work for their money. Or they may create an elaborate world of fantasy in which at least their suffering has some meaning, and they an apparent status and importance. For example, the idea that their suffering is to redeem the sins of the world.....
This brief description does not describe a host of other influences that we take from our pasts into our joint activities - like for example the sometimes crippling effect of rivalries between younger and elder brothers and sisters. The point is that there are not many of us that have not been damaged by our pasts. Many of us responded to the hurts in our past by secretly deciding 'we'll show them'. Our mission is to prove to the people who made us feel small and then to the world that we are important, virtuous and clever people. (I mean look at this book, for example. However, valid it is - what are my reasons for writing it?. Our narcissistic concern to be seen by others as important, clever and good then fits neatly the mass media ideals of our culture which projects an idea of 'success' as recognition, fame and maximum media exposure. But such narcissism can make it difficult to work together. For it can mean that the hidden agenda, is that everyone else must recognise that they are dealing with a virtuous, clever, and good person, tell them so, and look up to them. (i.e. acknowledge that they are not as good as them.)
When this happens we may think we are discussing some item of business in a committee - but actually we are functioning as audience. The real expectation is that we listen attentively and appreciatively and make remarks that celebrates the presence of a wonderful person in our midst.
Sometimes people like this become highly excited and dash around if they have, or have the fantasy of having, projects, ideas, and abilities that will give them the recognition and status that they have always craved.
The neediness that is revealed by an insistent demand to be valued, the demand to be recognised as a heroine or hero, may be very sad. For to be recognised in the way that is being demanded is really a demand to be admired, and looked up to. Being admired and looked up to in this way will not satisfy a deeper craving for love. This often arises out of a sense of neglect or abandonment in infancy. Perhaps one never did have the unconditional affection of parents - but was only loved for what one could do, for one's performance at school, for being 'better' than one's cousins or the neighbours children and thus a pawn in a game of adult rivalry. Or perhaps circumstances contrived to take away parental attention at a crucial time - the death of their parents, the birth of another child, leaving a deep and little understood wound.
Being admired and looked up to, even if attained, gives one an inherently solitary sort of 'satisfaction'. One can only be the subject of others admiration, and looked up to, if there is a sense in which you stand above the other people. You are therefore set apart from them - you are distanced by your sense of superiority and their acknowledgement of this. Hence the solitary, and thus unsatisfactory, character of the resultant emotional experience, which cannot satisfy the underlying craving for affection. In consequence, no matter how much fame and recognition you get, you will never be satisfied. People think that they will be happy once they have made their fortune, and attain the status of millionaires, only to find that they are still not happy. It is the same for those who wish to become famous. No matter how famous they become, it will still not get them what they want, if the drive for fame really arises out of a drive to be loved, (perhaps combined with a drive to get all those belittling critics to acknowledge how wrong they were). At the hour of victory the success is seen to be of little worth.
More to the point this disturbed narcissism is very difficult for other people to work with. The outcome can be that we can be prevented from doing anything. Earlier I said that one problem that can arise in organisations with ambitious goals is an overabundance of ideas of what might be done - but in circumstances where there are not the resources to achieve more than a fraction. What can then happen is that some people can overestimate themselves and initiate work that they will never be able to bring to fruition, through the lack of their own time and resources. This is bad enough but it can be worse if they also, in effect, claim a property right over that work for the future. This can prevent it ever being brought to fruition. They may stake claims so that things cannot be developed without maximum personal ego reward being wrung out of these developments for themselves. They 'patent' more than they can develop themselves, then not let others develop things without them in the leading role, thus strangling the development of their own ideas.
Intrusive management
As another example of these kind of problems in empowerment a friend of mine tells me of a youth project where, in line with the fashion for empowerment, young people came to be on the management of a group of youth workers. Nothing in the life experience of these young people had given them the basis for formulating and guiding workers in a managerial capacity. They did not have a clear view of what policies they wanted the workers to implement. But they did think that for once in their lives they were the boss. As a group of deprived young people angry at always being always bossed around they relished the taste of power - and used it to drop in to the project at any time of the day to demand to know what the workers were doing, to check up on them. Needless to say the workers experienced this as a harassment which prevented them with getting on with their jobs. It did not make for happy committee meetings.
Scapegoating
As was argued in an earlier chapter power is 'earthed' because reasons are found to justify the passing of aggression, violence and frustration 'downwards', onto those more who are more vulnerable, rather than 'upwards'. These processes of scapegoating frequently happen in organisations and groups, including groups which striving to be egalitarian.
A long time before anyone can work out exactly what is wrong people may sense that an organisation is not living up to its ideals or their expectations and hopes for it. Disappointments and frustrations may be felt, but not stated as that would breach the sense of solidarity and shared purpose that is important to the organisation. In this context someone may commit a minor infraction, behave or say something that others do not understand or approve of. (This may even be a questioning of group ideals, perhaps in a cynical or disparaging way, or in a sincere, but too bluntly expressed manner). The group turns on this individual with a ferocity which is out of proportion to what has happened. The group can hold together its identity and shared purpose by defining itself collectively against dissidence. The dissident has performed the 'useful' function of enabling people to channel damned emotions, frustrations and feelings. The group can feel that its problems lie in the lack of sincerity of people 'like that' and find an simply expainable cause for what is wrong. If the scapegoat is then driven, by the ferocity of the group's exclusion to yet more outlandish statements and forms of behaviour s/he then performs a further useful role. The scapegoat has been driven to such licence and behaviour in words and deeds that they move the goal posts on acceptable behaviour and acceptable talking. They enable everyone else to loosen up. The secure collective identity is maintained by a definition against the scapegoat but within that everyone else can begin to talk to each other more freely.
The scapegoat role might be filled by people who has been subjected to an overintrusive parenting which demanded to know what the child was up to, and feeling and thinking all the time so that these thoughts feelings and intentions could be corrected. Such a person may too open about their feelings in a way that is profoundly threatening to others. Such people may have played the same role in the family, of soaking up the aggression, of being 'the cause' of problems. They may not exactly be happy with this role, but it may at least be familiar, a part that they know how to play.
Scapegoats may have more particular motivations. In order to make a meaning out of their suffering they might be taking comfort in their discovery, their truth, that other people cannot be trusted and are unworthy. The secret knowledge of this 'truth' puts them above these other people, it makes them superior both in understanding and morality. They then test situations to reveal this 'truth' i.e. the hypocrisy and uncaring nature of everyone else. Piping up an amplified bitterness that everyone else feels (but hides), and repeating it over and again, fits them up for scapegoating. In extremity their revenge is a suicide attempt whose fantasy is of how sorry everyone else will be - as in the funeral of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the novel by Mark Twain.
If your only tool is a hammer all your problems look like nail
Another life 'script', another kind of personality, is the person who in the past was forced by personal circumstances to confront and fight against powerfully felt oppression. Their only strategies are to fight for things. If things go wrong - they have to identify the person to blame and then attack that person. Their only tool is a hammer so all their problems look like nails...When conflicts in organisations prove intractable it is these people who come to the fore. Such people may then attract inexperienced proteges in the manner related.
To develop a society that is moving away from power as the basis of its relationships these kind of issues will have to addressed. If we understand where some problems might come from we may not need to experience them, or perhaps we can better deal with them, or at least live with them better. Sometimes you cannot solve problems but if you share a common view of the causes and intractability of the problems then people become prepared to live with them without falling out.
No Fail-safe solutions - the need for a range of responses
There are no fail safe solutions for these problems. But they can be worked on. When one is aware of them it effects the style with which one works. Developing an organisation involves spending a lot of time explaining people's actions to each other - when people are annoyed with each other finding a fuller explanation for what another person has done which is not straight away blaming. Earlier I showed that it is possible, for example, to try to make learning two way - giving people the opportunity to be teachers as well as learners. It is possible also to chat, while one is working alongside people, about potential sources of conflict before they occur - so that people become aware of the structural roots of conflict.
By keeping activities practical and recreational, by minimising the earnestness of local transformation and keeping the accent on making it fun, many of these problems are not crippling. Many of these problems arise in existing organisations which are trying to change and become more participative - trying to draw people without previous experience into new processes. This is a bit different from where one is starting things right from the beginning where the people can grow with the organisation that they have founded, learning as they go along and never getting out of their depth. However in any organisation and process people come and go and this may create a host of problems, as we have seen.
Part of the problem here is not only that there may be a conflict between newcomers and old timers but conflicts arise when an organisation starts to become too large. After about 7 members in a group working closely together it becomes difficult to take fully everyone's feelings into account. In larger organisations there are likely to be several different departments or wings doing different activities. The people working together day by day begin to see things in the same way. If they then fall out with the people in another department or branch of the organisation this might become difficult to heal. The potential for falling out in large organisations is always there - who gets the time on the crowded committee agenda to discuss their problems; who gets priority use of the min - bus; who gets to go on the foreign trip; who gets to go to the conference weekend; why can those people never be relied on to get their accounts done on time; what exactly are they up to at the office - it always seems to be on the answerphone; its out of sight and out of mind - they forget to tell our department when they cancelled that event and made a right fool of us......The organisation that was so successful rakes in alots of money, grows and is suddenly the victim of its own success, racked by crises and rows as the incoming staff and volunteers bring in a quite different set of assumptions about how things are and find the old guard cliquey and resentful. The old guard wonder what ever happened to the feelings of solidarity as they were struggling against the odds to get something off the ground with next to nothing - along come these newcomers and expect it all on a plate. etc. etc. etc.
The next set of problems is always in the post......If an organisation is one largely of volunteers who can vote with their feet then it by no means follows that it is good to grow bigger and bigger. Good interpersonal dynamics might involve growing through a looser network of smaller organisations. One can and should chat about these things - making people aware that conflicts are sometimes created by the structures of organisations rather than the wickedness of individuals and trying to evolve structures to minimise the risks of conflicts.
However - going through crises seems sort of inevitable. The important things is learning for next time.
Not always tackling problems head on
Sometimes it helps not to approach problems head on. If you argue strongly for something you will often find people putting up a counter argument. People want to feel they are independent and in order not to be passive they think up counter view points. However if you draw their attention to the problem, if you tell them the information that you have about the problem, then they will often draw the same conclusions as you have done. The need to draw conclusions for other people is often a subtle way of showing that you are a smarter thinker and when you do that they'll often find a different point of view to prove that you aren't. If you assume that they are as smart as you then they might be more likely to arrive at the same conclusion as you.
Another indirect approach which can avoid conflicts recognises if new activities emerge in which both factions can get involved on equal terms people will sometimes put aside and then forget their differences - enmities are forgotten when something new happens. On a larger canvas too the psycho-dynamics of a whole neighbourhood often require an indirect approach to situations of conflict.
Community Workers should, wherever possible develop projects in a way which avoids taking sides in a troubled area. This is because when you declare war on a problem you will often make it worse. While it is true that people whose property is vandalised need direct protection it is also true that if this is the main or only strategy things may go wrong. Let us assume, as is often the case that the vandalism has arisen from young people who are bored, frustrated and angry, because there is nothing for them. If they are quiet and well behaved then their reward for quiet obedience may have been the experience of being ignored and having their needs neglected. The young vandals may actually be smarting from conflicts with parents or step parents and taking their aggression down the street. Their rage cannot be expressed as safely at home, where they are vulnerable, and is more safely expressed somewhere else, where someone else is vulnerable. If one identifies these young people as wicked and wage a campaign for their punishment and repentance, you may create a situation where they defiantly adopt your negative label as their new identity. At least that way they get noticed. Rather than obediently humiliate themselves they prefer to steal cars and have the drama of having police cars or, even better, helicopters chase them. (A lifestyle as advertised on TV).
But look at it now from another angle - and there is one. It would be equally futile to identify "bad parenting" as "the problem" and organise what would be felt as moralising campaign. Parents would probably feel such a campaign as a statement that they had failed by a group of "experts" (living in easier circumstances) who, as usual, know better. Nothing would be more likely to drive these parents against you. The "bad parenting" way of understanding things would not take into account the difficulty and strain year after year of making ends meet on low incomes, of worrying about looking after children, the fear about what might happen to their children on drugs, the frustration of having to look after children for year after year because of too much traffic in the street, the anger felt at having to swallow the multiple humiliations associated with looking for work and claiming benefits and then coming home, wound up by this, to be met by children and young people wound up in the dramas of their own world....
It is not that parent - child relationships could not be looked at directly but it would have to be a process initiated by parents. What stops things being humiliating is when you organise them and steer them yourself. It is when they are organised by others, and the implication is that these people know better what is your best interest, that things become humiliating. For external community work development agencies it is often safer to work indirectly at underlying causative contexts rather than directly and punitively on surface symptoms, gradually removing the need for direct action by outside social control agencies.
Tools for collectively - side-stepping power neuroses - the example of Planning for Real
To some degree these problems can be overcome with specific techniques designed to help people participate unobtrusively, collectively and with an emphasis on showing rather than talking. A technique like Planning for Real, for example, works by enabling people to plan and evolve their ideas without having to speak up for, as we have seen, power often operates through those who are the fluent talkers. (Tony Gibson, The Power in Our Hands, Jon Carpenter, 1996) The point about fluent talkers is that their orientation systems, which are usually integrally linked with the pursuit of power agendas, come to dominate almost automatically. Other people, as we have seen tend to be expected to fall in with these agendas and are, at best, consulted over them - which often merely serves to legitimise what the people with power always intended to do. However the "hands-on" approach of the planning for real is a technique which works because:
1. It starts by working with the people that Tony Gibson, the originator of Planning for Real, calls the "moving spirits" rather than the "leading lights". It identifies those people who want to do something rather than those who want to make a name for themselves- usually by clever talking.
2. It works using a model and map of the neighbourhood or a part of it (e.g. a disused building which could be taken over) which enables people to show what they want to do by putting cut out suggestion cards on the model/map. This avoids needing verbal fluency and switches the thinking into another dimension - i.e. things are posed in terms of design and spatial elements on the home ground of the participants. This puts them on equal terms with visiting "experts" (e.g. planners, politicians, housing department officials etc.). The experts can be turned to if need be. This changes the psycho-dynamics with visiting experts who, rather than being the authorities on top, are now people who can be used "on tap".
3. The making of the model and map can be done involving the neighbourhoods children which gives them an important stake and role in the process. Children also have a way of drawing adults together - in this case in a positive way. The Pf R is done on a Fun Day involving music, multi-cultural events, sports and so on. Fun makes people loosen up.
4. By putting suggestions on cards which people use the they can sort and sift ideas by removing duplications of the cut outs and grouping them together. This again gives a framework which avoids experts moving in to organise a process.
5. The moving spirits make a survey of the neighbourhood to find out the skills and experience of each household. They start with themselves and friends first. Here again the confidence is built up step by step. They do not ask for commitment - another important aspect to make a successful process in psycho-dynamic terms. People do not therefore feel under pressure.
6. Sorting out priorities. The suggestions placed on the model are transferred on cards onto NOW SOON LATER charts. NOW means next week or next month. LATER may mean many years ahead. There is then a process of assessing who is best placed to do what under the alternative headings WE CAN DO IT ALONE/WITH A LITTLE MONEY/WITH A LITTLE MONEY AND ADVICE/ JOINTLY WITH AN OUTSIDE BODY. There is a further column for those things only an outside agency is capable of.
The point here is that the design of the Planning for Real tool kit makes automatic, collective and largely non-verbal a strategy and prioritisation process which policy makers and power holders would normally dominate and conduct through formal procedures carried out through reading, writing and non-everyday speech (i.e. policy speak which is based on written language).
In a process carried on in writing and speech it is very difficult for people not up on the language of the policy makers to come forward. They can easily feel small in front of the clever talkers. But in the PfR people do not have to speak. They can make their contributions unobtrusively, even anonymously. Disagreements can also be expressed without personalities being necessarily identified as anyone can unobtrusively show disagreement by turning suggestion cards on the model upside down. People are not asked to commit themselves beyond what they see as immediately practicable.
Setting a personal example
PfR neatly gets round many of the psycho-dynamic problems discussed earlier in a crucial stage of the community development process. It is a valuable tool for community participation. Unfortunately tools like this have not so far been evolved for all aspects of collective working in community regeneration. A mixture of other approaches are needed to address the issues raised in this chapter.
Part of the solution must be self evaluation by community development workers and community development agencies. One has to set a personal example and community development agencies will ideally become aware of these things and integrate this awareness into their work. Much of the work of a good community development worker involves a keen eye for psycho-dynamics. Any community worker or development worker is frequently going to find themselves in situations where the people they are working with are expressing jaundiced or hostile opinions about what other people have done. Often one must peace make by exploring what are other ways of explaining the actions of other people - that the alleged offenders have less experience, that their situation is more difficult to cope with, that they are struggling in more unfavourable conditions to keep their heads above water, that someone might have forgotten to pass on the important message because the receptionist was ill and they were overwhelmed by distracting phone calls and visitors on the day they were supposed to remember.....
An Ethical Methodology for Community Development Work
The community worker or development worker catalysing social change is well advised to think what kind of personal example they are themselves giving. The following is a short list for self checking.
Do you set a good example by being open and relaxed about your own uncertainties, indecisions and insecurities where it relates to your work - thereby creating a climate where other people can do this?
Can you resist the temptation to show off when helping someone who is not so skilled or who is out of their depth?
Can you resist temptations to tell people what to do rather than exploring what people want to do and then working from that?
Do your enthusiasms lead to pressure on others sometimes? Are you sensitive when people have got too much on their plate? Can you adapt to, and cope with, others dropping out?
Do you try to understand the life of those you work with and how much time and energy they have?
If things went wrong would you say "This is a fine mess you got me into" or "Mistakes are inevitable because we never know enough and are under pressure. Let's see what we can learn from this"
When under stress do you reassure those you are working with that although you are angry/frustrated/frightened those you are working with are not the cause. (If they are not.)?
Would be easy to say "No" to you if you have a good idea but those you are working with don't have the time, have other priorities or haven't yet got the skills to get involved?
Are you noticing when the people you are working with are getting nervous about new commitments where they fear they will lose control of their time and/or are getting out of their depth? Would you be able to put them at their ease by being able to talk about your own fear when you were a beginner?
Do you ever put people in embarrassing situations where they are asked to do things they haven't enough skills for?
Are you out to make a name for yourself rather than help your "clients" pursue their own interests? (Do you spend a lot of time thinking about how wonderful other people will think you are for doing what you do?)
Are you more interested in developing your own ideas than those of the people you work with and for?
If not working in your usual field would you be prepared to follow other people's lead or are you only interested in doing what you already know about? (Are you irritated or frightened by people who know bits of your job better than you?)
When you seem to have more experience than the people they are working with do you make it clear it is only that you might have more experience not that you are a better person? Do they make others feel like equals?
This is a sort of evaluative check list which assumes that the community worker or development agent is providing support based on empathy - and draws attention to how other more egotistical motivations might get in the way. It is important to point out here that no one is perfect. Virtually everyone in our society wants to make a name for themselves, feels insecure about other people taking the lead, gets irritated when other people's ideas get priority, finds it uncomfortable to work with other people's anxieties. One cannot and should not expect to find anything else inside oneself. The important point is recognising that those things are there and then being able to gradually get better at correcting for them - because one recognises that when these things get in the way that ends up damaging working relationships. When one can get these things right it creates optimal relationships in which things can get done rather than tit for tat squabbling which so often gets in the way as people try to prove they are better than everyone else. One develops an ethics based on non-futility.
In redeveloping places and people one redevelops ethics. A new set of principles emerge. This is not based on a authoritarian view of right and wrong identifying who is to blame for things. It is based on the idea that certain ways of relating to other people are futile because everyone effected ends up frustrated and further away from what they want to achieve.
The Ethics of Development for social excluded people
Ethical behaviour is not learned when people are made to fear punishment. That tends rather to teach obedience - after a while the fear is hidden from view and the punishment is not even felt as a humiliation only as an inconvenience. At some point what develops is an open or concealed hatred and contempt for the authority or authorities that impose the punishment. The basis for this mental attitude will probably have been laid in earlier life. Many people grow up to expect authority to always make them miserable - because that is what their first experience of authority with their parents has meant - or perhaps there may have been this experience with other adults like teachers from a different social background unsympathetic to theirs. Such people will have been told that the miseries imposed on them as children is because they are 'bad' or 'naughty' . This identity for oneself can come just to be taken for granted - then the only worry is whether they get caught. When confronted by lectures by magistrates or judges or probation workers such people may appear to strike an attitude of remorse but this is often largely pretence. For many people driven to destructive and self destructive behaviour by the injustices and inequalities of the social system there is no real basis for contrition. If lectured by figures of authority the offender feels that they are being lectured by the codes and rules of a society and community that has never offered anything. They may indeed feel at the deepest level of their being an incoherent sense of rage and injustice that they cannot find the words for but which is based on something real - a sense that they themselves have themselves been robbed somehow - not of property but of a chance to find the ordinary satisfactions of living enjoyed in the mainstream society, to find satisfying and reaonably paid work, live in a comfortable home and have satisfying sexual and emotional relationships based on affection and trust.
If people who have been used to destructive and self destructive behaviour are to learn ethical behaviour then this must be in relation to projects and movements that really do belong to themselves - in places and in organisations where they feel that they will not be judged as moral inferiors but where they can start again, and can start again not only ethically but in their day to day lives and arrangements.
Developing a self help or mutual aid group together inevitably involves some subordinate of the self to rules, to principles and to codes of conduct. When these are genuinely jointly created and agreed and not imposed or manipulated into existence it helps people agree to abide by them. But many people find it difficult to change instantly the habits of a lifetime. Part of the process of learning the value of ethical codes is through the hard experience of what happens when things go wrong. At such times people may learn, through their own experiences, that the consequences of their actions go way beyond what they thought. Acting unethically creates tangles in life, it can start the process of destroying the life of small group or entire social structures. Unethical behaviour does not begin and end with the act and then being caught or getting away with it. Unethical behaviour starts chain reactions of consequences which tend to get worse and worse until a halt is called. At this point we can come to see that acting unethically is futile, damaging everyone and ourselves too.
There are many paradoxes in this process. I do not believe in aspiring to the status of 'saints'. Saints are so often menaces, they are nuisance characters whose virtue is rewarded with a gold star, a title and place in history. In a society obsessed with power and status everyone must make a claim to being best at something and there are those whose choice is self denial and self sacrifice to a point which is actually neurotic because it denies the very nature of our biology - for example as beings with sexual needs. Such saints are held up as ideals because their message is actually one of obedience - obedience which precludes the very possibility of joy. (The Pope recently sanctified the leader of a religious group called Opus Dei because he promoted the idea of masochistic obedience, an idea very handy to a church that wants to believe in infallibility). Such ideas have no relevance to the future of society - on the contrary they lead us backwards into hypocrisy, the perpetuate the emotional and ethical anarchy and disintegration in the world around us. I do not believe either in sanctifying the words of Karl Marx but in my view he said a very wise thing when he pointed out that without criminals there would be no employment for all sorts of good people - for police, judges, lawyers and jailers, for probation workers, social workers, locksmiths, for experts on ethics, vicars, and an army of supporting clerical workers. If these people are ever to be given the experience of redundancy - then this will only come about by the powerless people finding constructive rather than destructive and self destructive ways of leading their lives.
We have no need for saints - but we do have a need for those who have come back from a real lived experience of destructiveness and/or self destructiveness. Such people may see much clearer than any lecturer in criminology or professor of psychiatry the way the world really is as they have seen society from the point of view of those excluded from it. When one has strayed from the straight and narrow path, been to the places one should not have been to, only then can one see through the hypocrisy of society to its victims. We need then a movement of people who want to start again - but this means a movement of people with records. And these records mean that one is always vulnerable to suspicion and accusation. I am not a Christian in any conventional sense (I do not believe in God - I believe in a planetary life force which some have called Gaia) but it is with ideas like this that I understand the movement that Christ got going - full of 'sinners' because Christ identified with the poor and outcast and saw their behaviour as arising in their life circumstances, reserving his real hatred for the lawyers and Pharisees, the educated know-whats best for you classes. To me the forgiveness of sins, of not judging lest you be judged, of not throwing the first stone, were the ideas of a historical movement of people seeking to start again. (A movement that was slowly taken over ideologically and practically by the powerful in society as Karl Kautsky brilliantly demonstrated in his book, written at the turn of the century, 'The Foundations of Christianity', Allen and Unwin, London, 1925)
Ethics and uncertainty - the place for rules
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other;
Long and short contrast each other
High and low rest upon each other;
Front and back follow each other.
Lao Tsu - Tao Te Ching
None of us is perfect because we act with limited knowledge in a sea of uncertainty, a cloud of unknowns. We cannot foresee what all the consequences of our actions will be and we cannot foresee how others will react to them.
When we lack a clear sense of the bewildering complexity and the vast differences between people we assume that other people are basically like ourselves. When we guess how people will react to us the first way of making this guess tends to be to ask how we would react in similar circumstances. But of course we also know that others are different so then we adjust this idea in a number of ways. Although rather like ourselves we see other people as more or less stupid than ourselves, more or less moral than we are, more or less street wise, more or less tuned into cruel but regrettable realities - realities that we think that we can see but we assume that they cannot. And then these adjustments to this sense that other people are like ourselves enables us to take decisions over their heads if they are more stupid, revenge ourselves on them if they are less moral, give them a lesson in hard knocks if they are not yet street wise enough.
As a rule of thumb however we are more likely to be wrong about people, especially those we do not know well, than right. For example different people have very different motivations. Ethical or unethical behaviour is based on our motivations and the motivations of people are very different. The actions of others may be motivated by the desire to improve the quality of their lives. Or we may not know that they are in a personal retreat. Or they may be trying to stabilise their feelings of anxiety or find expression for the anger at the idea that we have been wronged,
Thus different people act to achieve very different goals in very different circumstances. Because our lives are, and have been, so different we act in many different ways. As others see our actions they are unlikely to see clearly where they have come from - only those closest to us can known that we act because we are desperately in debt, or that we are infuriated by what we see as a slight to our competence, or that we are trying to take a short cut, as we see it, that is in everyone's deepest interest....On a deeper level also our actions arise our of quite different ideas about what would improve our lives (more money, love, fame , power, wisdom, the vanquishing of our enemies...). When we act we also have different ideas about how others will react to our actions (we assume they will, and we want them, to admire us - or perhaps we want them to hate us in defeat or we simply want them to leave us alone...).
Because of this when we act expecting a particular outcome it is very frequently the case that something totally different happens. People react in a way that surprises or bewilders us. This causes us distress because our security in life is based on predictability. We would not do anything at all unless we could be reasonably sure that particular actions would have particular outcomes. Sure, we often act in conditions of risk but if the risk seems too great we don't do anything - we are paralysed by our fear, the insecurity of not knowing what will happen if we act in a particular way.
Unethical behaviour, because if destroys the predictability, security and trust between people that is the basis of shared activity creates chaos. It can create splintering in which each individual, or factions, insist that their perspective on what should happen is the 'right' one (i.e. the one that most corresponds to their view of predictable behaviour, the one they can cope with best).
In order to rescue ourselves from this we can assume a number of approaches.
1. We can let a single person take all our decisions for us. At its best this involves appointing someone who is then held accountable in some way to an elected group. At its worse it involves creating tyrants who are accountable only to themselves because "they know best". For if we have a need to decide in the confusion what is right and what is wrong to regulate our affairs together, and we give this task to one person, then the implication is that this one person is the moral and intellectual superior. This can even ends up in the simplification where we idolise this person, assume that they could never do any wrong, that they are infallible. History is full of emotionally damaged children burning with fury from the experience of abuse and persecution, whose souls have been formed into an unbreakable self certainty about their own destiny, their kampf, to prove everyone else their inferiors and to demand absolute obedience from them - or pious saints out to make a name for themselves by inhuman self sacrifice or pronouncements made from a protected world of cloisters -( not to mention self appointed gurus pronouncing wisely at the bewildering nature of things - like me).
2. Another approach is to try to work towards explicit, agreed (written down) principles. These principles are agreed ways of working together, codes of practice and behaviour to which all agree to abide on pain of sanctions or exclusion from the group, temporarily or permanently. Many of these codes of principles are embodied in law and good practice manuals and we can subordinate ourselves to them. When we come together we can do so for agreed purposes and we can agree, at the time and in the manner we come together, that our shared aims are higher than our individual interests. We can agree that in our dealings with the organisations we create the collective pursuit of goals comes first and us second. The manner of our agreement is the agreement to abide by the written rules.
This does not necessarily make us unfree agents. In our joint and collective arrangements (whether that be a sexual relationship where the parties are explicit on the terms in which they are together or a project with a constitution and codes of practice, or an elected state structure) it is by working through collective arrangements that we achieve more than working alone. This gives us a sense of belonging and, if it is not an obedience based organisation, we can and should have the space to be heard, to play a part in forming the direction of the group as a whole. We have a right too, in the life of the organisation, to write or amend to codes of practice. If we do not like it we can leave.
Because they are so different people react to situations differently and the inability to agree brings out the process of making personal judgements about each other - this person is BAD, this person is STUPID, this person is NOT STREET WISE, (this person is A BIG HEAD writing irrelevant philosophical drivel about community ethics). As passions are raised the temptation becomes stronger to act against the organisation for shared purposes, and therefore against the people in it. In all of this factions and loyalty networks tend to emerge since people are very rarely willing and able to go off into the wilderness on their own.
Organisations organised by and for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy can be very prone to these pressures and dynamics. It is all very well to be ethical when one is rich and not being hunted by a loan shark. At the base of a society that is itself unjust are many people who have been driven to destructive and self destructive behaviour. They come together in mutual aid and self help groups because there is a part of themselves that really, genuinely wants to try again, to make a fresh start after a lifetime of snakes and ladders on a board game of survival.
Degeneration in empowerment organisations
People bring into organisations their own interests, their own grievances, their own ways of acting. At the beginning of organisations and relationships these things may not seem to matter since the aims are shared by all and there is a sense of trust and optimism. This is a period of honeymoon. Later, when keeping the organisation going through inevitable periods of strain these things can become critical. As the organisation seems to ask more of people it puts their loyalty to it and their shared purpose under strain.
I've been in several organisations in which the old-timers have falled out with the newcomers. The old timers have shared the building of an organisation and can seem to newcomers to be a clique who "know it all" and pass off their way of doing things (the way that evolved to suit them best) as the self evidently "correct" way of doing things. The oldtimers remember and glory in the struggle to get things going and may resent the money and contracts going to the people who came along later, on the backs of all their hard work, who have never had to worry and work for what they got, but who are "coming on board" in a quite different way, without all the risks of the past, perhaps as a career move, perhaps through an advertisement and an appointments procedure. Newcomers often do not have that sense that the organisation that they are joining was created by people and perhaps that this creation was the most important thing that the organisations founder members feel they have ever done. For the old timers the organisation was not a career move it may be the most important piece of their life. However, the glorying in the past achievements and hard times by old timers can sometimes be a subtle justification for taking it easy - after having done what they have, the old timers now feel entitled to take out some benefits. Indeed after the anger and frustration which motivated the old timers to get things going they may have got rather cosy. The ideas and ideals of the past may still be what people talk about - because they inspire and justify the organisation to everyone else. However the past ideals and ideas, may only be a radicalism of words about original goals combined with a less inspiring reality. The practice may be very different and newcomers may notice this.
The newcomers are at first indulgent. They want to contribute what they can to bring to the organisation in new ideas and ideals.They want to bring in new interests and different approaches. They may indeed have been hired to do just this. However the old timers may feel that things are good enough already and feel undermined by the idea that things could be organised differently. In practice they resent the time that is devoted to the newcomers on already crowded committee agendas. They resent having to share things that were there originally for their exclusive use - an office computer, transport etc. Newcomers then experience a sense that what they want to contribute to keep things moving forward is not considered interesting or worthy enough by the old-timers whose disinterest can come to feel like sabotage when their suggestions, initiatives and actions are forgotten about, not taken up or not even noticed. The newcomers may have become involved originally because of the radical words and after a short time discover the hollowness and compromises behind the radical facade. People start to talk to people who they think will confirm their discomfort or irritation. Rival factions begin to emerge. Suspicions, sometimes justified and sometimes not, begin about the ratio of what people are putting in to what they are taking out. It begins to look as if some people are putting in a lot and taking out only a little whereas there are people who are rather comfortable and who are taking out a lot but not doing very much any more.
It is as such times that questions of ethics come to the fore. In writing this book I have stressed the not for profit goals, the citizenship and empowerment motives, as well as of working out of a sense of empathy. But there are times when the influence of the mainstream, of money, comes to undermine what one is doing. At such times one must decide what it is best to do. Sometimes there is not the time, or energy, or enough hard information to challenge people with effect and one wait for the right time to challenge or leave. Indeed one must sometimes live through periods in which organisations break up. This has happened to me before and looking back it is possible to recognise that organisations sometimes achieve and then outlive the purposes for which they were established. Indeed they may block further movement towards the underlying ideals because there is a refusal to acknowledge, in the cosy relationships that build up around them, how they have ceased to really challenge the existing order or things but are instead legitimising it behind the radical rhetoric. At such time progress sometimes occurs best when these organisations "die", for this clears a space and provides resources for healthier new beginning .
Sexual Relationships in Holistic Development
One cannot adequately cover the psychological and ethical dimensions of local development working with and through socially excluded people without discussing issues that arise out of sexual longings. These effect the ability and way in which men and women (or gay people and lesbians) work together and get on. A major theme of this book is that we cannot divorce ourselves from our biological natures and it is in our nature as animals to feel sexual desires. Sexual relationships are increasingly difficult for everyone in the modern world as rapid social change and growing mobility produces changes in gender roles and a confusion whereby people find it more and more difficult to find and keep harmonious relationships in which they can find sexual love. For the losers of a vicious and uncaring economic system poverty not only has an economic dimension it has a sexual love dimension. The people who are economic paupers are commonly relationship paupers too and these are directly linked. As George Orwell put it in "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" " Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever present consciousness of failure - above all means loneliness". (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954). Were Orwell writing today he would have probably added "means lack of access to a car" which is so much the key to leisure, shopping expeditions and taking children to school that those without one have very poor chances of finding or sustaining relationships.
People who are socially excluded have commonly suffered abuse or neglect or both in their childhoods and find it difficult to form trusting relationships.Inside the projects and campaigns that one develops there is often a replay of futile and painful strategies as people try to form partnerships. Sometimes they succeed often they do not. Disempowered people feel the same desires as everyone else and often experience this side of their lives as a cruel series of paradoxes in which they somehow never seem to be able to win. For example when they see or meet someone to whom they are attracted they are may feel the attraction mixed with frustration or bitterness. The attractive person reminds them of a happiness that others have, but which has always been out of their reach. But the person that they feel attracted to senses their bitterness and frustration and this leads them to keep the other person at arms length. Or they expect to be rejected and their dejection makes them unattractive. Or they lunge desperately towards people who show the slightest sign of friendship so that these people feel overwhelmed and draw back, thus adding yet another rejection. Or in fear of being rejected again they reveal all their painful past at once, before others have had a chance to get to know them as they are in the present, and bring on just what they have feared. Or they grab at relationships with someone because this other person is considered a desirable catch in their social network - without waiting to find out if they are really compatible.
All of these things have their effect inside the organisations and initiatives one is trying to build. For project organisers it is usually none of one's business how people organise this part of their life - however the complications get talked about informally and it does help to be guided by an ethics based on non-futility rather than denial and puritanism. By this I mean to try to get over the idea that the feelings of bitterness at a lifetime of denial are understandable but that others have rights too and that if expressed inside an organisation it will drive others away. One has to acknowledge how painful it is to accept it, but to say that there is no guarantee for anyone that they will find sexual happiness and that one must avoid ways of relating that impose pain on others as this drives people against you and is futile. That pressuring people to have relationships is futile as the relationship will harbour resentment not love. That if you lunge at someone that will drive them away. That love is something that you give and, as R.D.. Laing put it "Love is letting other people be, but with affection and concern". These principles are not difficult to understand, they can be learned and lived with if people are not totally isolated. They are sometimes difficult to take, however, when they are coming as reprovals from those who never have problems finding or sustaining relationships. The job of holistic development, of a strategy for losers, is to create a place where people can find friends through convivial activities together and find other people who have been losers to talk to about these things.
If these things are not worked on it will be many times difficult to sustain activities in which single men and women work alongside each other. Too often a single women joining a group mainly made up of single men will not be involved for long. Either she feels uncomfortable and leaves fairly quickly or eventually someone makes a pass at her and she leaves. Or if she does go into a relationship with the person making the pass then, when the relationship gets into difficulties, it is she that leaves rather than the man.
It is not only of course a matter of sexual desire there is commonly a degree of discomfort if the woman is working alongside men in activities which the men think of as male activities (e.g. building related tasks). In this case it is very helpful to have womens only activities or days within an organisation while the women gain their self confidence. Attendance to child care is also, of course, an important consideration if women are to get involved.
In conclusion
Disempowered people starting again are not plaster saints. The development of a society from below implies the development of new ways of relating if people are not to be continually tripping themselves and each other up. This is a matter of applied pscyho-dynamics and it can also be said to have an ethical dimension. Thorough understanding of principles may prevent us making the mistakes we might have made in the past again in the future. They give us an opportunity to set to right what has gone before. This may sometimes be painful but when we get the principles right it creates the foundations for a securer future.
© BRIAN DAVEY