Debbie Frieze (Berkana Exchange)
The greater part of what my
neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of
anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me
that I behaved so well?
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
I am not an activist.
In the early 90s, I was a student
at Amherst College. Amherst has long been considered a “bastion of liberalism”
on the East Coast, and it was no different then. Our small community was
immersed in post-modernism, occupying ourselves with deconstructing every piece
of identity we could wrap our minds around — politics, race, gender, class and
nation.
Sure, we did the usual campus
activism thing. We held rallies. We waved our fists at the Chinese government
over Tienanmen Square. We dutifully showed up each year for Take Back the
Night. Someone even immolated himself on the town common my junior year to
protest the Gulf War.
But for most of us, I don’t think
our hearts were in it. Mine wasn’t, anyway. After all, everything we’d been
studying told us that there wasn’t really a right and wrong, there was no
shared story, and there certainly wasn’t any such thing as absolute truth. We
went to rallies because that’s just what politically and socially aware
students do. We’d chant the chants and write the slogans and wave the posters.
But I don’t know if I ever really believed in the cause. I certainly never
considered myself an activist.
Intellectually, I was curious about
just how much I was willing to let go of. I chose philosophy as my platform,
and gravitated toward skepticism and nihilism. I discovered you could really
believe in absolutely nothing, and the world would hang together just fine. I
had a practice in those days, too. My practice was to periodically check in
with myself to ask whether this moment, this now, was exactly where I
wanted to be. If the answer was no, then wherever I was — in the middle of a class,
at a party, on the phone — I would ask myself what was required of me to create
the environment I sought. Often, that meant having to leave.
After graduation, I moved to
Colorado to ski — in part because there was no reason not to. That led to working
at a ski magazine. And from there, I went to business school. What made that
odd transition possible was the idea that, given my lack of belief or purpose
around any particular thing, why not throw myself into an unlikely environment
to see what would happen next?
I am grateful for that opening,
because what happened next awakened my awareness about the path I was treading.
My post-business school experience running a dot-com company was my first ugly
encounter with the limits of a deconstructed world. How obvious it seems to me
now: If you refuse to stand for your own beliefs, then someone else’s beliefs
will slide in to fill that vacuum. For the first time, I had discovered a
system that I felt deep in my soul to be wrong — to be constructed in a
way that did not serve humanity. What that looked like was a world in which
short-term performance mattered more than long-term relationships. Incentive
plans and bonuses were meant to motivate us — because our personal passions
weren’t in alignment with organizational goals. The work culture was designed
to maximize control and predictability. We streamlined our thinking into
repeatable processes and reusable components. We created long-term plans and
measured the gap with our performance — as if our purpose were to excel in
forecasting the future and eliminating deviation.
So I walked out of that world,
completely adrift. In college, we practiced peeling away, layer by layer, the
many systems of meaning and belief that gave us identity. What was left seemed
to be little more than my commitment to deconstruction. And now that no longer
served me either. I could no longer sustain a belief in a world of no absolute
truth when I had become certain about what wasn’t working.
What did serve me was the practice
I had sustained over the years of checking in with myself to discover what I
was being called to create. I didn’t have any language for it at the time.
Mostly, I referred to it as my “gut,” because that was the term we
entrepreneurs felt comfortable with. ‘Intuition’ was also an acceptable word.
‘Guidance’ and ‘spirituality’ were not… And then Berkana showed up in my life
and offered me language and new ways of seeing myself in relation to the
systems and beliefs that I had spent my adulthood abandoning.
For instance, I learned that
systems rarely change as a result of plans and strategies. In only 18 months, I
saw my dot-com company go through massive change, from an innovative and
intimate community of 25 to an impersonal web of 900 people that had become oriented
around self-interest. But no one planned that change. It emerged as a
result of a complex set of conditions that were constantly changing as we grew.
I learned that emergence is the process by which large-scale change does
happen. As separate, local efforts connect and strengthen their interactions
and interdependencies, a system of influence develops — a powerful cultural
shift that influences behaviors and defines accepted practices.
Systems of influence are emerging
all the time. They possess qualities and capacities that were unknown in the
individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the
system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once
there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses
greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental
change.
So what happens when the systems of
influence that emerge don’t serve humanity? I believe that’s the situation we
find ourselves in today—from systems of corporate greed to political corruption
and environmental exploitation. And I believe we can’t break these systems down
by protesting against them, tweaking them or trying to repair them. They are
far too complex. Even if we could change each discrete element, we could never
replicate and change the dynamics how they converged.
The only thing we can do is work to
support the emergence of an alternative system, one that represents the good
intentions that we create in the world. To do that, we have to stand for
something. We have to create, not deconstruct—because life is
relentlessly creating new things all around us anyway. In the past few years in
the
My story of the Now Activism is
just beginning. As I sit and write these thoughts, I’m amazed at how my
intellectual journey has brought me to this place. During college, we always
wondered what would come after post-modernism. Perhaps it is the Now Activism.