Even a decade after the publication of her book, The Feminine Mystique, widely credited for sparking second-wave feminism in the United States, the male establishment took neither Betty Friedan nor the women’s movement seriously. In this context, “Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her” by Moira Donegan” reviews the early years of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and how Friedan dominated it, with decidedly mixed results.
Read MoreA Declaration for Action
By Wade Lee Hudson
Introduction
Countless individuals and organizations relieve suffering and promote justice. Unfortunately, this compassionate humanity community is fragmented and afflicted with selfish and competitive hyper-individualism. Members don’t support each other to undo or control divisive social conditioning, even though this mutual aid could increase their effectiveness, help them unite based on shared principles, adopt new ways of working together, cultivate caring cooperation throughout society, and grow a compassionate humanity movement to change the System.
Currently, gaining wealth, power, and status is primary. Money is a way to keep score. Political ambition is an addiction. Social recognition is an obsession. But these patterns aren’t inevitable.
Businesses can serve the public interest as well as earn profits. Politicians can be community organizers who help build people power. Everyone can welcome praise, if it comes, as icing on the cake rather than seek it. We can make wealth, power, and status means to a higher end: serving humanity, the environment, and life itself, the invisible creative force that energizes and stabilizes the universe and enables living objects to reproduce.
Read MoreThe Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit
By Wade Lee Hudson
Power struggles weaken organizations, but hardly anyone addresses the divisive social conditioning that inflames the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit for personal gain. Overcoming this divisive root cause can help fix dysfunctional organizations and build a systemic reform movement to transform society into a just and compassionate community rooted in democratic hierarchies.
Hyper-individualistic, hyper-competitive domination leads to exploitation and efforts to defeat “enemies” and punish scapegoats. Blind submission reinforces the status quo. The failure to distinguish between justified and unjustified domination/submission interferes with controlling adverse reactions.
Paternalistic human service professionals assume a superior, controlling, disabling attitude toward clients. Nonprofit housing corporations resist collaborating with tenant councils. Kind-hearted people-helpers seek ego gratification and social status. Teachers funnel knowledge into students’ minds in a one-way process. Traditional doctors and nurses treat patients as objects. Self-seeking trainers of all sorts hustle for money and praise.
Read MorePetition for Peace in Palestine
Dear Mr. President:
Israel deserves to exist in peace and the Palestinian people deserve their own country.
The Palestinian Authority and the Arab nations have recognized the right of Israel to exist.
But Israel has not pledged to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza to allow the formation of a Palestinian state on those lands.
International law forbids Israel from keeping land that it seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, including the West Bank and Gaza.
The United States has thrown its weight behind Israel in the Middle East conflict, rather than adopting a balanced approach.
Israel is the largest recipient of United States foreign aid, including two billion dollars a year in military aid.
Israel, with the fourth largest military in the world, can protect itself against military conquest.
Israel could trade land for peace by agreeing to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza and recognizing a Palestinian state on those lands.
Therefore, I urge you to:
Read MoreApril 4
I want to love you as an equal for the benefit of all.
Paul Atreides, Dune; Part Two
By Wade Lee Hudson
Modern society's driving force is the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit. Submission may be involuntary, as with prisoners, but the promise of money and security seduces people to conform. Seeking wealth, status, and power is central. Hyper-individualism fragments society.
People worship “saviors” and disrespect “inferiors.” Lack of respect often takes the form of scapegoating — placing total blame for problems on others. This dynamic is at the root of many crises. Worse yet, it distracts from positive social change.
Nevertheless, as far as I know, no activist organization encourages its members to help each other unlearn this self-centered dominate/submit conditioning. This neglect makes it hard to build an other-centered systemic reform movement.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
The desire for wealth, power, and status in order to dominate and the willingness to submit to oppressive power is society’s driving force. This pattern permeates every arena: cultural, social, personal, economic, environmental, and political — national, and international.
These dynamics reinforce each other, producing our prevailing self-perpetuating system — the System. This hyper-competitive, hyper-individualistic system pressures people to conform, forces many to obey against their will, fragments society, scapegoats “enemies,” blames individuals for social problems, and foments revenge and the desire to punish. With activists, toxic interpersonal dynamics often result.
Changing this system fundamentally requires a new central mission, such as: to transform our dominant social system — the System — into a just and compassionate community that serves humanity, the environment, and life itself.
A systemic reform movement committed to a mission like this could advance simultaneous, synergistic reforms in every arena. This holistic and systemic transformation would address the whole person and the whole society, reform existing social structures, and establish new ones.
Read MoreHow Russia Went from Ally to Adversary, Keith Gessen
The dominate-and-surrender paradigm on the global stage
In early December of 1989, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, Mikhail Gorbachev attended his first summit with President George H. W. Bush... Gorbachev unveiled what he considered a great surprise. It was a heartfelt statement about his hope for new relations between the two superpowers. “I want to say to you and the United States that the Soviet Union will under no circumstances start a war,” Gorbachev said. “The Soviet Union is no longer prepared to regard the United States as an adversary.”... Bush did not react... Perhaps it was because to him, as a practical matter, the declaration of peace and partnership was meaningless. As he put it, a couple of months later, to the German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, “We prevailed and they didn’t.” Gorbachev thought he was discussing the creation of a new world, in which the Soviet Union and the United States worked together, two old foes reconciled. Bush thought he was merely negotiating the terms for the Soviets’ surrender...
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
I know it’s not all about me. Nevertheless, “Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late (Bob Dylan).” At times, I’m sad, mad, lonely, and determined...
After facing these realities, the melancholy lifts and I feel liberated. I concentrate on making the website as good as possible before I die. (Suggestions for additions and offers for help are welcome.) It may take a decade to put the site together as I envision, but someday, maybe many more people will find it useful.
My focus is on quality, not quantity. I work as if this work will someday strike a nerve broadly. I believe everyone should be interested — and committed to implementing these ideas. I think I’m basically right. I may be tilting at windmills; if so, I hope the world will be better for it. I may be pushing the rock up and down the hill like Sisyphus; if so, I’ll try to do it with a smile on my face, chuckling at the Absurd.
I cherish occasional nuggets of connection, such as two responses to the question I posed to the FromWade list: “In what way (if any) do you work on unlearning oppressive domination/submission social conditioning?”
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Barack Obama's presidential campaigns showed we can create a large national movement based on local teams focused on achievable goals. Instead of relying solely on top-down leadership, these campaigns enabled ordinary citizens to collaborate as equals. We can learn from these efforts to build a movement to transform the world with compassion and justice one demand at a time.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Countless compassionate individuals relieve suffering and promote justice, but these efforts are fragmented and internal conflicts undermine effectiveness.
What if we unite, call for holistic and systemic transformation, unlearn divisive social conditioning, build caring communities, and focus on winnable policy changes? A powerful independent, global movement could emerge.
Activists could come together briefly to support each other and accomplish more together than they can alone — and then return to their regular activities, empowered by a sense of purpose and solidarity.
Imagine two million Americans urging their Congresspeople to support a crucial bill with strong public backing but stuck in Congress. These campaigners use various methods, such as letters, emails, phone calls, office visits, and statements at public forums.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
After watching the feature film, “Oppenheimer,” I viewed the PBS documentary, “The Day After Trinity,” and the documentary about its production on the Criterion channel. I then did some research on the issues these films raise.
The backdrop for the decision to bomb Hiroshima was America’s apparently unusual demand for unconditional surrender from Germany and Japan.
Read MoreOrganized people power leading change towards a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change.
We are a global community of organizers, practitioners, educators and researchers catalyzing change through the power of narratives, rooted in the pedagogy and practice of community organizing.
We develop and support new civic leadership that organizes communities to build power and create change. We build the leadership, organizing capacity and resources of change makers across the globe to enable them to win campaigns that strengthen justice and human rights.
LCN members are developing leadership and building power in over 75 countries.
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
Society weaves together our institutions, communities, families, cultures, and ourselves as individuals into a single self-perpetuating social system — the System. This system permeates every aspect of our lives. Our society teaches individuals, groups, organizations, and nations to seek status, wealth, and power to dominate and exploit those below them and submit to those above them for selfish gain.
Compassion-mind individuals and organizations promote justice and relieve suffering in countless ways — at home and work, in spiritual communities and civic organizations, and with their nations. If these fragmented efforts united, they could change the world.
A powerful grassroots movement based on shared principles could nurture just and compassionate communities dedicated to all humanity, the environment, and life itself.
Read Moreby Bill Betzler:
I'm concerned that your monthly newsletter is too macroscopic to be of help in microscopic actions. I've been working one-on-one w/ people experiencing homelessness for 15 years. I start out w/ a systems POV & end up w/ some specific possible action steps. I recognize like you do that systems change is an essential element of the solution & I believe there are things we can do now on a community level to begin to mend the circle.
Read MoreNOTE: In this lecture, which Emerson delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, in January 1842, he vividly describes the young Transcendentalists of his day with great sympathy. However, toward the end, he voices some criticisms of “ all these of whom I speak (who) are not proficients; they are novices;…”
But he concludes with:
Will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?... The thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.
Following are excerpts.
+++++
…Although, as we have said, there is no pure Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the intuitions, and to give them, at least in our creed, all authority over our experience, has deeply colored the conversation and poetry of the present day; and the history of genius and of religion in these times, though impure, and as yet not incarnated in any powerful individual, will be the history of this tendency.
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation.
Read MoreJune 6
The Politics of Delusion
These excerpts from Edsall’s New York Times essay., The Politics of Delusion Have Taken Hold, The language is his except where indicated. Following these excerpts, I post a comment. Posted in Political/Partisan Divide
“Matters of status and identity are easy to whip up into existential conflicts with zero-sum solutions. To the extent that political leaders are encouraging people to focus on threats to their social status rather than their economic or material well-being, they are certainly directing attention in an unhelpful and often dangerous direction. It’s much easier to think of others as disproportionately dangerous and extreme when their victory means your loss, rather than focusing on the overall well-being of the nation as a whole.” (Lilliana Mason) [read more]
Read MoreOn May 18, 2023 I posted the following to the Compassionate Action Workshop listserv:
In his “What Americans Don’t Understand About China” New York Times op-ed yesterday, Peter Coy reported:
The latest World Values Survey, conducted from 2017 to 2020, indicates that 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the United States. Similarly, 93 percent of Chinese participants valued security over freedom; only 28 percent of Americans did so.
This data prompted me to find these quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” story in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
You want to go into the world, and you are going empty-handed, with some promise of freedom, which they in their simplicity and innate lawlessness cannot even comprehend, which they dread and fear—for nothing has ever been more insufferable for man and for human society than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them…
This elicited the following comments:
Larry Walker: I like this a lot. I believe China is VERY misunderstood in America - to our loss!
Wade Lee Hudson: Should we encourage the development of more democracy in China? If so, how?
By Hua Hsu
Excerpts from the March 20, 2023 Issue of The New Yorker
Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?
...“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains... Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” (Princeton). She makes the case that talking to others—sharing our stories—is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls...
Cohen returns to true conversation as a kind of sanctuary... In its ideal form, it involves no audience or judge, just partners; no fixed agenda or goals, just process...
Read MoreBy Wade Lee Hudson
In her April 14, 2023 interview on the Ezra Klein Show, Danielle Allen (whose new book is Justice by Means of Democracy) addresses how society might use modern technology to develop and strengthen “deliberative democracy structures that we have not yet set up.” Klein calls voting “a pretty thin level of participation” and envisions methods to enable people to “really be part of steering the ship of state.”
Klein argues, “You could have things like citizens assemblies and meetings, and in other ways, you could have a thicker kind of participation and advisory role for the public than you currently do.” Modern deliberative digital tools can enhance democracy, which Allen defines as “equal empowerment across a body of free and equal citizens.” She believes, “One of the greatest values of democracy is that together we can be much smarter than we can be as individuals.”
Read More