There is no really easy way to write this, so perhaps its just best to be polemical about it.
I am no longer going to be supporting cishet white men who are running for office. Basically guys that look like me. We’ve had our run, we have propagated genocide, mass destruction and murder, war, criminal economic inequality and the destruction of the life support systems of the planet we live on and now I think it is time to stop. Of course folks will “not all…” me on this, but just stop. Our role now is to support different people than us. Because what happens when we feel the MEREREST slipping away of power and influence is that we do ridiculous things like driving hundreds of trucks into the middle of Ottawa and demanding that the unelected Senate assist us in the overthrow of the government. Or worse. Much worse.
We do shit like this:
Just read the replies on that thread. I’m not going to tell you how bad it is.
Policy making matters. The people who make policy matter. Our job now is to use our power, money and influence to get behind different decision makers and support their election to office, or their appointment to the judiciary. because we need different decisions and we need to change the face and experience base of those making those decisions.
Three years ago the Canadian inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded – quite rightly – that what has happened and continues to happen to Indigenous people in Canada constitutes genocide. And what continues to happen to women, non-binary, and trans folks is a good indicator of a country’s character and perspective. In Louisiana if this law goes through, any woman who terminates a pregnancy because it is ectopic and life threatening is a murderer. A women who has an unimplanted fertilized egg that flows out with her period is technically a murderer. And a judge that seeks to stay the charges is to be automatically impeached.
Let us stop being outraged and surprised at this continued pursuit of genocidal policies and fascist radical Christian extremism, for none of this is new. Let us instead change the game by changing the people with their hands of power. Make laws not blog posts.
Euan Semple was the first person I ever linked to on my blog. Today he posts a little reflection on his blogging practice:
…I’ve always said, my blog posts are mostly memos to self. They are for me to react to the world around me and to see those reactions placed before me for inspection. Yes inspection by others but mostly by me. Being concerned about whether or not people like what I have written affects how I write.
I guess this process mirrors our struggles to identify our true selves in the rest of our lives. The draw of relationship becomes pressure to conform.
Can we know ourselves without relationship? Can we truly be ourselves if it becomes too important?
In Jonathan Haidt’s latest essay in The Atlantic entitled “Why the past ten years of American Life have been Uniquely Stupid” he writes about how the “like” and “share/retweet” functions came into social media. It changed everything, mostly by gaming the algorithm with likes and speeding up the uncritical consumption of information.
Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.
By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonestyand mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
These two functions definitely changed the way I write when I moved most of my writing to social media from the blog. Likes and shares are both powerful attractors but the most powerful of all is the comment. Because that one fosters reflective community and relationship.
Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking for evidence that I am NOT on the path. Is there broken foliage? Is the soil compressed and eroded by boots rather than hoofs or water? Are the roots underfoot rubbed clean of bark? Are there any trail markers about? When I find myself answering “no” to these questions I move slower, until the evidence is overwhelming, and I stop and track back to find out where I went wrong.
You can see why looking for evidence to DISPROVE your belief creates a safe to fail situation. If I find a single piece of evidence that confirms my belief that I am on the right track, and I follow it unquestioningly, the results become increasingly dangerous, and failure becomes unsafe.
A lot of my life and work is about paying attention to these weak signals. Whether it is making music with others, facilitating groups, helping organizations with strategy, playing and watching sports like soccer, rugby and hockey, it all comes down to paying attention in a way that challenges your beliefs.
The other day I offered a pithy comment on facebook to the question of “what is the difference between critical thinking and buying conspiracy theories?” and it really came down to this: critical thinkers look for evidence to disprove their beliefs and conspiracy theorists look for evidence to confirm their beliefs.
I think the latter is quite the norm in our current mainstream organizational cultures, even if it doesn’t lead to conspiracy theory. The pressure for accountability and getting it right leaves very little space to see what’s going wrong in the organization. The desire to build on what is working – while being an important part of the strategic toolkit – is not served without a critical look at the fact that we might be doing it wrong.
This is why sensemaking has become a critical part of my practice. And by sensemaking I mean collecting large numbers of small anecdotes about a situation and having large numbers of people look at them together. The idea is that with a diverse set of data points and a diverse number of perspectives, you get a truer picture of the actual culture of an organization, and you can act with more capacity to find multiple ways forward, including those which both challenge your assumptions about what is right and good now and those which discover what is better and better.
Recently in Canada we have been having a little debate about whether celebrating Canada Day on July 1 is appropriate given that fact that this month – National Indigenous Peoples Month, as it turns out – has been marked by a reckoning with the visible evidence of the genocide that has been committed here. While hundreds of thousands of people here are in mourning or grief, and are reliving the trauma that has travelled through their families as a result of the genocidal policies of residential school and the non-consensual adoption of children, many others are predictably coming out with a counter reaction that goes something like this “yeah, well let’s get over it. Canada is still the best country of the world to live in.”
And that makes sense for many people – like me – who live here and have a great life. But as I have been saying elsewhere on Twitter: don’t confuse you having a great life with this being a great country. There is nothing wrong with people having a great life. That is what we should want for all people. But Canada is not a place where that happens for everyone. The story is very different for lots of people who struggle to find contentment and acceptance inside this nation-state. Canada’s very existence is owed to broken treaties, environmental destruction, relational treachery, economic injustice, and genocide.
Paying attention to the weak signals is important here. If all you can see is how great your own life is, and you think we just need to keep doing whatever it is that we are doing that assures that continuity, then we are headed for a precipice. We are headed off an environmental cliff, into a quagmire of injustice and economic inequality that destabilizes everything you have in a catastrophic way.
Listening to First Nations – really paying attention to possibilities – is mutually beneficial to everyone. If one wants all lives to matter, then one has to ensure that every life matters, which means taking the lead from those whose lives have been considered dispensable in the project called “Canada.” And it’s not like they haven’t been out here for the past 250 years calling for a better way. It’s just that the mainstream, largely led by commercial interests who have hungered for and exploited natural resources that never belonged to them, have cheered on the idea that if Canada is good for me, it must be good period.
Let seeing be disbelieving. This country is not an inherently GOOD place. But it could be. It could be great. It could be safe, healthy, prosperous, balanced, creative and monumentally amazing. But it requires us to first question the limiting beliefs we have that it could never be better than this and second to pay attention to the weak signals that help guide us onto a path that takes us there.
It is far too early to celebrate Canada Day. We haven’t yet fulfilled the promise of the treaties and the vision with which indigenous Nations entered into relationships with Europeans oh so long ago, and that vision which is continually offered up to settlers through reciprocity and relationship. If there is anything to celebrate, perhaps it is the fact that we do have the resources to make this country work for all and we have the intelligence and creativity and willingness to do it, but you won’t find that in the Board rooms and the Parliamentary lobbies and the Cabinet offices and the global markets.
It is in the weak signals, the stories and small pathways of promise out there that are born in struggle and resilience and survival and generate connection, sustainability and the promise of well-being for all.
Today Ontario goes back into lockdown, complete with curfews and the enforcement of the situation by police officers with the discretion to charge people with a violation of the public health orders. This is all being done without any significant new programs to support those who otherwise have to travel or move to non-essential jobs – including night shifts – because while the work may be non-essential, living without income is not. It is a situation that is going to impact marginalized people of all kinds.
This is an unprecedented public health crisis. We are battling an easily spread, lethal virus which causes incurable effects in many who catch it. It requires our health care systems to be overly careful when handling COVID-19 patients. The purpose of lockdowns has always been to manage the spread of the virus. Complexity geeks will know that connections are an important enabling constraint in self-organizing systems. Break connections, and you slow the ability of an overwhelming crisis to take shape. In theory, breaking connections should be the easiest thing to do but the combination of mixed messages and the unwillingness of governments to incentivize isolation over interaction has meant that places like Ontario need to take harsher measures: the imposition of boundaries on behaviour.
When the pandemic began I was impressed at the speed with which our government mobilized resources to ensure that people were able to choose isolation over interaction. In Canada, the Canada Emergency Response Benefit program was a stunning, accessible, guaranteed income program that provided $2000 a month of taxable income to anyone who wanted it. There was no means test, the application website was straight forward, and payments came fairly quickly. In addition, the federal and provincial governments launched a series of programs to protect tenants and businesses from being evicted, to extend credits and grants to businesses, to subsidize wages, to defer mortgages, and to relieve student debt payments.
These programs had the effect of initially “flattening the curve” the term used to describe the collective social effort to prevent spikes in hospitalizations which would allow for emergency services to properly treat COVID patients and not reach a situation like they did early on in Italy, where death rates spiked because doctors were forced to choose between who would live and who would die. For a couple of months, we all pulled together and with Herculean effort of citizens, businesses and government, we flattened the curve for the first wave
The implementation of these social programs had the effect of eliminating a whle lot of personal debt among many other positive effects. For people whose income is dependent on minimum wage jobs, the support of $2000 a month was, in many cases, all they needed to pay off bills that had been dogging them for years, make a rent payment that was overdue, get back on their feet. It hasn’t been perfect, and certainly folks on social assistance, folks with disabilities and students fell through the cracks. And the money that flowed to everyone who applied for the CERB went directly into the economy. It didn’t get tied up in equity, investments, or real estate. It went to the purchase of goods and services in unprecedented ways. This had the effect of enriching many billionaires and banks, but also of supporting local businesses and economies, and despite the potential for it, our economy has not entered a depression. Hard times for sure, but still afloat.
The CERB payment – and universal basic incomes in general – are the ideal form of stimulus for an economy. First, it is a policy of care, providing resources directly to people in need without strings attached, which allows people to quickly organize their own lives and allows the cash to immediately enter the economy. For conservatives who praise a market economy, trickle down economics is actually a terrible idea, because giving billions directly to the top of the economic food chain through subsides and tax breaks does not encourage a market at all. It encourages an oligarchy were very few people get unimaginably rich without any actual purchasing power being introduced into a market.
Markets self-organize around innovation and creativity, but only if there is spending money in the economy, for those who organize well will capture it. During the spring and summer, in my own community I witnessed the conversation and the call to action on local economy blossom like it never had before, during all the years I was on our Community Economic Development Community. There was money in our community, a need to stay home, and local businesses continually made their case for support. We had very few local businesses here shut down, despite these challenging times. That isn’t to say that things haven’t been challenging for my friends who own businesses, but a combination of government supports, mutual aid, and spending money circulating locally created the conditions for a healthy, local economy.
The CERB was designed for people to spend, and that is what happened. Many of the people who received the money had very little savings to begin with, and so when the money came in it went right back out the door into the economy, Banks got richer, Amazon got richer and the people that own these companies got richer too. Substantially richer at a rate that was faster than they had ever experienced.
Last month the federal government announced that it was now investigating something like 400,000 CERB applications that were apparently irregular. In its haste to set the program up, apparently the government failed to communicate a key aspect of the program criteria: that you needed to have made a net income of $5000 in the previous tax year as a self-emplyed person in order to be eligible for the benefit. Here is the crux of the problem:
In the first few weeks of the CERB rollout, CRA call-centre agents were given wrong instructions for how self-employed Canadians would be assessed for their eligibility. To be eligible, self-employed Canadians had to have received more than $5,000 in income in 2019 or in the previous 12 months before applying.
While eligibility was meant to be based off net income after expenses, CRA agents were provided written instructions that incorrectly stated that gross income, not net, was how someone’s eligibility for CERB would be determined. That information was then passed along to callers seeking clarity.
At the same time, the word “net” didn’t appear on CERB applications or the CRA’s “Who is eligible” page. It wasn’t until sometime after April 21 — more than two weeks after applications opened — that the CRA quietly update a Q&A page to include specific language on net income.
The problem now is that the government is now enforcing repayment orders for the money that was received. And of course people don’t have that money. They don’t have it because they did what they were told they should do with it, and used it to stay afloat during the early days of the pandemic while staying at home to flatten the curve.
But the money HASN’t disappeared. Not at all. the 400,000 people who took four months of CERB money have injected $32 billion dollars into the economy, much of it local, but a significant amount of it going to banks, utility companies and large consumer and service outlets like Costco and Amazon, and Netflix and Zoom. This video explains why.
I am at a loss to understand why the government – who has admitted to screwing up the CERB criteria communications – is punishing the people who have supported the survival of the economy during a once in a century economic event. During the spring we were all told that we needed to do our part to get this virus under control. We all did our part, we stayed home AND stimulated the economy. And now 400,000 people are being saddled with $8000 or more in debt.
Nationalizing debt is perhaps one of the best things we can do as a society. The CERB did that, providing for people to cover their debts and pay their bills. The government used the near zero interest rates to borrow to make that possible – thereby assuming consumer and business debt at far better rates than consumers and businesses were getting, and despite mortgage deferrals and lost revenues, the six Canadian chartered banks STILL made about $13 billion in net income in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone. The money hasn’t disappeared: it has moved. If governments need it back, they need only tax the richest businesses in the country with a one time pandemic tax totalling $32 billion and all is well.
But I suspect that this isn’t the issue, and I don’t expect this tax to be implemented. There is a stench of the age-old stigma associated with poor folks, that they are not deserving of government support, that “free money” is a risky thing to just give away without a means test, without accountability and without any sense of “deserving it.”
So Ontario is going into lockdown. Citizens once again are being asked to do their part to flatten the curve, and it is a challenge many folks will take up with relish IF they also feel a reciprocity from their governments to support and enable them to do that. But that isn’t happening. Not only are there no new supports for people but the federal government is chasing down repayments, with no forgiveness, and banks are stopping the mortgage deferral program. This is terrible public policy for a start, it is poor economics, even by conservative, market-based standards and most important, it is immoral.
There is a massive gulf between the top and the bottom in our society, a direct result of 40 years of the biggest wealth transfer in human history. This gap has created two different realities. The folks with the resources who are able to run for public office, garner the approval of their parties, and be given the reins of power are screened into this class of the wealthy. Their lives are very different from the lives of the majority of citizens who are living paycheck-to-paycheck or who are on social assistance or who have no means of support at all. The fact that several political leaders from all parties have been recently caught travelling abroad over Christmas, when governments were locking down everyone else, is a stark and ostentatious indicator of this difference.
Along with the wealth and income gap comes a sense that “rules don’t apply to me” because, actually, that seems to be the case. Despite bungled messaging and unclear criteria, the federal government is enforcing repayment orders against 400,000 Canadians, almost none of whom committed fraud in fact or intention with this benefits program. And yet, there are no new taxes, no special one time claw back for those that actually now have the money. Instead of THEM having to do paperwork and liquidating a few assets to repay the federal government and get that money back into the economy, they make plans for heading out of the country to their second properties.
Public policy that is made in the interests of the wealthy few at the expense of the many is immoral. For public leaders to appeal that “we are all in this together” when we are clearly not is an abdication of integrity. The federal government needs to immediately suspend the actions of the CRA in pursuing these repayments, and furthermore, as a country, we really need to push for a universal basic income, because we now have evidence, during that pandemic, that it works.
If you are in Canada, you can support this by lending your support to Leah Gazan who is sponsoring a House of Commons motion that reads:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should introduce legislation and work with provincial and territorial governments and Indigenous peoples to ensure that a guaranteed livable basic income (i) accounting for regional differences in living costs, (ii) for all Canadians over the age of 18, including single persons, students, families, seniors, persons with disabilities, temporary foreign workers, permanent residents, and refugee claimants, (iii) paid on a regular basis, (iv) not requiring participation in the labour market, education or training in order to be eligible, (v) in addition to current and future government public services and income supports meant to meet special, exceptional and other distinct needs and goals rather than basic needs, including accessible affordable social housing and expanded health services, replace the Canada Emergency Response Benefit on an ongoing and permanent basis in a concerted effort to eradicate poverty and ensure the respect, dignity and security of all persons in respect of Canada’s domestic and international legal obligations.
House of Commons Motion M-46 Guaranteed Liveable Basic Income
This is not the final answer, but it is an important step to establishing the will of the House of Commons to undertake this project. It will be interesting to see who votes against it, and I suspect I will not be surprised. I think Leah Gazan is one of those rare people in Parliament that is able to understand how to use the tools of government to govern from the perspective of common citizens, those whose voices are meant to be primary in the House of Commons. She is doing so from an opposition bench, and while a house motion is a weak tool, she is relentless in pursuing this course of action and I believe she needs the support of many citizens from across the country to elevate and amplify her voice.
This is my contribution to that. It is time.
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things.
Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach a two hour session to some amazing social justice activists in Eastern and Central Europe, who are fighting for things like environment justice, and racial and gender and sexual orientation equality, among other topics. I get to teach about working with complexity.
As part of that, I will elaborate on my little model of constraints, which for the record is now described as Connections, Exchanges, Attractors, Boundaries and Identities the short form of which is CEAB(I). In this blog post I’ll explain why.
These five types of constraints essentially cover all the ways that complex systems or problems are constituted. They function as a mix of constraints that govern and constraints that enable. These two terms come from the work of Alicia Juarrero and Dave Snowden. Governing constraints stop certain things from happening (a door keeps the public out, a bolt attaches two pieces of metal). They create a limitation on action. Enabling constraints create a space, a context or a container in which action can happen within boundaries. They are essential for emergence and coherence in a complex system. Think about form in poetry, or the kinds of direction that managers give their workers. If these constraints are too tight, we compromise and stifle emergence. If they are too loose, we create too diffuse a context for action. A manager that says “do whatever you want” is going to make trouble in the organization. So too will one who says “let me review every single move you make.” Managing enabling constraints is really the high art of working in complexity especially as you can never know in advance what “too tight” and “too loose” looks like.
So far so good.
Now this little model, CEAB(I) can be used to both analyse a situation and to take action to change that situation. When I am confronted with a stuck problem in ir near the complexity domain, I will often do a quick survey of the constraints that are active in the moment. From a social action perspective, lets just look at a relatively straightforward (!) case or trying to change policy around affordable rental housing. What are the constraints at play that create the emergent situation of “unaffordabilty?” Here are a few sketched out thoughts:
CONNECTIONS – Landlords can use AirBnB to get a better revenue stream rather than long term rental; tenants need to be “connected” to find good deals;
EXCHANGES – Insiders in communities recommend “good” tenants to landlords, thereby gaming the market for accessibility to affordable spaces;
ATTRACTORS –Landlords have few incentives to offer long term housing over short term rentals that give them more flexibility; landlord regulations make long term rental prohibitive, but lax regulations on BnB’s make it easy to rent short term; high mortgages and house prices mean landlords charge high rents to recover costs.
BOUNDARIES – Government regulations make developing a suite to be prohibitive (secondary suites are often banned in residential neighbourhoods due to concerns about traffic and noise); restricted zoning means rentals are located only in certain places making them more scarce and therefore higher priced on the market; lack of rental increase guidelines that allow landlords to charge maximum rather than affordable rents.
IDENTITY – Renters perceived as poorer than the home owners in the surrounding neighbourhood; rentals and density considered undesirable as it is perceived to lower property values; density considered a change to the character of a neighbourhood opposed by people with a vested interest in the status quo; fear of outsiders or transient residents.
Okay. You see where this is going. Complex issues are so named because these factors (and many many more) work together to create the emergent characteristic of unaffordable rents.
To change the system we need to change the constraints.
There are some high value targets. For example, you could create a governing constraint in the system that bans rents above a certain price point and creates expensive fines for breaking that law. This may have the unintended consequence of forcing rentals OFF the market and possibly into shotr term rentals OR having a black market emerge of unregulated suites and apartments. It may limit the supply and force renters into tent cities for example, creating another situation. On the other hand such a law may give everyone clarity and force a change for the good. But this is a very high energy solution and requires a great deal of power to effect.
At the other end of the spectrum, you could create different kinds of connections in the system. You could ban AirBnB (as some jurisdictions have done) but also incentivize rentals by providing a property tax breaks to people renting out affordable suites or apartments. Tenants can organize to strike against high rents by creating tight connections and limiting the exchanges that go between them as a class and landlords as a class, forcing political action.
You could also change the nature of the problem by allowing different kinds of rentals (such as secondary suites in single family homes, which happened in my community and instantly increased the amount of rental housing in the stock). Potential renters could form new connections, such as co-ops and co-housing groups (or indeed create tent cities) to create new forms of housing and community.
The four constraints of connection, exchanges, attractors, and boundaries offer places for action. As you go from C —-> E —-> A —> B you require more and more power to act. Creating and enforcing boundaries is very difficult for community organizers to do. But creating new connections and changing the exchanges that happen are accessible tools for people without formal power in a system. This is how people organize and build movements for change. If your hands are not on the levers of power, you need to mobilize to get them there.
Identities are a special class of constraint, and everyone plays in this space. You are often forced into a certain class by the ethos of a culture: in a white supremacist culture like Canada, BIPOC people are often marginalized as outsiders. But white people have choices about using power and privilege, to either uphold the status quo or change it. Identity and context play together. Some people are able to code switch, or form alliances, or play along with epectations and then make surprise moves. The film Black Klansman is a great example of this. How you name yourself, appear, code-switch, separate and join groups is a tactical consideration for making change. Do you join certain clubs and networks to gain influence? Or is it better to stand outside the system and protest? Do you join the mainstream or offer alternatives? Do you participate in advisory panels or critique and tear down the process? Or do you do all of these simultaneously. Identity and identity politics are a big deal.
To set up new attractors and new boundaries is possible only if you have some power. That power can be formal coercive power, or it could be charismatic influence. Even a social movement without policy making capability can force change through boycotts (limiting exchanges), shifting the story (through re-casting identity), creating alliances (connections acorss power gradients) or creating alternative glimpses of the future (off the grid experiments, tent cities communities) that might force policy makers to stabilize good ideas or finally confront the constraints that create problems by breaking them.
Being effective in mobilizing for change requires a huge amount of creativity, collaborative relationship, collective intelligence, and situational awareness. You need to ask:
- How does this problem work?
- What do we have the power to change?
- What do we not yet have the power to change?
- What can we change now that will create more stories and examples of what we want to see and fewer examples of what we don;t want to see?
Then you make small plans, try to catalyze new patterns in the system and see what happens. And you fail. A LOT, which is something that all activists know, but which doesn’t stop them from organizing and working anyway.
A long ramble, but hopefully it gives you a peek at some of the thinking that I’m doing about how power comes into play in influencing complex systems and addressing complex problems. Let me know what you think in the comments.