Living Between Worlds #2.2: "Power"

Welcome everybody. Glad to have you back here for the next monthly installment of Living Between Worlds. I see many of you have been here in this conversation before. Some are new, so welcome in all cases. I call this living between worlds because that's where we seem to be. We're between an old world and a new world. We're between the fossil age and the renewable age. We're between a linear economy and a circular, between the post world global economic and geopolitical order and what something else. We know it's going to be something else. We don't know what we're living between. Focus on short term and focus on long term. Between the past and the future. The past that actually inhabits us and shapes us. A future that calls to us and draws us and sometimes terrifies us. Past and future, present in us, now in the present. That is all we have. We're between inside and outside. Many of us here on this call are working to help or force institutions to adapt. Others of us are working to reinvent or replace existing institutions. Between tinkering at the margins and reinventing everything, between reform and revolution, between what John Foley so eloquently wrote about last week as between fear and hope, between ambition and resignation. There we are. All this in a world of utter uncertainty. Mathematician John Allen Polo said uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live within security is the only security. How will we live and manage and act and invest in a world of utter uncertainty? How will we prepare ourselves and our institutions to be agile and adaptive in a future that we can't possibly predict, but can maybe anticipate or attune ourselves to? How will we develop strategies and culture of contingency, recognizing that anything and everything could change dramatically in the blink of an eye, as we've seen this last 15 months? How will we maintain peace of mind and organizational coherence in the face of roiling change? We can't predict the future. Forecasting is, in a way a trap. But we can know that things are changing and where do we stand? Where's the bedrock in the fog that we're moving into? Living between worlds is. I don't know. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it both? A familiar song this week? A very different song this week from a familiar voice. The International Energy Agency IEA now recommends massive investments in renewables, immediate stop to new gas and oil projects, no new sales of fossil fuel boilers starting in 2025, fossil fuel subsidy phase outs, carbon pricing and other market reforms that can ensure appropriate price signals. You can look up the roadmap to net zero by 2050 from the IEA. Thank you, George Mocray, for that link this morning. This is stuff that was crazy 10 years ago, five years ago, 20 years ago that many of us have been saying for decades and were dismissed as fanciful and impractical. Now here it is, not just in the boardrooms of corporations and in the White House and on Wall street, but here at the International Energy Agency, which has not historically been a friend of this strategy over the past few decades. Remarkable. On the other hand, Wall street poured $3.6 trillion into oil, gas and coal since the Paris Agreement. Change happens, but sometimes at a slow pace. This could be the year, many analysts think, where the thing flips to a significant degree. One of the questions for us is what has driven those changes and what drives those changes in the future? For all the good news of that move off of fossil fuel, as John Foley points out, one third of our emissions are in the biological realm, in food and fiber and soils and oceans, fibrous forests and so forth. So the IEA moves, don't touch that. Yet these are also the significant sinks of carbon, the biological sinks that can take carbon out of the atmosphere. And all this reminds us that behind the ignored climate crisis sit the crises of biodiversity, ecosystem regenerativity, human suffering, and so much more. Fred Cook asked me this morning, are we too late for a soft landing? Well, we don't know. It remains to be seen. We're making the future now in every action and in every conversation that we're part of. So this series is called Living Between Worlds, subtitled with Grace and Calm and power. Last month we spoke briefly about power. I'd like to talk about that more today and then later in the call. Let you know what we have in mind for next month's call. So what is power? We ask if anybody wants to speak to that. You can raise your hand using the, I think it's the reactions button at the bottom of your screen. I'll try to call on you more or less in the order that you raise your hands. If you do, no pressure. Well, actually some pressure might call on somebody. If you don't, nobody raises their hands. Shel Horowitz, please.

Just double checking that I heard correctly. You were asking for a definition of power.

Yeah. Your definition of power.

Well, I define two ways. Power of and power over.

Okay.

Power up is an affirmative, empowering approach where you are enabled to do things that maybe you couldn't do before. Power over is dominance, expanding the Sort of colonialist mentality, whether it's on a personal level, societal level, or somewhere in between.

Okay, thank you, Brad. Hi, everybody. Brad Warren, Castro Valley, California. I like a definition I heard several years ago. Power is the ability to act. Very good. Thank you. Carolyn Raffensperger.

Hi, Carolyn Raffensperger. In Iowa, I once asked Navajo medicine man what his definition of power was, and he didn't even give the usual long pause before his answer. He said, it's when you have the ability to speak with all of the creatures and they have a willingness to communicate with you. And it occurred to me that power is communion, which Susan Griffin, the wonderful writer, has talked about. Power as communion.

Thank you. So, Carolyn, what comes from that? What emerges from that communion that you might call power?

Well, I'd follow up on the previous definition that it's our ability to act. It's our ability to work in concert. It is to make harmony and to make. To. To do things in concert.

Right. Shell, is your hand up again or still up? Okay, you're muted, but you can all. You can lower your hands using the same way that you raised it.

Okay.

Bear with me. I'm playing with multiple screens here. You know, in physics, power is the capacity to do work, or we could say the power, the ability, the capacity to get things done, to make things happen, make things move, what have you. Gregory Bateson talked about power as living in bottlenecks of information. Really the antithesis, Carolyn, of communion. In our lived experience, I would say that it's a tangle of emotions and judgments about power, but also a lived experience that both creatures, us and all our relations and the institutions and collectivities that we form, have the capacity to do things in the world, to make things happen, to get things done, to engage in changing something. Although there's a power and stillness also, isn't there? And it's also the capacity to accumulate the capacity to do things in the world. So there's a reflexive level to this. There's power, power to accumulate power, and, you know, they will. We accumulate these capacities differentially, unevenly. We might. You know, we think about it as Shell said about, you know, power of. Or power with, and power over as an important distinction for many of us. We might dream of power as being equalitarian, but it isn't. And we accumulate this capacity to get things done in different realms. Some of them are physical, some of them are relational and thus conversational, as we've talked about last time, the sociologist Michael Mann, not the climatologist Michael Mann but this gentleman offered a schema suggesting that there are four sources of what he calls social power. The power of humans in the world. One is ideological. See if I can pop this on screen for a moment for you. Not so lucky. Sorry. One is ideological. The meaning and the norms. And the. What he called the ritual practices. I would call also the social practices. How we live together, what we take for normal, what we consider acceptable and unacceptable. Second is military power, which is the organized physical coercion and violence or threat of violence. Third is economic institutions that are concerned with satisfying human material. Satisfying material needs. That's the way he would formulate it. I know there's some of you on this call who will formulate that in a very different sense. And political power, territorial regulation in man's worlds, laying down rules and adjudicating disputes. This is like the ideological where we're talking about the norms of behavior that pervade a culture and are sometimes unstated, but powerful nonetheless. And the explicit rules, methods of adjudicating disputes, settling disputes between people and enforcing those rules through economic, military power. As well as the ideological power of shunning and so forth. So, you know, it's ironic that while many of us, or most of us here, probably hanker for a fairer or flatter distribution of power, it actually takes power to impact that distribution of power. And frankly, I'm not sure that power is ever distributed. It may be that it's asserted both in the sense of taken by someone who is asserting power over. It's also granted when we yield power to someone. Or accept their authority to exercise power in the ways that we do. There's always, I would suggest, a yielding to power without which power isn't powerful. How does this show up in our lives and our own narratives. And our capacity to do things, to make things happen, to affect worlds? I'm reflecting on four ways. It's a different matrix than man's. It may intersect, I'm not sure, but I think in the realm of our. First, of all, our words and ourselves and selves that are formed in the conversations that we have with ourselves. Our interior dialogue, the interpretations and narratives of the world that we construct, which affect our mood and our capacity to move our personal. Second, our personal behavior and practices, what we do in our lives, in the world, which are, of course, rooted in the conversations that we have with ourselves. And brought to life in the conversations we have with others. Third might be our direct influence. Again, the conversations we have with others, the requests and promises we make of each Other the things that we do with our bodies and our money and the other extensions of ourselves. And fourth would be our apparently indirect influence in the larger realms of community and society, from local to national to international levels. So our own words and internal conversations, our behaviors and practices, our influence on others, relatively direct influence, and our more indirect influence in larger realms. So when I think about that in the context of climate, with myself as an example, I ask, what conversations do I have with myself about what I care about, about what I observe in the world? What interpretations do I form about those observations about good and bad, possible and not possible? Happy, sad, grateful, indignant. What requests and offers do I make out of those interpretations? What requests and offers of other people do I not make? Second, how do I live my life? What practices do I engage in or abandon or cultivate or aspire to or fail to fulfill? And here we could think about the realm of, you know, what I recycle, what I buy, how I heat my house, how I move my body in the world. Where I put my body would be, frankly, be another element here, where I put my body and my money in the voting that I do every single day, not just every two or four years. And in what ways do I consciously and unconsciously affect the drift of the world? You know, in the dreams that I hold and the norms that I accept. And how do I affect the drift of the people around me, from my family and friends to my community and my nation and to what Gary Snyder calls Earth household. For me personally, as I think about the larger realm, my focus is increasingly on climate finance. How do we pay for the world that we want? Looking at everything from corporate strategy and investment to regional efforts in the San Francisco Bay Area to finance the future, to, you know, to create the capacity to both mitigate and adapt to the climate change that's not going to be on us. It's already on us. To our work with Force for good, which benchmarked 60 of the largest asset holders in the world against the Sustainable Development Goals and their commitments to not just divest, but invest to Critical Path Capital, the investment group that I'm building to an inescapable diagnosis about capitalism, which we'll focus on more next month. And for that, for all of that, how do I build the power to affect these things, to take care of the things that I care about? I'm saying I because I'm talking about my personal reflection. But these are all questions for you. How do you engage in these? These four are not discrete nor Michael Mann's Discrete. They interpenetrate. What's new for me is that I'm much more actively observing them all live in real time. I find myself watching the words that come out of my mouth and wondering, where did that come from? Do I know that that's true? Is it grounded? What habits does it arise out of? What hopes does it open or close for me? So with that, let me turn to you and ask you, what does this provoke? What does what I've said provoke for? And no rush. There was a lot there. And it's fine. If we can reflect in silence for a few minutes is just as good. David Schoenbrunn, welcome. I'll offer.

Perhaps a more honest response than you may want. I don't relate to the headiness of the conceptual frame that you've offered. I just can't go there. So I'll stand by and see what else happens. Thank you.

Well, could I invite you to offer a less heady frame for a conversation about power? What does it mean to you?

Well, I just had a counseling session with a younger man who has been fighting a very powerful institution. And my message to him was, they have proven that they're not in the slightest bit interested in what you have to tell them. And the first job that you have is to deal emotionally with the immense disappointment of knowing that others don't care.

And what's the second job?

I. I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.

You said that the first job was coming to terms emotionally with that disappointment. What's the second job.

Is. Is to look out honestly at the trends that are in front of us and to acknowledge this is not going anyplace good. And. And to find whatever level of peace one can find in the present and in sharing and caring here.

M.

And if I could speculate, David, you know, we've known each other for. I'm going to speculate there's a third job because I know that you and you spoke about this in the last call. You. You know, you have an assessment that things are not going well or not going to go much better, and yet you're actively engaged in trying to affect how the future unfolds. And it's. It's. It's an interesting contradiction to hold.

Yes.

No expectation of success, and yet you are engaged.

Exactly.

Could I put you on the spot and invite you to unpack that a little bit? And you're welcome to decline if you don't want to, but I think would be no.

I think it's incredibly important and it gets down to who I am as a spiritual being. I feel like I have skills and passions that I have put into effect for what I understand as the betterment of humanity, which hasn't expressed much in the way of interest, quite frankly, and active hostility. And I like to conceptualize it as I'm working for the man. And so I'm just staying in the present and doing what I feel.

Drawn.

To do without expecting that it's going to change the larger picture. And that seems to be enough for now.

Okay, I've got some thoughts in response, but I'd like to go walk around the room and let other people talk first before I respond directly to you. Thank you for that. Thank you for being forthright about it. Margaret Coveton. Hi there.

Well, I used to be into zero waste, economic development and green business, and I know Gil from that era. I am now a lymphatic decongestive therapist in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I find that there are some amazing overlaps in these conversations. And David inspired me to raise my hand because I will say that many of. Well, I say that the lymphatic system is essentially the home of your immune system. And right now with COVID you know, obviously that's bigger deal. It's more. Can you hear me?

Yeah, you're a little weak and choppy, but keep going.

I'm sorry, I'm at a very noisy location. I'm trying to mitigate that as best I can. But what I'm finding is with David's comment about emotions, I would add that I find that emotions and lymph and immunity are inextricably linked and that. Gil, what you were also saying. Well, I'll just go. But I'm seeing a lot of my clients currently, for the last several years, really working on clear multi generational traumas, and they're doing it to help their own body. I find that if we're talking about the field. All right. Like Greg Braden talks about or some of the other, I guess, quantum folks are talking about, I really believe that if we change us and we can do it for ourselves, but it also impacts everything else in the field and that our emotions, if we stay calm in this VUCA world, it influences other people. And I would say one of my key learnings in this time of speaking of power is to notice that a thank you goes a long way these days. And anger or being quick to anger is more difficult. And I see that like in the grocery store line or, you know, when somebody just says thank you it has a big change. So I will say some of these power pieces to me are self empowerment in a way that I am self empowering myself not to have power over. I really liked that, that thought at the beginning. But that it is self empowering, that I get to be more me and I can be calm and, and flexible and conscious. I think that's enough. I saw, I go kind of, no, this is good.

And you know, folks have been on the calls before, know that I'm, I'm not above cutting people off when they go too long just to try to manage the flow. So I thank you for that. You know, when, when someone says thank you to you, when someone says thank you to me, it's not just the words and it's not just what we might call the emotions, but they're actually physiological changes happen in my body. My blood chemistry changes in the moment, my neurobiology changes in the moment. And this happens with any of us interacting with each other. It's happening right now with, you know, 50, whatever, 100 people on this call is that we are, you know, separate bodies on separate screens on this matrix of screens. But yet we are in it. We're in a neurological interaction of affecting each other. And it's worse than that too, because we then build an interpretation of those changes that happen in our body. I was working with physical therapists, brilliant physical therapist over the past couple of years and we were doing a new exercise and I felt pain in my leg and I told him so. And he said, actually, you're not feeling pain. I thought, what the are you talking about? Of course I am. He said, no, what your nerves can read, what your nerves can perceive is two things. They can perceive pressure and temperature. If you cut your leg, there's going to be a change in pressure. The nerves will perceive that. The brain interprets that as pain and let get me out of here, I'm in trouble. But if you've ever been an athlete, you know that there's a kind of pain that you play through. If you've worked out in a gym, there's a kind of pain that is involved with the breakdown of muscle tissue that can then be reconstructed more powerfully. If you tell yourself the story, this is pain and dangerous. You stop and don't work out and don't develop yourselves. If you tell yourself a story that this is a physiological reaction to a set of symptoms that I can tolerate and I am safe within and I'm going to pursue them anyway, different story that's happening all the time as we encounter each other and encounter the world. And now I've gone on too long, so. Bruce Preble, please. Bruce, lower your hand, if you would. Gail has his hand up as well. Gil, I got it. Bruce, can you. Can you speak? Yes, go ahead.

You were talking about power earlier, and I just wanted to focus on the power with as opposed to power over. And for me, what I notice about that is that a source of that of power with has to do with an ability to see something larger than my own point of view or my own perspective on things. An ability to. The visionary view, the. Even the prophetic view of seeing future, of seeing possibility. And it provides a place where you see what's missing and you can speak to that in a way that people can relate to it. And that's very powerful. It takes courage to speak up, and it takes vision and it takes a strong commitment. So it's all stuff that's at a personal level, but at some way it's transpersonal. And I just wanted to put that into the stew.

I appreciate it, and the stew appreciates it. What's the power that you're naming that's happening there in that process?

It's a power to see possibility.

Okay.

Or to see what's missing. You know, oftentimes people can see what's there and complain about it, but they don't see what's missing because it doesn't show up and see that.

Yep. Good. Thank you. Shel Horowitz again. And then Jane Bird.

Yeah. This is roofing off David's pessimism. I am hardwired, I think, to be optimist. And I see that we have many instances in which we actually can and do make a big impact. Sometimes we don't know that at the time. Sometimes we may find out years later, or sometimes the change may happen lifetimes later and we're not around to know it. But I'm going to just turn my camera for a second. This mountain behind me is Mount Holyoke in Hadley, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The mountain next to it, which is not inside from my yard. A developer in 1999 announced that he was going to put 20 McMansions on that hill that would have been visible from the top of this mountain. That always wins. The best place to take an out of town guest in the local newspaper readers poll. And while most of the people in my area who had credibility were saying, oh, this is terrible, there's nothing we can do, my wife and I went out and organized a movement and the thing and we did it fast. It only took 13 months. Even I thought it would take five years. That was a situation where I was aware of my impact. But there have been many others where I found out years later that I made a difference. Or in one case, when I was a college student and a fellow student told me basically that I was being an asshole. It stung at the time, but I kind of sorted it through my brain, decided he was right, changed my behavior, and got to thank him 20 years later at a reunion. He had no memory of the incident, of course, but he made a huge difference in who I am today.

Good. Thank you. You know, for me, it's not so much a matter of optimism or pessimism as it is of seeing possibility as you described it. You know, David Schoenberg, one of the places I differ with you is that I don't feel able to draw the conclusion that we're doomed or that things can't happen any more than I can draw the conclusion that everything's going to be okay. I don't know. I don't have the ability to predict what the world's going to be, but I can see possibilities that are worth. That are worth investing in for me both, because they. At a simple level, they feel good to me. I feel. You know, I feel alive and meaningful and myself, like Margaret was talking about. I feel Margot. I feel alive in doing the things that matter to me. And I suspect there may be a possibility that they will bear fruit. But I don't know. I'm not doing it because I know it will work, or not doing it because I know it won't, which to me is. It's almost a kind of arrogance. And I'm not saying this is a charge against you, David, but as beyond my capacity to think, I know how the future will unfold. If I was that good at that, I'd have made a ton of money in the stock market and playing the ponies. And there's a different game of foot here. Jane. I'm going to. I'm going to not go. I'm going to hold you for just a second and let David respond.

I think you.