Where are "we"? Where are YOU? — Living Between Worlds 6.6
Gil Friend and Ken Homer host a salon about how people are responding to political turbulence. Participants describe scattered attention and anxiety alongside community organizing, local action, and attendance at "No Kings/No Tyrants" demonstrations across U.S. cities. They discuss tactics from FiveCalls to tax resistance, grounded in Erica Chenoweth's research on nonviolent movements.
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Foreign. Welcome, everybody. This is Living between Worlds for June 18, 2025. I'm Gil Friend. I'm CEO of Natural Logic and an executive coach helping world changers change worlds. You've just met my co host, Ken Homer of Collaborative Conversations, and we're delighted to have you here, both those of you who have been with us for many, many months or years even, and those who are here for the first time. So welcome everybody. So Ken and I deliberated a bunch about where to focus today in this time of turmoil. There are too many, too many topics throwing things at us to. To pick one to focus on. I'm not going to recount what they all are, but you're living in this time along with us. We named this salon series Living Between Worlds after Antonio Gramsci's observation 100 or so years ago that, that this is a time between worlds, that the old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. And between, he put it approximately. The translations are varied. In between is the time of monsters, which I think of as primal forces loose below the surface, a time of great uncertainty. When I asked my friend Chauncey Bell, who's on the call with us today, how you doing? He tends to say, well, the things in my control are fine, and the things that are not in my control are not in my control. So I've taken that version of the serenity prayer to heart as part of my way of navigating these times. And so what we'd like to suggest today is that we not talk so much about the issues, but that we talk about us and how we are orienting and acting in these days, in these times, in our lives. I want to suggest some boundary conditions for the conversation. Ken, can you pop that slide up? Let's have this be not a time of complaining about what people out in the world have done. Political opponents, political leaders, what have you. Not debate over what folks should have done. Not engaged in therapy about what people were thinking, but focus on where we are, how we're orienting, and what might be possible for us in these moments. And we'll invite you to hold those, Ken. Maybe put those in the chat if you could. And we think that will produce a very different kind of conversation. And the ones that I find people are mostly thrown into, we're kind of automatically drawn into the kind of conversations that we're asking us not to do for today. You'll have plenty of time to do that other times. So let's go there. So we've got a few Questions that we'd like to invite us to talk about. And we'll start with, I'll answer them for myself, Ken will answer them for himself, and then we'll open it up to all of you, what you have to say. So sorry, I'm still learning how to do multiple keyboards. So the questions are these. Where is your attention these days? What's gripping you? What moods do you find yourself in? How are you participating in what's emerging? Where are you finding support and what are you longing for? And there they are in the chat. So for me, where's my attention these days? It's scattered, it's very reactive. I'm dialing down my news habit, trying to constrain when I expose myself to the incoming. But I've had days, and I remember particularly last Thursday, where there was a triple whammy, as you may recall, where it's just really hard for me to focus and maintain my center. And it took some time of stepping away and settling down to be able to re engage both in the external, the internal. My mood is anxiety about, you name it, war, politics, state of the world, immigration, economy, democracy. But my mood is also perplexity. And from my mentor, Fernando Flores, I learned the distinction between bad perplexity and good perplexity. There's a perplexity of I don't know what's going to happen next. And that can either be a mood of doom and despair and resignation or a mood of opportunity, ambition, of something to step into. So I am mostly in a mood of good perplexity. And I'm remembering these days a quote that I encountered from Henry Kissinger. Not one of my favorite guys, granted, but who said some years ago he said, you know, in the. In the affairs of state that he's involved in, the choices are often 5,149. I found that very sobering and very appropriate to these moments. How am I participating in what's emerging? Primarily through conversations like these in small salons and groups, one on one with my friends and colleagues and coaching clients, writing, trying to bring some clarity and perspective to these situations. And I'm sorry to say, not so much walking and marking marching these days. I was hoping to join the no Kings demonstration last Saturday. I've got some physical ailments. My walkability is limited coming back, but it felt like not the thing to do. Although I give a deep bow to the people of Minnesota who, though they were told asked by their governor to stay home because of the safety issues around the shooter, showed up in Mass Numbers at the State Capitol. More people in Minneapolis than in Washington D.C. interestingly enough, Where I look for support is in community. Like this is, is talking with people mostly who I share a lot with and wherever I can, with people who have different views than mine. It's, as I've told you before, I live in a bubble. In a bubble, in a bubble. So that takes some doing. But I find it enormously enriching to engage in conversations with people who have very different views in a mood of curiosity rather than a mood of debate. And what I'm longing for is more of that. Ken, how about you? Well, like Gil, my attention is scattered. A big part of my attention is focused on moving to Spain. My wife and I are in the process of applying for a visa to get a residence visa there and just going through the house, cleaning things out. It's been very emotional time for me to go back through 60 plus years of personal stuff. Finding letters from my parents back in the 40s, the 30s, before they were married in the 40s. And so that's been a big foreground part of my attention. And then the background of my attention is the state of the world, which there's days when I'm just like, I cannot take it in. And there's days when I. When I indulge in reading various news sources, carefully chosen and curated. And. And that leads to moods of, of, like Gil said, perplexity, moods of, of anger and outrage. A sense of how, how can we be so advanced with our technologies and so able to do so many amazing things and yet so stupid collectively that we're making. That we're finding ourselves stuck in these impossible situations. I remember E.O. wilson said, you know, our problem is that we have primitive emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology, which is not a very good mix. And that's on my mind a lot of, you know, where is sanity? I'm skipping ahead. I'm longing for sanity. I'm longing for the emergence of sanity. And I also wanted to be in the King no Kings parade or no Kings protests last week. But there was a neighborhood wide yard sale. So I was torn because we're trying to sell a bunch of stuff. So I was at the yard sale, but I am participating in several different conversations with people. I did go to the April 5 protest. I have a number of groups that I'm working with that are talking about what do we do, what constitutes an appropriate response and how do we personally find ourselves able to resource ourselves and how do we collectively take effective action which is something that seems to be a really big and important question right now. Those of you who know Cory Doctorow, you know, he says, people write me all the time and say, what do I do to take action in the world? And my response is almost always join a movement, because there's very little you as an individual can do to fight climate change. You know, sure you can. You can recycle and all kinds of stuff, but to be effective, you have to start to come together. So the problem of collective action is very much forefront in my mind of how do we effectively coordinate action without getting hung up on, is this the exact right thing to do? And if it's not, I'm not going to be part of it. But rather, we need a critical mass to say we're here for the Earth, we're here for the future, we're here for the people that are coming after us. And I'm not seeing that emerging in the mainstream, but I am seeing lots of signs of it all over the place. You know, there's so much. I'm very much find myself supported by the way that people are showing up, by the things people are saying and doing, at least in my circles. So I feel like there's plenty of energy there, and it's building and building and building. And my question is, when does it actually hit the crest and the wave breaks? That's where I am. So I have a question. We could go one at a time and ask people to do this, but I think we might be better off to go into breakout rooms of, say, four people, talk about these questions, and then come back and hear from folks. What do you think, Gil? I think that makes good sense. I think have a lot to say about this, and that gives more chance for more people to speak and be here. Yeah, I'd like to give people as much possibility to talk as possible. So let me two rounds, as we've often done. Yeah, we can do two rounds. Let me just get the breakout rooms going here. One second. All right, we have 37 people here, so we'll do eight breakout rooms. Should give us four to five people. Okay, we'll do 20 minutes, come back for just a minute and do another 20 minutes, and we'll open it up in plenary. How's that sound? Any questions before we do this? Anybody have something really burning they want to share before we. We go off? And I do want to just say it's great to see several people I have not seen in a while. Feder, how you doing? Long time. So welcome and let's go to breakout rooms. So we had, we had talked about doing a second round of breakouts. I'm wondering if people would rather do a second round of breakouts or continue the conversation in plenary. I vote for plenary. We have some show. Let's have hands for plenary. Okay, let's have hands for breakout. Another round with different breakout with different people. Hands for breakout. You're gonna make me quote Henry Kissinger again. We could also share some of the insights on chat in plenary for five or 10 minutes and then go back. Yeah, I was going to make a similar suggestion of have a little plenary and then maybe do another round. That's a great idea. Can make sense to you, Ken. You're muted. You're a process jockey. Rookie mistake. Okay, Brad, where's your sock? That's very nice, Brad. So if you'd like to speak, please raise your hand. And I just want to say, Mike Nelson, it's good to see you here. Welcome, Mike. Good to be here. Please keep your mic on mute if you're not speaking. It helps us with the video editing. Use the chat freely. Reminder, we're not going to send the chat out, so if you want to save the chat, save it yourself and go ahead. Okay, thanks. I have a. Don, your voice is very soft. Is it possible to increase your volume a little, please? Yeah. Can you hear me better now? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah, so I have an appointment with my publisher at one that I'm going to have to jump off. So I wanted to jump in and just say that having kind of been on a war footing since the 70s, observing the genocide on our citizenry that's been going on for the last 50 years that I've been watching, I'm kind of glad that everybody else is noticing and just want to let you know that this is business as usual. This is what they've always been doing. It's just they've been doing it and trying to make it look like something else. So now we have like the real story in front of us. And I'm very happy to say in my life and my attention, I'm launching a movement to make California an independent country governed by the leadership, graduates of the many dozens of leadership programs that have been going like the one I started in Santa Barbara in 1989, which has a thousand graduates in Santa Barbara, and basically create a non legal, extra governmental citizen policy dynamic through the leadership programs of the country. And put in place civic assemblies, citizen assemblies, which follow Jefferson's dictum of 1821, about how our experiment can actually succeed that I learned from the black Thomas Jefferson, Donald Anderson. And I just invite all of you to check out his obituary in the, in the wal in the Washington Post or check out his Schumacher lecture. Donald Anderson, national association of the Southern Poor, the citizen Assemblies movement of Southern Virginia from the late 60s through the mid-80s. And I'm just thrilled that this conversation is happening this way. And I just love what you and Gil are doing Ken and you and Ken are doing, Gil and thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks. John. Allen, please go ahead. Well, always glad to be here and never miss an opportunity to raise my hand. So when the question was posed, consider what might be possible. And I looked at what Gil has done over six years now with people all over the world, more men than women, more white than multicolored, but a range of consciousness that is an amazing fungal network of knowledge. And it seems that the task that is needed, that might be possible, that we might be able to envision, is a collective work that we could take on among ourselves as part of this continuing endeavor between the worlds to create and envision what would actually be a new government in America. The existing government and form of creating it is very flawed. And what happens in the normal process is left only by itself is not likely to be much better than what we got now. But there is a sense that we need a wide system change and the knowledge of that is embedded in this fungal network that Gill has assembled. And there's a living web of knowledge and consciousness. And if we would take on in some way a task among us in this continuing conversation of shaping the consciousness and the seeking the people and program, drawing all the movements and silos together, what would be a new government that could begin to take shape by 2026 and by 2028 be an option for people to recognize. So that's what I saw as what is possible to imagine from this network, which I'm happy to be part of. Alan, thank you for all that. I just want to respond briefly. I'm mostly not going to respond to folks comments now, but I just want to say that we, Ken and I made a decision fairly early on to not try to create a new project out of this group because there are so many projects and networks and activities underway. Many of you are involved in those. And so for me, before starting something new, I would ask could we individually or together pour support into something that's already in motion and reinforce what's already in motion? If there's nothing on the landscape that you see that is adequate to the times, then there's something for you to suggest specifically. But let's not get into that in detail in this call. We may do that in another one. So, Alan, thank you for that. This notion was put forward, as you may recall, anticipating the 20, the 1976 bicentennial election. People's movements could cohere and put forward an unlimited network of all our nations for a new government here. That didn't work at all. But maybe this is now the time to see that as a potentiality of connection. So thanks. Thank you. Rob Maddox. Yes, thanks, Gil. Just very quick, I put it in the chat, I shared it with the other group about a 90 second video I saw of Arnold Schwarzenegger who seems to be stepping up, I thought was great. It's like stop whining, get working. And I'm not going to let Trump and his supporters and those forces continue to wreck my day myself. To your point, Gil, that's why I wanted wanted to chime in. I admit I didn't go to the no Kings rally. Instead I spent the day doing some research and I went the day before to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection and I had a whole planning because I live in a blue state on climate change and gave them very constructive comments. What do we need to do at the state level on climate change if we're serious about dealing with climate change? Let's be honest, folks, I think it's going to be done at the local and state level. States issue building permits, local towns issue building permits. The built environment is dictated there. They do the transportation planning. Washington does help pay for it sometimes. But the reality is the amount of action we could take at the local level is there. I'm also kind of reminded, two more quick points. A famous statement attributed to Winston Churchill. You can count on America to do the right thing once we've tried everything else and we're trying everything else now. And I think, and I just was speaking with a dear friend, the sporty who thinks we're going to have this boomerang effect. I was admit I went out on Saturday and I live in an area of northwest Connecticut that is mixed. It's Republican and Democrat and usually when they have these protests, it's 20 people on the green. There were 300 people on the green. It was unheard of to have that many people on a little town green. So there's going to be this boomerang effect. I would encourage people on this phone call what to do, you know do it local. Get your town moving. If they're not doing something, if they're not improving, improving things, there's a lot of energy there. Get your state to do something. I mean, many of us live in blue states, so let's get them to do more. Thank you, Gil. I'd like to raise my hand, but I can't find it quickly. So I just saw your hand go in the air. Margaret, go ahead. Somebody in the chat said they were surprised that we aren't hearing from the people who were at the rallies. No King rallies. I was unable to go. Also physically not able and would. Would have liked to. But I just thought if there was an opening, if people had reports like Rob just given us a quick report of what. What people experienced or saw possible or, you know, it might be interesting for at least some of us to hear that if there's a space for it. Michelle, go ahead. Okay, I'll bite. I went to Springfield, Massachusetts. No Kings Day. I had many choices. Northampton, Amherst, Greenfield, Hoyoke, east hampton, all within 20 miles of me. All had no Kings Days. I think all of them had more than a thousand people. Springfield had about 4,000. Northampton, I believe, had about 3,000. I'm not sure about the others. In Springfield, we were not able to hear or see the speakers because we were spread out across several blocks going up and down the hill from the central point and to both sides of it. But we got to hold our Jewish Activists for Immigration justice banner where many people driving by could see it. And oh my goodness, I don't think I've ever been at a demonstration where I saw so many hunks of support, court thumbs ups, people taping the whole march as they went by. A few scarily were driving while doing their cell phone, but the smart ones had a passenger doing it. And it was a very good event. The cops were in their regular uniforms, no riot gear, their badges were showing. They were polite. They were fairly firm about keeping out of the roadway and on the sidewalk, which is appropriate, especially since it turned out that was a bus lane and the buses are pretty wide. I felt very energized. Some friends of mine did street theater there, which I only got to see on video later because as I said, I wasn't in a position to see or hear the program. Area people I know who went to some of those other demonstrations reported high energy, great turnout as well, lots of support. I did not hear or see a single anti that's even out here in very blue western Massachusetts, not so far from Rob I find that usually, not usually, but often there will be a few counter protesters. And that goes back at least as far as the first pride march around here in 1982, where there were 500 people and some of them wearing bags over their heads and about 50 people from the local Baptist church trying to tell us we were all sinners. And now the pride march gets tens of thousands of people and I haven't seen a counter protester there and I don't know, 15 years. You know, I was really struck by the. Thank you for that shell. I think I thought the branding of no Kings was one of the best I've heard in a long time because it invited in people from across the political spectrum. Even people who are, you know, who are conservative might have different views than some of the folks here who also don't want kings. So it was, it was a big tense slogan. I think it worked well. Jim and then. Elena Foreign. Did you say Jim? I did say Jim Hartsfield. Yeah. Well, great to see everyone. I'll just admit I, I attended somewhat late, but the rally in Marietta, Georgia. We're talking seriously deep red territory here. And just down the road by the way, is the lynching site of Leo Frank. If you know that story and, and. And musical. It was really interesting nothing what I experienced it was like two separate events that were side by side. It was clearly had already been a well planned festival for Juneteenth. Celebration was in the old town square and park proper in, in Marietta and it was a festival. It was bands and people and booths and. And then the block over was. Was along the streets the, the signs and the protesting and the honking the horns of cars going through. But that was what was really interesting. It was like two simultaneously thing. Simultaneous things going on with completely different atmospheres. All very positive, positive interactions with the law enforcement officers that were, you know, there's plenty of them around. No sounds of a, of a, of a. Of a counter protest. I will mention, I think it was my other Atlantan. Sydney. Yeah, Sydney not only the, the. The band but by the way, what happened in Atlanta by a couple of tuba and, and trombone players with, with proud Boys I think was highlighted on the Rachel Mattow show about just a, a just using humor and absurdity to, to create br. Actually quite, quite effective. Anyway, that's my quick report. Thanks Jim. Elena, welcome. Thank you. Well, here in Toronto we didn't do no kings. We did no tyrants because we kind of like King Charles. He just came and gave the throne speech for Our new prime minister. And in any case, he is about as far from a tyrant as you could get. The same thing was happening with democrats abroad groups in places like Denmark and Sweden, where they also have kings that are pretty much ceremonial figures who are goodwill ambassadors. But our situation, we had about a thousand people. The police were very helpful. They'd also been helpful to us when we had the hands off one. We had about 1,000 people. A lot of people spoke about being afraid to go back to the United States and visit their families because they were concerned about being hassled at the border. And I just had my sister and brother in law decided to not come and visit me on their way back from California because they didn't want to to risk getting hassled at the border. And these are two natural born middle class white folks, you know, not the sort of thing, not the sort of people that are considered to be likely radicals. But I think that that seems to be coming up more and more is that the United States is, at least in terms of its customs and border people, seen as hostile to anyone who is not a Trumpist. And some of our folks have gotten hassled when they visited family in the States. Not refused entry, but hassled, you know, and all, you know, like, like regular citizens. And the last thing I'll say is after I visited the States and to see family in February, I came back and I got a phone call on my Canadian cell phone that said my parole had been revoked and I had 10 days to leave the country. Oh. Which I presumed at the time was a scam. But apparently they are sending these things out, you know, pretty much indiscriminately. And I think that it's probably a tactic of intimidation for anybody who isn't a full citizen with a passport. So help me understand. Elena, are you, are you on parole? No. Okay, so your non existent parole was revoked. Okay. Yeah, yeah. My non existent parole is something that they were granting to people on temporary protected status and refugee claimants. Y. Gotcha. Okay. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah. Actually I've never even been arrested. Yeah. Reports. You're not something to be proud of or ashamed of, you'll say yet. Plenty of time left. Thanks, Elena. Jane Bird. Okay. I find it ironic that we don't want kings. And yet on a day to day basis we're rather unfamiliar with democracy because most of us work in workplaces, they have bosses and the corporate hierarchy is not a democracy. And by and large workers never get on the boards of directors to guide the policies of These companies. So the challenge of creating a culture that, that primarily values conducting business to be in the service of life is working against that kind of gradient of our day to day experience is of kings and bosses. And yet our social aspiration is democracy. So there's a contradiction there that we have to somehow get around and becoming locally involved in politics in these days and times. I fathom it takes more courage on a local level because people know, you know, they know where you live. The attack on Democrats, even to the point of murder is lurking in the background in such a gun volatilized society that the issue of courage is really a huge issue. And thank heavens for the demonstrators that give solace that they're not afraid to come out on the street and be in groups. That gives comfort to a lot of us. I think we need to think about how to build courage and support people on a local level to actually be politically operative. Thank you for that. We've reinserted courage into the subtitle of this salon. So important theme. Thank you also for raising the workplace democracy question. As you and a number of folks on the call know, this is a place where I've been putting a lot of attention on workplace democracy and collaboration and employee ownership. And one of the values of watching the news is that I learned some things sometimes in Germany there's a statutory requirement that there must be workers on boards of directors. Percentage depends on the size of the companies. But it's there in law. There was jumping up and down opposition when it was first proposed. Now the business community has embraced it and other, some, some dozen or so other European countries have adopted the same principle. So you do have that. Also just learned this week that there's now more than half a billion dollars in funds raised to foster employee ownership conversions of companies and another half billion in the pipeline. So there's a rising attention to that, at least in this country. Tamara. And then Mindy and then Thomas. I was just looking up on my next door to tell you about one of the no Kings events. How many people we got here. And then I just see that ICE is now raiding, raiding the farms that feed America in Thermal and Mecca, which is Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley right now. So I was going to say that the no Kings rally that I was at was in Rancho Mirage, California and we had maybe, maybe 1,000 people, I'm not sure, but we are mostly made up of seniors and there were two women, elderly women, who probably it was held at between 9 and 10 in the morning, but it was already in the 90s, so we had to get paramedics because of the heat factor. And then, but the, and then down the street Cathedral City, we had the no ice rally and then. And people stayed there many hours. And then we had in Palm Springs, it's also pride. So we had all these guys in town. So there were at least 3,000 people for that one at night. But there was a, but there was a, a threat. I don't remember if it was. It was a shooting threat online for that one. But the police found him in time. Interestingly, I don't remember if I said this in this group or before. Governor Waltz in Minnesota urged people not to come to the, to the demonstration on Saturday at the State Capitol because of the shooter was still loose. Yes. And they had massive turnout anyway. Right. People said, well yeah, I'm not going to be cowed. We're coming out. And there were more people at the state Capitol in Minneapolis than at the federal Capitol at Trump's birthday party. It's kind of interesting. Also Mindy and then Thomas. Hi, thanks. I am a member of Indivisible. I'm also working with some other political action groups with Danny Sheehan out of the Romero Institute in addressing the government. I attended March in Walnut Creek, California, which is a pretty upper middle class area. We had anywhere between estimates are 5 to 7,000 people in downtown Walnut Creek. In Portland, Oregon, I live in Vancouver, Washington. Portland, Oregon had 12,000 people. So it's interesting to see that USA Today reported only 5 million people, but 50, 51 reported 12 to 13 million people nationwide. Wonderful start. The problem is how do we continue this? And we can't be doing this on a monthly. I mean if we really want to evoke change, there needs to be some sort of a weekly movement. Things are degrading at a rapid pace in regards to our democracy and we need to stand up and we need to continue to grow upon the no kings. The next thing that I'm seeing and I was on vacation and I have indivisible tonight but is June 17th. But we have to keep the numbers up and we also need to bring in people from across the spectrum. We need to bring in the 20 year olds, the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds as well because it's a lot of people 50 and over who have been protesting, me personally in my 60s since middle school. So you know, we have to show up, we have to keep the numbers going, we have to keep doing the five calls. I don't know what the answer is, but things are Going to continue to get worse before they get better unless we start standing up. Mindy, what's the five calls, please? The five calls app, it's five calls.org and what you can do there is it'll bring up anywhere from 50 plus apps, active legislative actions. It'll call. It's an app that you can load on your phone and do on a daily basis to call your local representatives. It makes it very simple, very streamlined about what's in the queue for them to vote on. And it calculates those numbers and aggregates them so that we can substantially say to our legislators, listen, you've had 50,000 of your constituents call you on this. What is your position? Yeah, my experience talking with folks in elected office and their staffs is that this makes a difference for them. And particularly the level of personalization matters a lot. I have friends who are calling and talking live with legislative staff every day. Not just leaving a message of support on the recording, but talking live with people. And it weighs a lot more as they do their analysis and assessment. So it's important work to do. Thanks for clarifying that. The five or if you put it in the chat, put the link in the chat if you would. Already did. Okay. Thomas Hudson, welcome. I think you get the long distance prize today. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be in this incredible team. I'm joining in from Nairobi, Kenya, a young person and I've been actually referred to this network by a friend of mine who's living in California. She's called Melanie Belfeld, a residence of California and to start with, I run an initiative back in Kenya. A founder of Youth Green Space Action and Network Organization, which is a national registered NGO working with a network of 3,000 young people on mobilizing youth to take up leadership in driving climate action and building resilient communities. And for the last two years, actually three years because we formally began our engagements in 2022 and since then actually things were really moving smoothly till this year when, you know, we encountered a lot of funding challenges and a lot of issues to do with our local entities with regards to Trump administration. Actually right now a lot of organizations back in Kenya, in Africa to be precise, are winding up either the operations or actually building consortia to actually survive the heat. And besides that, besides that, it's ridiculous that if you engage yourself in matters, you know, climate related and climate related and matters activism, your social media pages or accounts are screened. And recently actually the other day I just saw our, our neighboring countries just joined the list of Countries yet to be banned from getting into the United States, that is Tanzania and Uganda. So that speaks a lot of heat. That speaks a lot of heat to all of us that today is happening to them. Tomorrow it will be us. And you know, that in one way or the other affects our work and even our relationship, you know, into doing what we are doing back here. And so for me right now in this moment, as our organization has been hugely affected, I was in a group where we were sharing what has happened with the shutdown of the USAID program back in Kenya. Health related programs, climate related programs, actually adaptation and resilience supporting community has been hugely affected and that makes even other sectors crippled. So what does that mean for us? Mosul as a youth led organization, we shut down and basically I had to actually tell the other youngsters to be able to look for other ways of coping up. But when I had an engagement with my friend Melanie because most of the time this has been one of the difficult time as a leader and you know, as a young founder where young people are looking up to me back in Kenya, she told me, you know, Hudson, you don't have to fold your organization. You can always have time to relax, but also build strategic alliances to help support your initiative. And that's why I'm here actually, to be able to build new relationship, but not just relationship, to support this, to connect deeply. Yes. To get to understand what you are doing and also get to connect beyond just work. For me that really means a lot and I'm looking forward to having, you know, engagements with all of you either while in Kenya or other parts of Africa. Thank you so much. Thank you for all that, Thomas. And thank you for your comment about consortia to survive the heat. Reminding us that the heat is both the literal heat and the metaphoric heat that we're all facing. If you like, you can put your contact information in the chat so people can reach out to you if they're interested in doing that. And that's true for everybody. Sure. I'm texting my email and my phone number, my phone number and email down the chats. Thank you. And yeah, anybody else who'd like to connect with anybody else, you can do that too. Got about 15 or 20 minutes left on the call. Peter Yakovsky, are you still here? Yeah. Could I poke you and invite you to the mic? I suppose so. You and I had a pretty interesting conversation yesterday that ties in with all this and I wonder what's, what's percolating for you in, in. I can't quite remember what all the questions were and all that, but one of the things is I see that power has been big, power has been running the game for a long, long time and has consolidated so much that the veneer of workability that it's all for the people and all that, that veneer is peeling and everybody can see it now. I have a friend whose grandfather worked in a. As a common labor in a sawmill in Oregon, and he had three children, a house and a wife, and was able to support all that by being just a laborer. You can't do that anymore. Nobody can. And so something has changed. I feel the pressure of the power as debt, money, the financial part, but lurking behind that is everything else. And underneath it is the kind of distraction from the recognition that we are all together in a drift of the mysteriousness into a future we really don't know about which we have deceptively little influence. And instead of working to live well together and figure out how to go forward, we end up trying to dominate one another. And that ethos of domination, I think, is the big problem. It shows up in the tiniest thing, like being argumentative, like wanting to be right like that. And by the way, I'm an expert about arguing and being right. But I've discovered so much. The moment I finally decided to give that up, I began to see myself in a new way with a little bit of chagrin at the very least, maybe a lot. And so coming here in this conversation, I am really impressed with people who are thinking in large organizational terms. And I'm thinking more in how do individuals learn to relate with one another without trying to dominate and cultivate, instead of the capability for controlling and influencing things to living together with others. And those two are completely different Capabilities, often confused, often overlap. But I think living together with others is the big challenge. And in all the vast uncertainty of it all, we can't even tell what's really going on anywhere. Did the bombing in Iran take out the air defense or not? We don't know. And. But the one thing you can do is you can build confidence in your relations with direct relations with other individuals. And I think that's a skill that's worth cultivating. Yeah. Now, did I cover the things you wanted me to touch? You did good, Peter. And I know you've got enormous depth of experience in nurturing those kind of conversations. For me, the. The practice in that direction has been from shifting from thinking, saying to somebody, well, you know you're wrong, or how could you possibly think that or, you know, all the various argumentations that I've learned so well. Oh, I'm good at that. Yeah. Yeah. And, well, you know, been. Been to school, learned how to do that thing. And instead what I'm practicing doing is saying, oh, that's an interesting perspective. It's different than mine. Tell me more about why you think that or how did you get there? Like, approach it with curiosity rather than fight. And something shifts in me as well as in the other person. And I've found in cases like that where we can actually do something together about. Well, it's even more than that. Even though we disagree. Yeah. Let me. Let me go a little further. One of the things I discovered, I think you guys, everybody will realize this, is that, I mean, it was so obvious, I can't believe I never saw it before, is that everything someone says or does at that moment makes sense to them in some way. We do. I do, you do. We all do. Something makes sense now. It may be something trivial, maybe vastly important, but it makes sense. So then. And that's where meaning comes in. Words don't mean anything. People do. And then how do we navigate? That is like, oh, if I recognize that what you just said, which sounds ridiculous to me, it makes sense to you, then that curiosity. I think I can be a lot more generous, less judgmental, and find out, hey, help me understand how that works for you. Like that. And in the end, we can maybe find not only what we can do together, but we may find a future that is attractive to us both that neither saw before. Yeah. One of the things, Peter, that I've learned from Fernando Flores and from you and from Chauncey Bell, is that there's pretty much no point arguing about interpretations of things and interpretations of what most of us have most of the time. There's something else to do with that, which is to be curious and explore and dance together and see what. What possibilities can emerge from that. And it's a. It's a lesson I'm gradually learning and finding great reward in. Thank you, Peter, for that. Let me have one more tiny thing there about the interpretation business, because strong opinions are clearly interpretations, but then we can sometimes retreat to facts. Can't argue with a fact. But what you can find out about a fact is, why is that important? And that's an interpretation. Then we find that we're living in interpretations all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Philip. And then Craig, I just wanted to respond to Peter's point that I'm very much resonating with. But I kind of suspect that the challenge really is not that we need to learn how to engage in a non dominating way. In my experience, when people, no matter their background, no matter their experience, if they have a shared pursuit, they find a way to cooperate and domination just doesn't enter in, doesn't need to enter into the practice whatsoever. I think that it's really the case that in fact we naturally are cooperative in this way. We naturally set up games that aren't about winning and losing, they're about simply moving forward, accomplishing our goals. And that our culture has in fact indoctrinated us in the norms of domination. And that if modernity is anything, it may be shorthand for simply that the culture of domination. And that it's perhaps about unlearning or checking the ways in which our default assumptions and our normal approaches to problem solving, organization building evoke and reify these norms of domination without our realizing it. And because I agree 100%, yes, really good at just doing it without that intervention. Yeah, thank you, thank you. We're in violent agreement there. Philip. There you go. Craig and then David. And let me ask, in these last few minutes, try to, let's try to bring the conversation back to your personal experience, not your philosophical interpretation or political interpretation of what's going on out there. That's been a lot of the richness of this call so far. And Craig and then David. Yes, thank you. There's a great quote by E.O. wilson in his book Consilience the Unity of Knowledge, where he talks about how we are drowning in data while starving for wisdom. And I think this is a very important key concept right now as data is off the charts. And in a way, I believe we started AI with the very first computers where computations were outside of our own brains. But where is it leading us? It's leading us to that domination and illusion of control. And this is what is fundamentally flawed about our modern culture, is that we have lost sight of what wisdom is. And one of the the primary things in my world right now, because I've been at this for 60, 60 plus years, is that no longer can I find true integration and synthesis. That things are so polarized that the opportunity for real dialogue is stifled to the nth degree. And I'm talking about Oregon, Oregon State, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and Yale in my own personal experience. And so if there's not an opportunity to create integration and synthesis through the essence of science being, exploring differing hypotheses, how can we possibly think we're going to evolve. Greg, thank you. I hear you. And I also see rich conversations happening in a very different mode. And Peter, could you put the title of your book in the chat please? As something people want to look to about different kinds of conversations that are not arguments. David Schoenbrunn, thanks for being patient. Sure. There was a term missing from Peter's comments in terms of domination and that's psychopathy. The more that I've studied, the more I've become convinced that the primary level at which world events are happening is driven by psychopaths. And we as rational people have no ability to even imagine that thought process can't just can't tune into it. So this relates to me in having a serious degree of despair in terms of, you know, here we go again. This is Iraq changed with the last letter changed to N. It's the same exact playbook. I'm furious about it and, and I, I believe that the, the media have so warped people's understanding of what goes on in the world that they're just going to sit by and allow this to happen. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. There's a film came out on about 20 years ago called the Corporation. Richard Ray Anderson and a number of other business leaders as well as anti corporate leaders. And one of the things it did was talk with a bunch of psychiatrists who diagnosed and said that the. The System selects for CEOs who are at least sociopathic, if not psychopathic. It's the nature of the system. Birch Bali who Senator from Indiana who ran for president in 1976. Jan, I see your hand. I'll get you in a second. Stepped out of the primary, was doing well and stepped down for two reasons. One is he said this is destructive of my family. And second, the process that we were going through is selecting for the wrong kind of leader. The nature of the process selects for the wrong ones. So I hear echoes of what you're saying in that David Chain Bird. This is the time to find all the myriad ways in which each of us can withdraw our consent from. From what is taking place and letting our political operatives know that we are withdrawing our consent. What does that mean or look like? Shane it's for each of us to find out what it means. For some of us it's not censoring ourselves in advance. For others it's a phone call to a representative or it's a way that one spends one's money or donates money and to whom contacting media, expressing your withdrawal of consent targeting specific things of the day. To mention in your withdrawal of consent, We have countless ways to do this because of our communications technology, and it's within our imaginations to find it and do it. Thank you, Jane. But I know that the Soviet Union fell to its knees when the mass of Soviet citizens had withdrawn their consent. It's an important perspective on power. We think of power as something that. Where folks force other people to do things that they don't want to do, but that only works with consent. Even the most violent power fails in the face of resistance that won't go along. Gregory Bateson wrote eloquently about this 50 years ago and Steps to an Ecology of Mind. He decried the way that we use power as a metaphor from physics in the affairs of human beings where something very different is underway. A good time to commend to people the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp, which has been the handbook for nonviolent overturning of dictatorships in many countries. So it's a useful read, Shell. I'm inclined to give Jane the last word unless you got something that just really needs to go right here. So I figure you might. Withdrawal of consent is something that a scholar named Erica Chenoweth and her partner Maria Stanley have studied extensively. And their research shows that if just three and a half people withdraw that consent. Three and a half percent. Three and a half percent. You said three and a half people. So just three and a half percent. For the record. Yeah. The government tends to topple non violently and with greater results than in violent revolution. And she was a skeptic. She came to this thinking that violent social change was better and her research totally undermined her belief. And there's a million ways to do it. You know, tax resistance is one that I've done in the past. I'm not in a position to do that right now. But showing up at events like no Kings Day, making it clear on my Facebook page, I'm constantly debating with Republicans and my audience is not them. My audience is the people who don't really know what they think about something. I'll stop there. It's a lot more. I could say I'm a skeptic about her work for various reasons. We've discussed that in a previous call. But I will note that three and a half percent means three and a half percent persistent day in, day out. So like you look at Serbia and you see hundreds of thousands of people in the street every day, not every few months. Also, it's not a. You know, we are not machines. It's not like a magic switch that you flip because there could be three and a half percent. From another point of view. It's not like magic, but. But the point of persistent action by a significant subset of the population is a really good one. The kings, the no kings actually reached pretty close to that threshold. According to some estimates, it did. But the question is, can that be sustained? Ken, you got a last slide for us. I just want to thank everybody for your participation and your presence and your thoughtfulness in this. This is a very rich call. I'm glad we had more activity than we usually have. I hope all your breakouts were as rich as the one that I was in. I want to invite you to come back next month. Bring other people. Thank you. For those of you who brought other folks to this one. We love expanding the breadth and diversity of the conversation that we're having here. And you're all on the mailing list. We'll be sending out the recording later this week, more likely early next week. Feel free to respond to Ken and me through that email. You can reach out directly to me in through these links. And again, thank you so much for being with us. Let's. For me, the echo that lasts here is what Peter said about learning to live well together at many different levels. That's the challenge here. And as always, remind. We remind you in our closing music, if we have that. We do. I just want to say one quick thing, which is, given the level of conflict in the world, the number of people who think they're going to solve it through force, there's an African proverb that says, in conflict, you don't bring a knife that cuts, you bring a needle that sews. Thank you, everybody. You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you're standing in the eye. You can dance in a hurricane but only if you're standing in the eye.
