“We are already emergent beings, just by our very existence. But we’ve been tricked away from it.
Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other:
We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land.
We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo.
We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home?
We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance.
We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in.
We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness.
We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together.
We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments.
We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life.
In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education.
Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not.
We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion.
We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together.
Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.
Lots of people and organizations have been and are critical of these ways we socialize each other, and have offered solutions—I think here of Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Augusto Boal, Malcolm X, the Zapatistas, and others throughout history who I believe have felt the thrum of emergence in their systems and moved what was possible in their lifetimes such that their impacts reverberate in my life and the work of my generation.
We are still mostly misdirected, turned away from the wisdom that is our inheritance. Joanna Macy speaks of the “great turning,” a collective awakening and shifting direction, away from the wanton destruction of this planet and each other, away from those practices of separation and competition listed above, towards life and abundance. I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now.
When Wheatley visited Detroit on a learning journey, she said systems built on greed eventually collapse on themselves, topple under their own top-heavy weight.
Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt. It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.”
-- Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
