Recently, however, I’ve become more skeptical in my writing about whether or not political activism really has any effect. Most of my attention has been focused on personal change, on adapting to the world rather than trying to make it better.

More recently still, I’ve begun to think that personal change is equally futile: that we cannot be other than who we are, and that the best personal coping strategy is to know and accept yourself. My friend Janene has tempered my thoughts on this somewhat; she says that while we may not be able to change who we are, we can change what we do.

To some extent this takes us full circle. If we have the opportunity and responsibility to change our behaviour, our activities, to make different choices about what we do, and don’t do, what is this if not political activism? And if those actions do make a difference, then skepticism about the effectiveness of political activism is at best unwarranted, and at worst defeatist. My political activist friends have called me on this, and I promised to recant any suggestion on these pages that political activism is a waste of time and energy.

So I’m doing so. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” She was right. Social and political movements have always pushed people and institutions to make important and meaningful change that they would not otherwise make, by appealing in part to their sense of what’s fair and just and reasonable (an intellectual appeal), but more importantly by appealing to human emotion, by moving them. Without such movements there would be no movement, and we would probably be living in a world with much more slavery, violence, destruction and tyranny than the one we live in now.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is so. I have a fairly optimistic view of human intention and behaviour, as befits an incurable idealist. But I also confess to being misanthropic — I don’t much like most people. I find them stupid, unimaginative, indifferent to the suffering of others, and conveniently ignorant and agnostic. It is easy to give up hope on people, and to blame “the system” that grinds the sense and sensibility out of them, and just give up.

I believe, as John Gray has argued, that we humans, like most creatures, are preoccupied with the needs of the moment. We are myopic, both in time and space — unable to really care about what we cannot see and feel, or about what the future consequences of our actions might be. That’s not a criticism, just a Darwinian truth. That is who we are.

The problem is one of scale. When something affects us, or our immediate circle, personally, it is in our nature to care about it, and, with some struggle (because in our modern world we do not get much practice building consensus, resolving conflicts, and really caring about those we haven’t personally selected to be part of our networks) to resolve it congenially, fairly and effectively.

But the further away something gets from those intimate circles, the less capacity we have to understand it, to care about it, or to deal with it effectively. With distance and size it becomes remote, invisible, complex, unfathomable. We introduce hierarchy (whose effect is to increase efficiency and the concentration of power and reduce effectiveness, resilience, information-sharing and peer communication). We introduce agents, brokers, intermediaries, media and ‘representatives’ to whom we cede power and responsibility.

As we become more distant and as the circle becomes much larger, we cannot care as much. Soon it takes a massive fear-based propaganda machine just to make us vote, or fight a foreign ‘enemy’ thousands of miles away. Likewise, when politicians are far removed from their constituents, they cease to know or care what those constituents individually want or feel, and focus instead on how to broadcast messages to get re-elected. If they’re business leaders, likewise removed by many layers and floors and oceans from the front line people, they cease to care about those people, and begin to think of them merely as ‘resources’ to be managed.

There’s a new book out about government corruption in Kenya called It’s Our Turn to Eat. The title refers to the appeal of each elected government to its own tribal supporters that they have to seize power and gorge themselves quickly because after the next election some other tribe will be in power and they too will look after ‘their own’. The twist is that the elite in Kenya, across all tribal groups, exploits this tribal animosity and fear to distract the electorate from the fact that, whoever is in power, the elite still pull the strings, pay off the politicians, and hoard the resulting wealth. The objective is to subjugate and discourage the people, because that allows the elite to continue to rule unopposed. Then it all becomes a game of perpetuating power and wealth — stealing elections, ever-increasing disparity, police state laws, bribes, pork, subsidies and payoffs, propaganda, intimidation, media control, divide and conquer, and massive corruption. US 2000, Kenya or Iran 2009, it doesn’t matter. To think that this is a struggling-nation problem only is pure conceit. Thanks to distance, size, and scale, the benign inclinations of human nature are coopted, perverted and corrupted. Everything that works at a community level fails at the level of corporation and nation. We have shown, all over the world, again and again, that once we reach a certain size we become depraved, ungovernable.

The role of the activist is to act as a counterbalance to this perversion, to speak truth to power, to bridge the distance, to hold those who are irresponsible and unaccountable, responsible and accountable. To intervene. To break down what is already broken. To enable what the people really want to be realized, despite everything. A step forward for every step back. A holding action.

This is thankless work. So I want to say thank you.

Without activists, the Republican neocons would still and forever control the US government. Without activists, the world would be full of gulags, torture prisons, brutalized, silent spouses and children. Without activists, the forests would all be gone, the air fouled, the oceans dead, the glaciers and ice-cap and permafrost melted into a brown sea. Without activists, women would have no vote and no right to choose, and people of colour would have no freedom. Without activists, the books with the most important ideas in human history would be banned, or never published. Without activists, the world’s children would be working in mines, and the world’s adults would be working in chains. Without activists, we would all be addicted to the poisons that Big Tobacco and Big Agribiz and Big Pharma and Big Energy try to convince us we cannot live without. Without activists, the only non-human animals would be farmed animals. Without activists, the world would be awash in billions of unwanted children.

All of us must be activists, if we are to give this world a fighting chance.

What should you do? Picking your cause is just like picking the work you’re meant to do, as I explain in my book Finding the Sweet Spot. This is not work for the half-hearted or easily-discouraged. So, just as in choosing the paying work that gives your life meaning, you need to identify and choose a cause that’s in your ‘sweet spot’ — something you love doing, and that you’re good at, and that is needed in the world, and that you care about. If you are no good at it you’ll get discouraged or burned out. If you don’t love the cause, you’ll end up disengaged. If it’s not really needed, if the world’s not ready for it, you’ll be unappreciated and frustrated.

To find this, you must learn something about yourself, and then do some research about the world, about what’s really going on, about the points of intervention that will allow you to make a difference. There are a few ideas in the brown box in the top chart above, but it’s only a tiny segment of the work that needs to be done. Whether your cause is health or corruption or energy or pollution or water or food or conservation or animal welfare or urban despair or suburban sprawl or power or inequity, the process is the same: Find partners, a community of people who share your purpose and your cause and whose work and strengths complement your own, so that you get to do what you love and are good at and so that the sum of the team’s work is greater than its parts.

Next, you need to be for something, not just against something. Always fighting against, as important as that work is, will drain your energy unless you also have a vision of a better way, something to replace what you’re battling. So you need to be not only an informed warrier but also an innovator, an entrepreneur, a visionary.

And you need to be prepared to search insatiably and undogmatically for the truth, because ultimately that is your most powerful, and sometimes your only, weapon. Without it, your belief and passion are not enough.

You also need to be able to articulate, simply, clearly and honestly, what you believe and why. There is power in intention and strength in numbers, but you will be unable to achieve either unless you are able to convey what is, and what needs to be done, to those who are ready to listen and to make common cause with you. You cannot do it alone, and you have to pace yourself. You need to understand too that many people will not be ready for your explanation, and that your response when you meet them is to be polite and to move on, not waste your energies trying to make them believe what they are not ready to believe. You must have faith that they will come around, in time, and you or one of those you have joined in common cause will be there, then, to welcome them.

And at times you need to be ready to fight. You might think this would require courage, but if you believe in the cause, and you know it’s right, fighting for it will not be hard; in your mind there will be no choice.

(What else, activists? What am I missing? Lessons from the trenches? Secrets of success?)

We must all be activists, and relentless, and patient, and brilliant at it, because as long as the majority are hopeless, there is no hope. And because we cannot fail. We cannot.

Until the day when it’s no one group’s turn to eat. Until there is enough for all, and more.

As you may have guessed from recent posts, I’m in a very contemplative and self-preoccupied space lately. Much of my writing has been about what I call “Let-Self-Change”, based on the principle that we can’t really hope to change the world very much, so what we should concentrate on is adapting to the world, letting ourselves change.

But now I’m not so sure on either count: I’m beginning to think we have more power to change the world than we might imagine; more on that in an upcoming post entitled Why Activism Works. And I’m beginning to think we have less power to change ourselves than we might expect: We cannot be other than who we are. Look at all the self-help books out there, and from what I can tell almost none of them has any enduring effect.

I’ve been talking a lot about my three latest self-improvement projects: To connect better with my own (largely suppressed) emotions, to become more empathetic, and to learn to live in Now Time instead of Anxious Time. I certainly believe that practice and exercise have value, but I’m increasingly convinced that any changes they provoke are likely to be modest, and perpetually difficult to sustain.

So what if I were to just slow down, make space, and pay attention to who I really am, now? And then just accept that that is who I am, already, this nobody-but-myself I keep aspiring to become?

The result of my doing so (aside from some consternation and self-dissatisfaction I had to sit with for a long time to quell), is the word self-portrait above. Here’s what it acknowledges:

1. I am, and I think we all are, largely a product of two forces over which we have little control: our bodies, that “complicity of organs that evolved our brains as an information-processing and feature-detection system for their benefit”, and our civilization culture, that molds us with language and socialization to behave and fit into this overcrowded world. The two lower boxes of my self-portrait list the qualities that I think each of these forces have instilled in me. I am not blaming ‘them’ for this, just acknowledging that they have played important roles in formng who I am. Had I grown up in a natural environment outside of civilization, the qualities in the lower left would still be present.
2. There are some other qualities, that I list as Things I’m Not, that I’ve repeatedly acknowledged, but I’m not sure where they ‘come from’ — they’re not clearly attributable to either my body/metabolism or the influences culture has had on me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; whatever their cause, these qualities too are a part of who I am. I’d love to be present, empathetic, sensitive, patient, a fast learner, and carefree ‘the space through which stuff passes’, but instead I am absent, inattentive, insensitive, impatient, a slow-learner, and intense. It’s not for lack of trying to change.
3. I tell myself 5 stories, shown in the upper left box, that I believe to be true stories (to the extent any ‘story’ can be ‘true’), that I don’t think I can significantly change, and which evoke in me the flurry of what Richard Moss calls “tamed” emotions in the box connected to my box of stories (they are called “tamed” because one can learn to live with them, in contrast to the ones that eat you alive). I’ve tried Moss’ approach of declaring such stories to be fictions to free myself from these emotions, but with limited and unenduring success. I can suppress these emotions, and perhaps it’s useful to do so, but I cannot deny them, or indefinitely distract myself from them. They, too, are an integral part of who I am.
4. Finally, since who we are and what we do are inseparable, I’ve listed the six ‘groups’ of things I love to do. Most of my time is now spent doing these things, which is distracting me from my tamed emotions and making me, most of the time, extremely happy as a result (is happiness just the absence of negative emotions and anxieties?; I don’t know). The first two groups (imagining/reflecting, and writing), are my Sweet Spot: They are things that I do well, and which are needed in the world, besides being things I love doing. The rest of this list are things I love doing but confess to no particular competency at them. These things, too, are who I am.

That’s my self-portrait, my honest-as-possible assessment of who I am. Suppose I just accept that, and acknowledge that this rather unflattering portrait is authentic, and reflects who I have always been, and am largely fated to be for the rest of my life. And, most importantly, suppose I just accept that here, now, in this moment, this is who I am. No escape, no correction, no denying, no path to ‘betterment’.

Nobody but myself.

Is ‘knowing’ this, consciously, all that is needed? If I just let myself be this, and if I let this authentic self-knowledge guide me in deciding what to do, moment to moment, can I give up all the Let-Self-Change machinations, let go of all the gunk and intentions and expectations that are not-me, and just soar? Might it even, unintentionally, make me more empathetic, more present, less anxious, more like the space through which stuff passes?

Hmmm…

Thanks to Nick, Cheryl, Tree, and Patti for the conversations that enabled this. Egret photo is by Eileen Nauman.

everything tells me
there is something terribly wrong
with the way we live now,
that this is not how we’re meant to live.

people behave in unnatural ways
ways detached from reality,
from others, from themselves.
it’s as if reality is too terrible, too hard,
more trouble than it’s worth.
so we live in these imaginary places,
in our heads,
in our stories.
it’s safer here.

i can imagine how it was
to live in a primeval world,
a world where our senses and instincts held sway,
a world of astonishing colour, and surprise,
a world without politics, without scarcity
without fear.
a world that just was.
and of which we were, from birth, a part.
accepted, loved, honoured.
even by those who would devour us.

our intellectual and emotional selves
are a natural evolution:
more thought enables us to innovate,
to survive in places we are not naturally endowed to live.
more feeling enables us to care –
and when times are challenging
those who care will outlive those who do not.
now we are smart, and fierce, creatures,
evolved, grimly, to survive.

but that intellect can also imagine
things far more fearsome than other creatures,
and can make those terrors a reality,
while those sensitive emotions
can make those terrors unbearable.
unintended consequences,
enough to suggest that nature made a mistake with us,
a big enough mistake to usher in
the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.

so here we are, as we wait to discover
what we have wrought.
out of control, over-bred,
damaged by stresses we could not foresee,
self-imposed, and self-compounding.

all creatures value freedom above all else,
even above love.
in a world of horrific overcrowding,
constrained to live in a social compact
that inhibits us everywhere,
that deprives us of everything in life that’s natural,
we have ceded all our freedoms
for survival:
obey, or die.

hence the asylum: deprived of freedom
we quickly go mad:
we kill, wage war, sacrifice our souls,
pray to gods of suffering,
eat our young.

so what are we to do?
inure ourselves, become machines,
live in our heads, suppress our feelings,
do what we must,
keep our heads, enough to help others,
to be of use, while we wait
for a salvation beyond hope?

or walk away from civilization,
be selfish, find oasis for ourselves and those we love
and live as free and natural lives
as can be found in soils untouched
by the asylum, as humble models
for the seventh world that will arise
with our demise?

Last week I was recuperating from a back injury, so I had more than the usual amount of time for reflection, time to do nothing, and I really like the space it’s left me in. For someone who spends too much time thinking, too much time in his own head, I have to admit that having unrushed time to think about things that are actually important to me, and with it, time to feel, to pay attention to my senses, and to listen to my intuitions, seems to be good for me. Perhaps rather than thinking too much, my problem may be that I think reactively too much.

It has occurred to me that, rather than some kind of ‘self-improvement’ actions, what I should be focusing on is getting rid of the gunk — the anxiety-creating stories and commensurate emotions, the tasks I’ve undertaken that are not essential to anyone, all the stuff that needs to be looked after — gunk that is preventing me from having the time to just be Me. I don’t need more things to do, I need fewer. And perhaps if I create more time for myself to just be Me, I will find that I am living in the Now.

Rather than starting this week stressed and ‘behind’ as a result of having not done much on my ‘to do’ list last week, I started the week relaxed, refreshed, focused. I accomplished twice as much today as I usually do, and I did it better. I was more attentive to the people I work with, more centred, able to bring more concentration to the problems at hand, and more imagination and creativity. I was more helpful.

I recently pledged to learn to increase my awareness of my own feelings, manage my own emotions better, improve my emotional communication, and become more attentive and appreciative of others’ feelings and the context that has created them. I am starting to sense that by just being Me, just living in the Now, I might automatically and immediately become better at doing these five natural things. Living in the Now, it seems to me, must accelerate one’s self-knowledge to the point one becomes more intelligent (in useful ways), more emotionally intelligent, more aware and ‘sensitive’, more intuitive, more present.

Today I felt closer to people, more sympathetic. Could this living in the New even be the remedy for my misanthropy?

Perhaps it’s just the euphoria of feeling better after feeling ill. But maybe all these struggles to try to meditate, to try to get myself into a space, this simpler ‘space through which stuff passes’, are bearing some real fruit. If so, here are the things that I’ve been doing differently, that might be worth making more time for:

1. Deliberately doing less, just enjoying the passage of time, guilt free, lazily. 
2. Long walks in the forest, in the rain, and in the moonlight.
3. Listening to favourite, well-crafted music.
4. Watching sunrises and sunsets, with a cup of tea.
5. Surrounding myself with lovely smells — scented candles, flowers, spices.
6. Looking at flames — candles and fireplaces.
7. Smiling and laughing — at funny cartoons, poignant stories, playful kittens.
8. Eating simple whole foods — berries, nuts, fruits, raw vegetables.
9. Dancing by myself.
10. Looking at things from unusual perspectives — up close, in shadow, looking up.

These attentive, solitary, sensory pursuits slow my breathing, my heart rate, and silence the machine in my head. Perhaps this is my meditation.

After I’ve spent some time doing them, I seem to be more centred, more ready for social activities, more competent at them. I enjoy them more. I’m more present.

I’m more Me.