Posts in Social
The Willingness to Submit

By Wade Lee Hudson

Conformity comes in many shapes, and often it’s rational. Unfortunately, society fosters irrational submission that undermines personal and collective empowerment. Determining if rebellion is justified can be tricky, but these decisions are essential, and engaging in effective resistance is critical.

Many people please their teacher to gain good grades and please their boss to get promoted. They self-censor and avoid expressing their views on controversial topics to minimize the risk of job loss or career opportunities. They work for dictatorial employers who regulate their speech, clothing, and manners and threaten to fire them for their political activities, diet, or almost anything bosses care to govern. 

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The Essential Skills for Being Human

By David Brooks

…Life has a way of tenderizing you, though. Becoming a father was an emotional revolution, of course. Later, I absorbed my share of the normal blows that any adult suffers — broken relationships, personal failures, the vulnerability that comes with getting older. The ensuing sense of my own frailty was good for me, introducing me to deeper, repressed parts of myself. I learned that living in a detached way is a withdrawal from life, an estrangement not just from other people but also from yourself.

I’m not an exceptional person, but I am a grower. I do have the ability to look at my shortcomings and then try to prod myself into becoming a more fully developed person.

I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills….

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Thoughts on “Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her” 

Even a decade after the publication of her book, The Feminine Mystique, widely credited for sparking second-wave feminism in the United States, the male establishment took neither Betty Friedan nor the women’s movement seriously. In this context, “Betty Friedan and the Movement That Outgrew Her” by Moira Donegan” reviews the early years of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and how Friedan dominated it, with decidedly mixed results.

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What Conversation Can Do for Us

By Hua Hsu

Excerpts from the March 20, 2023 Issue of The New Yorker

Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?

...“In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains... Cohen, a professor of English at Drexel University, is the author of “Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation” (Princeton). She makes the case that talking to others—sharing our stories—is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls...

Cohen returns to true conversation as a kind of sanctuary... In its ideal form, it involves no audience or judge, just partners; no fixed agenda or goals, just process...

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Leadership

What are healthy and unhealthy forms of leadership? Is a co-equal partnership the ideal or merely one option? Must some one person ALWAYS be in charge (in control)? If not, then when must someone be in charge? Are there examples of democratic hierarchies? Are there examples of viable collective/collaborative leadership? Do we need to cultivate more collective/collaborative leadership?


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The Desire to Dominate and the Willingness to Submit

By Wade Lee Hudson

Exploitative domination and submission produce fear; justified domination produces trust. Whether it’s done directly with interpersonal intervention or indirectly with legislation, domination of those who violate the rights of others is justified. It reduces the fear that poisons relationships and fosters exploitation.

Learning to control or overcome the desire to dominate or submit for personal gain nurtures compassionate action. The more you’re driven by the desire to serve rather than by ego, the more you can support others individually and help establish democratic-equality structures throughout society.

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Two First Things in Building Collective Action

By Michael Johnson

I have put 40 years into building and sustaining an urban intentional community of substantial size—the Ganas Community in Staten Island, NY. We began with seven, reached 100 in the 90s, and settled in at around 65 ever since. I have also studied collective action groups out in the regular world, especially worker co-operatives and solidarity economic groups.

So, do I have anything useful to pass on? I think so. At least a couple.

For me there is one lesson that stands out above all others in starting a community or collective action group: the group that starts and sustains the project has to learn how to talk to each other about the problems they have with each other.

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Georgia Football: Team "Connection"

In the business world, a company may hold a corporate retreat for employees for team building in hopes of producing better results.

The Georgia football team turned inward for players to get to know the guy across from them in the locker room or the person who they lined up besides or against on the practice field.

Skull sessions, they called them. It started last winter after an 8-2 season in which Georgia failed to win the SEC East for the first time since 2016 and the pandemic altered usual player interactions.

For three days a week, players met in small groups for as long as 20 to 25 minutes. They were held after weight lifting sessions. Coach Kirby Smart moved from meeting to meeting and assistant coaches rotated.

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Globalization and the Myth of Human Races

By Hector E. Garcia

At the core of the nation’s current socio-political conditions are two underlying challenges, both have been intensified by this stage of globalization but were present before it began with the fall of the Soviet Union. One can be addressed rationally and objectively; it is the growth of inequality in wealth and income… The other challenge compounds the first one unnecessarily… It could be simpler than the first because it draws power from a centuries' old myth that was debunked by DNA science in 2002: the classification of human races, which assumes a hierarchy of moral and intellectual aptitudes related to color of skin, geographical origin and language.

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Nonprofit Partnerships

Effective structures, a commitment to honor them, and mutual support for self-development can help nonprofit organizations cultivate productive partnerships. Members/clients can be partners with each other and with staff. Staff can be partners with each other, with members/clients, and with the governing board. Governing board members can be partners with each other and with staff.

In these ways, housing programs, community centers, activist organizations, faith communities, rehab centers, schools, and other nonprofits with a regular membership/client base can nurture self- and community empowerment — and serve as models for holistic and systemic transformation rooted in democratic hierarchies.

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Who Will Take Care of America’s Caregivers?

By Michelle Cottle

When you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire — whom do you expect to help take care of you? Family? Friends? Paid aides? All of the above?

The nation’s caregiving work force is fraying. Paid providers are overworked and undervalued, often forced to take on multiple jobs or turn to public assistance just to scrape by. Many family caregivers are struggling as well, sacrificing their own health and well-being to tend to loved ones for years on end. Consistent, skilled, affordable care is in short supply — and getting shorter — and those who provide it are shouldering an increasingly unsustainable burden.

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What I’ve Learned Over a Lifetime of Caring for the Dying

By Lynn Hallarman

While I slept in my home, my mother lay dying on the bathroom floor in her home in another state. She was not alone. Her longtime professional home health aide was by her side, propping her up with a hastily grabbed pillow and holding her hand.

Because I am a palliative care physician, I had been preparing myself and my family for the moment of her death for a long time. My mother, after all, was 92 and frail, and had dementia. At this point in her life, it would come down to the place where she would die and who was there in her last moments.

My experience as a physician — a professional life spent mainly tending to the dying — and as a daughter who navigated my mother’s last years with chronic illness, has kept me alert to the national conversations now taking place about the role of professional caregiving as essential health care.

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Mutual Support Groups

Small mutual support teams that embrace shared values and principles can nurture self-development. In Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, Tina Rosenberg reports that “from the affluent suburbs of Chicago to the impoverished shanties of rural India” mutual support teams have helped smokers stop smoking, teens fight AIDS, worshippers deepen their faith, activists overthrow dictators, addicts overcome addictions, and students learn calculus.[1]

Such teams could also help compassion-minded individuals set aside counter-productive tendencies and become more effective — and inspire politically inactive people to become more active.

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A Network of Mutual Support Teams

Small mutual support teams that embrace shared values and principles can nurture self-development. In Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, Tina Rosenberg reports that “from the affluent suburbs of Chicago to the impoverished shanties of rural India” mutual support teams have helped smokers stop smoking, teens fight AIDS, worshippers deepen their faith, activists overthrow dictators, addicts overcome addictions, and students learn calculus.[1]

Such teams could also help compassion-minded individuals set aside counter-productive tendencies and become more effective — and inspire politically inactive people to become more active. Those teams could serve as social greenhouses where we could develop our ability to relate as equals, create models, and strengthen our ability to help transform the world.

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How Privilege and Capital Warped a Movement

By Talmon Joseph Smith

On a humid, windless night several years ago, I was driving my parents’ S.U.V. through the oak-covered back streets of my hometown with four teenage friends. At an empty intersection, I reflexively began turning left before spotting the no-left-turn sign on the traffic light above. I jerked the wheel right, crossed the intersection and headed for the U-turn lane.

Before my friend riding shotgun could even finish joking about my driving, we were surrounded by two blaring cop cars that had been waiting in the shadows nearby.

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