System Change Requires a Radically Softer Approach

Presented at an online Real Democracy Movement event on the 2nd October 2024

G2G has been working with people’s assemblies in Scotland and East Africa that are led together with the communities. we are learning how to create an atmosphere that supports people to listen deeply to each other, and to themselves as well, so that we can think creatively together.

Power-over & Power-under

Experience has taught us that, run by governments, or even used to advise governments, Assemblies can be just as easy to co-opt as other democratic processes - they can easily turn into rubber stamp exercises and as such, aren’t necessarily a huge improvement on what we already have. The problem we’re facing is much deeper than just the format or the number of people involved in our decision making.

This is because we’re deeply embedded in a system which is based on a power dynamic where a few people have a lot more power and most people have much less. At first glance, this seems (blindingly!) obvious, but it brings deep implications for every part of our lives that can at first be hard to spot. 

This dynamic of power-over / power-under requires those of us with less power to accept and play their part. Domination can’t work when people won’t let themselves be dominated (even though the cost may be high, which is the fundamental reason most of us don’t want to go there), but many of us have been effectively educated and socialised either to assume we have a right to wield power - or to accept and even feel safe when someone else is in charge. Even when we don’t accept this, most of us have been convinced that we live in a world with lots of competing interests - rather than seeing that we all have at least one big thing in common: we have very little say in the big decisions that affect our lives. So we often just get on with our own focus, and draw back from joining with others more than fleetingly, fearing judgement, rejection, co-option, competition of any of the other separating tendencies we’ve been brought up to fear are at the core of our true nature.

We have absorbed this dynamic since we were very young: some belong in charge, others should do what they’re told. It happens in the way we parent, in our schooling, our workplaces and most of our institutions - not just the political ones. 

The thing that has stymied our attempts at radically changing our system for decades if not centuries, is that we haven’t till recently been aware of - or had tools to work with - the deep impacts on each of us of growing up in this kind of colonial domination culture. Whether we’re playing a power-over or a power-under role (and most of us play both in different contexts), the deep wounds of dominating or being dominated live in our nervous systems, making us reactive, frightened or aggressive when we don’t need to be - and because the workings of our nervous systems are largely unconscious, we’re very often not even aware that this is going on. Speaking publicly about our emotions - about what’s going on in our nervous systems has until very recently been taboo, and even now can take a lot of courage, so this whole dynamic is very often personally and socially hidden, to our great detriment.

If we DON’T start to tackle this issue of power at this kind of depth - if we don’t talk about it and find ways to start to build another kind of personal and social culture - then through no intention of the organisers - assemblies can end up simply reinforcing the status quo. If we DO start talking about and working with this power dynamic - not just as a social wrong, but as something that reaches into and damages (but that also has a huge capacity to heal) almost all aspects of our personal as well as our working lives we have an unprecedented opportunity for change.

Modelling a Power-with Democracy

Much of G2G’s work is about exploring structures and processes that try to help imagine and model what a power-with democracy could look like, and so help bring it into being: although we don’t always mention it directly, a large part of this is trying to create processes that are less likely to trigger people’s nervous systems.

Facilitators can play a crucial role in this: having a leader embodying a culture of power-with can be way more impactful than just talking about it. Facilitators can also help frame the deliberation as involving not just our heads, but our emotions and bodies. A facilitator who has worked on these issues in themselves can really support groups to start to expand their idea of what’s allowed in our democratic spaces.

So for instance when we’re dealing with a ‘hot’ topic it can be easy for the pace of the conversation to speed up, which makes it easy to slip into reactivity. Offering moments of quiet - possibly with a bit of support for mindfulness on offer - can be very helpful, as long as people can opt out if they want. However you do them, these quiet spaces for self-reflection are crucial for noticing and soothing triggered states as well as processing everything that has been spoken about.

One format that can really help with this and which encourages curiosity and deep listening, especially when people disagree, is using council circles, where people go round in a circle, taking turns to speak spontaneously, and listen deeply to the other people for the rest of the time. Although it can feel a bit unfamiliar speaking in such a structured way, this process can make space for people who usually don't speak up, and help those who tend to talk a lot focus on listening and getting curious about what’s going on for others. Circles like this often open the conversation up in unexpected directions and facilitate levels of openness and compassion that can be hard to reach with other processes.

So clearly, democratic processes that are trying to embody a culture of power-with can look and feel very different to mainstream democratic spaces, where people are mostly trying to win arguments, and even to ‘new democratic spaces’ that focus mostly on rational, intellectual techniques.

Such seemingly ‘soft’ Assembly processes deeply challenge the habitual ways we reproduce the dominant system. They can also support people to hear, share and process ‘hard’ information of the level of existential crisis we are in and the level of change we need, as well as opening up new avenues of connection, courage and inspiration. 

In assemblies as in the rest of our change making efforts, we need to recognise that the ‘how’ is as important as the ‘what’ of our activity. Our task has never been just to change the world out there: our world-in-here - singly and collectively - is what makes the world-out-there. Until we give our own personal and shared understanding and healing equal priority with the action we’re taking in the world, we are ultimately going to reproduce the current system of domination, even if that’s the last thing we intend. This is huge, deep rooted work, but it’s fundamentally also joyful and relieving - enabling us to come back into right relationship with ourselves, one another and the planet - the mostly unacknowledged third party in any human dynamic.

Making this level of change is not easy, but given the forces we are up against, we believe it’s essential to dive into the opportunity we have to explore these possibilities while we still have time. There’s still loads of work to do to develop this way of working and make it more accessible, but the shocks to the system of our current moment of existential threat are also opening up the possibility of genuinely fundamental change, so we are still hopeful!