This page explores our cultural assumption that the goal is always to be/do/get more and be/do/get bigger. This leads to an emphasis on what we can "objectively" measure - how well we are doing at being/doing/getting more - as more valuable than the quality of our relationships to all living beings.

The invitation on this and every page is to investigate how these characteristics and qualities lead to disconnection (from each other, ourselves, and all living things) and how the antidotes can support us to reconnect. If you read these characteristics and qualities as blaming or shaming, perhaps they are particularly alive for you. If you find yourself becoming defensive as you read them, lean into the gift of defensiveness and ask yourself what you are defending. These pages and these characteristics are meant to help us see our culture so that we can transgress and transform and build culture that truly supports us individually and collectively. Breathe into that intention if you can.

​progress is 
bigger & more

Progress is bigger and more shows up as:

• how we define success (success is always bigger, more)
• an organization that assumes the goal is to grow - add staff, add projects, or ​serve more people regardless of how well they can serve them; raise more money, or gain more influence and power for its own sake - all without regard to the organization's mission or especially the people and/or living beings that the organization is in relationship with
• gives no value, not even negative value, to its cost; for example, increased accountability to funders as the budget grows in ways that leave those served exploited, excluded, or underserved as we focus on how many we are serving instead of quality of service or values created by the ways in which we serve
• little or no ability to consider the cost of growth in social, emotional, psychic, embodied, spiritual, and financial realms
• a narrow focus on numbers (financial, people, geography, power) without an ability to value processes (relationships), including cost to the human and natural environment
• valuing those who have "progressed" over those who "have not" - where progress is measured in degrees, grades, money, power, status, material belongings - in ways that erase lived experience and wisdom/knowledge that is invisibilized - tending, cleaning, feeding, nurturing, caring for, raising up, supporting (thank you Bevelyn Ukah)​
• focus on getting bigger (in size, transactional power, numbers) leading to little or no ability to consider the cost of getting big in social, emotional, psychic, embodied, spiritual, and financial realms (thank you Bevelyn Ukah)

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​quantity over
quality

Quote by Albert Einstein. Art by Ricardo Levins Morales.

Quantity over quality shows up as:

• most or all resources directed toward producing quantitatively measurable goals
• things that can be counted are more highly valued than things that cannot, for example numbers of people attending a meeting, newsletter circulation, money raised and spent are valued more than quality of relationships, democratic decision-making, ability to constructively deal with conflict, morale and mutual support
• little or no value attached to process in the internalized belief that if it can’t be measured, it has no value
• discomfort with emotion and feelings
• little or no understanding that when there is a conflict between content (the agenda of the meeting) and process (people’s need to be heard or engaged), process will prevail (for example, you may get through the agenda, but if you haven’t paid attention to people’s need to be heard, the decisions made at the meeting are undermined and/or disregarded)
• connected to perfectionism, one right way, I'm the only one, and right to comfort because of the ways in which process, which cannot be numerically measured, requires emotional presence and intelligence whereas product, when it can be numerically measured, feels "safe" and controllable​
• short-term thinking, urgency thinking, either/or thinking in the consuming effort to meet often unrealistic quantitative goals (numbers)

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​or as MC Hammer
​tweets ...

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antidotes

Antidotes include:

• honoring the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future
• insure that any cost/benefit analysis includes all the costs, not just the financial ones, for example the cost in morale, the cost in credibility, the cost in relationship to living beings, the cost in the use of resources
• include process goals in your planning, for example make sure that your goals speak to how you want to do your work, not just what you want to do
• ask those you work with and for to establish goals and evaluate performance holistically; for one example, set both content and process goals (what you do and how you do it) aligned with the values of the organization and/or community​
• make sure you and/or your community or organization has a values statement that expresses the ways in which you want to do your work; create this as a living document that people use in their day to day work
• look for ways to measure process goals (for example if you have a goal of mutually respectful relationships, think about ways you can measure how you are living into that goal);
• ​​learn to recognize those times when you need to go off the planned agenda in order to address people’s underlying concerns with the knowledge that doing so will result in a more solid product in the long term
• distinguish between growth, which is necessary and organic, and the conditioned desire for "more" - more stuff, more transactional power, more people, more ... for its own sake
• consider adding measures that keep you grounded in what's important - how many times did we laugh together today? how many times did we express gratitude? how many times did we allow silence? how many times did we allow dissent?

Probably the central story of our culture—which I think has replaced a lot of the religious stories that used to be at the heart of our culture—is the story of progress.

What we say is: it is possible, through human ingenuity, to create a utopia. We have a story that tells us that human beings started as ignorant savages and are moving through a series of progressive steps, in which, at every point, they get cleverer, they get richer, they get smarter, they develop technologies which allow them to live longer, they learn more. Eventually, that ends with us probably leaving the planet and colonizing the stars, or living forever, or downloading our brains onto silicon chips. It’s a kind of technological rapture that sees time in a linear fashion rather than in a cyclical fashion.

It sees an endless series of steps, every one of which improves things in the material sense from the one before. I don’t think it’s historically true. Actually, what happens is that things tend to rise and fall in cycles. But it has an enormously powerful grip on us, and it informs everything from our view of the past, which we increasingly believe was a savage place in which our lack of technology and science drove us to a sort of misery and poverty, to our view of the future, in which we assume that more technology and more scientific focus and more centralization will take us to a kind of paradise.
​
And so we have this story that we believe in which everything continues to get better every generation, and our job is to keep that process going. I think once you believe that, then you are stuck in a very linear narrative. You are unable to see, you are unable to learn much from the past on your own, and you are probably unable to learn much from the mistakes of the present as well.

​paul kingsnorth
The Myth of Progress

This is an excerpt 
from a longer interview.

​
​a paradigm shift

Artwork by Tema Okun.

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Dr. Barbara Holmes, in her groundbreaking book Race and the Cosmos, writes (pp. 28-29):

We can now admit in retrospect that Western cultures shared a profound naiveté about liberation. The path toward an egalatarian society seemed linear and goals were deemed to be determinate and reachable. Yet, deterministic models of freedom created mirages of confusion that lured the unwary. The idea of liberation as a definitive "overcoming" enticed a generation with phantom promises of "progress." 

... I am suggesting that we view issues of race and liberation from the perspective of the cosmos, and that we begin to incorporate the languages of science into our discussion of liberation. This is a reasonable choice, given the reality that the universe is an integral aspect of any human endeavor, even when it is a taken-for-granted backdrop for our activities. I am challenging all justice seekers to awaken to the vibrant and mysterious worlds of quantum physics and cosmology. Recent discoveries on cosmic and quantum levels are as dramatic as the realization that the sun does not rotate around the earth. All of the narratives that frame reality have been unsettled by the Hubble telescope's unblinking eye and strangely responsive but unseen quantum elements. From cosmic and quantum realms we learn that we are connected to one another in unexpected ways. Theoretical physics suggests that, even when separated, entities that have once been in contact will react to changes in others.

The truth is that our images of life in community changed when we realized that the world was not flat. Everything will change again when interhuman dominance is seen as a false construct in the universe. A level playing field is being offered to those who can grasp the concepts as tangible precursors of freedom. As amazing as it may seem, the physical sciences offer creative rhetorical tools that may help us to rethink the dynamics of race relations within the broader context of the cosmos.

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There is so much more that could be said about the paradigm shift that the late Dr. Barbara Holmes, a spiritual teacher, activist, and scholar focused on African American spirituality, mysticism, cosmology, and culture (among others) was offering here. I am just beginning to explore this territory myself, so will simply offer this enticement to dig deeper, read her book, and see where it leads you and us as we contemplate a completely transgressive notion of both progress and liberation.

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​antidotes

RACIAL EQUITY PRINCIPLES

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accountability to 
people and principles

​seek connection

We can choose to be accountable to people and to principles. Accountable is another word for support; being accountable means to support people and to support principles or values knowing that we need to hold the inevitable tensions that occur. Our current culture prioritizes profit over people; we vision a world where people and all living beings come first, where we honor the idea of seven generation thinking and the interdependence of all with all. We also realize that in the short term people need jobs and housing and health care and sometimes, in order to pay the bills; we have to work for corporations or institutions that are perpetuating the devastation of humans and animals and plants and air and water and sky. Nonetheless we do all in our power to maintain our connection to each other and to the trees and to spirit and to all that nurtures our ability to thrive together. We practice over and over again so that we grow our ability to prioritize each other rather than power or profit.