by Peter Block
Storytelling plays a noble and historic role in our lives and in society. Stories can give us a narrative to guide and instruct us. They are crucial to our knowing who we are; they provide a sense of identity. Some stories, however, become the limitation to creating anything new. Werner Erhard has been so insightful about this. We need to distinguish between the stories that give meaning to our lives and help us find our voice, and those that limit our possibility.
In Russia, even the past is unpredictable.
Author unknown
The stories that are useful and fulfilling are the ones that are metaphors, signposts, parables, and inspiration for the fullest expression of our humanity. They are communal teaching stories. Creation stories, wisdom stories, sometimes personal stories that have a mythic quality, even if they come from the person sitting next to you.
Theater, movies, song, literature, and art are storytelling of the highest order. These are the mediums for building an individual sense of what it means to be human. The arts are an essential part of the story of what it means to be a human being and a community.
There are other kinds of stories that in their telling become a limitation. Limiting stories are personal versions of the past. They are stories about the conclusions we drew from events that happened to us. Other limiting stories are those that are rehearsed or make the point that the future will be a slightly modified continuation of the past out of which the story arose. Stories of this nature place us as victims of events or even fate.
Limiting stories are the ones that present themselves as if they were true. Facts. Our stories of our own past are heartfelt and yet are fiction. All we know that is true is that we were born. We may know for sure who our parents, siblings, and other key players in our drama were. But our version of all of them, the meaning and memory that we narrate to all who will listen, is our creation. Made up. Fiction. And this is good news, for it means that a new story can be concocted any time we choose.
Same with community. The stories of violence, crime, and wrongdoing that are constantly told are also fiction. The events may have happened, but the versions that let those events define who we are as a community—such as whether it is safe to go downtown, whether we need new leaders, whether people in this place are friendly, whether we are headed up or down—are all fiction. The decision to tell those stories over and over again as if they were defining truths creates the limitation against an alternative future.
This is why therapy and healing are really processes of re-remembering the past in a more forgiving way. The willingness to own up to the fictional nature of our story is where the healing begins. And where the possibility of restoration resides.
In this way, restoration can be considered the willingness to complete and extract the power out of the current story we have of our community and our place in it. This creates an opening to produce a new collective story. A new story based on restorative community. One of possibility, generosity, accountability.
CHAPTER 3
The Stuck Community
The existing community context is one that markets fear, assigns fault, and worships self-interest. This context supports the belief that the future will be improved with new laws, more oversight, and stronger leadership. Possibility thinking and associational life are marginalized, relegated to human interest and side stories in the media. The corporate model is the modern ideal, and the economy is the center story. The story in the stuck community defines the role of the media as framer of the debate. In community building, we need to realize that what the media reports is a reflection, not the cause, of the conversation that citizens currently hold.
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To create a new story, we first need to come to terms with the current one. This begins by naming it. The story of the stuck community can be heard both in the dominant public debate and also in what we talk about to each other each day. It is important to understand that there is a hidden agenda in every story. This agenda is a point to be made, a political belief about what is important, that stays constant regardless of the events of the day.
Marketing Fear and Fault
The overriding characteristic of the stuck community is the decision to broadcast all the reasons we have to be afraid. This is a kind of advertising that exploits the fear we have of violence, of the urban core, of terrorism, of African Americans and other ethnic groups, of immigrants, of those who are poor or undereducated, of other religions, and of other countries. It seems as though the lead story of every local evening newscast is about crime and human suffering, and if our city had none that day, then we hear how somewhere else in the world someone was murdered, bombed, killed in an accident, or abducted from what was once thought to be a safe place. What we are hearing is the marketing of fear.
In the telling, we are willing to sacrifice the wholeness and dignity of a person for the sake of capturing the emotion or drama of the moment. The marketing of fear thrusts a microphone in the face of someone who has just suffered an irreplaceable loss and asks, “How do you feel?” It is the commercialization of suffering for the sake of profit. Not that complicated.
When I was deputy press secretary at the White House, our credibility was so bad we couldn’t believe our own leaks.
Bill Moyers
The marketing of fear is not just for profit; it also holds a political agenda. Fear justifies the retributive agenda, fundamentalist in the extreme, that has been on the rise for some time. The retributive agenda believes that a just and civil society is one that gives priority to restraints, consequences, and control, and underlines the importance of rules. It gets packaged as spiritual values, family values, the American Way, love it or leave it, all under the umbrella of law and order. It helps build the incarceration industry and the protection industry, it creates a platform that enables those in power to expand their belief system, and it discounts the rehabilitation industry. Fear forms the basis of our recent foreign policy and drives much of our legislation. Fear also fuels the allure of suburban life and is a subtle but clear argument against diversity and inclusion.
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In addition to marketing fear, the stuck community markets fault. When there is a human tragedy, most of the energy goes into finding who was to blame. There is a retributive search for responsibility and a corresponding defense from the players claiming their innocence. This blame marketing rests on the belief that if we can assign blame and find cause, it is useful to society and somehow reassures us that the tragedy won’t happen again. To me, this is irrational thinking. What is missing here is a recognition of the complexity of human affairs, an acknowledgment of the paradoxical and accidental nature of life. There is no insurance policy against the human condition.
Out of the decision to dwell on fear and fault, the community is stuck in a context that holds the following:
• We are a community of problems to be solved. Those who can best articulate the problems and who can best articulate the solutions dominate the conversation.
• The future is defined by the interplay of self-interests, dependent on the accountability of leaders, and controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, commonly lumped into the category we call “they.”
• Community action is aimed at eliminating the sources of our fear. We aim at a set of needs and deficiencies. In order to eliminate our fear and respond to the neediness of our people, we try harder at what we have been doing all along. We lock down neighborhoods, build more prisons, and reduce tolerance to zero. We call for better measurements, more expertise, more funding, better leadership, stronger consequences, and more protection. We are committed to trying harder at what is not working.
Ramping Up Laws and Oversight
When something goes wrong, we carry the illusion that after we find the guilty party, some kind of legislation or change in policy will prevent the crime or accident from happening again. We are stuck in the belief that we can legislate the future and mandate morality. In Cincinna
ti, we passed an ordinance that street people had to be licensed to ask passersby for money. The idea was that somehow I now would be comfortable going downtown knowing that the person asking for money had been certified and approved by the city council. Now even panhandling was professionalized. The ordinance did not bring more people into town at night.
A corollary to passing more laws is the push for more oversight. We think that more watching improves performance. All the evidence is to the contrary, for most high-performing communities and organizations are heavily self-regulating. My favorite quote on this is “Research causes cancer in rats.” It is reasonable to understand that the act of oversight may in fact increase the very thing that is being watched with the intent of reducing it.
The political agenda of the stuck community says that citizens and employees are incapable of monitoring themselves and controlling each other, and that more careful oversight, institutionally mandated and installed, will build community and provide for the common good. It is in fact an argument against building community. It ends up leaving us more dependent on security specialists and professionalized control. It provides the business case for monarchy. Someone to watch over me.
Romanticizing Leadership
Carole Schurch was taking care of the logistics of a conference on transformation. She opened the event by announcing, “The restrooms are down the hall on the left, lunch will be at 1:00 p.m., dinner is at 8:00 p.m., and the conference will be over tomorrow afternoon. Let me know if I can help you with anything and also let me know what time your mother is picking you up!”
We love our habit of dependency and accept the culture of retribution because it reinforces the case for strong leaders—“strong” being the code word for autocratic, a message our culture is increasingly willing to accede to. We are fascinated with our leaders. We speak endlessly, both in the public conversation and privately, about the rise and fall of leaders. The agenda this sustains is that leaders are cause and all others are effect. That all that counts is what leaders do. That leaders are the leverage point for building a better community. That they are foreground, while citizens, followers, players, and anyone else not in a leadership position are background. This is a deeply patriarchal agenda, and it is this love of leaders that limits our capacity to create an alternative future. It proposes that the only real accountability in the world is at the top. They are the only ones worth talking about.
The effect of buying in to this view of leadership is that it lets citizens off the hook and breeds citizen dependency and entitlement. It undermines the development of a culture where each is accountable for their community. The attention on the leader makes good copy; it gives us someone to blame and thereby declares our innocence. In its own way, it reinforces individualism, putting us in the stance of waiting for the cream to rise, wishing for a great individual to bring light where there is darkness. It is possible to admire and be inspired by great leaders, even bosses, but we need to resist the projection that they can produce a change in the conditions that concern us. Each of us is accountable for our small piece of creating better conditions. When we project that on a leader, power gets abused and disappointment is inevitable.
What is missing or dismissed here are the community-building insights about how groups work, the power of relatedness, what occurs when ordinary people get together. We write communal possibility off as just another meeting, the blind leading the blind, citizens coming together to pool ignorance or to speak “truth to power,” which is just a complaint session in evening clothes.
As an aside, some reasons for discounting the power of citizens are well founded, for most of the time when citizens come together it makes no difference. That’s because they operate under the retributive principles that I am trying to describe in this section. They want to define the problem, find fault, elaborate fear, demand control-oriented action, and point to leaders. Many citizens get engaged in community only when they are angry.
If we keep engaging citizens in this traditional way, then no amount of involvement will make a difference. The way we currently gather has no transformational power. This is what needs to change, for if we do not change the way citizens come together, if we do not shift the context under which we gather and do not change the methodology of our gatherings, then we will have to keep waiting for great leaders, and we will never step up to the power and accountability that is within our grasp.
Marginalizing Possibility
Given the dominant context that values scarcity, leadership, individualism, fear, and fault, anything positive or hopeful becomes an anomaly. An exception, an accident. To choose possibility means that we have to confront cynicism. Journalism, human services, corrections, and public safety are professions which claim that their cynicism comes from constant contact and familiarity with the dark side of society. This ignores the reality that what you see comes from what you choose to look at. Decide that all the news fit to print is about problems, and that is what you get. In the retributive culture, cynicism is the norm and becomes the lead story. Cynicism justifies retribution. Retribution is fueled by cynicism.
In this context, possibility and vision become buried in the middle section of the news, or become an upbeat pat on the back as the anchor goes off the air. Possibility and faith are seen as threatening because they are an indictment of cynicism. So when citizens do find a way to use their gifts, or commit to something thought impossible, or bring faith and gratitude into the world, it is not by accident that the story is reduced to a “human interest” piece—the kiss of death when it comes to changing our context. Many reporters do not even consider these stories journalism.
When labeled “human interest,” possibility doesn’t qualify as news. It is a feel-good diversion. Something to calm our nerves. Possibility and the faith that supports it may be strong declarations for the individual, but for the collective, they are neutered and treated as merely charming. Mainstream journalism treats us as passive spectators and is a profession which thinks that its role is to speak truth to power. It worships the sensational and the tragic. What bleeds is what leads. This is costing the profession its audience. Especially since every individual is now a publisher. We need to support the efforts of a journalism committed to what is working. Think of the Solutions Journalism Network, the citizen journalism movement, NewScoop in Calgary, Kolbe Times. Small signs of a shift in thinking.
Possibility also gets undermined by being confused with optimism. Even when leaders speak to the possibility of our community, in the stuck community we consider it a motivational speech, a sales pitch, a bootstrap keynote to make us feel better and lift our spirits from what we call reality. But possibility is not a prediction or a goal; it is a choice to bring a certain quality into our lives. Optimism, which is a prediction about the future, has no power. Pessimism is equally irrelevant.
The ways in which possibility is marginalized underline the importance of context. All that does not confirm the prevailing mind-set is made marginal and cute. This is why, if you want to create an alternative future, you have to shift the context, for all that disconfirms the current context will be discarded. We need to shift what is considered “reality.” For example, what if we see the media as a reflection of who we are, and choose to listen primarily to media that promote learning and possibility, document miracles, and report on a different agenda, and call it the “new reality”? Les Ihara, a longtime state senator in Hawaii, says that what is needed is “a shift in the ground of being that reports the news.”
Devaluing Associational Life
John McKnight has studied communities for thirty years and found that community is built most powerfully by what he calls “associational life,” referring to the myriad ways citizens come together to do good work and serve the public interest. Whether in clubs, associations, informal gatherings, special events, or just on the street or at breakfast, neighborly contact constitutes an uncounted and unnoticed glue and connection that makes good communities wor
k.
The stuck community essentially discounts associational life and instead values, and even glorifies, the “system” life, especially the private sector and corporate mind-set. This context is so pervasive that we have become anaesthetized to it. Although there is a growing awareness of the cost of this mind-set (see David Korten’s work, listed at the end of the book), we still act as if what is good for business is good for the country.
Here are some ways in which we discount associational life, the place where the social fabric is built:
• The only true measure of community is its economic prosperity according to traditional measures. We seek the American dream, streets paved with gold. The only good news that makes the news is when Toyota decides to build a plant in our town. Communities will justify spending infinite amounts of money to keep sports teams because they are theoretically good for the economy. Job creation is the final argument for most of our mistakes, especially when we destroy the neighborhood economy. We measure the neighborhood and the person by their average annual income.
• We name social services and institutions that serve the public good “not for profits.” “Not for profit” means that service and generosity are defined by what they are not. What kind of identity and esteem does this establish for the choice for service and care for community? Can you imagine introducing yourself as the name you are not? “Hello, my name is not Alice.” “Well, I would like you to meet my friend, not Roger.” There is no identity in that. Nothing memorable or recognizable next time we meet. There is a movement to call it the “public benefit” sector. Not such a bad thing.
