Community

by Peter Block

  Nothing guarantees that a young person will see a new possibility, but we can create the conditions where that choice is more likely. The transformation we seek occurs when these two conditions are created: when we produce deeper relatedness across boundaries, and when we create new conversations that focus on the gifts and capacities of others.

  These conditions allow us to focus on our connectedness rather than on our differences. We no longer need to take our identity from being right about “them” or from continuing to see “them” as individuals with needs or as people somehow less than us. It puts an end to our need to declare victory. The differences, instead of being problems to solve, become a source of vitality, a gift. In the language of community transformation, this is what it means to be accountable. At these moments, we become owners, with the free will capable of creating the world we want to inhabit. We become citizens.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Inversion into Citizen

  Choosing to be accountable for the whole, creating a context of hospitality and collective possibility, acting to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center—these are some of the ways we begin to create a community of citizens. To reclaim our citizenship is to be accountable, and this comes from the inversion of what is cause and what is effect. When we are open to thinking along the lines that citizens create leaders, that children create parents, and that the audience creates the performance, we create the conditions for widespread accountability and the commitment that emerges from it. This inversion may not be the whole truth, but it is useful.

  • • •

  If what holds the possibility of an alternative future for our community is our capacity to come fully into being as citizens, then we have to talk about this word citizen. Our definition here is that a citizen is one who is willing to be accountable for and committed to the well-being of the whole. That whole can be a city block, a workplace, a community, a nation, the earth. A citizen is one who produces the future, someone who does not wait, beg, or dream for the future.

  The antithesis of being a citizen is being a consumer or a client, another idea that John McKnight has been so instructive about. Consumers give power away. They believe that their own needs can be best satisfied by the actions of others—whether those others are elected officials, top management, social service providers, or the shopping mall. Consumers also allow others to define their needs. If leaders and service providers are guilty of labeling or projecting onto others the “needs” to justify their own style of leadership or service they provide, consumers collude with them by accepting others’ definition of their needs. This provider–consumer transaction is the breeding ground for entitlement, and it is unfriendly to our definition of citizen and the power inherent in that definition.

  The Meaning of Citizenship

  The conventional definition of citizenship is concerned with the act of voting and taking a vow to uphold the constitution and laws of a country. This is narrow and limiting. Too many organizations that are committed to sustaining democracy in the world and at home have this constrained view of citizenship. Citizenship is not about voting, or even about having a vote. To construe the essence of citizenship primarily as the right to vote reduces its power—as if voting ensures a democracy. It is certainly a feature of democracy, but as Fareed Zakaria points out in his book The Future of Freedom, the right to vote does not guarantee a civil society, or in our terms a restorative one.

  When we think of citizens as just voters, we reduce them to being consumers of elected officials and leaders. We see this most vividly at election time, when candidates become products, issues become the message, and the campaign is a marketing and distribution system for the selling of the candidate. Great campaign managers are great marketers and product managers. Voters become target markets, demographics, whose most important role is to meet in focus groups to respond to the nuances of message. This is the power of the consumer, which is no power at all.

  Through this lens, we can understand why so many people do not vote. They do not believe that their action can impact the future. It is partly a self-chosen stance and partly an expression of the helplessness that grows out of a retributive world. This way of thinking is not an excuse not to vote, but it does say that our work is to build the capacity of citizens to be accountable and to become creators of community.

  • • •

  We can see most clearly how we marginalize the real meaning of citizen when the word becomes politicized as part of the retributive debate. We argue over undocumented workers, immigration, and the rights of exfelons—and even their children. We politicize the issue of English as the official language and building a new wall on the Rio Grande that we will have to tear down someday.

  Citizenship as the willingness to build community gets displaced by isolationism in any form. It is not by accident that the loudest activists for finding and deporting undocumented workers are some of the leaders of the fear, oversight, safety, and security agenda. They are the key beneficiaries of the retributive society. If we want community, we have to be unwilling to allow citizenship to be co-opted in this way.

  The idea of what it means to be a citizen is too important and needs to be taken back to its more profound value. Citizenship is a state of being. It is a choice for activism and care. As a citizen you are someone who is willing to do the following:

  • Hold yourself accountable for the well-being of the larger collective of which you are a part. Don’t answer the question “What’s in it for me?” When asked, simply say, “I don’t know.”

  • Choose to own and exercise power rather than defer or delegate it to others. Set aside your wish for great leadership. You may be it. How enticing is that?

  • Enter into a collective possibility that gives hospitable and restorative community its own sense of being.

  • Acknowledge that community grows out of citizens’ deciding to trust each other and cooperate to make this place better. Community is built not by specialized expertise or great leadership or improved services; it is built by great local people deciding to do something useful together.

  • Attend to the gifts and capacities of all others, and act to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. Find a way to do this each time you meet. To understand our gifts, we need to hear about them from each other as a practice for ending a gathering. Citizenship is the knowledge that I have contributed something of value. I have to hear to believe it.

  The Inversion of Cause

  To create communities where citizens reclaim their power, we need to shift our beliefs about who is in charge and where power resides. We need to invert our thinking about what is cause and what is effect. This shift is what has the capacity to confront our entitlement and dependency.

  Being powerful means that my experience, my discovery, even my pleasure are mine to create. This view has us see how audiences create performances, children create parents, students create teachers, and citizens create leaders.

  The chicken is the egg’s way of reproducing itself.

  Peter Koestenbaum

  It is not that these shifts of cause are necessarily true, but they give us power. In every case, it puts choice into our own hands instead of having us wait for the transformation of others to give us the future we desire. If our intention is to create the possibility of an alternative future, then we need a future formed by our own hands. A handcrafted future.

  Inverting our thinking does not change the world, but it creates a condition where the shift in the world becomes possible. The shift starts with the inversion in our thinking. The step from thinking of ourselves as effect to thinking of ourselves as cause is the act of inversion that creates a culture of citizen accountability. This is the point on which accountability revolves.

  A note: the cause-and-effect, Cartesian clockwork view of the world not only overstated the mechanical nature of the world but also put cause at the wrong end of the equation. Double indemnity.

  Th
is inversion challenges conventional wisdom that believes there is one right way. And by “inversion” I mean a real inversion: 180 degrees, not 179 degrees. This is not the time for compromise or balance. Inverting our thinking about cause and effect gives support to really challenge “the way things work.” Again, I am not saying that this way of thinking is 100 percent accurate 100 percent of the time, but it can give added power to our way of being in community. The question to begin to reclaim our power as citizens is, “If you believed this to be true, in what ways would that make a difference, or change your actions?”

  This means that the possibility of an alternative future centers on the question, “Have we chosen the present, or has it been handed to us?” The default culture would have us believe that the past creates the future, that a change in individuals causes a change in organizations and community, and that people in authority create people in a subordinate position. That we are determined by everything aside from free will. That culture, history, genetics, organizations, and society drive our actions and our way of being.

  All this is true, but the opposite is also true: that free will trumps genetics, culture, and parental upbringing.

  The Utility of This Inversion

  The first inversion I ran into years ago was the thought that the inmates run the prison. I was skeptical until I worked with some corrections people, who said there is truth in this. Here are some implications of switching our thinking this way:

  Inversion: The audience creates the performance.

  Implications: Redesign the audience experience. Stop putting so much energy into the talent and message of those on stage. Limit PowerPoint presentations to four slides. Peter Brook immersed the stage in the center of the audience; John Cage held concerts where the rumbling, coughing sounds of the audience were the show. When we meet, make it possible for the audience to be engaged with one another. Every auditorium, almost every church, almost every conference room and classroom would be redesigned. Chairs would be mobile; the audience members would be able to see one another and know that no matter what occurred onstage, they would not be alone and would have the ability to get what they came for.

  Inversion: The subordinate creates the boss.

  Implications: Learning, development, and goal setting are in the hands of the subordinate. We would stop doing surveys about how people feel about their bosses, the results of which no one knows what to do with anyway. The attention would turn from the boss to peers, which is the relationship that produces the work.

  Inversion: The child creates the parent.

  Implications: Parents could sleep through the night. The conversation and industry of inculcating values and forcing consequences onto kids would quiet down. We would focus on the gifts, teachings, and blessings of the young instead of seeing them as problems to be managed. We would decide that the primary role of the parent is to discover who these strange little creatures we call children really are. We would listen to them instead of instructing and teaching them again and again. This would allow parents to relax their jaws and index fingers, a secondary health benefit.

  Inversion: Citizens create their leaders.

  Implications: Our dependency on leaders and our disappointment in them would go down. The media would have to change their thinking about lead stories. What citizens are doing to improve their community would no longer be human interest stories but actual news. The cost of elections would be reduced by 90 percent, for the question of whom we elect would be less critical. Candidates for elected office could be poor.

  Above all, our leaders would be conveners, not role models and containers for our projections. More on this later.

  Inversion: A room and a building are created by the way they are occupied.

  Implications: We would be intentional about how we show up. We would spend time designing how we sit in the room, and not be mere consumers of the way the room was intended to be used, or dependent on what the custodians or the last group using the room had in mind.

  We would redesign the physical space around us—rooms, hallways, reception areas—in a way that affirmed community, so that it had a welcoming feeling and gave the sense that you had come to the right place. Most of all, how we sit together would be a serious subject of discussion.

  Inversion: The student creates the teacher and the learning.

  Implications: Education would be designed more for learning than for teaching. This already occurs in many places under the heading of individualized learning. Montessori education has forever operated along these lines. The social contract in the classroom would be renegotiated toward a partnership between teacher and student. Students would set goals for themselves and be responsible for the learning of other students. Simple ideas, powerful ideas, still rare in practice. This would also find a resting place for standardized testing and the colonial drive for a core curriculum.

  Inversion: Youth create adults.

  Implications: Adultism would be confronted. Adults would decide to get interested in the experience of youth instead of always instructing them. When there were meetings and conferences about youth, the voices of youth would be central to the conversation. Youth would become a possibility, not a problem. If we really believed this, we would move our belief in the next generation from lip service to pervasive practice. The question we would ask of youth is “What is it that we do not understand about you?” This would be life changing, if we had the nerve.

  Inversion: The listening creates the speaker.

  Implications: Listening would be considered an action step. For most of us, listening is just waiting until we get a chance to speak. There might even be a period of silence between statements, and this silence would be experienced as part of the conversation, not dead space. The dark side of virtual communication is that there is little place for silence. If we were in the room together and you were quiet, we would wait. If we are in a Zoom call and you don’t speak, we think it is a failure in technology.

  Listening would drive our speaking. We would also learn what speaking into the listening of the room means. Fundamentally, we would treat the listening as more important than the speaking.

  You get the point—the list could go on. In each case, when we invert our thinking, the focus of attention and effort gets redirected.

  The power in these shifts is that they confront us with our own freedom in unexpected ways. It is out of this freedom, which all of us have ways of escaping, that community and authentic accountability are born. I will be an accountable possibility for only that which I have had a hand in creating, my life and community included.

  The politics of this is that the inversion of cause refocuses my attention from that person in authority—leader, performer, parent, warden—to that person who together with others also holds the real power. Not to overdo this perspective, for leader, performer, parent, and warden are critical partners in community; it’s just that they are not the primary or sole proprietors we have construed them to be. We will never eliminate our need for great leaders and people on the stage; we just cannot afford to put all our experience and future in their hands.

  • • •

  There is no need to argue about this idea of inversion, only to play with its utility. A given inversion may not be true, but it is useful in the way it gives us power to evoke the kind of citizen we have defined as crucial to a true community. People who work in the civic arena have a certain cynicism about citizens. For example, they talk about how hard it is to get parents involved in their child’s school. About how few people show up at council and board meetings unless they are angry. About how such a small number of people are really active in their community. There is truth to this view. It is not just cynicism; it is pretty accurate observation. What restores community is to believe that we play a role in constructing this condition. It is not in the nature of people to be apathetic, entitled, complainers.

  To state the issue simply, as long as we see leader as cause, we will produce pas
sive, entitled citizens. We will put our attention, our training, and our resources wherever we think cause resides. When we see citizen as cause, then this will shift our attention and our wealth, and the energy and creativity that go with them.

  This shift in thinking about cause and effect creates the belief that in each case, including our individual lives, choice and destiny replace accident and fate. No small thing.

  A Word About Accountability

  One cost of the retributive conversation is that it breeds entitlement. Entitlement is essentially the conversation, “What’s in it for me?” It expresses a consumer mentality, and the economist tells us that only what is scarce has value. Entitlement is the outcome of a patriarchal culture, which I have discussed too often in other books. But for this discussion, I’ll simply say that if we create a context of fear, fault, and retribution, then we will focus on protecting ourselves, which plants the seed of entitlement.

  The cost of entitlement is that it is an escape from accountability and soft on commitment. What is interesting is that the existing public conversation claims to be tough on accountability, but the language of accountability as it is used in a retributive context is code for “control.” High-control systems are unbearably soft on accountability. They keep screaming for tighter controls, new laws, and bigger systems, but in the scream, they expose their weakness.