Speaking Your Truth

 Now that I think about it, trying to create an environment where everyone can 'speak your truth' underlies quite a bit of my thinking.

Gerrymandering, for example... is a problem because it means our represents don't truly reflect the will of the people. They aren't 'speaking their truth' for that particular region, because some voices are amplified and others are suppressed.

Part of the reason I disliked the trend towards pushing out 'RINOs' and 'Blue Dog Democrats' is because our nation is not really composed of red states or blue states. Or rather, Illinois (a blue state) has Chicago... but downstate Illinois is generally red, and a lot more like their neighbor across the border in Indiana.

Indiana is 'red', but I lived in South Bend (where Joe Kernan was mayor, and later became a Democratic governor of Indiana) and Bloomington - a college town that, like many, trends blue.

Because our system favors two parties (first past the post elections, winner-takes-all, etc) those parties tend to be 'big tents' with a variety of different reasons people support one over the other. That also means two different blue states or two different red states can still be wildly different. Colorado leans more towards the libertarian side (legalized marijuana, support for the 2nd Amendment) whereas many of the Bible belt states lean more towards the Christian conservative. It means it's hard to say how many people voting blue or red are truly prioritizing one issue or another, which is also part of why I wish we did have something like mixed member proportional representation. Speak our truth, reflect the will of all people. Not the views of whoever has managed to get a lock on the national party.

Even within the more red or blue regions of a state, we're all mixed up. That article talking about a rural town in Kansas (I think) that got hit hard by the coronavirus said 80% of them voted Trump. That means 20% didn't. 

(This is part of why muttering about seceding is mostly just that. There'd be a helluva lot of things to work out to divide us up by political views. Tbf, quite a bit of that is happening on it's own. Self-selection, the big sort. People have been complaining about the relatives on the other side of the political aisle for ages, some even going so far as to cut them off. People move because they're tired of being a political minority - like a couple of my own relatives, who left Oklahoma because it was 'too red'.)

I understand the pressures driving these trends. They're there throughout all of history.

Harnessing the wide variety of opinions out there so that they drive everyone forward is tough. It's like the old cliche about herding cats. 

It also takes a lot of maturity to hear criticism and not take it personally. To appreciate and respect the 'loyal opposition', and use their feedback to make improvements. It's all too easy to see it as yet another roadblock. Yet another frustrating obstacle.

 To decide that 'if you're not with us, your against us' and punish people for signs of disloyalty.

This is, btw, why I think libertarians have cognitive dissonance regarding Trump. I've heard people on the right complain about how extremists on the left can also be fascist.

There's a bit of truth to that criticism. Or perhaps we should say 'authoritarian'. I don't really know the exact semantics for the proper word, but what I think they're trying to say is this: How people deal with opposing viewpoints, how they design their decision-making processes - those have a great deal to do with whether or not they become dictators on a larger scale. In some ways it doesn't matter what the larger political goal is - those who need absolute loyalty in order to accomplish it, who punish opposition by arresting or exiling their opponents for purely political reasons - they're all creating the exact same type of system. 

And it's a pretty terrible one, tbh. Every time it happens it has a tendency to go poorly, for a lot of the reasons I've described in this blog. They punish the truthtellers, so they only have 'yes-men' and women telling them what they want to hear. Which means they make faulty decisions, because they're not really aware of the facts on the ground. They are threatened by anything that makes them look 'weak', even the smallest little thing (which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) Their control of the levers of power mean that nobody else is able to do anything without convincing them first, and there are very limited ways of doing that. Talented people become threats, and thus targets. All of this also means that change becomes hard, and the system is slow to react. After all, talented people have either been driven out or taught not to take initiative... so things keep getting pushed up the chain. Which means people higher up have to make more and more of the decisions, which slows the process down...

And so on, and so forth. Death by a thousand cuts. A million and one little things that all pile up to create disaster.

There are alternatives. Of course there are.

They aren't easy, of course. Or may be just difficult in different ways. It involves building systems where people are encouraged to speak their truths, which comes with a lot of challenges. There are entire libraries of books about things like that - change management, business leadership, organizational behavior... psychology. Sociology. 

Helps to have experience too. Naturally. A leadership pipeline where people learn on the job and/or put into practice the things they learn. It's one thing to read about 'groupthink', to hear about change management - it's quite another to recognize when you're in a situation where it applies and to figure out a way of dealing with it.

Still, I think the end goal is worth it. Just feeling like your opinions are heard and appreciated does wonders for morale, as does feeling like you're able to push for the changes that really matter to you. Having a process for doing that, one that draws on all the different takes on an issue (when done right) can lead to solutions that are effective, nuanced, and less likely to have undesired and unintended consequences. They tend to be more well thought out, and take into account challenges that might otherwise have been overlooked.

There's a lot more I could write about this, but it's enough for now. The only thing I'll add is this - creating such a system also means taking seriously any attempt to ignore, marginalize, or penalize unwanted opinions. That's true for BLM, and also true for white supremacy. I would argue that white supremacy threatens the system in a way that BLM doesn't, since white supremacists are essentially trying to 'ignore, marginalize, and penalize' the people they don't like, whereas BLM supporters are generally trying NOT to be ignored, marginalized, and penalized... but that's for another time.