Politics, Trauma and Empathy: Breakthrough to a politics of the heart? – Resilience

Can this be a turning point for our species? Do we have time to transform our system or are we already committed through climate feedback loops to the destruction of the ecological systems we rely on to survive? Although we are writing from a Scottish and UK perspective, we expect that much of what were saying applies elsewhere. Certainly, to successfully change our political paradigm, the shift needs to be international.

Our current political system is responsible for dizzying inequalities in wealth and opportunity, resulting in massive suffering for billions of people. It is impacting on essential earth systems to the point that they are unable to maintain the benign balance of the last 10,000 years. There are, as is repeatedly pointed out, at most only a handful of years left to address this effectively. Looking at humans track record, and at our current inability to organise ourselves to work together on any issue that counts, the prospects are not looking too good.

Many have long been at rock bottom through the impacts of a system that impoverishes billions for the enrichment of a handful of billionaires. That temporary state of imbalance is almost over. There is no way for it to persist without taking everyone down with it. So here near our collective rock bottom, can we finally acknowledge the depth of change we need to make? Can we face up to the tough shared task of putting together a completely different decision making system?

Knowing how bad things have got, and seeing how much worse they will become unless we choose to do things differently, we are at a moment of breakdown or breakthrough. Awakening to the need for complete system change, though painful, can bring us home to ourselves, one another and our shared home in a way that nothing else could. Countless numbers of us who have been on our knees, and as a result journeyed towards a new way of being, know this well.

Have we had enough of this way of understanding reality, this way of organising our society? Are we now willing to do what it takes to make the changes needed to shift the outcome?

In this essay we use the word we often and are frequently referring to different wes. Sometimes were talking to the wider human we, sometimes to those of us who are living in cultures with experience of colonialism, sometimes to those who are broadly from the social group who benefit most from the system of domination. We (the authors, your good pals Eva and Justin) have tried to make which we were on about clear from the context, but please either use the opportunity of any dissonance to reflect or flag any places where you feel excluded or unseen in the wes that we use. Almost all of us are impacted by the dominator culture and are all only ever part way through our healing from that.

With love and solidarity.

What are the impacts of our psychologies on our social structures, how and why have we got here and what kind of tools can help us make change happen? To answer this, well look at the principal systems through which we make change in our society: our collective decision making systems, also known as politics.

How have we allowed a small group of highly dysfunctional people and organisations to have so much wealth, power and privilege that their short-term me, me, me agenda is allowed free rein to trample on all other human and non-human interests?

Dare we dream that there could be other ways to collectively agree on whats important and organise ourselves to address whats really crucial? The journey from politics as we think of it now, to a way of making collective decisions that actually works for us and our ecosystems is long and deep. Lets begin.

Our existing political system has its roots in some of the darkest aspects of human behaviour. Although it has been pruned, modified and prettied up over the centuries, it still carries the inheritance of power by domination deep within its DNA.

To unpick this and design systems and processes that are based on a more accurate understanding of human behaviour, and that mitigate our worst aspects and support our best, requires us to first acknowledge some uncomfortable, fundamental truths about our shared human experience and dwell a little on their implications.

Much of our outlook is conditioned by neurobiological patterning in response to our experience in our first few years. This is a period we have all but forgotten by adulthood, but it continues to powerfully affect our resilience, attitudes, behaviour, and our ability to make healthy decisions for the rest of our lives. The quality of our early experience is highly dependent on our relationships with our primary caregivers and their ability to support us (or not) in these early years (Gerhardt 2003).

The ability to parent effectively is affected by a massive range of factors including our parents own experience of being parented, their deep personal, social and cultural patterning and backgrounds, the state of their relationships, their access to food and water, their work situation, their social status, whether they or their parents experienced disability, racism, slavery, war, famine, addiction or serious disease. So this very early conditioning is not only flavoured by our personal experience but is tightly enmeshed in our social, political and historic contexts.

We also all share a few core needs including the obvious air, water, food and shelter, but extending to less tangible but equally vital things like a feeling of safety, emotional connection and a sense of purpose or meaning in life. If these basic needs are not met (atanytime in our lives) we generally feel vulnerable, anxious, angry or depressed. However, the extent to which they are met, or not, in our early years sets up most of our lifetime strengths and weaknesses. When our early experiences are positive and our needs are met, this stays with us, contributing to our strength and resilience, our ability to be empathic, authentic and confident as adults. Negative experiences and unmet needs also stay with us, echoing through the rest of our lives as things like difficulty with anger management, lack of self-worth or insecurity.

Babies and young children who are habitually left to cry on their own, ignored or punished, told off or humiliated for not behaving the way their parents think they should, who are dealt with harshly if they stand up for themselves, or who were abused by the adults in their lives in one way or another (in the wide range of ways this can and does happen), internalise the resulting pain they feel. This pain doesnt go away. It is made sense of in a range of childish ways (its all my fault, Im bad, life is scary, I will only be loved if Im strong/ dont cry/ do as Im told/ take care of of others/ control others). These patterns are incorporated and become part of the unconscious beliefs and behaviour strategies we come back to again and again for the rest of our lives, regardless of whether they continue to make sense or even work to get us what we really want.

If our core needs were acutely or chronically unmet in our early years, we may experience an undercurrent of one or more of these states running in the background our whole lives, colouring much of our ability to form relationships and act positively in the world. These early experiences haunt our lives, impacting us in a range of ways, from a kind of background tone, through a range of levels of reactivity to full blown PTSD symptoms.

Trauma is a catch-all term for these responses. Its the process our body-mind uses to deal with events which we experience asoverwhelming, either physically or emotionally. Something of such states remains frozen in rigid patterns of physical and emotional reaction. These experiences are not stored in memory in the same way as other things that have happened to us, but are kept in the unconscious and the body as patterns which are triggered when something happens that reminds us of the initial experience. Because this triggering usually happens in split seconds, and usually completely unconsciously, its very common that the frightened, angry or desolate little child the one who first experienced the trauma, and a fragment of whose consciousness is now an inherent part of these patterns takes over for however long were experiencing the trigger, plunging us into a state which objectively now has very little to do with whats going on in the present.

For those who have had good enough parenting, these immature but powerful presences within our psyches are generally quiet when our needs are being met, but they can come rushing in to run the show when were under stress or when were exposed to a scenario that triggers them. Every one of us can remember times when we have overreacted or shut down (or a host of other inappropriate responses) when things didnt go our way. We are probably also aware of parts of life (for example public speaking, standing up to bullies, managing our anger or coping with rejection) where we know we tend to act differently to how wed like. Dig a little into these uncomfortable feelings and the roots always lead back to the fears, griefs and disappointments of childhood.

When our early patterning is triggered, we are no longer present in our wholeness. As part of a healthy maturing process over the course of our lives, we start to notice, understand and change our relationship with, and ideally begin to heal, our hurt inner aspects. But unexamined, allowed to run rampant and call the shots, they can make our (and others) lives a misery.

While some aspects of our personalities genuinely mature into functioning, flexible, compassionate adult selves, we also build adult-stylefacades of appearing and behaving on top of our traumatised parts, allowing us a defended, adult-seeming presence in the world. We feel that we are keeping ourselves safe, when we are actually perpetuating the unconscious conditions that keep our early wounds intact and active.

From the personal, these constructions ripple out into complex interactions with wider society. Our early trauma responses are triggered by things other people do and vice versa. We all spend quite a lot of our time trying, mostly unconsciously, to get our childhood needs met in indirect ways, or to protect these hurt parts of ourselves. This shows up in the kinds of everyday bullying, manipulation, clinginess, power play, duplicity, and dishonesty that we all engage in to some extent, justifed as defending ourselves and experience in others in a dismal range of ways ranging from irritating to abusive.

Every single one of us has experienced our own version of this, but the underlying reasons for this kind of behaviour are hardly ever acknowledged. They are certainly not acknowledged publicly, socially, andparticularlynot in those crucial arenas where we have given power to others to make the decisions that define our lives in this society, and on whom our lives depend. The implications of this collective blind spot on our ability to restore our world are monumental.

All this can look like a personal issue something to deal with in therapy or in our close relationships. And in part it can be. But the trauma we experience is way more than just personal and it will take deep cultural shifts as well as personal growth to deal with it. To see why, we need to look back at the roots of our dysfunctional relationship with power.

The most recent colonial project began with what is known as theEuropean colonial period, perpetrated by the European ruling class, dispossessing their own populations and mobilising them to colonise much of the rest of the world. Prior to this, the trauma of internal dispossession and enslavement and of invading and enslaving others had been repeatedly embedded in the European psyche, impacting on culture and interpersonal relations so that this most recent wave (begun in the 15th century and continuing to this day under the guise of corporate activity, economic policy and sanctions, politically motivated assassination and overt and covert regime change wars) became, if not inevitable, then certainly no great surprise.

The process of colonisation traumatises both the object and the subject in different ways. The surviving colonised peoples are forced to comply with their new masters in ways that are inherently offensive to their sense of personhood, and which severely limit their agency and ability to resist. Colonisers have to sever from their own innate empathy, sensitivity and sense of their own decency in order to be able to control the supposedly inferior colonised.

In almost all people there is a psychological line. On one side is behaviour that sits anywhere from the fully altruistic awareness that our own well-being depends entirely on ensuring the well-being of others, to that which can be rationalised as understandable given the circumstances. On the other side of that line lies behaviour that negates our fundamental sense of our own decency and which when consciously, deliberately and repeatedly enacted, traumatises the enacter to the extent that they can no longer face the implications of what they have done. Each crossing of that line makes us more likely to become caught in an increasingly self-reinforcing cycle, which validates the unbearable by repeating it, each repetition proving through this internal logic that the previous acts were necessary, normal or acceptable.

The upshot of this is that over the time that our current culture was developing (1) there was a severely traumatised, colonising ruling class (many of whom lived on the wrong side of the decency line and who spent a vast amount of time and money perpetuating a cultural mythology that they were good, deserving, mighty and just etc) and (2) their actions created a severely traumatised, colonised population (most of whom tried most of the time to stay on the right side of the line, but who could be pushed over it by punitive measures such as corporal punishment,empressment, threat of death etc or by desperation due to poverty or starvation), which was part of how (3) European countries managed to visit an astonishing quantity of appalling atrocities on populations across much of the rest of the world, often disguising such oppression by describing it as the civilising mission, or the white mans burden, or more recently as development or aid as if these are gifts rather than mechanisms through which we normalise the theft of resources from those we aid.

In spite of repeated attempts at reform and steps towards greater equality over the last 200 years, the task of actually addressing and attempting to repair the harm done through colonisation has where it has happened at all done no more than scratch the surface. This is partly because colonisation did not just happen externally, it also penetrated our inner lives, cutting us off from essential parts of our psyches, forcing its way into our shared culture, ensuring that we would pass on this colonised mindset from generation to generation whether in the now independent colonised countries or in the countries from which the colonisers came.

The British approach to colonialism in Africa was to maintain local leaders who would enforce British rule, and replace those who wouldnt. Decolonisation has often continued the same approach but at a greater distance, perpetuating the experience of colonisation.[Footnote: Similarly, ways of moving beyond gender inequality that prioritise moving women into the public realm dominated by men, can mean intensifying the devaluing of the home and the work of emotional care. This contrasts with moves that prioritise men relearning how to value childcare and their emotions.]

Different types of colonisation have different impacts. Some earlier conquests may have tended to leave populations pretty much alone as long as they paid the required tribute or taxes. But in Europe there was a lethal combination of first feudalism and then capitalism together with an evangelising Christianity. This insisted that those colonised (whether at home or elsewhere) not only cede land, resources and labour, but also accept that their indigenous spiritual, social and cultural sense-making was appallingly inferior or evil.

European colonisation whether in the Highlands of Scotland or elsewhere in the world saw the destruction of the cultural and spiritual fabric of the subjugated peoples as part of their mission, and then used those they subdued to subdue others. The (traumatised, domination focused) European culture considered itself superior to all others, presenting its domination as some kind of kindness, while extracting everything of value from colonised peoples and their lands. In the process it tried to smash indigenous cultures, replacing them with, as far as possible, a facsimile of the colonisers own.

This energised a massive negative cultural feedback loop: traumatising individuals and communities, seeding in them the potential to become dominators, ensuring that the indigenous cultural processes which could have supported healing and recovery were also systematically destroyed. Connections with local spirits were demonised, spirituality privatised, childcare put into the hands of the state, pupils kept indoors and alienated from the wisdom of their bodies, displays of any empathic emotions repressed, elders forgotten, lands held in common stolen, and people forced from subsistence livelihoods and a connection with family, place and nature into slavery or wage slavery, whether on plantations or in cities.

For most of those of white European descent, our true selves are buried under not only the unconscious pain of unprocessed childhood trauma, but also the colonial inheritance of traumatised and tragically mistaken assumptions about what it is to be human.

The extent to which we believe that we are separate individuals, that the earth can be owned, that our hearts are not as wise as our heads and our bodies are incapable of thought, that those in power are there because they know best: all this and more is our colonial inheritance and it isthisalienation from ourselves, one another and our land that makes it possible for the ruling class to tear up our communities, wreck our lands and poison our air.

This process is partly kept in place through the trauma the ruling class deliberately visit on their own children. This kicks off a seemingly inescapable loop of self-justification. Whenever you hear the refrain There is no alternative, you are hearing the desperate cry of those who know that if they admit that there is, and always has been, an alternative of real relationship, then they will have to feel the depth of pain they have had inflicted on them.

Within our social and political systems theres a vortex of unacknowledged trauma combined with a hereditary system of domination which, turbo charged by the neo-liberal agenda over the past 40 years, is now running close to costing us everything.

Those at the apex of our systems of power are often amongst those of us most seriously traumatised. Many have been put through the ruling castes mincer of distant or proxy parenting, forced separation, physical punishment and/ or emotional denial, bribery, adulation and humiliation as control, sometimes with visibly crippling results. But when this works, it results in the smooth, powerful, controlled and controlling social presentation of the elite class.

This is clearly a simplified version of a much more complex picture. Many children reared in this way do not go on to wield power in society, and some from other social backgrounds do. The political system that we in Britain have inherited however, has an unbroken line into the very depths of feudal brutality. It causes severe problems for any who attempt to function according to different principles within it, while those operating within the traditional power dynamic are supported by the structures around them.

Even within newer structures, such as the Scottish Parliament, which has in many ways freed itself from the ancient feudal energies of Westminster, the amount of power vested in individuals through the representative system, the power of lobbyists to shape policy behind closed doors, the lack of meaningfully accessible ways for ordinary people to engage in thinking about and affecting policy, and the complete blindness to the role of trauma in our thinking and our relationship to power, still means that those in the debating chamber are all too easily divorced from the realities of those they are intended to represent. The power and prestige that go hand in hand with political representationall too easilytake their toll on even those with the best of intentions, once they are given power within the current system.

Traditional upper class parenting is aimed at making the offspring of the social elite able to take and hold power in their turn. The only lasting way to dominate another is through coercion of one kind or another, so the essential human quality that must be inhibited in such unfortunate children is their sense of empathy.

Empathy is love translated into the social sphere. Many of us easily feel the joys and pains of those closest to us, but empathy allows us to feel for those outside of our group, those we have never met, those of other species and for the planet as a living system.

Our culture has in general sectioned love off to the isolated personal realm, or to the shared spiritual or storytelling realm, where it appears to pose no threat to the established social hierarchy. But love for those outside our immediate circle, or even our species, is a crucial component of our ability to be social, enabling us to override our powerful inbuilt tendency to ingroup/ outgroup thinking. It is no accident that empathy and love are denigrated and laughed at as weak and idealistic in politics. This attitude comes directly from the impulse to maintain control. It comes from the unconscious understanding thatour ability to make decisions based on our love for those outside our social groups, for other beings and for our world, is key to defusing the power-over paradigm.

The experience of childhood across all social classes is shaped by an abnormal system of emotional impoverishment, that presents itself as normal. Here, we focus specifically on how that experience impacts those who believe they benefit from this system, those we are taught to envy. Children who have had the deliberate, elite-perpetuating trauma of an upper class upbringing inflicted on them may still have access to their ability to care about those closest to them, but the deep denial, shaming, disparagement and sometimes even physical punishment of their own early sensitivity and vulnerability works to inhibit and displace empathy when faced with vulnerability in others, particularly those outside their social in-group.

Without empathy were not able to feel the impact of our selfish impulses, so there is nothing to mitigate them, especially when such impulses are also condoned by our peers and reflected in their (also traumatised) behaviour. Decisions made by people without access to their sense of empathy are traumatised, traumatising and, as we have abundant evidence to show, lead to devastating social and environmental consequences. Although, through this lens, it is possible to feel compassion for those in positions of authority, this should not blind us to the real world consequences of their trauma-driven actions. The trauma they wreck on others, the pain and misery caused by their privilege, is inexcusable. However, paradoxically, to defuse such abusive power requires us to understand the trauma-driven source of their actions.

We are, and have for a very long time been, living at the mercy of a self-perpetuating, intergenerational mechanism for keeping the checks and balances of empathy and fellow feelingoutof our decision making processes. Coupled with a social reward system which values those most able to distance themselves from love and compassion, while presenting themselves as supremely confident and unflappable, this is an almost failsafe system that has worked over many generations.

Those who enact that power are ruthless in ensuring their social in-group stays at the centre of power and repeatedly re-confirm their divorce from empathy and fellow feeling by acting with violence to those who are more vulnerable. From bureaucratic cruelties like toxic welfare reform, to building armaments empires and then creating markets for them by stirring up or initiating international conflict, many of those at the top will stop at nothing to perpetuate the system their inner hurt has driven them to affiliate with.

Women, children, those less privileged by birth, those whose skin is a different colour, those who are of other species and the land itself are seen as weaker, lesser and there only to be controlled and made use of. Anyone aspiring to power from categories seen as lesser may have to demonstrate a greater devotion to dominating others in order to prove their right to belong at the apex of such a system.

This system is the root cause of our current social and environmental emergencies. It is inherently incapable of getting us out of them. We need to create a different system.

The possible end of life on our planet is being driven by those too damaged and constricted to be able to feel their care. But what of the rest of us?

In most public social contexts we are similarly prey to the emotional and social conventions which mean that sharing our inner realities feels exceptionally risky. We fear being laughed at, shamed or ostracised. In agreeing to keep quiet, we help to perpetuate this system.

As in the political sphere so in the hierarchical organisations most of us work within, it can feel unsafe on a number of levels to voice an opinion that runs counter to the status quo. Ultimately conformity is rewarded and while imagination and insight can also be valued in some fields or areas of work, they are often hedged round with sanctions for those who go too far. Employers hold the ultimate sanction of dismissal for those who repeatedly refuse to conform to the way we do things or who bring in challenges that are uncomfortable to those with more power. There is an absolute absence of democracy from almost all workplaces. There may be protocols that need to be observed, but ultimately those higher up have the power to advance or sack those beneath them. The infantilization of adults in the workplace, the requirement to perform a role rather than be ones whole self, is an intrinsic part of maintaining this dysfunctional system.

This system can only persist to the extent it can get us to deny our whole selves. Our innate tendency to grow towards wholeness is its Achilles heel. One aspect of this is that the intermeshed self-reinforcing system of politics, economics and the media needs to incessantly generate novelty (personalities in politics, products in the economy, stories in the media). This makes it very vulnerable to an approach that enables people to be real, the economy to serve our needs, and to stories that resonate with reality. Movements and responses incessantly arise to champion these fuller ways of being, but with few exceptions political movements either become the power structures they oppose or remain in purity on the sidelines, innovations that connect us are appropriated to exploit us, and new stories fall away because they challenge only parts of the dominant paradigm and so end up reinforcing those parts they are blind to.

Our cultural reticence to stand out from the crowd is established deeply and early within some families, and aspects of the education system carefully school children on giving the correct answers and unquestioning obedience to those in authority. Time and time again, individuality, questioning, creative thinking and personal preferences and concerns are allowed within carefully controlled parameters, or ignored or even punished, leaving students in no doubt that their personal opinions and values must be carefully trained to fit within a certain mould.

Continuing relatively unchanged since the Victorian era, the school system is where many of us have cultural colonisation drummed into us, most often by well-meaning people who are, to a greater or lesser extent, unquestioningly (because thats built in) passing on the cultural imprint that they themselves absorbed. Our world is structured to persuade us that the home is the place of emotions (where we are supposed to share with our baby brother), and school and then work is the real world (where we are supposed to compete with others to get ahead). School is the place where the work ofpersonal and indigenous culturalsuppression so often happens, where conformity to the rule of authority can be embedded so deeply that most of us dont even notice its there.

School can be a place of discovery, of friendships, of teachers who care, of interacting outside the confines of what is allowed at home. However, running deep and silent, alongside and intermingled with the range of school subjects, much of the medium, context, unspoken rules and values which underlie the education system feed into the (unconscious) perpetuation of the mindset of domination that enables the ongoing colonial project. This mindset includes the objectification of anyone who is not a wealthy white human male and the treatment of nature as a commodity, rather than the miraculous basis for our and all other species survival. We are taught that animals, winds, oceans and birds are natural resources rather than our relations, and ultimately that we are only human resources too.

This system of domination requires us to separate from our inner selves and so stay separate from one another. If we were to challenge this, if we were to commit to working towards a system of connection, then the cruelty, injustice and alienation we experience and support would become impossible for us.

Those currently in power are not willing or able to change their fundamental, ecocidal, way of being, certainly not while they remain in their current structural positions. So any hope for our species is now in our hands.

Is it worth trying to find another way of doing things? Can we find one which is able to recognise the deeper levels of our being, support that within us which is prosocial and that places our needs alongside those of other humans and species and within bountiful ecosystems that offer to take care of our material, and thereby spiritual, needs if we take care of them?

Could our current life or death predicament be the ideal moment for us to collectively and clearly look at what we really want and need, and what were willing to do in order to be able to stay on as part of this beautiful planet? Maybe it was always going to be like this only when the alternative is so clearlymuch worse only then could we gather the collective motivation to do this difficult work. Even this late in the day, can we decide to do this whole being human another way, whatever the outcome?

In some contexts it is very difficult for us to make good decisions: when were stressed, when were tired, when were triggered . . . So the first thing we need to think about in developing ideas about what a new political system might look like is how to ensure, as far as possible, that we create structures and processes which take into account and mitigate these difficulties.

Heres are some of the big factors that play against our ability to make good decisions:

Since our early trauma states affect our ability to relate well to ourselves and others, recognising this and creating structures which enable us to deal with our traumatised states is an essential component of a new politics.

These states are so common. They tend to cut us off from our adult, empathic selves and so often take over without out conscious awareness, as they touch on deep running, painful emotions like shame, rage and desolation.

Just bringing the reality of trauma into the discourse can fundamentally change things. Acknowledging that we all share this experience of trauma is a huge step to enabling it to be processed. Building our relationships and running groups so that for example our tendency to flake out at certain points has a meaning that can be spoken about, can change the game entirely.

Our work relations are often so compartmentalised, we so often have to pretend to be other than we really are, imagine the relief if we were able to drop those roles and just be ourselves? Many people have spoken of the Covid period as including the experience of real connection with neighbours, strangers helping each other out, work meetings on zoom where pets and children interrupt the meeting and we are all reminded that beneath our roles we are full human beings.

There are many techniques that enable us to notice, process and ultimately heal our traumatised parts. There are many ways to acknowledge, heal and integrate these parts of ourselves, but here we are looking at simple ways of ensuring our work contexts support that integration rather than perpetuate trauma. We would want to ensure that for instance:

How counter cultural is this? How difficult is it to imagine a world like this? Are we uncertain about whether we even like the sound of it? To some extent this is the eye of the needle: the excruciating, embarrassing, vulnerable-feeling squeeze in the middle that, once we are through, can change everything.

Humans are predisposed to a range of foibles in the way we make sense of whats happening around us. Sometimes glossed as cognitive biases these are more correctly a highly complex bundle of neurological, hormonal and cultural tendencies some more deeply neurological and some more culturally determined. One of the most prevalent and, for the purposes of this essay, most important, is in-group/ out-group thinking. The extent to which we are conscious of this will have a big impact on the extent to which we are run by, or are able to manage it. In our globalised times, it is a crucial element to be aware of.

Cognitive Bias Codex from Designhacks.co

Any map of cognitive biases is bound to be biased, in that it is a particular perspective arrived at from within a particular culture. Perhaps it is best to think of it as the tip of the iceberg, a list of reminders that our way of thinking is shaped by assumptions. So, for example, the idea that some biases are more deeply neurological and some more culturally determined suggests an opposition or continuum between nature and culture that is fundamental to how we have learnt to make sense of the world within a system in which we are predisposed to control and dominate the unknown other, to relate to them as a threat to order rather than as an opportunity for shared learning and celebration.

In our dominant culture this in group/ out group bias is a fundamental all pervasive process of othering. However, the fundamental experience of other shared by many indigenous peoples is very different to this. Deborah Bird Rose writes of Yarralin Aboriginal Australian peoples way of relating to other peoples and other species, that:

Yarralin people assume that all species are made up of conscious and thinking individuals who speak, fight, plan, joke, perform rituals according to their own law. (2000: 46) Through their continued observance of the Law, all species sustain the relationships which were developed in Dreaming. It is implicit that all living beings have a choice in following Law. They can do what is necessary to maintain life or they can turn their backs on responsibility and, in so doing, allow destruction . . . All species have Law and culture, free will and choice (2000: 57).

Deborah Bird-Rose explains the contrast between this Aboriginal understanding of mutuality (known as the dreaming), and Western understandings of opposition (known as dualism):

In Aboriginal dreaming, all living things together constitute country, are conscious, responsible and mutually dependent. When country suffers, so do people. Ones interests are enfolded within the interests of all others. In Western dualism, one side is seen as an absence, and not heard. One side depends on the subordinated other, and denies that dependency. Dualism insists that the only hope for dignity is to set oneself in opposition to the systems on which our lives depend. It encourages people to make decisions to oppose self-interest to the interest of others, shifting pain and damage elsewhere. The need is to relinquish hope for future solutions, and to instead attend to mending present day relations. (Deborah Bird-Rose 1999)

For a very long time in our culture, power rested with the top dog, the biggest bully, the one who was the best at, or maybe just prepared to go the furthest, in terms of killing and maiming. Similar dynamics are still at play. Even if physical violence is no longer publicly condoned, bullying, shaming, taunting are all a familiar part of the way that politicians may feel they have to behave to defend themselves or get their way.

Politicians are people who have decided to try and get power, however pure their motivation. They are flattered, wined and dined, lobbied, pushed into the public eye, held personally accountable for contentious decisions all within a context where power is fiercely contested and weakness and vulnerability mercilessly punished.

Politicians can also become vehicles for the corporate ego of their parties. Political parties play to the worst aspects of our psychology, tipping us headlong into groupthink, party lines and in group/out group thinking at its worst. Parties groom their representatives to appear in certain ways, and to maintain the party line at all costs. They also groom their members, demanding complete loyalty and seeking to turn their representatives into facsimile people who are supposed to be the embodiment of the party a process that happens across the spectrum of political parties.

Deliberative democracy offers many insights into what a new locus of power might look like. Citizens Assemblies for instance, bring randomly selected groups of normally between 50 to 100 ordinary people together to explore and come to a view on complex and controversial policy areas. At their best, they are supported by facilitators whose over-riding agenda is to enable deeper deliberation, are informed by a group of expert witnesses chosen initially by the facilitators and then by the assembly members themselves, and use a variety of small group processes to explore the issues. Experience so far with these is that Citizens Assemblies can be very effective in allowing people to really listen to one another and often find that their strongly held opinions change as the process unfolds.

Systems like sociocracy also have a huge amount to offer the process of building a new politics. Shared governance systems like this have already mapped out egalitarian and effective formats for sharing power, enabling autonomy through horizontal accountability. Self-organising groups of people can then get work done effectively, without giving any one person or group undue power over anyone else. Even in such systems, theres a continual need to defuse emergent hierarchies and empower collective decision making.

Using processes like these, place based and work or interest circles could interlink, allowing communication at a range of levels, so that the impacts of actions by one group are thought through by everyone they will affect.

These systems work in communities of place or of practice. In shared governance, those who do the work tend to make most of the decisions about that work, so it would be councils of healthcare workers that would create structures within our healthcare services, repair and recycling workers who would feed into decisions about how we end waste and so on. As all aspects of society are interlinked, there would need to be connective structures which enable different parts of the system to communicate with one another, but all of this complexity would still be informed and mediated by the basic attitude of empathy and love for our fellow beings and home planet, and by the intention to create and maintain connection.

The organising logic in a shared governance system is one of connectivity and mutual care. This is in strong contrast to the organising logic of the pyramid systems (whether feudal, capitalist, state bureaucratic, authoritarian or dictatorial) where the requirement is to compete to rise higher, and to demonstrate servility to seek protection from those above us. In either type of system the organising logic becomes self-reinforcing.

Shared governance systems creatively evolve in a thousand different ways, but one essential ingredient in such systems is their emphasis on groups, and the roles within them. This emphasis is on ensuring that each of us brings our individuality in a way that enables others to also creatively contribute to our mutual care, rather than in a way that seeks to claim our contribution is superior to others. This doesnt so much de-emphasise the contribution of the individuals involved, so much as recognise the origins and fulfilment of our individuality as being in how we relate to others.

Within a pyramid system, whatever the level of self-awareness of those involved, the intense pressure, personal power, prestige and exposure that come with being one of those who govern departments, workplaces, institutions, or entire countries, are increasingly immense. The evidence is that no matter how well-intentioned someone has been on their way into holding power over others, the experience of having it is increasingly destructive of their ability to empathise.

A new political system would need to be built around the individuals contribution to the groups collective roles, rather than individuals claiming credit for fundamentally collective efforts. Hadrian did not build that wall, Brunel did not build that tunnel.

Creating contexts that de-stress

What would change the game entirely would be:

The UKs House of Commons pits two sides against one another, placing them slightly further apart than the length of a sword. So one place to start making this a reality would be to create decision making spaces that feel safer for us to bring the whole of who we are.

To make good decisions, we need spaces we can relax in, where people can become less defensive and more willing to be courageous and honest about their own buried experience and how it might be coming through in their current interactions and opinions.

Safe spaces acknowledge and accept all aspects (though not necessarily all behaviours) of the people within them and create processes, structures and codes of behaviour which support reflection, empathy, patience, understanding and imagination. Above all, they create spaces where deep impassioned disagreements can be the route to deeper understanding, resolution and ways forward.

These new decision making spaces wouldnt rely on people digging deep into their historic pain to bring it into the light for healing (useful though such processes can be). They would only need to acknowledge that when we become unable to care, to be empathic, we have stumbled across one of our early hidden patterns. At those times, we need to reflect on why this has happened, on whats going on with us that means were not able to be open hearted. This can be a quick internal process, or something that needs time and support from others. In either case its almost always enlightening and relieving and having been dealt with, can allow us to return to whatever we were doing with more information, more attention, and a mind that is once again open.

Techniques like Nonviolent Communication can be really useful in supporting this kind of process. There is a skill to this, but more than that it takes real courage and humility to acknowledge ones humanity and vulnerability in public spaces. These are the qualities we need in our politicians.

Clearly a shift to this kind of decision making context would be a massive change. Different skills would be called for in those who participated, and different kinds of people would be drawn to engage. At the moment, people involved in politics tend towards strong opinions and a high tolerance for (and probably a facility with) adversarial argument and conflict. They are likely to have a strong ego identification. This is fed by the role they are required to play in the system and so this aspect of their personality tends to be bolstered and (given the bias in the system towards selfish behaviour) makes our politicians vulnerable to opportunities to make the most of the perks of leadership, to play the system, or even to engage in full corruption. It can engender a sense of being exceptional and entitled, of the rules not applying to them.

Of course, political and economic elites sense of entitlement is built on a widespread social belief in exceptionalism that is central to any colonising mentality. The idea that:

In contrast, in a system based on emotional intelligence and a drive towards connection, those drawn to engage would be strong in empathy, self-reflexivity, wisdom (the willingness to learn from, rather than deny, mistakes), and deeper, collaborative thinking. These skills can be learned and our education system could be quick to build in material that would support these behaviours and skills if there was a practical call for them. Done well, this way of doing things could quickly become embedded as our way of working. At the same time, even just looking at the few examples given above, it is clear that it would also lead to a far broader reclaiming of who we are, and a willingness to support others elsewhere engaged in parallel struggles.

These are the conditions which promote clear thinking, deliberation and good decisions. Such spaces need good facilitation, so the role of trained, highly skilled facilitators, who are aware of their biases and keen to compensate for them, would be a key addition to political processes that would contribute a great deal to making sure that our decision-making is safe, orderly and fair.

The presence of someone (or more than one person) who has agreed to stay out of the to and fro of any disagreements that arise, and who is committed to maintaining good process, can make a massive difference to achieving good decisions. It would be important to ensure that such people were socially rewarded for their ability to maintain good process, rather than gain power or prestige from their roles. This could potentially be helped by frequent rotation.

Of course tensions will arise, there will be deep disagreements in how to move forward. Processes like Sociocracy, Dynamic and Convergent Facilitation, Wisdom Councils and the Way of Council, to name but a few, have much to offer in terms of focusing our attention on our innate creativity, our wisdom and the underlying truth of our interconnection, instead of hunkering down into our polarised positions. Given the right context, patience and support, new thinking (arising from the identifying of deeper connections) which takes everyones needs into account can be enabled to arise from even very deep divisions.

The rest is here:

Politics, Trauma and Empathy: Breakthrough to a politics of the heart? - Resilience