Ask how,  not why

More ways to save democracy by talking about it…

Ask people to explain “how” their ideas would work, rather than asking “why” they believe in them:

Curiosity is contagious. There’s a “mirroring effect” in which the inquisitiveness is reciprocated: “Because you were curious, now they’ll want to be curious back.” If we avoid challenging people with “why” and instead ask for more information, he says, “Eventually you’re going to find that I might disagree with 80 percent of what you’re saying, but here’s the 20 percent where we see that there are connection points.” – Spencer Harrison

Recognize that people in your own “party” likely have more diverse beliefs than you might expect, and consider how you’d advise others to have a conversation with someone who holds a different view:

“One of the many problems with extreme partisanship is that you assume that your group is more homogenous than it actually is, and because of that we come rigid…This is about allowing people to be black sheep in their groups where they can think differently.” Todd Kashdan

Challenging these efforts are the ways media and recommendation algorithms polarize groups of people, to the extent they don’t even talk to each other anymore:

Not only are young people growing up very native to screens, to social media, and to these algorithmic impulses that push them into completely different worlds…[but also] COVID did a massive disruption for this younger generation that actually created for them an inability to even talk to each other in the normal ways…

When you have young [people] who not only don’t live together, but don’t consume the same media, don’t get the same algorithmic feeds…they’re not talking and therefore not converging. – Sarah Longwell

Time to touch grass!

The score at the beginning of the ninth

Love this definition of democracy by E.B. White:

[Democracy] is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

Individuals that are part of something

The real politics of the future is going to have to square the circle. It’s going to have to allow you to still feel that you are an individual and in control of your own destiny…

Its roots are going to lie in two places: one is the fusion of keeping the idea of individualism yet giving you a sense of being part of something, but you are not a slave to it, and the other is that you are going to re-energise the idea of science and fuse it to the idea that there is a purpose to your life.

• Adam Curtis

Always take sides

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. – Elie Wiesel

Saving democracy by talking about it

In a time when many people are getting all of their news from one polarized, personalized information feed or another, it’s interesting to see how low-tech 1930s solutions helped save democracy then.

The core elements were ways to get people talking about the real issues instead of the tribes they associated with.

The more argument the better is what the North Carolina-born George V. Denny, Jr., was banking on, anyway, after a neighbor of his, in Scarsdale, declared that he so strongly disagreed with F.D.R. that he never listened to him.

Like this program which opened up schools at night for the community to discuss topics:

The federal forum program started out in ten test sites—from Orange County, California, to Sedgwick County, Kansas, and Pulaski County, Arkansas. It came to include almost five hundred forums in forty-three states and involved two and a half million Americans. Even people who had steadfastly predicted the demise of democracy participated. “It seems to me the only method by which we are going to achieve democracy in the United States,” Du Bois wrote, in 1937.

And this one, which enlisted diverse people to all explain what democracy was:

Somehow, in the end, NBC arranged a coast-to-coast broadcast, in which eight prominent thinkers—two ministers, three professors, a former ambassador, a poet, and a journalist—tried to explain to Alice the meaning of democracy. American democracy had found its “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” moment, except that it was messier, and more interesting, because those eight people didn’t agree on the answer.

Prosocial and cultural change

[Prosocial](https://www.prosocial.world/) is “a change method based on evolutionary science to enhance cooperation and collaboration for groups of all types and sizes that’s effective at a global scale.”

It combines [Elinor Ostrom’s insights about the behaviors of effective groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principles_for_Common_Pool_Resource_(CPR)_institution) with evolutionary science and [theories of change](https://contextualscience.org/act)–moving toward or away from goals, with visible and internal reactions–that can make existing groups more effective.

Prosocial was used to [fight Ebola in Sierra Leone](https://www.prosocial.world/post/combating-the-ebola-epidemic-in-sierra-leone-with-prosocial), where the facilitators worked with local people to create a new way of honoring the dead that didn’t cause more infections; and to [design a new community park in Detroit](https://www.prosocial.world/post/prosocial-gives-a-boost-to-detroits-viola-liuzzo-park-project).

Seshat Global History Database

Interesting [database of the evolution of several cultures around the world](http://seshatdatabank.info/data/)–when they developed which technologies, religious beliefs, political systems, etc.

Anarchy and our interconnected future

Most societal critiques today come from either the right or the left, so it was interesting to read this (very!) long analysis of multiple interconnected issues–democracy, capitalism, equality, opportunity, the climate crisis, technology, and more–from a self-professed anarchist perspective.

Near the end the author describes the central challenge of defining societal narratives that can compete with the dominant one:

We are increasingly being sold a transhumanist narrative in which nature and the body are presented as limitations to be overcome. This is the same old Enlightenment ideology that anarchists have fallen for time and again, and it rests upon a hatred of the natural world and an implicit belief in (Western) human supremacy and unfettered entitlement. It is also being increasingly used to make the capitalist future enticing and attractive, at a time when one of the primary threats to capitalism is that many people do not see things improving. If anarchists cannot recover our imagination, if we cannot talk about the possibility of a joyful existence, not only in fleeting moments of negation but also in the kind of society we could create, in how we could relate to one another and to the planet, then I don’t believe we have any chance of changing what happens next.

This is one of the few attempts I’ve read to even describe an alternative system encompassing economic, political, environmental, and technological aspects; the Green New Deal is another, though that’s still early in development. It’s clear that trying to change any single aspect of our interconnected society is doomed to fail against the inertia of the status quo; change will come all together or not at all.

Power and choice

> One might think that the most powerful man has the most choices, but in reality he has the fewest. Too much depends on his every move.

– from [Tales of the Tyrant](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/tales-of-the-tyrant/302480/), a fascinating look at Saddam Hussein’s daily life

Dystopia and its discontents

Kim Stanley Robinson [breaks down the various flavors of utopia and dystopia](https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/) and comes out in favor of writing about, and pursuing, utopias, despite their limitations.

He concisely explains why dystopias are unable to spur real change:

> These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through…If this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness.

And why utopias meet such strong opposition:

> It is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many.

It’s interesting to read his comments in the context of reactions to politically progressive efforts like the Green New Deal and universal healthcare. Some of the loudest opposition has come from those who already enjoy the desired benefits.

> Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It’s very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.

Crafting a compelling utopia–or as I sometimes put it, designing a better way to live together–is the defining project of our generation. We have the resources and capability; what we still lack is the right design and pathway.