Over dinner with the girls at my mother’s tonight, an interview with Obama and his family came on, and conversation turned to politics. I mentioned seeing an embarrassing video of McCain on YouTube, and she brought up the very true fact that she works with people (she’s a nurse at the VA’s Blind Rehab program) who think Obama is a Muslim and who are filled with other unfactual opinions.
The problem is, as she stated, that such people don’t watch what we (our people?) do; that they only watch what backs up their ignorance (Faux news, crap talk radio, etc…).
(Image courtesy of neys on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license. Original image here).
My question, and the opportunity and challenge at hand, is how to leverage all of the emerging tools of social/community media/networking to develop ways to crack open these self-isolated communities.
I don’t have a ready answer, and I doubt if there is any easy answer. But whatever solutions emerge, they’re going to have to be inclusive of all people. I like Obama on this count, in the way he is attempting to use language that is all-encompassing, and calling for an end to the use of polarizing terminology such as “Liberal” vs. “Conservative,” or “Democrat” vs. “Republican.”
My previous post intoduced the first set of distinctions of the Integral model. I know it was a bit general, but give me some time and I will elaborate, and try to make as much immediate sense as possible through the use of examples.
In the challenge set forth in this post, you can easily see that, in the polarized view, we’ve got two communities that consider what each other believes and says to be flat-out wrong. Now I don’t consider myself a part of either of these communities, but I, as an example, have at earlier points in my life identified with both of them.
I had a great conversation with my cousin-in-law who, in his own terms, used to be fundamentalist in his views. Given that his particular brand of fundamentalism happened to be Rastafarian, it could be seen as being very different from that of the Christian variety, but their differences are only ideological. In their strict adherence to their respective world-views they are radically alike.
The same could be said for Muslim fundamentalists, or Buddhists, or even Atheists, Hedonists or what-have-you. Anyone who believes their own truth to be the REAL truth, and everyone else’s to be invalid is caught up in this game. And the only way out of it is to move developmentally forward.
(Image courtesy of ~C4Chaos on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license. Original image here).
Don’t be fooled into thinking that trading one set of rigid beliefs for another is a way out. I’ve known plenty of Mormans who became “Jack-Morman” only to find themselves equally fundamentalist in their new perspective.
As John Lennon states in this brilliant interview (via laughingsquid), the only effective place to begin is with yourself. Speaking to the young interviewer, who snuck into his room with a reel-to-reel to record it, Lennon says to him, on the subject of revolution:
And you guys are going to be the establishment, in a few years. It’s not worth knocking it down, ’cause it’s convenient to have the rooms and the machinery. Thing is to protest, and protest non-violently. Because violence begets violence, you know, and if you run around wild, you get smacked, and that’s it, you know, that’s the laws of the universe. And they’ve got all the weapons; they’ve got all the money. And they know how to fight violence ’cause they’ve done it for a thousand years, suppressing us.
And the only thing they don’t know about is non-violence… And humor. And there’s many ways of promoting peace — do everything for peace: piss for peace, or smile for peace, or go to school for peace or don’t go to school for peace; whatever you do, just do it for peace. It’s up to the people. You can’t blame it on the government, and say “they’re doing this” and “they’re — oh, they’re putting us into war,” — we put ‘em there; we allow it, you know. And we can change it — if we really want to, we can change it.
[ . . . ]
You got to try and work your own head out, you know, and get non-violent, and it’s pretty hard, because we’re all violent –we’re all Hitler, inside; we’re all Christ inside — and it’s just try try and work on the good bit in you.
In working on our own heads, we come back quickly to our perception of others, the “they” who are “out there.” And it’s important to understand, however you can get to it, that beyond our opinions and politics and identities, we’re all human beings born into a vast, mysterious world, grasping to whatever keeps us afloat.
It may be most important, in communicating, to share our humanness with each other. To recognize that ultimately we’re all full of shit, pretending we are who we want to believe we are. And humor may play as important a role as seriousness in this attempt to authentically share our selves. In the end, we all die, and that common denominator; that ultimate failure, is a good place to start looking from for common ground.
(Image courtesy of love_child_kyoto on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license. Original image here).
This makes me realize that the tools of social networking are only a medium — that the important bit is what we feed them, and ourselves.
