Securing our Democracy: This is the theme of a conference held this coming weekend at the Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA. The conference/retreat is offered by the Humanistic Studies Institute, a transdisciplinary learning community. Presenters are also participants, learning together.
Democracies Do Fail
They require integrity and openness of citizens.
Mary Rees
It takes rather little energy … to enable a human being to destroy others or the integration of society. ~ Gregory Bateson
Though the behavior of downward spirals seems to be common in human social systems, often assumed to be instinctual, Gregory Bateson observed in Balinese people a different and rare community that intentionally deescalated such cycles, thus demonstrating that human cycles could contain their own self-correction, as a governor provides in a physical system. We do not have to train the same way the Balinese people did, but we can learn from them that it is possible to create a different kind of social order.
Sustained effort and openness are required to maintain democratic principles: acting on human interest, not self-interest, choosing democracy over party and personal benefit. A basic requirement is personal integrity, integrity born of willingness and effort to challenge one’s self. Personal integrity can thus be the self correction in our systems. We can be the correction, the actor/agents that impact our systems. Even small actions can make a difference.
How do we become part of solutions without being part of the problem? How do we learn to listen deeply enough to see through personal assumptions and conditioning? This is a universal human problem. I propose and offer several methods for learning to recognize our own biases or blind spots.