Co-Intelligent Alternatives for Action Now – Random Communications from an Evolutionary Edge

Reaching beyond our usual responses to partisan crises

People who won the 2024 US election are celebrating their successes. People who lost are frustrated, angry, amazed, despairing, and starting to talk about what went wrong and what to do next. That’s the nature of the electoral process, especially winner-take-all competitions like we have in the US.

On the leading edges of all this clamor, we find people asking themselves and each other “What is possible now?” We’re in a very new context. New possibilities – for better and worse – have become more likely, given how things are now being configured. And, since those configuration will be shifting, this question can be asked again and again…

For folks who are angry and frustrated AND who are interested in co-intelligence, I want to offer a few thoughts about some co-intelligent directions in which you could invest your life energy.

And I want to note that the times are ripe for engaging with the two great domains of evolving wholeness – healing (into a past wholeness) and transformation (into a new wholeness).

Here are five approaches which I think are intriguingly different from what you find in most public discourse today. Anything you do with them and any support you might give to them, will be serving the growth of co-intelligence in our currently fraught political culture.

1. Bridge-Building into Action

2. Nonviolence that Expands Empathy

3. Collective Reflection into Evolutionary Clarity

4. Liberation from Modernity into Metabolism

5. Mainstreaming the Idea of Wisdom in Public Affairs

Below are some thoughts about each of these unusual ideas.

Bridge-Building into Action

He drew a circle that shut me out –
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle and took him In!
― Edwin Markham

With its significant diversity, the US has a history not only of conflict and oppression but also of efforts to help people meet each other across differences in race, religion, culture, and more – and now, more than ever, across different political orientations.

Toxic, mutually dehumanizing political polarization has inspired a fabulous array of efforts to help Left and Right (“Blues” and “Reds”) hear each other and discover their mutual humanity. You can explore and connect with many of these efforts through the Bridge Alliance.

Among them, the initiative I’m probably most familiar with is Braver Angels. Significantly, for what I want to share here, Reds and Blues who have discovered each other’s humanity through the Braver Angels program are beginning to ask “What now?” There’s a growing hunger to actually DO things together. And lately I’ve heard that this question is showing up increasingly in other bridging activities, creating the conditions for bipartisan collaborations – not just among public officials – as important as that will increasingly be – but among ordinary citizens of all types in a wide variety of initiatives and contexts.

Alongside these emerging efforts, I’d like to point to the growing interest in Citizen Assemblies formed by random selection. Random selection produces councils of citizens who show up not as partisans but as ordinary citizens trying to do some good work together on behalf of their communities. Their shared mandate to co-create useful outcomes causes them all to rise to the occasion together. Their diverse perspectives suddenly become more of a resource for deeper understanding and possibility than a problem that divides them. When it is all over, they often really LIKE each other and want to do more things together. This is a great untapped resource of energy for positive change.

Nonviolence that Expands Empathy

In most cases, nonviolence can be considered more co-intelligent than violence. Using force to get one’s way wastes energies and knowledge from everyone involved, whereas respect, listening, dialogue, and catalytic empathy could enable them to make a difference that they all value. In addition to generating better solutions, nonviolence tends to leave less bitterness and resentment to mess things up later.

Most nonviolent campaigns nowadays focus on strategic nonviolent resistance. Studies have shown that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent approaches. Extensive bodies of knowledge and practice have been developed about how to use nonviolent power to impact people, institutions and media. But official power-holders have also become increasingly sophisticated in resisting and countering commonly used nonviolent actions.

While using many of the proven nonviolent tactics, some campaigns go even further. They delve deeper into the sources of conflict, oppression and harm. Underlying what people do and assert against each other. we find deeper needs, values, experiences, stories, and other motivators that usually remain hidden as battles rage. But there’s a secret here: These motivators are actually a renewable source of power and life energy for healing and transformation. Gandhi and King pioneered love as a mode for opening people into that transformational space. Strategic love still is a source of that power, and today we have even more ways to promote it.

We have accessible tools to assist even ordinary people to call forth that motivational potential. Nonviolent Communication, Reflective Listening, Strategic Questioning, Dynamic Facilitation and other such approaches tap into that nonviolent power to catalyze change.

While attack hardens two sides in a battle, real empathy – getting into someone else’s shoes, really hearing them so they know they’ve been heard – can shift an entire relationship from attacking and defending positions to searching together for what would really work for everybody.

Strategic nonviolence and authentic empathy can come together to weaken the “pillars” of support for oppressive, harmful institutions, leaders and policies. One starts with people not so invested in the oppressive systems (including those who may be being oppressed by it even as they work to support it!). Cleanly using tools like those above, one can inspire more and more of one’s opponents to become allies until the pillars of oppression collapse. And as this unfolds, it is wise to engage one’s erstwhile opponents in common action around common aspirations (see the previous section)!

As a final note on this I want to highlight Big Empathy. Big Empathy involves getting really skillful using the tools above. AND it involves stretching empathy to include more and more of life. AND it involves bringing empathic capacity into the institutions, stories and practices of all aspects of our culture. Ultimately, we should all be able to see and use that nonviolent power everywhere.

Collective Reflection into Evolutionary Clarity

After this election we hear hundreds of people talking about what went wrong and what to do now. This is good, but such talk often remains very shallow or controlled, wasting the opportunities for true dialogue by focusing on establishing who or what to blame for losing, how to frustrate the enemy now, and how to win the next election.

That’s all well and good, but it isn’t the kind of collective reflection I’m talking about. I’m thinking about something much deeper. Ideally, we’d be trying to learn how WE went about co-creating what happened. Just as Gandhi helped Indian peasants realize they were co-creating their own oppression and could thus have tremendous impact just by ending their collaborations with their British overlords, we can go deeper to understand our roles in generating not only the electoral outcomes we didn’t want but even what happens next.

When we understand our own co-creative roles in unwanted outcomes, we can do something to shift them – especially together. This is harder to do when we’re focused on assigning blame or on linear causes “out there” In fact, we’re actually looking less for solutions as we are for evolving our own awareness, behaviors, institutions and cultures. We want what comes next to be part of co-evolving the larger political and governance dynamics we and our children will all be living with into the future.

If we take this path, we also understand that whatever clarity we achieve will be intrinsically limited and temporary. We’re happy to see how things seem to hang together now, but we’re careful not to nail that down into solid certainty. Part of evolutionary consciousness is keeping our knowing tentative, open, and curious about what else might be involved, ever aware of the Mystery that is so much bigger than whatever we manage to grasp and do at any given point.

We also may use diverse sources of insight to help evoke the kinds of understanding we seek in our reflections. Pattern language cards like the Wise Democracy deck and the GroupWorks deck (for good group process) exist at the tip of a wide field of stimulating catalysts for reflection that includes more traditional oracle tools as well, such as the I Ching, Tarot (I like the Motherpeace deck), and even symbols like mandalas and the Yin-Yang and spiritual, psychological and other texts that evocatively articulate or represent meaningful patterns and dynamics. All such resources can provide starting points and inspiration for serious evolutionary reflection together.

Liberation from Modernity into Metabolism

That’s a weird way to talk about things, I admit; but check it out.

Vanessa Andreotti understands Modernity as arising from a worldview of separateness: Everything is fundamentally separate from everything else, notably including us being separate from each other and nature. Upon those assumptions, Modernity builds a Story of Progress which celebrates and promotes ongoing improvement while systematically externalizing, marginalizing, denying and hiding the harms it causes in the process – harms like colonization, oppression, exploitation, pollution, alienation, wars, climate disruption and so much more.

Unfortunately, we can observe these dynamics at work in virtually all aspects of civilization. For decades those one-sided shiny denial dynamics made progress believable. But as civilization runs into more and more global limits, Modernity’s Story of Progress is running into the limits of its utility and sustainability. All the damages that have been done and continue to be generated are now coming home to roost: from violent weather and mass migrations to droughts and suicides, the entangled tragedies of “the polycrisis” are becoming increasingly hard to hide. (My understanding of this was deepened by William Catton’s book OVERSHOOT. Overshoot and Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work on “systemic drivers of collapse” before it became searingly clear in Andreotti’s book HOSPICING MODERNITY.)

All this implies an expansion of liberatory movements and visions to imagine cultures and practices that are regenerative, reciprocal, inclusively familial and respectful, and responsive to the whole, with all the awareness, maturity and obligations these conditions demand. We can no longer liberate marginalized people into fuller participation in the socioeconomic dynamics that are destroying the world. We need to liberate all life into the sorts of quality of life that doesn’t generate global tragedy as a corollary.

We want to find non-harmful ways to BE with, to LISTEN TO, to APPRECIATE, to LEARN FROM and to PARTNER WITH the living world, both human and more-than-human. We want to learn how to be responsible participants in the ongoing processes and metabolism of the planet remaking itself through the co-creative dynamics of all entities living here, including ourselves. And we want to learn how to do all this as the old extractive, alienated and destructive modes of culture are coming apart in what some call collapse or the metacrisis.

Liberation from modernity into the great global metabolism of life means freeing ourselves and each other from bondage to the systems, stories and technologies that enforce our alienated participation in systemic harmfulness forever.

There are literally millions of ways to pursue that liberation, but the worldview described here provides a unique overarching perspective through which to evaluate all the other activities that vie for our attention, participation and resources, so that we can evolve into becoming one with the evolving regenerative metabolism of life on earth.

Mainstreaming the Idea of Wisdom in Public Affairs

Right now the idea that ordinary people, under the right conditions, can generate collective wisdom about our public affairs is considered unrealistic, if not off-the-wall woo-woo.

This is painfully tragic, since it is abundantly clear that smarts, power plays and experts are not enough to get us through the immensely complex challenges we face – largely because we are all participating in creating them. We need seriously out-of-the box collective responses and engagements.

I believe it is extremely important to break through people’s assumptions about wisdom as irrelevant to political life and governance, as unachievable or unrealistic, or as dependent only on wise leaders or personal enlightenment. I’ve been talking about this on my blog and in deliberative democracy circles for years.

I don’t have suggestions for how YOU might contribute to this, but I urge you to think about your work and networks and who you might be able to engage in thinking about and sensing into these ideas.

If you want to explore what “wisdom” might mean in this context, check out The Nature of Wisdom in a Wise Democracy. And since wholeness is (in my view) the principle underlying all aspects of wisdom, you can explore the Prime Directive to “appreciate, evoke and engage the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole”.

This post is obviously only a brief overview, just to suggest that there are alternatives to despair and the not very co-intelligent approaches being urgently advocated by so many groups and thought leaders. I want to expand our sense of possibilities, ideally to invite explorations that go both deeper into these approaches and far beyond them, along other paths you may know about or seek…

If you’d like me to do classes or convene conversations about any of this, let me know in a comment on my substack or blog.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440

Appreciating, evoking and engaging the wisdom and resourcefulness of the whole on behalf of the whole

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