Author: Laure X Cast

Choosing is Freedom

Healing is an act of resistance.

Doing the work of being with one another in love, in acceptance, and in freedom is an act of resistance.

Knowing that every judgement, desire to help, or anything that implies anything that others are incapable of freedom is a chance to look at the ways we still may need love and healing is an act of resistance.

And then maybe I will drop even that framing, which may still be centring the systems of oppression.

The systems don’t need to be resisted so much as loved out of existence.

The more I welcome my own ‘negative emotions,’ the more I get to let go of the behaviours I am using to avoid feeling shame. The more I stop calling myself broken, the more I get to welcome my connection with other beings. The more I am accountable for myself, the more I feel like it’s coming into being without resistance.

Systems of oppression depend on my belief in them. They depend on collective belief.

My freedom comes from my choice to do what feels right and feels aligned when I really allow myself to be. My freedom does not depend on what other people allow me to do. My freedom comes from my interdependence with you. Knowing we are free, right now, and every story that tells us otherwise makes us hide, makes us meek.

These stories come with a threat of violence. Our freedom is so terrifying for some, their own freedom is so terrifying that they need to violate our bodies, to make us know our place, to try and wrest our freedom from us like horror movie monsters pulling out our hearts, still pumping blood through torn veins.

It is very difficult to drop the stories of oppression. Especially as a way to subtly signal our awareness of our status. Our well-meaning gets in the way when we start saying, “I have the privilege to be free but not everyone does.” As though freedom were being free of hardship, of illness, of injustice.

I have to believe in everyone’s inherent freedom to divest myself from oppression and oppressing. I have to realize that no matter what someone’s circumstance may be, they are fully capable to choose freedom.

What depletes the capacity to choose this isn’t struggle, it’s power-over. It’s lack of empathy.

Even saying this I feel myself wanting to put down my freedom. To think of reasons why dominance, my ‘helpful’ dominance, should have a place. I am full of all kinds of strategies still that get in the way of my freedom, of my being in full, unconditional being. I don’t think I will be free, ever, in that sense, I will always feel the tension, the ‘anxiety’ as Peter Block puts it, of choice.

Choosing my freedom means being accountable. Being responsible for taking care of myself, for including and welcoming myself, for being in right relationship with the people I interact with, and for seeing ways my actions, thoughts, behaviours reinforce systems of dominance.

It doesn’t include trying to change other people. It does include working on structures and systems that can support freedom. It includes co-creating containers where those held within are welcome in full.

It’s important to avoid getting into spiritual materialism. To not feel like my choice to see my freedom and believe in it makes me special, better, or more wise. It’s the balance of seeing how systems don’t serve freedom and how behaviours in those system perpetuate harm with the idea that at our human core, we all want to be free. And seeing that many people aren’t choosing that, and wanting to be with people who are.

And most of all, to realize my freedom means nothing without yours. Without ours.

Tools for Collaborative Decision-Making?

Most technology that is out there to help facilitate community either mimic social media (posting! commenting! liking!) or seem to be about ‘how to make decisions as a group.’ I’m definitely not a fan of the former category and I also wonder if we are bypassing something fundamental with decision-making tooling.

When we look at our individual decision-making, we can observe that “making a decision” really is a meta-layer on top of something else, usually avoiding an emotion. When we’re agonizing over a decision, it’s usually because there’s something we don’t want to feel. For example, we might not want to feel the grief of giving up on a possibility of some kind of pleasure, we might not want to feel the judgement of other people, we might not want to feel like we’re disappointing someone, we might not want to feel fear or uncertainty, or any number of other things. When we’re not avoiding these feelings, there aren’t so much decisions as choices, there’s not so much of a story about the ‘importance’ of one choice versus another. (h/t Joe Hudson).

It’s always interesting how rare it is in retrospect for something that feels like “a big decision” to actually have the kind of impact I was projecting on the choice, whereas some things that didn’t feel like ‘major decisions’ have turned out to have big impacts later.

When I can open myself to the feelings and trust that I’m able to feel them without losing myself, I no longer find myself worrying about the outcome of a choice.

What I’ve seen with groups is similar.

We start thinking decisions need to made and mitigated by fair systems and technology mostly because we’re operating outside of trust, partly as a function of size and partly as a function of skipping over trust-building. I’m coming to believe that the gold standard for larger group decision making is really about fractal nesting, building trust and structures where trust is delegated up. Working in groups where the trust is embodied, so that representatives are largely in relationship with one another, and there’s nesting of these bodies of trust.

Groups where trust has been built, which tend to start very small and max out around 30-50 people, are typically able to make decisions about their own group without much technology (simple hand-counts are usually sufficient). When there’s a network involved, then groups can designate someone trusted to participate in a trust-building and decision-making body of up to 30 other such trustees, and up the chain it can go. This works without a bunch of zero-knowledge or anonymous votes as long as we centre trust-building and connection.

Trust is integral. As soon as we try to create organizations or networks or movements without beginning small and involving shared witness, we’re not operating collectively. We’re just a bunch of individuals.

Don’t misunderstand- the fundamental idea here is that we ARE individuals. We do come with our own unique experiences, and as soon as we put boundaries on how much of you we want in the space, we’re eroding belonging, we’re eroding a sense of each person’s responsibility for their own experience.

Trust results from spaces in which we are invited to be seen and heard and we’re acknowledging our own tendencies to look for safety or our temptations to help, manage, or solve. And it results from people voluntarily seeking each other out in pairs or smaller groups beyond the held spaces of the group to be in community and fellowship. And it results from clearly recognising and defining a common purpose.

Trust-building isn’t easy, which may be why there are so many people looking for shortcuts. Many people are out of practice when it comes to trusting. I am seeing in myself that when I am out of trust with others, I’m sometimes out of trust with myself, and sometimes I’m just picking up on other people’s lack of self-trust.

We really are swimming in the “water, what’s that?” of the structures necessary to support extraction and suppress freedom, so it’s not surprising that the tools we think we need reflect the idea that decision-making for groups needs bureaucracy. We all know our follower counts and associate our impact with metrics. That way of thinking is true when we’re measuring and comparing and rating. Leaving this water will require evolution and time. It’s not a returning to the past, it’s not trying to live on the land as hunter-gatherers as before the flood. It’s instead being here, being in relationship, practicing, opening ourselves to amphibious mutations.

On the meta-crisis

I’m in a few spaces where there’s frequent reference to the meta-crisis, this kind of collection of existential threats we find ourselves in as humans (climate, geopolitical nuclear threats, pandemics, social disconnection, etc).

You might sum it up as “the results of structures of domination and extraction.” Much of the conversation around this is too jargon-filled and quasi-academic / post-modern academic for my tastes, but the general idea that we’ll fail by trying to solve things by doubling down on the strategies that have led us here resonates for me.

I’ve noticed the meta-crisis concept brings out the brains when my sense is that most of the actually successful things we can do to be in right relation are embodied, maybe not outright abandoning the mind (enlightenment being some kind of magical state that even the greats eventually say is not a thing– the Buddha is all like, whatever you’re calling enlightenment is of course a notion that undermines whatever experience of enlightenment you may have touched into). So we are not abandoning our thinking but as soon as things get VERY thinking-y then we’re going in a direction usually that is just a perpetuation. Stop thinking so very much and start feeling it. I wonder at this point if it’s easier to think about it or feel it, probably the former. Because it can be a social media thing, the escape by retweet, the ‘I’ve done something so now I am free to relapse into all the worst and self-destructive behaviours.’

To put this more bluntly, I sense an embodied truth that the work I do to be in integrity with myself matters much more than all the achievements I could rack up, but that perspective is terrifying in some way to the part of me that is like ‘omg you are worthless without having done anything important.’ There’s so much trust fall in being like ‘does-higher power/intuition/bigger-than-me-universe-force want me to do something important? If so it will lead me there, I do not have to create a status-seeking strategy.’

In other words, I have to become willing to not do an important thing, because let’s be honest, doing important things has been very integral to our getting to the place we’re in now. How can we extricate doing important things from the extraction and exploitation? The idea of doing important things leads us to believe other people are expendable, that the earth or resources are expendable. There’s a reason why most spiritual leaders are anti-materialist; it’s incongruous to orient around doing important things and acting from love and detachment at the same time, and of course religion is the complete opposite often, where everything goes from the spiritual freedom to materialism.

Being in myself is much harder than coming up with great ideas and talking about great ideas and debating about ideas, and I am so into the thinking and talking. I’m now noticing that thinking and talking and building and designing are possible escapes, that all those activities are simply more effective to address the ‘meta-crisis’ when they are emerging from embodied practice, from learning how to be with ourselves without the story of our worth being tied up in these activities.

This is essentially why, though there are so many big problems we may or may not be able to work our way out of, there’s just no point if we don’t do the work to be both in integrity in ourselves and in right relation with the people we’re interacting with. To do this, we have to shift our mindset away from thinking it’s somehow valuable to know all the things going on as surfaced by unimpartial algorithms, and towards being very present to what is going on in the spaces our bodies (or even our intermediated but still connected virtual bodies) inhabit. This is why we keep returning, to ourselves and to the fractal wisdom of almost all spiritual traditions, that love and responsibility are what can make a difference, we keep hearing it and feeling it, but it’s so seductive to slip back into diagnosing and solving.

Love is change, change is love

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

—James A. Baldwin

I am noticing more love within me, emerging, changing everything. Not like some kind of soft hippie peace-and-love but the force of uprising, the love that says I must exist, the love that sees all as worthy of love, the love that unmasks us. If we can’t start with love then the whole exercise is useless.

Here we are in it, finding the others who can hold the love because they’ve been hollowed out by pain. Love that knows that as long as we are willing to overlook ongoing trauma and systems of dominance and violence, we aren’t loving ourselves, we are against love for ourselves or for anyone.

This is a love that doesn’t require perfection but doesn’t permit delusion. In this kind of love you lose everything, everything. It feels gut-wrenching and beautiful. This love is grief and possibility, unmeasurable. This love rips away all your defenses and shows you they were unnecessary, they were all made of lead, offering a sense of safety that slowly poisons your mind and body.

This is a love made of responsibility, of freedom, of belonging. Made for liberty. It’s not a love of humanity, it’s a love of being, of beings.

This is a love that sees no difference among us, and that celebrates our differences, that is not indifferent.

This love is the only weapon against tyranny and this love is not a weapon, not a defense, but a force that triumphs, or just creates a different reality altogether. It is larger than life and twice as natural.

It’s not in the slightest bit naive, it is the force that says ‘survive’ when we are hurt or broken. It might be supernatural and it might be just the air and rocks and trees, if you’re listening. It’s what exists before. What will take us to the after. It’s here, always. To feel it is to be swept by a river, a flow, bubbly and rushing through, left breathless.

This love is a chemical reaction, a consequence of collective practice, it is connected and emergent. This is a love with, and not just among. This love changes us, me, everything.

This love blasts out from our chests like a warrior goddess, takes us to a new place, returns us to ourselves.

Healing for the executioner

I’ve been audio-reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, and on top of some other books I’ve experienced in this way, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, there’s something deep in me that feels the violence described, the brutality that has been so frequently applied to bodies by other humans, especially to Black bodies, that quakes with the horror and the recognition that we are humanly capable of these acts. But how? I spend so much time participating in spaces of love and healing and to feel into that reality, that we humans do terrible violent things, can seem both incomprehensible and all too real.

Mostly it’s male humans who are brutalizing bodies. Of course, if you have been socialized into the idea that you shouldn’t show emotions and empathy is ‘weak’ and then you add in power-over, you will see terrible and algorithmically increasing terror as the power is deployed at scale.

Not just male people deploy this power, though typically male people are the ones enacting the body-level violence. Non-male people use their power-over in more subtle and sometimes sneaky ways. We have to acknowledge the scars that so many people live with as a result of others using power-over them. To name what has happened.

I also think about the healing that needs to happen for all the people who’ve found themselves in power-over as a result of this IWSHP form of extractive capitalism. What kind of grief needs to be felt collectively by those who’ve normalized power over?

We have many fables in WEIRD culture of people who were privileged and then became themselves servants that expose our underlying awareness of the unnatural state of this dynamic. Stories about masters and servants generally reflect the relative lack of virtue in dominance.

Yet it’s so tempting to be like, “I don’t have power over,” despite all the evidence to the contrary, like that people make TikToks based on forcing gig workers to dance for them or the many examples of white people call police on… and the like. As though if we don’t exploit the power-over, we don’t have it.

Power-over robs us of empathy. Can you picture being a servant? Wouldn’t you assume there to be a certain lack of empathy from your ‘master’ simply by virtue of the idea of servitude? You are now seen as simply a less human person by virtue of that role.

Is there any way around it? I don’t think so, because even a compassionate ‘master’ can never be fully trusted. Hierarchy is natural, but slavery and servitude are not; they are ultimately a byproduct of agriculture. We have been trained by wheat, as YNH says, and we have contorted ourselves in so many ways since then

In the U.S., landowning educated white men created a ‘blueprint for freedom for the people’ that excluded a majority of humans actually subject to the laws it enshrined. As a result, our kind of liberty has served as a model of inequity and even genocide.

If we want a world where there is freedom for any human, we can’t live in a world that condones, through laws or norms, command by violence. Someone will always be the slave when there are masters. Taking power-over leads us lose our empathy and start commanding people to do things that are only ‘good for ourselves’ – at the cost of our own humanity. Unpacking how we’ve taken that power and feeling the results within us is a process, but it’s the only path to trusting each other.

Process of Freedom

The individual process of freedom is losing everything.

The collective process of freedom is embracing everyone.

Freedom’s just another word

On Friday, I was lucky enough to be in the virtual room with Peter Block, who was celebrating the release of his new book, Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. I was struck, to use Peter’s word, by the palpable love in the room, and the presence of so many people who have known Peter for many years, have worked with him, and been impacted by his practice and ideas.

As has been the case when I’ve shared a room with Peter in the past, I found myself wanting to write down everything he said, even though I own his books, where these thoughts re-emerge again and again. And still, every time I encounter them, there’s a gong that goes off in my body.

Belonging and freedom and accountability are the same.

People mistake freedom and autonomy; freedom comes from connection.

Liberation is the absence of oppression, but it’s not freedom.

Freedom is the antidote to a leadership mindset. The task of leader is to get people to connect with each other.Leaders are not there to fill the expectations of ‘subordinates,’ they are there to partner.

Peter Block

Belonging = freedom = accountability.

YES!

What an amazing distillation of everything I’ve been thinking about lately. How can I live into my full power, be fully in love, be fully in responsibility, be fully free, be intimately interconnected with everything and everyone, be in connection, be able and willing to hold my boundaries with total compassion and humility? How can everything I build and do and contribute come from a place without fear? (Though Peter talked a lot about the anxiety of accountability – perhaps as I read the new book I’ll understand this more).

Belonging means letting go of so much, as does freedom, as does real responsibility. I belong when I belong to myself, which requires a container that is expansive and also an embrace. I can not belong if I’m only about myself, though. Such a paradox and that’s what real community is about, feeling into the mutual possibilities, taking on the ways I am part of the problem I want to see change, and coming with curiosity to hearing how you and others want a future to look. Coming with the kind of real wonder that is a result of love and letting go of the aspects of identity that depend on othering – othering myself and othering others.

I think this makes sense but I am still working towards this. I still find myself with a sense of frustration that there’s oppression around us, that there are so few BIPOC or disabled or non-binary or trans people or even women in some of the spaces I’m in, despite those spaces often being oriented around collective practices, community, and particularly creating spaces or technologies around bringing people together. I spend time in other spaces where there’s more melanin and queerness and look forward to finding ways to develop more and more overlap.

True community are spaces in which we feel that we are accepted in the wholeness of who we are. And that doesn’t mean that every part of who we are is expressed in every given moment, that’s not possible. But that the body, the collective of people that we are in relationship with, there is no request to leave a part of ourselves behind in order to be accepted in this group of people.

Rev. angel Kyodo williams

To have spaces like this, I think, requires us to not feel like the only, but is “the only” just a story we have of ourselves where we don’t belong to our selves? This stuff is complex, and in the end, I can only work on letting go, freeing the part of me that will love fully and not supposing the rest of me, the layers of protection, the shell, the veil, the disguise, is needed for its protection. That part is the strong part, the badass part, the part that can’t be abandoned because it’s where belonging is freedom and where freedom is owning my experience.

Resident Evil

‘Evil’ is a concept that is strange to me when I am in the “we’re all part of an inexplicable universe” state of mind. But I think I can understand it from at least one perspective: what we think of when we call a person evil.

Isn’t “evil” just a name for extreme aspects of lack of empathy? What is ‘evil’ to most people at its core? I am a little out of the loop with the good and evil framing but what comes to mind are ‘people being terrible’ in a way that put themselves first, that are power-hungry, that are cruel to other people or beings. (I am leaving aside ‘evil’ that just reflects people’s censorious interpretation of things other people shouldn’t do because another human wrote down words according to a deity, I am talking about evil you can feel).

In that case, why isn’t the answer to evil always empathy? This seems obvious, yet somehow the impulse in history is always war or punishment or something of that nature. We fear this kind of lack of empathy, perhaps because it lurks within us. Maybe the real evil is how lack of empathy provokes lack of empathy.

Of course there are those incapable of empathy, but as Robet Sapolsky suggests, as humanity we’re perhaps better off identifying and isolating sociopaths and then using deep empathy with everyone else. To recognise that in almost every case where empathy is possible, anti-social or ‘evil’ behaviour results not from free will, but from being an organism in a system that hasn’t properly nurtured it. As a society, we can look (with empathy) at what leads to this behaviour (and maybe even this thinking) and address it.

I mean, that will probably never happen, but there are interesting ‘microcosm’ experiments with this approach among collectives, people creating containers of empathy and building trust with each other. In a context of collective healing, it’s easier to spot dominance, anti-social behaviour, power-seeking, and to respond with empathy as well as approbation. It’s possible to have norms that allow people to make mistakes and be called in, and this rests, at least in part, in practices of interaction that involve witnessing, processing, slowness, not so much dialogue until the trust and norms are clear and held in the space.

It is not easy to meet what feels evil with empathy, and empathy isn’t enough. Empathy alone does not address the systemic scaffold that leads to evil, that supports massive social inequity that yields power of the kind that can drain empathy away. So I’m not saying, let’s just be understanding. We can put boundaries into play and make sure evil isn’t normalized. We can fight the idea that evil is not evil if it has some utility, if it means jobs or profit or security or control.

I do wonder in myself how I can meet evil more with wonder, like “humans are capable of this. I am a human. Am I capable of this?” And notice where the edges of evil might live in me, so that I can love them out of existence.

Disrupt LinkedIn

I have something to confess. I like LinkedIn.

I’ve trained that algorithm to deliver the things that make me say, “right on!” My feed, which I also feel fine ignoring for periods of time without any sense that my absence will be noticed, is full of people whose faces I like to see.

But I also hate LinkedIn.

Of course, there’s the fundamental problem of a centralized, traditionally-run tech company owning me as much as LinkedIn does. Of my contribution to it profiting someone, of my social relationships being owned. I can “export” a list of people I am connected to, my “data”, but I can’t easily connect LinkedIn to anything that would improve the connections – or so-called connections- I have developed.

Those corporate web 2.0 issues aside, LinkedIn is also kind of the opposite of useful for the very thing I am there for. Every time I am at an event with interesting people, or meet a new person, I “link” with them, only to have zero context about the whole thing immediately. There they are in the collection, but there’s basically no impetus to go further than that, or to be able to use LinkedIn to do the kind of basic follow-up and relationship development that would obviously be necessary for someone to go beyond being a profile to being a colleague. I hate having messages locked away in a UI that leads me to forget I ever spoke to someone. And don’t get me started on the giant misses in other parts of the product- why are LinkedIn Groups so completely terrible?

Yes, there have been attempts to disrupt LinkedIn before, but most of them are just the same ‘own everyone’s data’ kind of approaches. We are perhaps starting to have enough DeCent tech to do something more exciting? So if that’s what you are building, here are some wish list items:

  1. You have a public profile but you can limit information you share to classes of people (co-workers, communities, friends) or even to certain people. Over time you can shift the level of sharing based on relationships that develop.
  1. You have a social graph and when someone looks at your profile while logged into theirs, they can see your mutual connections
  2. When someone connects with you, you have the opportunity (or even requirement? You choose.) to add context about how you know them. You can add more context as time goes on. Their profile reflects messages you’ve shared as well. This shared context is visible to both people but no one else. Could this be contained in some E2E way? Why not?
  3. There’s an RSS feed associated with you that you can feed your various channels of public streams through, ala ActivityPub, and there’s a way for your contacts to see this as a feed with other people’s content. There’s a transparent algorithm you can adjust to favour certain people or relevant-to-you content or other preferences
  4. You can use the platform as a mailing list. Contacts can opt-in and then you can message groups of people filtered by interests, locations, etc.
  5. It’s easy to pass along other people’s content as well, so there are still metaphors for responding to and amplifying content (though it could be as a comment that is attached to the content or as a message only delivered to the person posting). There are ways to take content into a better UI for conversations, ideally. I’m imagining here that we’re really talking about something independent of this particular platform, no need to re-invent every wheel.
  6. There is probably benefit in orienting around profiles as a resume as well as simply a way to connect. LinkedIn has managed to stay less toxic by both avoiding being ad-driven and by being a space that represents you to the working world. But you could make many improvements to the way information is presented- making the resume part more modular so you could choose to emphasize non-job-work more prominently, and to more easily share your non-job aspects with people you get to know more deeply. The trick is to have that information be yours and not the platform’s. Now we get into identity management, but you know, people are figuring it out, or trying to- eep.

If you’re making this, I am excited. As everyone always says to me, “I want to be a beta tester.” I am guessing something like it already is happening. And then perhaps LinkedIn will finally be… left out.

Matters of Trust

How does trust work? It’s multi-faceted.

First, there’s congruence.

You say this is how you are, I see you behaving in ways that reflect that. This isn’t something I want to farm out to technology, it’s too easy to game anything that tried to quantify congruence.

Then, there’s connection.

I can’t trust someone who clearly has indifference or disregard for me. There’s no technology that proxies for this.

Next, we can throw in social context, or transitive trust.

When someone behaves negatively to other people with whom I can identify, I am likely to lose trust. This one is problematic in its nature because sometimes people are stuck in in-group thinking where doing bad things to someone we think of as ‘bad’ may feel correct to us, but I would argue that most of the time, there’s a violence and dominance in that behaviour that also provokes fear, rather than trust. If I see someone punishing someone I don’t like, I may feel like it’s warranted, but I also lose trust in the person performing the action.

We may have become inculturated with a kind of paternalism or patriarchal perspective that leads us to see punishers as protectors. My guess is that at heart, we know punishers are operating by invoking fear. First they came for…

We can also consider whether people we trust also trust other people and use their trust as a basis for our own.

Should we assume trust?

There’s a norm I’ve seen many communities and companies trying to establish of “trust until the trust is broken.” On some level, it’s a good strategy, a game theory that works. But it also feels like an approach developed by people who don’t regularly have to watch out for danger. Who don’t experience trust-breaking frequently, even in places where everyone has the best intentions.

To suggest that trust is about some kind of contractual, verifiable, identity-based thing feels like what is broken in the whole system (meaning the drive to quantify everything and extract its value). The way many technologists are talking today about trust is- basically a paradigm of imperialist, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy. (Though I’m not sure those labels are continuing to serve me, they have been a helpful lens).

Of course, trust is hard. Fundamentally, it starts by being able to trust yourself. It might be that a requirement for this kind of self-trust may be to go through the pain and heartbreak of seeing where one is not trustworthy to oneself. To notice how, to speak for myself, I have carried maladaptive lessons from trauma, how I have tried to avoid feeling shame by coming up with justifications, how I have been unwilling to look at my part in the systems I see as broken.

For communities to build trust, we need to start by creating containers that allow people to self-reflect without judgement. Witnessing this in others turns out to be highly trust-building. Offering welcome and checking our judgement builds trust for ourselves and others. It lets us be vulnerable, it lets us notice when we might want to rush to judgement and sit with that impulse, getting curious about what in ourselves we’re running from.