I just re-listened to one of my favorite podcast episodes of all time, and today’s article is my attempt to spread this vitally important message to more people. Before we start, full appreciation and all the hat tips to the inimitable Rob Bell for the ideas of his I’m about to share. Even my title is a nod to his amazing rant, recorded over 8 years ago, but with a few tweaks could have been recorded yesterday. Thank you for all you do, Rob. 🙏🏻
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If you’re a public speaker like me, people who know things about things will be fairly insistent about this point: do not wade into politics. Unless politics is your topic, it’s mostly understood, and probably solid advice, that speakers should not attempt to broach this subject as it is a minefield of danger.
Well, I’ve never been very good at not doing something a little rebellious.
So today, we’re going to talk about politics.
But it’s probably not going to be what you think.
I’ve got 2 Action Items for us, and I hope you find them as important and constructive as I have.
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First, a little Ancient Greek.
See? We’re already off to a strange and unexpected start!
The word “politics” comes from the Greek word “politikos” (πολιτικός) and it basically means “civic” or “citizen.” It’s referring to those who live in a common space together — like, you might say, in a “city,” which also shares some etymological roots with these ideas.
In other words, as Rob says poetically, what “politics” actually means, and should actually be about, is how we arrange our common life together.
Beautiful, right?
This is why we really need to talk about “politics,” the word.
“Politics” as we use it today is, of course, quite dirtied. This is (understandably) why people love to say things like “Oh, I’m not into politics,” or “I don’t do politics,” or “I stay out of politics.”
But if we understand politics as actually being how we arrange our common life together, all those statements are actually… nonsense.
Do you drive on roads?
Do you take showers?
Do you use electricity?
Then, I’m sorry to say, you ARE “into politics.”
ALL these things require politics — citizens who help arrange our common life together — to function. Unless you live 100% off the grid, you simply can’t “stay out” of this. And even then, I bet you drive on a public road to get to your land…
So “not doing politics” is simply not an option. Can you choose not to vote? Of course you can. (Also, please vote.) But you can’t really choose to not be “into politics” if you live in any sort of community with any other humans.
So, our first step is recapturing and sharing the actual meaning of “politics.”
Politics is how we arrange our shared common life together. It’s special — sacred, really — and we need to reclaim this understanding.
ACTION ITEM #1
Help people understand that politics isn’t something one can “opt out of” because it actually means “how we arrange our common life together.” We are all on the SAME side of that, because we’re all trying to figure out the best way to do it!
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Next, I want to encourage us to keep remembering the big picture.
If our goal is a better shared common life together (which is a much better organizing story than our current profit-centric one), then as we talk about politics we cannot avoid another major topic that we discuss here often:
Systems.
No matter who becomes the next American President, our big picture task will be largely the same: reimagining and reinventing most of the systems around us.
There’s no denying we are a deeply divided nation, but I think this is the one thing we might be able to agree on: that life as it’s currently structured just isn’t working for enough of us. Things feel fractured, broken, unsatisfactory, disappointing… right?
You feel that in your bones, like I do?
This deep, unsettled state is what it feels like when the invisible operating systems around us no longer serve most of us.
If you are a believer in cycles (we will talk more about this in future posts) it seems remarkably clear that we are entering a time ripe for massive, structural, systemic reinvention. Start with the works of these two smart individuals — Neil Howe and George Friedman — and you’ll see that demographic models and geopolitical models are both showing very clear indicators that our societal systems are due for a time of death and rebirth within the next decade.
So, after we have a clearer understanding of what politics actually is (how we arrange our shared life together), our next step is to keep our focus on the systems. To do this, we must work diligently to not get pulled too far into the world of individual issues — this is the zone of daily punditry, clickbait, tweets, and news fakery / slight-of-hand that keeps us at each others’ throats and believing we don’t actually have a shared, common life together.
The world of divisive issues is mostly smokescreen; we share so much.
To be clear: issues can be very important topics. But our current rapid-fire media dialogue mostly ignores the messy systemic complexity of what creates our issues, and this keeps us spinning in circles.
So instead of getting lost in issues, where our differences are highlighted to the point of complete intractability, we do whatever we can to work on the system(s) we have access to and can make an actual impact on.
I am quite convinced that in the next 5-10 years we will be getting a chance to rebuild most of our systems and structures in very new ways.
So here’s the question: What do you want to see get built?
ACTION ITEM #2
Train ourselves to see systems and to work on system-level problems. Practice extricating ourselves from the morass of issues where divisiveness is intractable, and focus instead on imagining and building systems that can better serve a whole lot more of us over the next century.
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The solution isn’t for us to “not talk about” this stuff or to pretend like we can somehow opt out of it; it’s to find a new way to engage our common life together as something that is worthy of our greatest imagination, our wildest hope, and our most passionate work.
Because in many ways, politics — our shared, common life together — is everything we have.