On Dave Brooks, Faith and Trust and Social Change

Wow! The secret is out! And it’s in the New York Times! David Brooks is breaking it down; Newtonian physics is not the end of the story. The industrial paradigm has broken down, we live in An Economy of Faith and Trust (this is the title of the piece!). Brooks boldly calls out the fantasy of control that we keep hoping will solve our problems, the ideas of “input to output” that dominate how we think about the world are being called into question. We have to shift from the complicated to the complex. (See David Snowden of Cognitive Edge, there are problems that are complicated where input to output is measured, and there are problems that are complex where you just can’t account for all the inputs – so what does that say about output?)

David Brooks applies similar logic to our economy and goes even further by saying “we must account for faith and trust.” There are lessons to be learned here for those of us who work for social change. “There is no outside” say Hardt & Negri and the Buddha, and so we are all in this mix, we are all influenced by the idea of homo-economicus and the paradigm that makes it possible. The social sector was born out of the same Newtonian paradigm that hopes to measure all inputs and outputs – and we are still seduced by it.

In the last 40 years alone, what was once a living and breathing organic movement became so institutionalized that we started to believe that it would be a business mindset of supposedly rigorous measures that would finally set us free. Today as the entire financial system breaks down the best we can do is look backwards and say that the forefathers of movement were right, capitalism will undo its own self – but what do we have to offer that is new? And what have we forgotten along the way?

The truth is that we lack as much faith and trust as the rest of them, fighting for grants, hoarding ideas and constraining ourselves. “People seek relationships more than money,” this is David Brooks in the New York Times, neither revolutionary nor new age, and if they get it why can’t we? This is what we have to be radical about, we have to drop the stuff and meetings that are overloading us, let them die with the dying while we seriously intensify our relationships to each other – connect in non-meeting space, get personal, get deep, get authentic, realize that we all want the same thing!

If you want to make people act like machines and steal most of their labor from them you build an oppressive organization, and this is what we’ve inherited oppressive organizations – system wide, the whole thing! Foundations, advocacy groups, service organizations, intermediaries, most coalitions and faith-based groups – all in the same paradigm. But when people are self-motivated, when they want to do something together, and the technology is there to do it, then we just have to cut the whole thing loose, not hold it back with our hopes for control.

By God we are the ones with heart, we have the competitive advantage on this one, we are the ones that want to go radical and this crisis is our chance. I think of my Rockwood year-long cohort and the economy of love that has now evolved among us – what else can we do with that? I think of the Boston non-meetings, of the effort to keep it real here at the Interaction Institute for Social Change, of the Gathering for Justice and it’s leaders telling me that they had built relationships together, that they have love and they have trust and they want to work with those. This, my friends is the raw material for movement, a paradigm shifts only as we step into the new – movement is not an election, it is social transformation. Let’s go!