Post-election: A collective shift from divided to wise
Dear friends,
President Obama said in his 2012 victory speech that “we are not as divided as our politics suggests”. He also argued that we are more united than our politics makes us think we are. Finally, he hinted that we are more diverse than our politics suggests. All of these are important truths.
However, President Obama failed to take the next step, the step that would make all the difference in the world, the step we must make through which we come to recognize how changing our political system will enable us to creatively use both our diversity and our common ground to generate public wisdom.
It is painful to watch the thrashings and lurchings of our quasi-democratic country, particularly during the spectacle of a presidential election. Our political system takes our vast diversity and, with tremendous verbal and ideological violence, mashes it down into two opposing forces. At the same time, it splits our vast common ground and fences it off to separate and solidify those two opposing armies.
After all, it is far easier to win a victorious majority if there are only two options, two sides, two ways of looking at the world. If there are three – or, heaven help us, thousands – winning a majority suddenly seems impossible to achieve.
Yet those two options, those two sides, those two worldviews are false – always. The passionate dichotomies that seems so solid to us as the warlike electoral fervor grows are mirages, hallucinations, cloud shadows. The categorical flags around which we rally, the castle boxes into which we gather in solidarity are simply not real; they do not stand up to close scrutiny, any more than the generalizations of racism and sexism do. They seduce us into the thrall of potent and degrading oversimplifications of who we are and how we think and feel and what is really possible for us as a people, as a community, as a world. They are prisons masquerading as knowledge and power.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: The Shift NOT Made by Obama – From Two to Many”
