Heretic – original use of the term, “Someone who is in possession of the facts and is able to choose.”
Anyone in the world following politics in the USA will have noticed the final acts of ‘civic disengagement’ occuring. Since the 1950s, ongoing dialogue within towns and neighborhoods was slowly eroded as opposing views became ever more polarized. Using emotional scripts that appealed to values of fear were increasingly used by marketers and developers to increase separation. The discourse originated outside of the communities with the sole aim of creating consumers reliant on media sources for their information and hence their increasing consumerist worldviews. The advent of television made this increasingly easy for cabalistic sources with unlimited money to frame issues that made polarization inevitable in a population becoming more and more used to sound bites of information. Polarization was the consequence of this disengagement as people more and more trusted external sources that framed their own opinions and enhanced negative stereotypes that kept them fixed on only themselves and a myriad number of ‘others’ not like them. This is true for other countries in the world that have accepted the consumer model as the way to live. Cabalistic control is a central core of this kind of process.
I cover this in my SL text, but I’ll outline it again here for this blog post. Anyone watching U.S. politics will notice that any discourse now seem highly ‘uncivil’ as large businesses push lobbying as their tactic to get concessions and control, and more importantly, freedom from any laws and regulations that would limit monetary profit and increased power to control society. Politicians of all parties rant and rave, and employ devious tactics at each other and go to great lengths to push their political agendas, which are the agendas of the puppet masters. The solution to reversing this trend is to get all people to talk to each other in civic discourse at the local level. And it is not that hard. Civic Agency is what we once did all the time only a few decades ago throughout human history.
A return to civic agency: 1) returns one’s understanding of politics as an organizing capacity around community plurality, which will lead to sustained agency and community empowerment for civic engagement in which we all work together; 2) understanding how we need to create meeting places, which are shared places, within neighborhoods that form learning communities. In this way the whole community becomes responsible for educating each other instead of just isolated institutions – this would be a return of place within the civic discourse; 3) begin to see how public purpose gives a sense of shared identity where individuals have a desire to be visible. This sets the drumbeat for the common good and regenerative community with an ethical perspective of all within the community (a formation of constructive individualism instead of destructive hyper individualism). Simply put, communication is the best indicator of successful interactions. Jurin SL text.
Propaganda is using selected truths and omitting inconvenient facts to mislead in order to push an agenda. Recently, it has become popular by some corrupt media and especially high-ranking politicians to use fabrications and lies to maintain their agenda. While many see this as the death knell of a free society (think Nazi Germany of the 1930s) it also shows the weaknesses occurring with the hierarchy that they need to succumb to such scurrilous tactics just to maintain their power and control. “True believers” is a term used by Philosopher Eric Hoffer to describe people who are willing to lose themselves in a mass movement that lets them express their biases (often in a hateful way) without consequences. Fortunately, most people are actually seeing through the fog of this deceit. What happened in Germany in the 1930s was a complex scenario, but that mass movement was built on the discontent of post WWI and the resulting financial failures of Weimar Germany. Hitler and his cronies were able to capitalize on this discontent to create the Nazi movement and used false flags to generate support from what should have been unwilling antagonists (False flags: a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility. Wiki.). Today the discontent people feel is mainly rooted in a series of fabricated scenarios, propaganda, and false flags to maintain a hyper-consumer worldview. True skeptics and people that think, readily see through much of the deceit but still feel disempowered to make a change. Choice is the central core of any free society, and being in possession of true facts is the weapon of change. At the start of this post I gave the term heretic. That term is what keeps people in place, the feeling that to talk out against the central and controlled dialogue is heretical and brings about ‘shame’ (see Reality 4 post). The amazing thing about civic agency is that once people of all persuasions get together, suspend judmentalism, and talk and really listen civilly, they quickly move past the polarization that has been artificially created to keep them separated. Harry Boyte (civic agency specialist form Minnesota) emphasizes that this is what citizenship really means.
Once we realize that large institution do not create everything we need, the return to localized systems becomes evident. Civic Agency allows us to move past “the increased divisions of race, ideologies, religion, class, the problem of the reduced sense of community and that society is simply becoming greedy as in number one first, and get rich quick ideas replacing the ethics of hard work, accountability, community and family life.” The system wants to keep us separated and dependent on the system, but everyone knows how good it feels to be needed and to feel useful in a group. “This is the impetus for the need of civic skills. A technocracy means we are now controlled by experts outside the community (e.g. businesses and the ivory tower) who are now causing alienation within the community, either deliberately or inadvertently as they adhere to the idea that only an expert can know what is needed. This is now changing as higher education now stresses people as stewards of place in essence becoming civic agents for that place. After all, the people who live in a community often know what it is they are lacking but have little idea of how to create the circumstances to get what they need.” Jurin.
Think about yourself and the training you may have had for your job. How much of it included training for collaboration work with stakeholders within a given neighborhood. Much of that is taken up by ‘external-experts’ who do not really know or live in the communities they are given to advise. For instance, as wonderful as modern school and college teachers are, they are too often merely detached experts providing service for people, but themselves are not fellow citizens of a community place. These problems arise when citizens are seen as customers and clients instead of co-producers of the public good. There is a need to learn civic skills and the mapping of power and interests in a community that facilitates good interactions and helps identify who has the non-official power and decision-making ability in a community. It also helps to understand what kinds of relationships exist. These skills awaken the community and help it realize it’s public purpose. So how do we build Civic Capacity? TBC…..
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