Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight

Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight

The architects of resentment, of any age, share certain characteristics. They deal in enemies. They trade in scarcity, the sense that there is not enough, that someone else is taking what is yours, that the only answer is to fight. Their nationalism and their religion are transactional and tribal rather than transcendent. They don’t lift people toward higher ground. They plant people more firmly in the mud and tell them to be proud of it. Continue reading Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight

The Cost of Hubris: Learning from Military and Social Patterns

The Cost of Hubris: Learning from Military and Social Patterns

But this post isn’t really about Iran. It’s about a pattern I see everywhere. A pattern of hubris and dehumanization that plays out on battlefields overseas and in our own communities and across dinner tables where families have stopped speaking to each other. The same inability to see others clearly. The same assumption that we have nothing to learn from people who disagree with us. The same surprise when those we’ve dismissed turn out to be more capable and more human than we wanted to believe. Continue reading The Cost of Hubris: Learning from Military and Social Patterns

Unpolished

Unpolished

This took some getting used to. In my experience growing up in America, changing your mind in public felt dangerous. It meant you were weak, or uninformed, or that you had somehow lost the argument. We treat conversations like competitions here, I think. Someone has to win. Someone has to be right. Continue reading Unpolished

When Story Is Not Enough: On Crossing the Line Between Fiction and Truth

When Story Is Not Enough: On Crossing the Line Between Fiction and Truth

The books that have actually transformed me were not always the ones with the best arguments. Sometimes they were novels that let me inhabit a consciousness so different from my own that I could never quite return to my previous assumptions. And sometimes they were people who stopped telling stories and simply said: This is what I experienced. This is what I now believe. This is what I am asking you to consider. Continue reading When Story Is Not Enough: On Crossing the Line Between Fiction and Truth

Happy Workers Do Better Work

Happy Workers Do Better Work

If you want to lead in a way that actually changes things, you will eventually have to do inner work that no case study can prepare you for. You will have to understand, from the inside, what it means to be a human being trying to be seen and heard and valued. And that requires a different kind of reading.
Continue reading Happy Workers Do Better Work

The Handlekraft Principle: Authority That Gives Power Away

The Handlekraft Principle: Authority That Gives Power Away

Dugnad was always my least favorite word in Norwegian. It means voluntary collective work, and it has organized Norwegian communities for over eight hundred years, and it’s not really “voluntary” as my wife would explain. In practice it means your Saturday now belongs to everyone. My neighbors would show up with rakes and rollers and thermoses of coffee, cheerful in a way I found deeply suspicious. Continue reading The Handlekraft Principle: Authority That Gives Power Away