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Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson
Article
Why are there no young people in the room?
Posted Mar 30, 2010 by Ken White
PCI Development Director Ken White wrote Politics in a New Key: Breaking the Cycle of U.S. Politics with a Generational/Developmental Approach for Integral Review in response to the oft-heard but rarely answered lament: "Why are there no young people in the room?" A more accessible version of that piece is also available.
As anyone who’s ever worked for political and social change can tell you, rocket science looks simple in comparison. The laws of physics are pretty well known, and the behavior of rockets is generally predictable (except when it isn’t). By comparison, the laws of politics are much more complex and changeable. And the laws of human behavior? Well, there really aren’t any (except maybe Murphy’s), and if there were, they’d likely have more exceptions than rules.
So, the list of structural and behavioral obstacles to change is long, daunting, and constantly in flux. And that’s just for “standard issue” social and political change efforts, like trying to introduce recycling in a community (and get people to actually recycle!), or pass a health care reform bill in the US Congress.
Truly transformational social and political change, like trying to reimagine how democracy could evolve in the 21st century? Let’s just say the impediments are even greater….
And, as anyone who’s ever worked for transformational social and political change can tell you, sometimes the biggest obstacle is: us! As in, all of us, changers and changees alike, and the “mental models” we use when we try to impose some kind of order on the chaotic social/political world.
So…"Why are there no young people in the room?” Maybe it’s because young people have different mental models of how to create social and political change.
Maybe those different models just might contain the potential for the truly transformational change we seek. And maybe, just maybe, we (all of us) can actually help coax those changes into reality…but perhaps only if we let go of our expectations of exactly how the process will unfold.
And therein lies the challenge. For all of us.
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
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1 comments
transformation
From: Free Oregon, Apr 4, 10 12:05 PM
We fail when we resort of have to and force. The alternative is want to and personal liberty.
For too long we've expected Government to solve our challenges. For too long we've looked outside ourselves, instead of inside.
Paradox. Yes.
But when Government fails, when Government can't, where do we look? I suggest we've been looking in all the wrong places for a long, long time.
There is information about how to change our minds, how to manage our thinking, and how to transform reality from the inside out.
Consider, for example, http://www.firstearthbattalion.org/ or http://www.thepacificinstitute.us/v2/ or http://vimeo.com/10246577