When toxic polarization becomes a civil war–and what we can do about it.

This week, Nonviolence Radio hears from John Paul Lederach, an international peace-builder, mediator and scholar. Stephanie, Michael and John Paul have a rich and wide-ranging conversation, one prominent theme is the power of pockets. This plays on the title of John Paul’s latest book: The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War. In it, he encourages us to remember that we all exist within various communities – pockets of the world – and that each pocket represents a unique perspective which is valuable to every other one: 

"…there is simultaneously this deep acknowledgment of the specificity of a context and this deep curiosity about what people have done or need to do.…people at a given location, at a given time, have a need to do something in response to what's happening. And in that innovation, their particular pocket, their particular place where they live, brings forward this kind of combination of resilience and resistance to the patterns that lead us toward violence"

Only by engaging honestly and kindly with these different views can we create – like a work of art – a better, more peaceful world. One wonderful aspect of this pocket metaphor is that it empowers each and every one of us to make a difference. Even the smallest act of love (in the broadest sense of the word) – wherever one is – is an act of creation. Such simple, accessible actions when woven together re-humanize those we might be inclined to dismiss or degrade. Right from within our pockets, we can build alternatives to the toxic polarization we see so much of today.

"It's about assuring the protection of the dignity of the people that I am most proximate with and live with, even if we are different. Then my responsibility is to help make sure that this neighborhood, this town, this area, is brought to a level of dignifying the humanity of the people who live here. And I think that's really a key driver to a lot of this. There's an element to this that I refer to as the principle of accessibility. I think one of the reasons that paralysis works, is a very powerful tool, is that people think they don't have access to the lever that will make a difference. But what if the principle of accessibility is that you have access to it?"

Initiating change from within our pockets directly and immediately reveals the power inherent in treating each other as worthy. When we listen closely thereby recognizing the dignity of everyone, we can construct together a world that has space for all.

Transcript

Stephanie: Greetings, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we're from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.

My guest today is John Paul Lederach. He is a globally respected peace builder, mediator, and scholar who's worked in conflict zones around the world, from Colombia to Northern Ireland to Nepal. His latest book, The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War, offers practical wisdom for those of us who want to resist cycles of division and violence before it's too late.

In this conversation, we'll explore what warning signs we should be paying attention to and what history teaches us about healing deep fractures. And most importantly, what each one of us can do in our own communities to build bridges instead of barricades. Let's turn now to our conversation with John Paul.

Let's start off with the “Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War.” Tell us about what inspired you to write this book.

John Paul: Well, there are quite a number of things. But I started getting, over the last few years, a lot of requests from people who were preoccupied with two questions, and then a third one, that kept getting at it.

The first question was, given your experiences in international settings of open warfare or war zones, do you think we're in any danger here in the United States of reaching, from our current level of polarization, into something that looks like that? And those two questions, the comparative, and the US kind of thing, were often followed by the one that said, “What can we do about it?”

And so, instead of just trying to write 100 emails, I started jotting down a number of things that, I felt, did have comparison. And it afforded me the opportunity to reflect on a few of the dynamics that I found most prevalent. My starting point was there never is a perfect comparable case. Every place has its own context and contours and history. You learn that pretty quickly internationally because people say, “Well, we're not like them, but what are they doing?” You know, so there is simultaneously this deep acknowledgment of the specificity of a context and this deep curiosity about what people have done or need to do.

And so, the chapters kind of unfolded along the lines of, in particular, as it started, one of those requests came from a group of people involved in philanthropy. And they were engaged with asking what they should be doing. This was probably two years prior to this past election. And so, I drafted out something for them and that became kind of the main structure of the book.

I landed on “Pocket Guide,” some people actually tell me, “Well, if it's a pocket guide, it should sit in your pocket. It should just be like one folded sheet.” And I know that that's kind of what, you know, birdwatching, you may go out and have this pocket guide unfolds to see what the birds are. But I was actually interested in how much, as I was writing, the word ‘pocket’ kept coming up. Things happened in local pockets, how they expand from there, how, at least in my experience, it's pretty rare to see a pure top down-approach to a full-blown civil war.

It was much more at the margins that either forms of repression or violence began to happen. How much I even thought about here in the US we’re in different locations where we were living in particular, I'd say down into Tucson, Arizona, or Colorado, and other locations. When you travel, you would sometimes come through an area where you would notice that there clearly were fairly open forms of almost militia-like behavior. People are quite direct and even vociferous about their perspectives.

And again, it's kind of from the pocket that these things emerge. And so, I was on the one hand, one of the messages was, you know, watch your pockets, keep your eyes on what's emergent. But the other side of that coin was that so much of my experience over the decades has been that really fantastic innovation does not happen all at once.

It happens because people at a given location, at a given time, have a need to do something in response to what's happening. And in that innovation, their particular pocket, their particular place where they live, brings forward this kind of combination of resilience and resistance to the patterns that lead us toward violence. And their ability to have that creativity is really what provides an example and light for what others can do.

And a lot of my work, of course, over the years, has at times been at the highest level of negotiations. It's more often been in accompaniment of local communities. And that's another way that I understood ‘pocket’, that the real innovations will come when people take seriously what's actually happening in their backyard, and that they will have to figure that out depending on where they live.

And it's going to require them to be in a whole series of relationships that may not always feel comfortable. Because for the innovations to last, there has to be a wider set of people coming together than normally hang out. And the patterns of polarization tend to drive us often in the opposite direction. So, that was kind of what was behind it.

Some of the chapters I think may have more relevance than others, depending on who's reading it and what they're thinking about. But that was where I was headed with it.

Stephanie: This idea of people in the US looking around, or people in different conflicts saying, “What's happening over there? They're not like us. This isn't the same situation.” And yet, we're also concerned. That speaks to me as a citizen here in the US of this kind of American exceptionalism, that we can really play with this fire of what you call toxic polarization. Whether it is coming from so-called nonviolent movements or whether it's coming from the White House. These forms of dehumanization, questions of gray areas of property destruction, you know, this polarization is fire. What makes us think here in the US that that's not going to get out of hand?

And so, I'd love to hear your insights about our playing with fire or are there safeguards in place that are going to keep us from descending into brutal violence like we've seen in other countries?

John Paul: So, two or three quick comments. The first being the phrase that I used in the book was that while we think, while we believe fairly deeply in some form of American exceptionalism, we're not exempt from the actual dynamics once they get unleashed. And not being exempt means that we have to take them very seriously. And that toxicity, Stephanie, what you just said is, I think, the core piece of toxicity is really that descent into dehumanization, where what we make of people who are different out of either fear or threat is that we see them as less than fully human. This then gives permission to either not pay any attention to them or to use in one form or another some justification of violence.

And the justification of violence is a very slippery road, as we know. It begins with this, often with a deep sense that there is a grievance that can no longer find another alternative. And I think a lot of the work of nonviolence is to constantly show that there are alternatives. There are other options, there are other ways of doing it.

But that begins with, I think, you know, some people don't particularly like this term, but I've been saying for a long time, it's very curious to me that our dictionary has a word for dehumanization, but never has a word for re-humanization. None that I've never been able to find.

So, when you actually get to a place where the polarization is so toxic, it's poisonous in the body politic, in the cultural politic, and in the social politic, across our ways of being together. When it's poisonous at that level, there is a road that we have to journey that begins to bring back into play our mutual humanity of seeing us as actual people.

And when we have really deep, really divided polarization, it means that we pull back into smaller and smaller groups of who we feel safe with. And we have very little contact and very little in-depth communication with people who may even be somewhat adjacent in their views, certainly neighbors, but who, for either fear or threat, we tend to have almost no conversation with.

In almost every way that I've worked, one of the things that has to happen is an expansion of conversation. An expansion beyond the boundaries in ways that engage deeply with where does this deep fear and grievance come from, and how do we get to the places where we can address some of those concerns and the need to actually stitch – I refer to them, as in this little pocket guide, I make reference to one of the places in Colombia where we worked where we called them, “The improbable dialogs.” The unlikely alliances, the unusual ways that sets of people begin to come together, is what creates a fabric that has a capacity to hold back that pull toward justification of violence.

And those who believe deeply in violence, who believe that it is the only alternative, often are very strategic in using it in ways to create reaction. So, that they have then a way to react back with even greater force. I refer to that in a chapter called “The Spectacular.” The belief that some kind of spectacular event will spark others to take up. Now the time has come that there is nothing left but to do this.

And I think we here in the US have to pay a lot more attention to the fact that this toxicity has gotten so powerful and so strong that many of us no longer know how to even talk with our neighbors. We're fearful of it. I say we listen with our eyes. We look for all the signals to place this person in a group. And then we can determine whether that group is safe enough to be with or talk to or engage. Whether that's by the colors of hats they wear, the language they use, or who they affiliate with. Almost immediately, we find that we're drawn to this, I would call it, this inability to transcend those divisions.

I think it's one of the outcomes of a very toxic system. I actually think that they systemically, if you look at it from a viewpoint of systems theory, I think one of the most exquisite outcomes of toxic polarization is paralysis. That it's aimed in the direction of having people so uncertain of what to do that the only thing they do is nothing. They pull back. And right now, I think that's being deployed as strategy, in fact.

You know, there's a phrase from Asia that says, you know, “You shoot the monkey to warn the tiger.” They're sort of making examples of certain things in order to create a wider spread fear of speaking out, of stepping out, or being engaged beyond the zones of safety. And those become ever more narrow. They create a much wider place of paralysis, of people waiting for somebody else to do something, to take care of the insecurities that they have. And that, I think, has been pretty prevalent in a lot of places that I've worked.

Stephanie: I'm particularly concerned about the nonviolence response right now and whether or not it's drawing on toxic polarization in order to promote a different way, which doesn't feel like a different way to me. So, I want to get your thoughts on this in terms of this context that we're setting up. 

You've said in another context that nonviolence – I think you broke it into two parts, like revolutionary nonviolence, which is focused on justice and reparational, or restorative nonviolence or repertory nonviolence, which is focused on mercy, and that we need to be able to bring these two together. And justice and mercy often seem to be at odds with one another.

As I'm watching nonviolent activists engage in protests, I'm seeing a lot of dehumanization of the people who are in the White House or Elon Musk, or from representing them as animals to not being like us, to being different. And I'm concerned about the impact of that, both on the soul of activism, in a way that this is our these are the means that we're using, but also then how that kind of framing ends up supporting other actions that are going to get out of hand, that are going to become increasingly violent actions from, you know, moving forward and to property destruction, to targeting people who bought their bought a Tesla five years ago.

We don't know who our enemy is anymore. And we have an enemy, and we're going to find them, and it's us. You know that, and then the other thing you said was there was like a conversation you had with a friend, that nonviolent activists – part of the problem is, they feel that understanding the problem is the same thing as having the tools to be able to resolve that problem.

John Paul: Yeah. Very good. Well, they're great prompts. So, let's go back to the first one. Particularly in the work around the connection between conflict transformation and peacebuilding. I've worked a lot with this phrase that I found in Nicaragua in the 1980s when we were working in a national mediation process between the east coast of Nicaragua and the Sandinista government where the primary people involved were from religious backgrounds and who use a Psalm, Psalm 85, to open up almost every one of either community meetings or negotiations that we had.

And that's the Psalm that has that phrase, “Truth and mercy have met together, peace and justice have kissed.” I think it's verse 7 within Psalm 85. And there is a very powerful kind of both/and component to those four voices. And I've often speculated, similar to what you were saying, that truth is often looking back to say what it is that has been harmed, how we have been harmed, or what the areas of harm have been. But that mercy, or compassion, depending on how you want to define it, is often looking forward, asking how are we going to find ways to relate together?

But the psalmist view was that they meet together, and they're held together. I think that's precisely the case. Now, if we bring that kind of vision into the context of nonviolence, as you were probing it here just a few minutes ago in your question…The system that we’re involved in, the system of highly toxic polarization, is one that is rife with reactivity. It needs reactivity to live.

So, one of the things that it constantly produces is opportunity for somebody to react to somebody else. And the reaction creates the counter-response that comes back. Sociologists, the area of field of study that I had in my PhD work, refer to this as, reciprocal causation. It's kind of a curious phrase. But what it means is the cause of the conflict is no longer originating issues or deeper needs and concerns, but it is in the reactivity, one to the other, that creates continuation.

And I think that the question you were asking is that nonviolence always has the opportunity. And I think the greatest spokespersons to this were people like Martin Luther King Jr, who spoke from a place of loving the enemy, of the beloved community that needed to be inclusive even of those who don't understand us. Or the movement in Colombia of, you know, sort of everyday folks in a situation where they're facing militias and armed violence who developed the phrase, “We commit ourselves to understand those who don't understand us.”

You know, there's this kind of way that you transcend, you shift, you transform, the reactivity by choosing not to join it. By finding ways to actively innovate and create re-engagement of people and bringing the process in the direction of dignity and respect. Even though you may be under threat and in many locations, that threat is quite direct and quite violent.

But this is the power of it. That you are, in fact, choosing not to join the repeated cycles of reactivity, but finding ways to transcend that by a transformative engagement of actual people in real relationships based on a deep belief that, keeping our humanity before us, we will have the capacity to be both humble and courageous.

Humility means open to knowing that we don't know it all, we don't have it all. But courageous to speak to those things that we know to be true and to hold to that capacity of it being invitational. Of it being, as I put it, re-humanizing, this situation in ways that refuses that descent into dehumanizing behavior.

And I do think that we've got a pretty big challenge on our hands. And I would say it's probably got two or three pieces to it. So, one piece is that we have the challenge that when polarization gets to the level it is right now, whatever group we're in probably has some form of a purity test. They're going to they're going to test everybody as to whether they're in or out. And I think that complicates things tremendously.

I would argue that we shouldn't be aimed at purity, we should be aimed at essence. We should be aimed at understanding. We should be aimed at deepening a view of the complexity that we live in. And that that is done better by having people speak from and to their lived experience together.

And in very real ways, the inability to be with difference, mitigates against the ability to create social movements that have an enduring quality. We cannot build movements that are exclusively based on what we're opposed to. The oppositional movements can gain great power in short periods of time, and they can overturn amazing things, but they rarely have an ability to build something together.

And I think we have to understand that we are in a moment that requires us both to see and feel the depth of the crisis and its complexity. But we also have to have an ability to think about what it is we're trying to build, and that that comes incorporated into the ways that we relate with others. 

So, for a wider nonviolent movement to emerge, it has to have the ability to be in conversation with those things that have lived differently, are different, and see the world differently, but in ways that engage that difference constructively and not reactively.

And I think that's maybe part of what you were aiming at, Stephanie, with your question about the concerns that are prevalent right now with so many ways that we participate in the reactivity and the dehumanization.

Stephanie: And in these, in coming together and creating spaces where we are talking while holding our differences. These don't have to be large groups, right? They can start off quite small.

John Paul: Yes. In fact, I have a whole, I think – well, it's probably by now it's probably my preference. But I think empirically speaking, it's been true that social change often begins with very small numbers of people. In the enduring changes, I refer to it as the critical yeast instead of the critical mass, just kind of a shift in metaphors.

The critical mass, I think, was a way that we took from physics and applied to social sciences, the idea that what matters is the number of people. So, you're looking for a large enough number of people that you can't move against it. But actually, in physics, critical mass was, in the atomic interaction, the point at which the interaction had a quality of reproducing itself independent of its originating source. So, it never was about quantity. It was about quality of interaction.

And that notion of ‘reproduce itself independently’ meant that you were not dependent on a particular person or a particular view but it had a quality of interaction that permitted energy in a constructive way to emerge.

I shifted to yeast because, obviously, it's like a very small ingredient in bread baking.

And if you have this notion that you're mixing it into the mass, it's what helps other things grow. So, the question you're after is what helps enduring, good growth to happen? And that, I think, often comes from a quality of relationships more than the quantity, the number of people that might be involved.

And then, particularly in early processes, it's about finding highly improbable but small sets of people who can interact differently, that actually create a kind of a catalyst energy that begins to reproduce itself more widely.

You then come back to my pocket notion. This is why starting where you live, starting where you have relationships, starting where you have access, these are actually all the points to become really significant for making a difference. And it moves directly against, I think, the system outcome of paralysis. It's saying you don't have to wait for the perfect thing. You don't have to wait for the perfect leader. You can engage where you're located. And often those smaller numbers are the ones that have proven to have that enduring quality.

Stephanie: Yeah, that reminds me of a project that's taking place in our local area, Petaluma, here in the Bay Area, it's climate activism in our town. But it's a project that begins with people learning how to communicate with their neighbors just on their block.

John Paul: You know, in the Pocket Guide, I mentioned that it always struck me as really interesting how in very different locations, Africa, Mindanao, in the Philippines, there were places in Nepal and Asia that I saw it, when I would ask people what their notion of what they were doing was, sort of their theory of change. Mindanao is a great example of this between Muslim and Catholic, primarily mothers and parents.

Their responses would be “Good neighborliness.” That it’s basically a kind of a notion that we know that for our children to get to this school, this street has to be open. And we know for this street to be open, we have to have the parents that live on different sides of that street to be involved. And we're going to have to figure out a way that the benefits that our children will have will be equally beneficial to their children, and that that's what we call good neighborliness.

It's about a concern for the quality of our particular neighborhood, or the well-being. And I think that there's a part of this work that is about micro dignity. Not dignity writ large, like the Human Rights Declaration for the whole world. It's about micro dignity.

It's about assuring the protection of the dignity of the people that I am most proximate with and live with, even if we are different. Then my responsibility is to help make sure that this neighborhood, this town, this area, is brought to a level of dignifying the humanity of the people who live here. And I think that's really a key driver to a lot of this.

There's an element to this that I refer to as the principle of accessibility. I think one of the reasons that paralysis works, is a very powerful tool, is that people think they don't have access to the lever that will make a difference. But what if the principle of accessibility is that you have access to it?

You just have to think with a few people about what you know, where you live. And you have to think through who you know – which was often the first step that I saw a lot of people doing. Thinking through who we know can make a difference and who we need to bring into this small group. That kind of thinking, that kind of engagement, is actually putting into motion the principle of accessibility. It's not about a miracle that somebody is going to pull far off and far away, or somebody of superintelligence has got it all ready in their head. It's about what's within and between us where we live, and that's what makes the difference.

Stephanie: I like tying that into your metaphor of yeast because here in the Bay Area, it's sourdough, you know, the yeast in the air.

John Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Sourdough is a wonderful metaphor because it moves by sharing. You know, if you go into any of the bakery shops, and you say, “I'd like to start, can you give me a little?” even the bakers will give you a little tiny piece. I just had that experience not long ago here a little further south of you all in California. They said, “No, we’ll just put in a little cup for you.” So, sourdough’s a great one because it doesn't move by the miracle of commercialization. It moves by the miracle of sharing abundance, if you will.

Michael: It completely overturns the paradigm of scarcity. You know, I don't have to hoard what I've got. The more of it, the better.

Well, John Paul, to continue the metaphor a little bit, I have a sense of what's happening now, and I want to, you know, I’ll sketch it and want to get your response to it.

I have a feeling that there is a lot of yeast going on. There are a lot of pockets, if you will, of very creative movements, almost any one of which could become a model for a complete rebuilding of the whole society. The whole loaf. But somehow, we haven't reached a tipping point.

People, you know, don't much know about this good stuff unless you're in that movement – like you and I, like the three of us. I have a feeling that it's kind of, to use a wrong metaphor, if you’ll permit me, is hanging fire. You know, something could spark the coalescing of all of those individual pockets into a coherent thrust of some kind.

And I'm watching eagerly for some signs of this. There are some. I'm wondering if that model makes sense to you, and whether you see things that way and where you think we're at with it.

John Paul: Yeah. Well, at first, yes, very much so. In the sense that the ability of pockets to have a wider capacity for transformation relies on the ability for both strategic, but also very innovative networking connections, engagements.

But I hope not to fall prey to coming together in order to get rid of something or somebody, only – which has often been the political driver that tends to be mobilized. Precisely the kind of concern that you were expressing earlier.

I do think that one of the things that I've been giving some thought to and where I have opportunity for direct engagement is that we have quite a number of very intriguing, crisscrossing networks of people who have not imagined themselves typically outside of either their professions or the niches that they're in, as being involved in something that has this part of a wider fabric, if you will, threads of a wider fabric.

And I think one of the interesting challenges that we may have is rather than imagining ourselves in a field of nonviolence or peacebuilding or whatever it is, as having a particular thing that we're pursuing, and we're getting people to come into that thing we're pursuing. But to take note of adjacent networks.

So, just as examples, I've been attending much more to – one of those has been in the health sector and in people facing challenges in health. Getting calls from people that are involved in some states that are facing some real challenges around statewide decisions that have been made on a number of issues, where people are saying, “We just want to think through what we can do from where we're at. And our workplaces are becoming so rife with polarization that we feel paralyzed. What do we do?”

Another is community foundations. I've been having interesting conversations with – so, rather than imagining the large-scale philanthropy model that affords the Carnegies – you can name all kinds of the really big top-end ones. These are people who are embedded in their local communities and who typically are investing. But they're feeling the same things.

So, there are networks, national networks of community foundations. These are kind of adjacent folks, but they're eager for a conversation about what this means. Libraries, I think libraries are another one. You know, the mainstay of libraries is really about civic spaces for people to have access to information, understanding and resources. And yet, these are often places that are also under duress.

So, one of the questions I have is: how do we think about this as the threading of improbable sets of networks that already to some degree exist, but that help stitch the pockets, if you will?  Because I think that's really what will be needed for – I go back to this, you know, the notion of enduring change rather than oppositional change. I think the biggest myth I've ever worked on in four and a half decades of this work has been the myth that once we get past this crisis, we'll get back to the real work.

I think what we need to do is to understand that the real work is actually embedded in the crisis. We have to have a both/and notion. Both of what it is that we're trying to change that we have to find ways to stand up to, but also what it is that we're trying to build and how to do that with the unusual sets of people that will be needed if it's going to last.

And I think that sits at the absolute core of the notion of nonviolence, that this is actually the work of the well-being of whole societies.

Michael: And John Paul, that was exactly the constructive program of Gandhi. Don't overthrow the system first. Build the alternative first. Then it's easy to push the system.

John Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Because what you tend to overthrow, you replicate in the reaction back. That's the power of the toxicity.

Stephanie: I think I want to pause with this idea though as well that we're not going to get back to a better time. We're not just, you know, trying to push something out of the way in order to have the good time and freedoms that we were all having before.

Michael: We don't want to make America great again?

Stephanie: Don’t be toxic. Yeah, no. That this is, we're practicing democracy, in a way. And we're seeing ourselves evolving, moving forward, changing forms, creating new realities.

John Paul: Yes. 100%. And I think it's a both/and equation. We can have clarity about the things that we need to resist. I think, if I was to put the single greatest thing, it is about the ability to recognize and resist the temptation toward dehumanization, of finding somebody to blame, that if we get rid of that person, get rid of that group, everything will be okay. 

So, there is a need to have great clarity about what it is that we're standing up against. But that should not be the driver. The driver should be what we're standing for. And the ability to do that with the widest expressions possible. And not to assume that only my particular version of what that looks like is the only one that's there. It requires that weaving, that weaving together.

I wrote in an article – I forget where it was right now – but I was so struck by going back and listening to Martin Luther King Jr's archive of speeches leading up to the “I Have a Dream” speech and how often he used the phrase, “We are bound together.” The notion of the word ‘bound’, that it is both being bound toward a horizon and also we're bound together, that there is this ultimate understanding of interdependency that is missed in the versions that say, “If we get rid of this or them, that somehow all the good things come.” This is, I think, at the very core of his vision of the beloved community.

Michael: He used the metaphor of the seamless garment of destiny.

John Paul: Yeah, exactly.

Michael: And what we're being offered instead is a very torn and tattered garment, the attempt to purify.

Stephanie: Now I want to add something that I found reassuring in the Pocket Guide, which was that I was sometimes, you know, here's this tremendous problem of dehumanization and toxic polarization and maybe you're going to offer a new kind of answer. 

And what I find reassuring is that it's the same – we're still talking about the same basic skills of nonviolence and conflict resolution, if we really understand them, and conflict transformation. Deep listening, respecting diversity, going beyond our comfort zones in terms of what we believe – restorative justice, unarmed civilian protection.

What am I missing? Like these are, this opens up another pocket of peace education and how important it really is because we're talking about not just resolving community problems or problems between the hosts of Nonviolence Radio. We're talking about facing down a civil war with these skills.

John Paul: Yeah, yeah. And to make the point that I was trying to bring forward, we are led by exemplars who did it in far worse conditions than we're in right now. They were on the other side of violence being totally unleashed. And we're doing this with such extraordinary vision, persistence, and clarity, that it's inspiring. And so, I think that's it precisely. But it does come back to those things that, I think, are at the core of it. And you've captured them. Yeah, for certain.

Stephanie: So, I think that's reassuring in a way, too, as people think about what kind of projects they want to work on or what they want to do, that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. They don't have to make some new breakthrough in the field that it's already all out there. Pick something.

John Paul: Yeah. And I think, pick something, but also believe in your inherent creativity that will arise from the particular context that you're in, that the context in the people you're with will invent things together. And when you look at them back across history, you'll notice parallels to other people, but this is a constant process of creativity.

That's why I've always felt like a lot of our work should be more lodged in sort of the arts, in the technique side of it. That we're really not technical specialists as much as we are people that are trying to bring into being something that does not yet fully exist. Well, that's the artistic process. That's the birthing of something that we know we can touch. And it's real, and it's close, but we still have to find ways to bring it forward.

And so, one of the things I find really reassuring is that it places a fundamental belief in our fellow humans. We actually believe in each other. We believe that there is a capacity to find ways of transcending these things that create, collective harm, and move toward things that are based much more on collective good and compassion.

Stephanie: Can I ask a question here, though? Because Michael and I have recently been revisiting Plato's Apology. This is Socrates on trial. And Socrates talks about the oracle saying that he's the wisest. Because he doesn't know anything, he can't believe it. So, he's going around looking for someone who's wiser than me so I can show everybody this person, that oracle is wrong.

And one of the first groups that he visits are the artists. Poets. And he determines that the poets act from something called inspiration, which is a lot like the oracle. When he’d go to the poets and say, “Tell me this mystical wisdom that is in what you said.” They can't tell you any more than he could tell you what they had to say. So, that’s the challenge of this, like that of art, if we were to call it a kind of an art, that it's very much based on inspiration and the unknown.

But then to tie it into a more Socratic wisdom, is maybe the sense of humility and knowing that we don't know what's going on.

John Paul: Yeah. Which not all poets have. No, but I think it is this latter part that you're mentioning that I find particularly true, which is that there is an unfolding mystery to it. Which is one of the reasons why, quite often, when you actually ask artists what does this mean, or what does it? And they'll say, “Well, it's speaking in the art.”

In other words, there's a kind of a mystery to it. I actually think the mystery is good. Because there's an unfolding emergence, which is always present. But it comes back to those things that we talked about earlier. The critical role of humility as part of truth, is that you don't fully know.

And if you 100% know and have that certainty that has no more space for question, or for searching, or for seeking together, you not only no longer need the quest, you no longer need people. And I think that is the opposite of what we're talking about. So, there is, I think – what I refer to as the art of this. It is that there is a need for us to understand that this will require creativity, but that the creativity is emergent in community, in connection. And that's potentially different than the singular artist who does it in isolation, though there may well be a role in a lot of ways for the isolated artist who has great brilliance.

I'm referencing this process that we believe in the creative act. We believe in the inherent capacity of human beings to come together in spite of the odds, in spite of what may feel like overwhelming moments when it seems impossible to find a way to bring forward something that at this moment doesn't seem even remotely possible. And that that has a proximity to the artistic process in some ways. Maybe not so much to the artist as ‘Picasso brilliant’. That's probably a wrong metaphor to try to draw on, that I can't do it unless I'm, you know, Mozart or Picasso. Well, yeah, then you're likely going to be in trouble.

But that process of engaging and birthing and learning and doing it again, that is actually where a lot of this sits, I think, for the kind of creativity will be needed.

Michael: As you're speaking there, John Paul, I think I had an insight which is not earthshaking, but it's helping. So, focusing a little bit on how much in our society today we try to promote or allow people and give them the facility to be independent: in your house, in your car, glued to your television set, if you're riding in an airplane, you've got your program in front of you. Without realizing what a deathblow this is to community. So, if we could, if we could break through that addiction, and I'm afraid what we would have to do is say no to technology.

John Paul: Yeah, yeah. No, I see – or at least learn to interact with technology differently. I tell you, this is kind of a joke I started. One of my daily practices is writing haiku. I write little haikus all the time. Every day I try to write at least one. I don't always achieve it every day, but it's really close. And for one year, I decided that I would take one photo and one haiku, and I would send that photo to my wife.

And so, I had to get to make this happen at the time. The only way I could figure out how to do it was by way of signing up to Instagram. So, I signed up to Instagram and I had one follower. But it was sort of a little bit of a metaphor of sorts. It’s like, you know, I want this because I want to be able to bring this photo and these words together, and I want to share it for one particular thing, which is quite different than the concern that one might have for having 2 million followers, or to be so worried about who's following or what's happening. Those were all kind of the tensions that you – but I agree.

I know we may have passed your time here, so I'll conclude with this. We've been doing a lot of work lately with a group thing in philanthropy that I'm engaged with, Humanity United, on the area of well-being. And well-being is so much a part of the groups that we work with in long-term situations, of how do we bring philanthropy better to support not just a project or an outcome or other things, but the actual well-being of people in their communities?

And so much of well-being tends to draw itself, I think, in the direction of finding a way to renewal or to recharge. That's one of the areas. And so, we came up with this little set of phrases that we're working with. I hope soon we can publish a bit on it. But we used three terms, “bounce back,” “push back,” and “have our backs.”

So, bounce back is kind of like resilience, the ability to stay really connected to purpose. And even when you get trampled, to bounce back into purpose is a very significant thing. And I think when we lose track of purpose, we lose track of a lot of things. A lot of our discussion today was around how to hold true to purpose.

Push back is more along the lines of resistance. And there's a lot of push back on resilience because people that have to be the ones who constantly are trying to bounce back are the same people impacted by the same system in ways where they bear the brunt of that are saying, “We've had enough of this.”

But push back, resistance in its best form, takes that creativity of transcending and not just reacting to. So, resilience and resistance, bounce back and push back.

Then come to the third one, which is, have our backs, which, I think, is accompaniment. How to learn the ways of being alongside. And if you put those three actions, where I was headed with your comment, you put those three into the perspective of voice.

The first voice is vocation. What's my deepest sense of who I am and what I bring to this world? The second is voice as a creative act. Our voice becomes something that has an ability to speak to the situation, to speak into that reality. And the third voice is community. And voice as community is probably the one that has been most greatly damaged by our toxic polarization. Because we have very perverted ways of understanding community right now, I think.

Anyway, those three – the big picture, those three, I think give a better, maybe more robust understanding of well-being. Not well-being as individuated, not well-being as exclusively kind of pulling out to recharge, but well-being as a constant process of being able to be alive and generative together. And that's really what a lot of this is about.

Michael: Have you run that past the people in Bhutan with their gross, you know –

John Paul: Yeah, well, they have the National Happiness Index. We don’t. I worked a lot in Nepal, so I was familiar with a number of them as I was discussing it.

Stephanie: But as we know now, Bhutan's Happiness Index was based on polarization too.

John Paul: Yeah, exactly. There was an element to it that was always kept just below the surface. Yeah.

Stephanie: Thank you for your time. I was wondering, do you – you do write poetry. Would you have something appropriate to share that we can give you a second to maybe try to locate it, if you do have something to add to the arts of the show?

John Paul: Sure. So, here's one that came this week. So, I'm giving you yesterday's morning walk haiku. I was walking around the day after the first day of sun, after four days of rain. Which, you know, the rain makes everything just extraordinary in the early morning when the sun hits it. So, I'm going to read you the haiku, then I'm going to tell you that I ended up giving it a very long title. So, I'm going to read you the title after I read you the haiku.

“A thousand dewdrops bubbling on clover leaves glisten. Morning sun.” I love this word glisten, by the way. At some point, we should have a conversation on the difference between glistening and listening. I think glistening is what I was never taught, which is how to bring out the fullest color of another person. How to bring out the fullness of their – how to be present in a way that helps them become brilliant. That kind of long-sightedness is glistening more than listening. It's what rain does that brings the color of the aspen leaves, or anything else that you're looking at, suddenly become very vibrant. That's glistening.

So, “A thousand dewdrops bubbling on clover leaves glisten. Morning sun.” Now, my title. “How a Resistant Movement Begins and Becomes Virtuous.” So, when you add a title to a haiku, you have a lot more words.

But I love that. I'm playing a lot with this question. It's the one you started with, Stephanie. How do we do this in a way that becomes virtuous and not pulled into the vicious cycle of reactivity? How do we resist in ways that it’s both enduring and virtuous? So, I'm taking an example from the sun in the dewdrops on lifting the brilliance of clover leaves.

Stephanie: That's it for today's conversation on Nonviolence Radio. I want to extend my deepest thanks to John Paul for joining us and sharing his wisdom on how we can resist polarization and foster peace in our communities. His book, The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War, is an essential read for anyone concerned about democracy or the future of our society and is looking for practical ways to engage in peacemaking.

If today's conversation resonated with you, I encourage you to reflect on how you can be part of the solution, whether it's through dialog or bridge building, or simply listening with an open heart. Change starts with each one of us. And peace in our communities translates to peace in our larger world.

You can find more episodes of Nonviolence Radio and stay connected with us at the Metta Center at MettaCenter.org and Nonviolence Radio.org. And as always, thank you for tuning in. And until next time, take care of one another and keep practicing nonviolence in all that you do.