Rethinking Power and Self Esteem

good evening my name is Mary Sawyer and I'm the faculty chair of this year's Institute on national affairs and it is my pleasure to welcome all of you here this evening we feel that the topic of this year's Institute is especially meaningful during this time of change in our country and we look forward to a lively discussion throughout the week before we introduce our speakers I would like to take a moment to thank all of the students who work so hard to make this event possible well the students on the Institute's committee please stand this Institute which is an annual event is very much a collective effort it could not occur without the involvement of dedicated and creative students and staff and certainly no one is more dedicated and creative than the staff of the lectures committee Pat Miller so let us also acknowledge Pat's contributions all of us on the committee would like to invite anyone who might be interested in helping with next year's Institute to join us in the pine room of the Memorial Union at 4 o'clock on Thursday February 18 or stop by the lectures program office in 36 physics for more information now to introduce our speaker one of our student chairs jennifer Schmeiser before we begin I'd like to remind everybody of the upcoming activities and tomorrow evening this evening speakers will be speaking again on the subject of living democracy then tomorrow evening we will have Lawrence Jones in the sunroom at 8:00 p.m. and he will be speaking on the Ezequiel experience values from the other side our keynote address will be presented by Francis Moore lepay and Paul Dubois together they are the cofounders of the Institute for the Arts of democracy MS lepay is the author of several books including Dyatlov small planet and rediscovering America's values which are both on sale over at the table and she's also co-founded the Institute for food and developmental policy mr. Dubois has been vice president at Cambridge College and at the College of the Atlantic he also has authored books such as the hospice way of death and modern practices in human service agencies together they have co-authored a new book doing democracy which will be out later this year we will hope you will join us for the rest of this week's activities and we would like to remind you that Tuesday's presentation does start at 7:00 p.m. and not p.m. as stated in our pamphlets please give a warm welcome to Frances Moore lupe and Paul Dubois thank you thank you for the last few years we've been traveling around the country on the country really discovering what many of you already know that this country has a great many very very large problems but we've also been finding some signs of hope I read thinking of democracy and that's what we're here to talk about tonight we don't have to be blinded by all the bad news that the media gives us constantly there are untold stories of democracy democracy coming to life that really shows the really show of great many new possibilities ordinary people have been sharing their lessons of success people who have learned to solve this country's problems and we're here tonight to share some of their lessons with you and we're going to start with a dialogue that contrasts the usual remedies for democracy with the lessons that these people have been showing us and I'm going to wear this tie during the dialogue because I hope that some day in fact the stars and stripes will come to represent the kind of democracy isn't this ridiculous the kind around me just wait all right it does that's true the kind of democracy that in fact we're going to be talking about this richer living democracy and when we're finished with this short dialogue and I'm very glad it's short don't take a picture when we're finished we're going to ask you to actually analyze what these two voices have been saying about what's wrong with America Paul there's so many things wrong where do I start I'm gonna pick up the paper and I'm bombarded I mean whether we're talking about crime or the environment or drugs but wait at wait a minute are these the problems are they only the symptoms of the problems I mean maybe beneath them lies a deeper kind of crisis I mean after all lots of people care about these problems lots of people are trying to do something about them but they're getting worse right well I believe there is a deeper crisis it's the crisis of our political system 3/4 of Americans very recently said that our political system is broken it's run by insiders who don't listen to working people and who cannot solve our problems I think we need reform we certainly need campaign finance reform we need to reform voter registration I think we might even need a new political party you may be right part of the way I mean our political system certainly needs fixing but there's a lot more than that that's not really what I'm trying to get it when I talk about the real crisis I mean suppose the real crisis lies beneath all of these issues all of the things that we can talk about even beneath the failure of our system of government and the failure that of the way in which we elect people suppose the real crisis is that most of us don't see a place for ourselves in actual decision-making in the solving of public problems I mean there's a huge sense of distance between ordinary people and the folks who make the decision don't you remember the guy on the Donahue show absolutely true story this guy stands up there talking about the SNL crisis right this guy stands up and he says I don't see why the taxpayers have to bail us out of this mess why can't the government do it I mean a real sense of distance between us and the government but that's why we need to reform the political system so that people won't be so turned off but even reforming the political system is not truly going to fix what's wrong I mean people would still feel distant from decision making they wouldn't feel that it's part of them that have a role in decision-making they wouldn't feel any responsibility themselves for actually jumping in and creatively finding solutions and the answers would still come from top down well you're saying that we need more and I'm saying that we really can't expect anything more I mean people already are overwhelmed for one thing and for many the the clinical system is a joke I remember last fall that bumper sticker it said if God had minister vote he would have given us candidates but maybe even worse is that people are overwhelmed by their personal problems how can they be expected to take on public problems I mean I think underneath it all people probably just don't care enough no way and when people do care they are not apathetic study after study shows that people are not deep down apathetic what they are are angry they feel powerless they feel shut out they don't feel capable anymore solving problems and what's worse they feel absolutely powerless to do anything about that feeling of being shut out no matter how important certain political reforms might be that you can talk about forever the fact is that the real challenge of democracy goes beneath that and it's that it's this one question how do Americans come to see that for democracy to really really work it's going to have to be a lot more than just about a political system it's gonna have to become a way of life a way of life in which regular people play essential roles not just on voting day but every day of the year not just in the polls but in their schools and in their workplaces on this campus in their communities in neighborhoods everywhere okay okay now what Paul takes off his tie let's go a little bit deeper into what his voice is communicating in this mock dialogue to do that we'll ask you to look at handout number one and take just one moment we've made it a list there for you and let your eye just roam over our list and as you do so ask yourself one of the common themes that you're finding here are there any threads that unite these very short examples we've put on handout 1 what does it mean that in Birmingham people actually elect their their citizen councils I mean what does it mean that welfare recipients in New York actually own their own homes anybody what are the common themes that you see here anything come to mind right off the bat anyone what do you think empowerment what do you mean by that can you all hear that these are citizens who have taken things into their own hands to some degree so he says one of the themes that he sees here is empowerment anybody else what else do you see it's a great answer what else anybody okay they're not only being empowered they're also being responsible they're taking responsibility for what they're doing and for what's happening in their lives yeah you see any other themes anyone else what do these things have in common they're all true what else we had somebody who said well they're all on the same type thing can you see anything else I think these partner people themselves making the policy yeah come on you give your nodded what do you mean even one of you that's fine people themselves making policies making decisions okay great anybody else yeah cooperation in other word is collaboration sometimes cooperation among people great yeah aha conflict resolution among groups yeah that has to happen also yeah let's go down here acting locally okay I think I don't know whether we have some some examples down here that are not just local but we do have stories in the book that that are not simply local but a lot of these are local and that's how people do in fact do what these other folks have been saying taking some authority responsibility into their own hands yeah okay great great excellent thank you thank you well I think that what you've hit on exactly what we ourselves find first people taking direct responsibility working collaboratively and actually solving real problems now what do these developments have to say about democracy to us they suggest that democracy firm and democracy with its multiple parties and its constitutional government it's not enough that just as nails and a hammer don't constitute carpentry that our formal institutions end of themselves don't make democracy they're simply tools that democracy means people coming together to solve our common problems mm-hmm that one realization really changed the course of both of our lives and that's part of what we're here to talk with you about the two of us have come to understand that in fact none of the particular concerns that we had focused our energies on whether it's racism or world hunger or or the problems that many of you are concerned about the end environment and poverty and so on that none of them are going to be addressed effectively successfully without addressing this deeper crisis of democracy at the same time that's a very radical statement because what we're talking about is nothing less than the rethinking of the meaning of democracy so let us take a few moments to tell you the paths that we each took to come to this realization and why we think this is so terribly important and Francis why do we start with you I mean people know you for 20 years of work on on world hunger tell these folks what made you come to this focus on democracy well I believe that if I could just help people understand that hunger is needless but it's made by human-made institutions and that we could just change those because they're human-made we could get at the roots of hunger and so my first step was to write a one-page handout that became diet for a small planet and then sort of I became that the Julia Child of the soybean circuit that wasn't exactly what I had in mind because what I wanted to do was to explain and to alarm people to awaken people to the roots of hunger that that could be addressed and I got very very good at shocking people with the horror of the extent of hunger in the world but by the early 1980s my message boiled down through one simple statement and that is that hunger is not caused by a scarcity of land or a scarcity of food but it's caused by a scarcity of democracy wait wait a minute what does that mean a scarcity of democracy well it meant for me that I could visit many countries with all of the trappings of democracy beautiful constitutions and dozens of political parties in a few cases and yet the majority of people lived in misery but these formalities of democracy did not mean that the majority weren't excluded from decision-making power over the most primal of needs such as food itself and so I wanted to expose those anti-democratic of hunger well that's good enough as far as it goes I suppose but what does that really say about democracy I mean can you actually point to a model of democracy that is strong enough to end world hunger well at first I had no answer to those questions I felt very uncomfortable standing in front of audiences and the answers to those questions and gradually I began to see that looking for some ideal model or simply decrying the tragedy of needless hunger as I had been doing both could blind us both could blind us to opportunities that we have a right now to begin to live democracy to begin to take responsibility for decisions that affect us and in fact this whole talk is about what happens when people break with when people break with that kind of despair okay Paul it's your turn all right being born black in a society that's predominantly run by whites must have focused your attention very early and a problem racism and here you are tonight saying that the root problem is democracy tell me why all right well it's true I was focused on the problems of racism from a very very early age in fact you'll be amazed at quite it's just how early I was born in Harlem Hospital in 1945 and in those days in the middle of Harlem in the leading Hospital of that harsh portion of Manhattan they had two wards for babies one called the Negro ward and the other called the white board and when I was born the nurses took one look at my parents they had no problem they put me in the Negro ward but I was so light skinned that four hours later another shift of nurses came along they hadn't seen my parents they thought that a terrible mistake invented they moved me to the white ward and then they went upstairs to apologize to my parents that was my introduction to the complex subject of race relations in this country they had to go back downstairs and move me to the quote Negro Ward and my mother tells me that with that introduction to the complex subject of race relations I was simply not very pleased I was four hours old that's where it all began so it's bad I'm still asking how did you end up coming to this place tonight to talk about Democritus on problems of racism as I grew older and as I and as I've got to be a teenager I really burned with without rage at the problems of racism and poverty and oppression of my people and in fact that kind of outrage really drove almost every important decision that I made I was arrested time after time on civil rights marches and when we won the Great Society programs I became the assistant director of a model Cities program where people were asked to participate in real decision-making and you know what it worked it worked when two conditions were met first of all when people learn the skills of good decision-making and secondly when they were really genuinely allowed to make good decisions but those conditions didn't exist very often and so I moved to something a little more radical I became the executive director of the largest black community organization in the state of New York at that time and we ran programs in which people did make decisions we ran programs in which they did create their own housing they did design their health program they did design their anti-drug programs they designed their education programs their health programs and so on and to this day there are black children in the city of Rochester whose future is a great deal better because their parents were empowered in programs like that and when I turn to teaching undergraduates that very rewarding we're as vice-president of college of the Atlantic that is to say emotionally rewarded not financially rewarded I really learned that what worked best in education was the same thing that was working in the rest of the of the experiences that I'd already had that that same kind of empowerment once when students had a chance to really participate in shaping their own educational program their own educational experiences and therefore they had a sense of ownership and then at the graduate level as vice president at Cambridge College I learned that what worked best also was when their academic studies were related to real-world problem-solving and then I turned rather intently to the women's movement of the dynamic women's movement that was very very viable at the time to try to learn even more about public problem solving I became the president of a now chapter and I became the head of Planned Parenthood of Nashville and then the head of all of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and the lesson that I learned there was that self interest could motivate people very very admirably and just as we had discovered in the civil rights movement that we had to redefine power so we learned in the women's movement that we had to redefine self interest we'll talk more about that in a little while and then I became the head of a large professional association and and I was looking for a synthesis of insights into human personality really and I learned that we all have an incredible hunger for meaning and aking credible capacity for growth and the question then was how could all of these lessons some be somehow related to social change so lots of questions really pushed me even further and what I decided was sort of no more of these kind of piecemeal insights what did all of this learning really add up to I mean after all the world was indeed getting worse but people were teaching very very valuable lessons and it was important to try to draw those lessons pointing in the direction of a democracy that could in fact work to solve our problems so you can see that we took quite different paths to arrive at one conclusion and that is that the problems that are confronting us today simply cannot be solved from the top down the to be solved three conditions have to be met and we've listed those on handout number two what does it take very realistically first it takes the the ingenuity it takes the experience of those directly affected whether we're talking about patients or welfare recipients or students or teachers it takes the creativity that emerges when diverse perspectives meet and mix and third may be most important of all solutions to the kind of complex problems that we face today require the commitment the commitment to implementation that only comes when people know that they themselves have been part of devising the solution and these are precisely the conditions in the way that are missing now in the way America practices democracy and the kind of democracy we have now is what this gentleman referred to earlier this sort of top-down politics but as I said earlier is we've traveled around the country what we found are many successful people who are learning to solve America's problems and they are incorporating those lessons into their practice of public life and so these are the lessons that are emerging from some of the stories that you read in that first handout and the lessons that we want to share with you so what we want to say to you is that these kinds of lessons are really emerging across the country even though you won't find them in the media they're emerging in schools and workplaces and human service agencies and even the media and we'd like to give you a taste of what we mean now I'll start with economics and you might be quite surprised I mean how can we say anything good about what's happening to the economy of our country in fact the figures showed that during the 1980s 60 percent of all income gains accrued to the top 10% of our population most of us lost ground and yet despite such very telling statistics as these despite this there are people in their communities people in citizen groups of all kinds at unions and church groups coming together to make sure that they are not simply vulnerable to what corporation in their vicinity has to say or what the impersonal market will do to them in fact let me give you an example example in Connecticut it's called the Naugatuck Valley project and I'd like to introduce you to one person her name is Teresa Francis and she's 63 years old now Teresa it's a public life most of her life her public life consisted of going to work at century brass and singing in the church choir I'm gonna interrupt here public life I use that phrase a minute ago you just used it for pump most people public life is what what celebrities and politicians have so you better explain what that means okay let me explain by asking you how many of you work how many of you go to church or synagogue how many of you belong to an organization like a PTA or a rotary or a professional organization you are experiencing public life in each of these roles because in each of these roles are choices influenced the larger community even to the national level I'm convinced and so Theresa's public life to return Teresa's public life greatly expanded in 1986 what happened is that century brass threatened to close she's going to lose everything including her retirement benefits Naugatuck Valley Project talked to Teresa and convinced her that she could fight it she joined with others in her community and over five years they protected 500 jobs ultimately they lost but Teresa told us what mattered to us is that we didn't stop there we kept together we built the relationships within the Naugatuck Valley project and so when Uniroyal threatened to close we knew what to do we got hundreds of people together we ended up meeting with the president and Teresa told us but felt great is that what happened to us didn't happen to the folks at uniform that Teresa is suffering from cancer and yet she told us it's such a joy at this stage in my life it's such a joy and we what is your joy so the joy is knowing that I don't have to just let things happen to me I can make things happen you see she said a Naugatuck Valley project they don't do things for us they help us learn how we can do things for ourselves now this project in addition to saving several thousand jobs from plant closings has helped three company workers and three companies buy their companies and three more worker buyouts are on the way they've confronted the biggest obstacle facing workers in buying out their companies when there's a threat enclosing and that is lack of capital because they've negotiated a straight estate trust fund to fund worker buyouts they've tackled the problem of rising cost of housing by creating a very ingenious innocent invented form called the Community Land Trust that creates permanently affordable housing and Gotha the state to support it so the Naugatuck Valley project that Teresa is part of is not fringe it's not simply about protesting failed policies it's about creating it's about creating a permanent place for citizens in negotiating their own economic futures and such independent citizen organizations are now in virtually every state to the largest has two million members now in 37 cities so that's just a taste of what can happen in a viable democracy in the whole field of economics let's turn to education now for just a minute we all know about the schools across this country and we all know that the top-heavy bureaucracy is under attack everywhere I mean in part because the simple fact is it doesn't work but under what some people call school-based management parents and teachers and sometimes students are learning to run their own schools in Chicago of all places a very unwise a coalition of thousands and thousands of low-income parents along with corporate leaders managed to get past one of the most sweeping school decentralization just three years ago in the history of American education and now local school councils where parents are in the majority make nearly all of the important decisions about every one of those schools and Chicago is not alone in dozens and dozens of school districts across the country there there is this rising of school based management kinds of approaches and within classrooms changes underway as well we have visited successful public schools even in the inner city even among the most deprived kids where students themselves are helping to define their courses and then they succeed better over time they have higher graduation rates and so on because they feel a sense of ownership of the educational experience kate is a as a student in one upstate New York school and when we visited with and she put it this way she said everyone here thinks of this as our school because we're the ones who make something happen here and then she said I think our school encourages people to participate more democracy more and democracy in our country when they're older because they're used to it here in Kate's Point is exactly our plan and successful schools are linking classroom learning with real-world problem solving at the University of Pennsylvania faculty and students have learned to come together with community leaders to create - first of all improve nine local schools and secondly to create an employment and job training center and this sort of cooperation between communities and colleges is also happening across the country and in aims villo hire one of our favorite stories involves a toxic spill in the town Creek and the local sixth grade beginning to study sixth grade chemistry decided that they wouldn't trust the EPA to clean it up these kids constituted themselves as the sixth grade Ames Ville water chemists they tested the water they worked with the town to get the cleanup accomplished they became the town's water quality control team and along the way they learned science and public policy and law and psychology and overall how to become effective in this society they also told us they learned teamwork excuse me they learn strategic thinking they said that they learned that you had to put one smart kid in each team but let me return to the theme of economics taking it another step into the workplace but we're discovering is there too that top-down decision-making is giving way it's giving way because it doesn't work as well as what people are discovering in the form of teamwork and worker ownership in fact almost one half of today's fortune today's Fortune 1000 companies are experimenting with teamwork in companies as different as chaparral steel and Midlothian Texas and the Saturn GM plant in Spring Hill Tennessee teamwork is what is making the company profitable workers there told us that we have considerably more decision-making power in this team structure but more than this decision-making we also feel greater dignity there are no time clocks here we were told by a worker at Saturn they treat us like adults now one particularly interesting story a telling story for us is the story of workplace ownership and that is that in fact today in four major industries businesses in which workers owned the majority now ranked in the top ten and their performance is outdoing companies without worker ownership now steel is one of these industries in which worker owners are in the top ten let me just tell you a story of what this can mean in the early 1980s national steel owned we're we're and we're in Pennsylvania and they didn't think we're and steel was profitable enough for them and so they stopped investing in weirdin and the workers noticed they noticed that the plant was deteriorating and they knew their jobs were at stake but instead of being paralyzed by their fear they joined together and bought weird and what happened they made it so profitable that by the late 80s Weirton was the only u.s. steel company that had that showed a profit every quarter the profits think earned they returned in part in in profit sharing and then what did they do in the early 1990s they said we'll do what national refused to do and they put hundreds and millions of dollars into modernization but they said we are investing this time in ourselves so in the community and in schools and in workplaces and companies everywhere there really are signs of change that you're not going to find in the media but there is one sector of this society namely the media where most of us don't hold a whole lot of hope I mean studies show time and time again that Americans in fact feel rather helpless when it comes to the media and the sorts of messages that come into our living rooms and our children's minds after all just 23 corporations now control most media outlets in this country and newspaper readership continues to decline and in fact the experts tell us that Americans can only handle sound bites and the sound bites keeps shrinking smaller and smaller last election honest-to-goodness when CBS News tried to counter that trend they declared a policy the campaign statements have to be more than 30 seconds and I'm swear to you this is true the executive producer CBS News actually said frankly we're skeptical whether we can keep this up it's very hard to find counted saying anything substitute for 30 seconds now but when the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a long fact feel just wonderful analysis of the economy of all things of all things the economy and what's behind the fact that the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are certainly not and why so many of us are suffering circulation rose 10,000 copies and so the paper issued a reprint and in fact the peeps so many people mob the doors they had to hire extra security in order to handle the demand 500,000 extra copies later and 20,000 calls and letters later these people have proven a point that in fact Americans do want to know what affects their lives and that series of articles eventually became a wonderful book America what went wrong and Donnell Bartlett one of the two authors will be here in this series a little bit later on and what the whole experience demonstrates is that ordinary Americans in fact want to know what's happening in their lives in Wichita Kansas finally that Wichita Eagle got that message enough to decide that in decent weather they're going to pitch a tent in the town Commons so that ordinary people can come and tell them what they want the newspaper to cover the fact is there are these changes that are beginning to take place and not just in those cities but in quite a number of others now these examples speak to what we're talking about tonight a form of democracy we call living democracy it may be the only type of democracy rich enough to meet the problems of today's world a living democracy and it's living because we live it daily I mean in our lives and schools like cape the purpose of student no I quoted a little while ago we're in our workplaces like like Wharton steel and the story that Francis just mentioned to you when our neighborhoods like the courageous Teresa Francis or or Naugatuck Valley and so on living because people really are living a day after day because it's a lie because it's dynamic living because it's evolving it's not some static state that we achieved some two hundred years ago that we all learned about in school well speaking of school taught notions of democracy we have to tell you a story a true story that that happened very recently a young friend of ours who had recently graduated from high school came to visit us and it was during that period of what's called rubber gate remember the bounced checks by our Congress people and he came to visit that day and he was extremely upset I mean Keith was livid he walked into the living room he said do you realize what's happening we elected these people we elected these people to represent us and they can't even keep their balances straight they keep bouncing their checks they don't even know how to keep a balance in their checkbook what's going on here their checks keep bouncing we said yeah I said well I just graduated from high school and there I was taught the very basis of our democracy it's good checks and balances this outrage does not exactly capture what we mean by a living evolving dynamic democracy so that's why we need to go deeper with you and so what we want to do is try another one of our dialogues and this time I get to wear the tie and my voice will represent living democracy and Paul's will capture two prevailing notions about citizens role in a democracy so what we want to do very very briefly is answer the question each in a very different way what is the appropriate role for citizens what is public life in a democracy look I know what public life is all about it's about doggy dog it's about going after what's what what's mine if I want to if I want something from government you know a job a license to build some houses a stop sign or whatever it is I know that I'm gonna have to fight for it of course my neighbors might want something very very different so therefore it's about figuring out my interest it's about going after it it's about fighting for it's about competing interests I mean it's got to be nasty but I think if you wait just a minute and think a bit about what matters most to you really most of you things like safe neighborhoods for your children to be able to walk to school a clean environment to enjoy and to live longer within there are opportunities for yourself and your children if you think about the things that that really mean most of us each of us I think we realized that we can't achieve them by ourselves that we can only begin to approach them by seeing how our interests connect with other people's interests and moving from there yeah but wait a minute negotiating interest solving problems I mean you know that's not what ordinary citizens should be expected to do I mean I'm a good citizen okay I pay my taxes in April I vote in November all right you know I try to elect the very best people I can think of to get into office and then I step aside and I let them do their job but you talk as if my public life is just my vertical tie to government and it isn't when I leave home everyday as a worker as a student as a user of the media and Health and Human Services in all these ways I am living my public life the choices I make create the community in which I live and the larger environment these are all arenas of my public life yeah but you know what the way you're talking about it sounds like there's no place for expertise where these professors get their consulting money I mean we're talking about we're talking about a very complex world here I mean we've got to rely on professionals who know a lot more about the world than you do I mean it sounds like you want ordinary people to begin to make you know important decisions here people who don't have the kind of knowledge that's really needed and people who you know have your level of knowledge for crying out loud look I'm not anti expertise I want to make that very clear but what's fuzzy and what we have to clarify is the appropriate role for citizens and decision making the appropriate role is in defining values can I can I give you just one example I have a feeling I'm gonna regret this but all right let me give you an example several years ago in Oregon citizens decided that they had to come together to set the values within which the states very limited budget for public health could could be allocated very difficult decisions thousands of Oregonians met in hundreds of meetings talking face to face trying to decide on the common values that would guide the allocation of this limited amount of money for health care they made tough choices for example they decided that it was more more important than keeping a baby was born without a brain alive for just a couple of weeks more important was getting health care to tens of thousands of pregnant women they made tough choices that ended up extending health care to many who did not have it so they showed that even in complex emotional issues citizens have a role to play in setting the values of boundaries within which experts can offer their guidance no no no the fact is that most people don't want a darn thing to do with public life I mean that's for activists that's for people like you have some strange way some strange need to get their way in public for crying out for people who think they know a lot more than the rest of us see I don't think that I'm that different I really don't I think that almost everyone wants to know that our voices count in the larger world that we have a need a deep need for meaning beyond our immediate families in fact psychologists tell us that the happiest people are those who have a purpose beyond their their private lives and what I began to see is that my public life action in the world in which I can make a difference is not just a means to an end to achieve what I want but it's actually a means to develop Who I am as a human being who you are as a human being give me a break you're making public life sound like some new age group therapy for crying out loud you've been living in California too long and a deep human need give me a break here voice is very strong in this but by the end of the talk hopefully you his voice will fade in your memory now let's look at what we've just said because we've touched on a whole lot of questions concepts that we've just assumed in this country for example what's our true self interest and what is the appropriate role of a citizen and what's the scope of public life I mean the real scope of public life doesn't include workplaces and schools and so on or is it really just the voting booth and what is the role for citizens and what its role for experts in this complex world and how important is it that we all feel that our lives really count for something and that our voices are really heard in the public world but we need to go deeper still we need to learn very specific lessons which are emerging from those Americans who are successfully engaging richly in public life and addressing real problems will focus on four key lessons that are listed here on this outline for those of you who can see it I'm sorry it's not more visible four key lessons and Paul will begin all right a first lesson is about relationship building relationships actually a mutual accountability living democracy is not about blame I mean whether we want to blame corporate greed on the one hand or welfare frauds on the other or media ownership concentration or school bureaucrats or whatever just fill in the blank right and whoever we want to blame okay if we could just get rid of them everything would be all right right well as our kids would say not the simple fact is that public life is about creating relationships of ongoing two-way accountability and we'd like to tell you a little story about that the kind of illustrates what we're talking about on a brisk fall evening we entered an auditorium in Sebastopol which is a small town just north of San Francisco and the air was electric and it was very very serious at the same time and among us to hispanic farmworkers they were looking exhausted but they were also eager and alongside were Quakers and Presbyterians and and Episcopalians from white middle class middle age churches and there were also representatives of an african-american church and all of them were members of the Sonoma County faith-based organizing project and they were there to evaluate candidates for the school board and it was a fabulous scene because what they did was just just as you are gathered here they had five candidates all five candidates who knew if they were going to be elected they better get these people's votes up there on the stage and then the usual scene that you see with you know when people are talking to candidates or candidates are talking to people didn't happen at all what they did was they divided into five groups around the auditorium and each candidate had to go with one of the groups and then the rules were that the candidate couldn't utter a single syllable everybody in a small group got to tell the candidate what was on his or her mind and then the candidates had to reassemble up here on the stage and then they had to tell the assembled audience what they have just heard and there was a big report card and they were graded on how well they had listened and they got grades on listening that's what we mean that's what we mean by mutual accountability the folks that we observe that night were not asking city officials to simply fix a problem they were entering into a relationship with a mutual accountability and what they decided to do was to have those candidates pledged if elected to meet with these people regularly over time because how can we build relationships of mutual accountability if we believe that all the power is in somebody else's hands the CEO or the boss the the the professor whoever it is in authority okay now if your we're gonna ask you a question what's the first word that comes to mind when I say the word power what are you thinking anybody control okay control that's a very common answer yeah what else power what comes to mind man okay all right she actually meant to say white man okay abuse okay good good what else yeah coercion I'm glad you're doing that Khan I don't think I could spell coercion anyway okay yeah how about back here corruption whoa all right yes manipulation we got back an EP right fast enough okay two more money money party love why do you say that do you all hear that love because that's true power okay well let me tell you that when one teacher asked some tenth graders that question what comes to mind when you hear the word power guess what they say they said money in this or money control parents Adolphe Hitler weapons and bullies and we have a teenager who would link money and control and parents and so if we think of power as control over others and as a fixed commodity the more for you the less for me or vice versa then we're likely to think of power as bad I mean after all if I don't have it I want it and if you've got it I don't like that now I better fight like hell to keep it too so in that sense we think of power as bad but wait a minute Paul we all need to realize our values to realize our legitimate interests so the second lesson of living democracy is that power is not a dirty word we have a lot of associations that are very negative but power is not an either/or as it is in some of these these associations it's not it either or either you have it or and you have it and I don't in fact we're learning by observing but power always exists in a relationship think about that for a second it means that what I do affects you I mean even if it's just trying to resist any effect power exists in a relationship so if that is true it means that no one is ever utter ly without power now on the top half of your 3rd handout handout number 3 we capture some of the contrast between these negative views of power and an enabling view of power now what happens when we let go of the fear of power we begin to discover some unappreciated sources that may be open to us and we begin to return power to its original meaning in Latin pulsing to be able now if you've got if you look at handout number 4 on the back of that page we've listed there some underappreciated sources of power for example the power of knowledge acorn is a national organization with 70,000 members and nearly all of them are low-income but when acorn members took on the banking industry and here's a national example by the way they took on the banking industry for neglecting poor communities and not lot not lending for housing and poor community something we all know about right and they knew however in acorn that they had a lot learning to do they had to develop the power of knowledge bank regulation is a very very complex topic but after enough study and discussion and eventually Lobby they've succeeded in passing national legislation that has returned eight billion dollars into poor neighborhoods throughout this country one college professor told us that those poor people learn more about banking regulation than most professors of Finance and last summer when acorn called a meeting on low-income housing guess what forty banks sent representatives that's power the power of knowledge but citizens are all for discovering the power of humor Kentuckians for the Commonwealth is an organization of thousands of people in that state kentucky of all walks of life you may know that they've had to confront toxic dumping in that state and for decades the coal company has had tremendous power now Kentuckians for the Commonwealth decided that they would make a point by putting a bed in the state capital and in that bed they had their farmer president of kmtc and other members tucked into bed with their stocking caps on and under the covers they passed huge wads of fake cash now some of those the one person in bed was representing the coal company the others representing the legislators now the media couldn't miss the message that in fact the coal companies control the legislators vote and that went out over the airwaves ultimately Kentuckians for the Commonwealth even despite the tremendous power of the coal companies in that state Kentuckians for the Commonwealth succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment to that state which protected farmland from strip mining now the third lesson of living democracy has to do with self-interest and again I want to ask you as soon as I say self-interest what comes to mind what are the usual things that come to mind when we say self-interest anybody okay okay you go and then somebody back here selfish yep okay greed yeah that's very common anybody else strength self-interest and strength okay anyone else work why are you working for it okay all right great what he thinks of his self-interest he thinks about all the workers got it there all right great great okay you know it's kind of funny isn't it our culture really carried two messages about self-interest first we're told that public life is really about getting with ours and standing up for our rights and whatever or in some cases being men right on the other hand we're told that we should squelch our self-interest or act like Mother Teresa or act on behalf of those who are less fortunate or act on behalf of the common good but suppose that we really think of self-interest is what we legitimately bring to public life it's what we care most about after all I mean when our interests our careers our families our faiths all the things that matter most to us those are the interests that we legitimately bring to public life so it just doesn't work to preach to people to let go of their interest what we're learning is that what does work is to show people that in order to pursue your self-interest you have to see how it connects to other people's self-interest and on the bottom of handout three we've been compared these two very different notions of self-interest self-interested selfishness or what we call relational self-interest because it's based on our connectedness with one another now money rule is a young african-american construction contractor in Chattanooga Tennessee and he taught us this third lesson of relational self-interest here he is also the president of Chattanooga venture which is this fabulous organization that has managed to pull the city together to plan a brand-new future and over the last 11 years to at least partially achieve the future that those people want and he taught us this relational thinking about self-interest and he said to us and this is a direct quote I want to read this he said people now know that they can't make enough money to get away from the polluted environment no matter how wealthy they are or even crime that's affecting the wealthy neighborhoods - in other words he said there may be no purely selfish solutions left anymore all the solutions the real solutions involve us with other people to act in our selfish interest in today's world is to get people to act together what does this look like in practice let me give you a short example from San Antonio now a few years back San Antonio people in San Antonio were extremely angry because corporations were importing people from out of state to fill jobs but there was very high unemployment especially among Hispanics in San Antonio now the organization that I'm going to tell you about communities organized for public service cops mine are just staged and angry protests even claiming racism but what did they do instead instead they sat down at the same table with leaders in each of the corporations around the city and they listened they listened to the concerns of corporations that were unable to find qualified people locally and out of that process and tremendous research they did including looking at job training programs in Europe these citizens divided you suck discovered that the essential problem had to do with lack of training opportunities and they can pose a complete reshaping of job training for the city of San Antonio it was passed unanimously by the City Council and has now become a national model so what we're seeing here is that the lesson is that citizens began by probing the self-interest of they're supposed adversaries and ended up meeting their own self-interest as well selfishness and self-interest are not the same thing so now we're moving from the subject of self-interest really to this last major art if you will and that has to do with capacity building the set of arts effective problem-solving involves relationship building which we talked about it involves redefining power and understanding it much more fully it involves relational self-interest and involves rethinking all of that but those kinds of lessons are not at all easy to live after all we weren't born effective citizens we weren't born affective collaborators but we're convinced again by our observation that we can all learn these arts of democracy with all the deliberateness and the pleasure that we get from learning to read or write or play basketball or whatever fact one member of the group that I just mentioned in San Antonio talked about the quality of her organization she said it's a university in public life the human development here is incredible now the most effective classrooms the most effective organizations all across the country are really those that are emphasizing training participants in these arts of democracy elementary school children defining the rules by which they're going to interact and workplaces training teams to collaborate them to cooperate in problem-solving an organization such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth rehearsing every public action over and over again so their members grow in skill and confidence now what are these arts of democracy we've listed just a few of them on your last handout number five they include mediation and negotiation and evaluation ongoing evaluation and certainly reflection but maybe the most difficult for us in this culture may be the most difficult part of Dammam that makes problem-solving work is the art of creative conflict now what is it that makes conflict creative rather than destructive well one has to do we and again by talking to people all across the country what we've learned is that there has to be conscious attention to creating an environment in which people feel safe to dissent safe to differ because we're all afraid of ridicule of exposure of being labeled and we're convinced that it's possible to make an environment safe for difference for creative conflict even on the most emotionally charged public issues would you believe abortion we talked to people in Milwaukee Wisconsin for example those in favor of protecting access to abortion abortion reached out to those who are opposed and they made their meetings safe how do they do it they arrived at seven rules but maybe most important they disallowed the use of any cliche any label or any rhetoric so that the participants didn't have to defend themselves against those and they were able then to listen and to discover an incredible common ground of concerned about women with unwanted pregnancies and out of this they were able actually jointly to build a suggested sexual education model that they then offered to the state legislature now in st. Louis the two sides of the abortion debate reached out to one another and they took a very different tack when they came together they agreed again to make the environment safe they agreed to talk about everything but abortion and they too began to discover that they had common ground would allow them to collaborate some people think that in fact the way we sometimes argue with the tie and all of that in these mock dialogue up on stage is it it's a good example of conflict well we when people have never said this to us we we have a great retort and that is that we learned a long time ago that that marriage is really Nature's Way of keeping people from fighting with strangers anyway the story the Frances just told you about the abortion antagonist really reminds us that perhaps the first art of democracy has to do with listening we're all pretty good at talking not too many of us are very good at listening in private life though we're often amazed that when we have a problem and we go to someone else and he or she just listens that suddenly we discovered that we ourselves and had the answer all along and all that we needed was a chance to kind of formulate that answer and communicate it well that same possibility exists in public life in North Carolina there's a project called the listening project and there they do hundreds of in-depth one-on-one interviews door-to-door with individual people in their homes and they don't do this quick check off kind of survey to get people's views and then move on to another home in in one home a white man complained that the biggest problem on his block were these noisy black teenagers at the end of the block who were making all these all the noise and was hanging we're hanging out on the streets and cause trouble now on that simple on a simple survey that one comment might have gotten him labeled a racist but instead he's me instead these people simply listened and they allowed him to talk and they asked a few probing questions and he went deeper and deeper and by the end of the evening he had redefined the entire problem and the problem that he saw at that in his neighborhood was the lack of decent recreational opportunities and decent job opportunities for these kids so when we think of listening is passive the stories that we've been hearing about democracy in action actually suggest something very something much more that the very act of being listened to actually changes the speaker's own understanding now of course there are many many other parts of democracy that we need to develop in order to effectively address our problems so what is it that distinguishes today's third of citizen engagement is it spotty protests is it localized is it simply transient before jumping to any of these conclusions consider the changes in living de ma toward living democracy the changes that are embodied in the examples that we gave tonight touch every sector of our society there's much more involved and simply protesting failed policies in fact citizens are changing the way that decisions get made they are creating ongoing roles for citizens in public decision-making that means that they are changing the core assumptions of our society about what ordinary people are capable of and what we are interested in being part of so it's an extraordinary time with the time of apparent collapse and disintegration in many ways and yet we hope you see also of opportunity unprecedented opportunity now what does it take to take advantage of being born into the privilege of living in this era first I would suggest that instead of simply decline our powerlessness that we begin to open our eyes to the sources of power maybe those listed on that handout of ours the source of power opened to any of us in our public lives on this campus in our communities in the larger the United States remember that we all live within a web of relationships in which we do have influence second we willingly risk and what do we risk the first let me make a case that I don't think that we can believe our society can move forward that it can't change unless we experience ourselves changing and the only way to do that is through risk we must risk well we all have to figure out ourselves what we have to risk and in that way maybe that's the riskiest part but we certainly have to risk believing in that which we will ultimately never see the result of and that may be extremely difficult when we are part of a historical transformation in the very meaning of democracy now I say this is a risk because I remember once when in the in to my food first to the 10 years ago a young volunteer came in and as he was leaving a few months later he came to me said Francis he said I considered going into your line of work trying to change the world daddy said I thought better of it he said the problem is you can go for weeks and not see any change at all and I couldn't argue with him but I do take comfort in this aspect of the risk that were all called upon in such a time I take comfort in the words of one of my heroes from the 1970s and that is I have stoned when he was confronted early in the 1970s no one was listening to him about the u.s. role in Vietnam and they said mr. stone what keeps you going no one is listening to your point of view and he said quite simply if you expect to see the final results of your work you have simply not asked a big enough question Francis and I moved to these conclusions by really studying the stories of success across this country and earlier I told you how I had looked at human service agencies and community organizing college teaching in the human potential movement and so on and slowly along the way I discovered as she did to that one what was really underneath it all was that our democracy itself wasn't working to solve a huge persistent problems of poverty and racism and environmental degradation and so on that have so affected our lives but also along the way I want to tell you that I really became proud because there are Americans who are working effectively to solve the problems of this country and I think we ought to honor them there are Americans in every town in every city in every Valley in this land who insist that I am a free human being and I will have my voice heard and there are Americans who are insisting that we will learn somehow a lesson that we perhaps have forgotten we will learn to work together to solve our problem and their message is that in every classroom and every factory in every home in every synagogue on every Church in on every campus in every town hall in every service agency in fact we asked two simple words as we go through our day why not why not come together for example why not build the relationships that address the deepest issues that so concern us why not talk about our problems actually begin to talk meaningfully and creatively about our problems why not share our values and applied them to our highest issues we don't see this happening in this country anymore why not why not discover all of the types of power that are open to us why not learn to define self-interest relationally why not hold our so-called public servants accountable why not insist that our values become their agenda we're very proud the two of us that there are Americans who are learning the skills to do just that there are thousands of successful Americans across this country who are asking why does our democracy have to wallow in the cynicism and the despair that we see in the media why not make it our effective practice for solving our problems and we're very proud also and grateful that you've asked us here tonight really to talk with you and I hope we can talk together both to vote for the next few minutes here as we take some questions and also in tomorrow's session we're proud of that we're grateful because ultimately the hope lies in each of us and all of us together thank you very much thank you other questions yeah he began with a wonderful assumption he said assuming that we buy into living democracy as one of the keys these kinds of lessons so we're not just simply hoping that they take hold and how do we take these lessons really into the media that's actually a McMahon operate essentially democratic well I think that the the gist of what we're getting across tonight is that each of us in our own in our own realms would have to see what openings exist and what we hope our book will do as opposed to just a one-hour talk doing democracy gives such an array our book will get such an array of examples that it will spur people think of how can I offer a tional eyes this what depending on what my most important concern is and so the house have to come it become very personal at that point there can't be a general formula but there are some specific lessons and that's what we hope we've drawn out so I don't know if we can answer that by saying one two three other than sort of the content of our whole talk in terms of orientation to open your eyes to what possibilities are there on this campus in this community now visa visa media Paul mentioned the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Wichita Eagle as examples of media confronting media and saying where is your self-interest your self-interest newspapers are less and less read newspapers to reconnect with the concerns of their community and how do you bring that to the editorial staff and others on the newspaper here in this community that their viability depends on addressing the real pressing concerns of this this and any other community in which a newspaper is trying to be viable that's just one example in our we can also say that in our that our organization the Institute for the Arts of democracy distributes resource lists that could give you examples of organizations that are working on the media for as one as one sector organizations that are working to make the media more accountable working to promote a more of the sort of Wichita eco kind of example the Philadelphia Inquirer examples media literacy organizations that are helping parents particularly understand how to monitor the media coming into their homes and to educate children to be critical of what they see so those resource guides are available to any of you who want to go deeper into some of these themes that we talked about tonight I think the first step for almost everyone is that people have to believe and at this point they don't really as we've said in one of the dialogues in fact people are not really apathetic if you look deeply enough they really care but they feel shut out so they have to believe how do they get to believe well that's part of what we're trying to do they learn the stories of success and as those stories begin to spread in fact they become inspired to find their own ways these aren't this is an hour doctor in fact the last chapter the book is entitled what no man I mean these aren't our stories these are their stories in their lesson so first they have to believe then they have to learn the skills together that allow them to become actively engage and one of the things that we didn't spend much time on is the fact that when they become engaged they find that it's really fun and it changes their lives we've learned an expression with many many independent sort of people coming into public life roles for the first time in a very conscious way so they've discovered the fun of power the fun of power is afraid for many many times though I guess we have time for one more questions we have what should we just wait until tomorrow if we do that a new tomorrow yeah we're just a little bit as well okay okay pine room pioneer room at noon we welcome all of you