After considerable searching for a community, about a year ago I joined Emergent Commons. All things considered, it has been a very good year. But now the magic is gone.
Magic is not quite the right word, nor is special, although it too is close to describing what I felt. There is a lot I want to say in this article and words are inadequate. But I will do the best I can. Of course, in any objective sense, EC is not magical nor special. These were merely my feelings which I had attached to a thing, a community.
The magic for me died during the EC Coordinator Team meeting on July 17, 2022 and it was my own outburst that killed it. During the meeting and its aftermath, I had intense reactions. I literally lost some sleep over this as I tried to calm the racing thoughts I had. This signaled to me that I had work to do. I withdrew from EC for a few days and began reflecting on what was happening. I needed to make sense of the matter, especially my own role, and began some deep reflection and processing. Writing this article is part of the process, mostly serving as a therapeutic tool for myself.
The matters that I am writing about at length are both trivial and not trivial. In light of the worldwide metacrisis, all of this is trivial. But in the experience of my own life, and some of the other EC members, this is not trivial.
There is a lot of context around this meeting, much more than I can capture in this article. I can only tell this story as I experienced it, a very incomplete picture. A more complete picture would require a considerable number of people adding their experience of these events, very unlikely to happen.
It all began when a volunteer, acting in accordance with her role as she saw it, abruptly moved a post from one topic area to another. This was considered to be inappropriate action made for the wrong reasons by the member who made the post, and by other members, and by the Conflict Resolution Team. But these statements do injustice to the event. It probably all began at the very beginning of EC itself over a year ago and brought to the surface tensions which had been building for months. I will come back to this later as I try to identify and address some larger issues facing EC, at least as I see it. But first I want to tell the story that unfolded from moving a post.
Matters escalated quickly. It became the main agenda item for the Coordinator Team meeting, which I had no intention of attending. A few hours before the meeting I received a message from one of the principal players in this drama. The person directly asked me for support and indicated that the right mix of people were needed at the meeting. My immediate response was expressing reluctance and I replied that I was a maybe and that I would think about it. But attend I did.
The first big lesson for me is to be more trusting of my own instincts. I had a strong feeling that I should not attend this meeting. Oh, if I had only listened to myself! Since the meeting I have had feelings of having been manipulated, used. The person who sought my support was very aware of my stance on some of the issues central to the meeting.
But I am resisting the temptation to blame her or others. I made the decision to attend. I own that. And I own everything I said at the meeting. I am fully responsible for all my words and actions. And, importantly, I believe that the person who sought my support acted in good faith at all times. I do not think we have any bad faith actors at EC.
Tension seemed to build during the meeting. But I ignored my own changing emotional state and became captured by my own emotions and the issues on the table. I reacted in a very agitated manner to one particular comment made by one of the attendees and said, “IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD.”
A couple of days later an EC member posted a poll related to one of the issues that needed to be resolved. One of the meeting attendees posted a comment to which I again had an intense emotional reaction and I quickly posted three comments of my own. The target of my comment above then posted a response to me. After reading his comment I decided to step back and disengage from EC. I will go into a lot more detail but for now I am trying to give an overview.
After considerable reflection, I now want to focus specifically on my “IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD” comment.
In an inappropriate manner I think I blurted out a truth which needs to be explicitly stated. In a certain sense, all of this is all in our heads. The words themselves, in a very different context, are not inappropriate.
I will now apply my own words to myself. The idea that EC was special was just in my head. The idea that the imagined EC was somehow being threatened at the meeting was just in my head.
My comment was made in reaction to a comment made to me and I now want to add that to this account. First I will say that I am very aware that the human memory is very imperfect. I stand to be corrected on what I remember. Unless we have a video of the meeting there is no objective record of what was said. No doubt each of us experienced this meeting in a very different way and will long remember it quite differently. In a sense, this meeting is in our heads. We need to be clear about whether we are speaking from an objective reality or our subjective experience. I am speaking from the perspective of my own subjective experience. I suspect there will be some members of EC who will not understand what I am trying to say but I have no one in particular in mind. I do have experience outside of EC with people who claim to come from the view of an objective reality that they personally see very clearly. I find such people very difficult to engage with.
What I think I heard said to me was something close to this. “People who are triggered are coming from a place of ego and that is a problem they need to deal with.” At that moment I felt attacked and my response was my defense. Upon reflection I think this is a true statement that applies to me in this context. Yes, I was coming from a place of ego and I was blind to the dynamic. In my head I had made EC into something special and I had attached myself far too strongly to something that was not real. As an aside, it seems to me that the statement is a very simplistic presentation of very complex matters which ego and triggering are. Words often reduce complex matters to simple statements and that is a difficult problem to mitigate.
I now want to turn my attention to what I see as a fundamental issue underneath some of the tension. How should Emergent Commons operate? Stated another way, should EC be primarily run by a group of volunteers or, primarily, by the members? There are no right or wrong answers but there are choices to be made.
I was not part of the original group of members that created EC. I was not party to any of their discussions. I have only the documents that were created and what I have observed and experienced as an active member. I have a very incomplete picture. Mostly what I am doing now is expressing opinions based on inadequate information.
And in my opinion, EC is not, primarily, a member run organization. And in my opinion, that contributed to some of the magic. In my opinion, some members would like EC to be more member driven. In my opinion, that would be a mistake. I have considerable experience in my Game A career with member driven organizations and I was hoping for something better, something new, something magical.
Another fundamental issue revolves around power. How much power does a volunteer in a particular role have? How much power does a group or a Team of volunteers have? How much power does a member have? How much power does a group of members have? The very first thing I will say is that when discussions are about power we are being postmodern, but this is just my opinion. It was my hope that EC was a metamodern entity led by a people who were themselves at least aspiring to be somehow transformed beings. I think there are such people at EC but perhaps not as many as I once thought. And I do not consider myself sufficiently evolved to a point where I should be granted much power. I want to be in an organization that is operated by people who are better than I am. Perhaps I was merely projecting hopes and dreams on to EC and this was just all in my head.
I now want to backtrack to an early part of the July 17th meeting. The person who informed me that my ego was the problem said, I think, that something needed to change at EC or a group of members would probably leave. This sounded like a change or else threat and did not land well with me and was probably the start of the growing tension I felt. I loved EC the way it was and the way it was moving forward. I do not remember anyone challenging this statement. I do not know if anyone in the meeting felt the comment was inappropriate and felt any tension as I did at that point. And I am not capable of processing these dynamics in real time, a good reason why I do not belong in meetings like this.
Near the end of the meeting something happened that continues to bother me. Several members seemed to be encouraging a particular member to take a step back from one aspect of her role as a volunteer. I thought they were very gentle, sensitive and appreciative. But it seemed to be met with a lot of resistance, what to me felt like too much resistance. It did change my perception of this member to a small degree. I hope that if I am ever in a similar position I will put the wellbeing of the organization, the collective, ahead of my individual desires. But I generally favor the collective over the individual, a tension present in many other contexts besides EC.
After that some lovely words intended to encourage us all to work through the tensions were spoken and the meeting concluded.
It is now Thursday, July 21. My mind is now in a very different place. I feel very detached from Emergent Commons. But I recognize that this is a pattern related to my mood swings. I have gone from being too attached to EC to being too detached.
This afternoon there is a scheduled Engagement Team meeting. Will I go? My favorite dysfunctional coping mechanism is withdrawal and I would like to avoid all contact with EC at this time. I am not ready to engage any part of EC. But, unlike the Coordinator Team meeting, I also have a feeling that I should be there. Joining this team has been a very positive experience. And I have a strong sense that I should honor my commitment as a volunteer.
I am now thinking that, in hindsight, the Sunday meeting was a recipe for disaster from the start. But there was not enough wisdom in the room to see this. I certainly did not have that level of discernment. I had only a faint instinct to not attend. It is now my intuition that if we were to garner lessons learned from that meeting, a pattern would be visible. My sense is that there would not be a consensus of what the underlying problems really were, no consensus on potential solutions and no consensus on next steps. Less likely, but also possible, is that a false consensus would emerge. One thing is now very clear to me. I should not have been at that meeting.
Yesterday I was writing about Emergent Commons but that is misleading in itself. There is much more than EC to my life and this will be true for everyone. Yesterday I was dealing with another frustrating situation which I will describe. I am doing so to illustrate that in reality our lives, and ourselves, are vastly more complex than they appear to be.
Repairs and maintenance of all kinds are very challenging in Mexico for several reasons, including deep cultural differences. Pat and I drink a lot of water and we have a purification system. Almost no one drinks water out of the tap here. Our system was malfunctioning and needed attention. After finally getting a Mexican on site, it was assumed that the problem was the pressure tank. So I authorized the worker to make a purchase and install a new one. And when we opened the tap again the pressure was no better than before the repair. Wrong diagnosis so, consequently, wrong solution (as could easily happen at EC). Back to square one on our drinking water system. This is frustrating but not a big deal as we have a sufficient supply of bottled water (in plastic bottles, so this solution for us is also contributing to a global problem).
Back to EC. It became apparent at the Sunday meeting that there was more to the problem than moving a post from one topic area to another. The very structure of the topics themselves seemed to be a problem for some members, something I had not realized. A few months ago, there was some reorganization of the structure supporting posts. That worked very well for me but not for everyone. For me it was a step in the right direction and for others a step in a wrong direction. And how decisions around topic restructuring were made, a power issue, also seemed problematic for some. And a technical issue, which I did not fully grasp, emerged and it seemed almost no one in the meeting had prior knowledge of its implications. So there I was in a meeting without adequate information and with the wrong temperament, a recipe for disaster.
In my Game A life I attended and chaired many meetings, some great meetings, some lousy meetings and many mediocre meetings. I have had training in small group dynamics and facilitated many of them. I have had leadership training. And now I am retired and I have a bias. Generally, I am sick and tired of meetings, been there, done that. And in retirement I served on our Condominio Board for a few years which reactivated some of the negative attitudes towards meetings which had built up slowly over a long career. This is some of the baggage I still carry into meetings.
My broader point is that many of us still carry baggage. And we have little insight into the baggage of others. And we have little insight into the life stories of others. I am trying to develop a solution to this challenge by practicing radical personal transparency. Very few other people are interested in this path. And, realistically, we have far too little time available to get to know more than a few people well. Because the story is already in the public domain, I would like to again highlight the effort made by Bryan Winchell to engage with me as I requested. It made a difference. But, generally, often we find ourselves in meetings with people who are essentially strangers. And we seem to be more interested in the opinions of people than the people themselves. And we all, appropriately, set very different boundaries and have very different expectations of others. All of this is background noise that is mostly in our heads, much louder in some heads than others.
The theme “we are all monsters” resonates with me. The Integral folks in Ukraine have taught me that it takes a monster to kill a monster. However, personally I prefer to capture this idea with the phrase we are all animals. I am now smiling as I wonder what would have happened on Sunday if instead of “IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD” I had said, “YOU ARE A MONSTER.”
As I continue to reflect on Sunday, and as I continue to reflect on the debriefings of the Austin Emerge conference, insight into another mistake I made is surfacing in my conscious mind.
The purposes and aspirations of Emergent Commons are no longer clear to me. What was crystal clear before Sunday may have been merely a projection of my own hopes and dreams on to EC. And with now having about 450 members, I very much doubt that a consensus on purposes and aspirations for EC is possible.
I am going to table a path forward, but this is just one possibility. I think we need many voices, the more the better. Different people will identify different problems and prioritize them differently and likewise with solutions.
I want to focus on what is most important to me. I believe that there can be no objective determination of what is important to EC. There are only our subjective judgments and opinions.
My aspiration for EC is that it becomes a metamodern community. We do not know how to do that because nobody knows. That is what we are trying to discover with this experiment called Emergent Commons. I will be skeptical of all those individuals who KNOW what THE problem is, what THE solution is and what THE path forward is. This is still a voyage of discovery.
Who should lead us forward? My opinion is that the first 100 members to join EC now bear the responsibility for taking the lead once again. You were the ones who created this wonderful container. You were in the room for the discussions that took place. You had the experience. Only you can know some very important things. Of course, many of the first 100 members did not become active for reasons I have little insight into. Perhaps the “right” number is 150. For the record, I was about the 250th member to join so I am definitely disqualifying myself from this process.
But not all members are equal and me saying so will ruffle some feathers. Some members are obviously wiser than others. I would like to suggest that a Council of Elders of 5 members somehow gets organized. We have enough experience at EC to have an intuitive sense of who should be on the Council. Is there anyone amongst us who would oppose Leilani Jennings being part of such an entity? The Council would have no Terms of Reference, which is a popular Game A approach. The Council would need to figure out its own role themselves. Their authority would emanate from their wisdom.
One task for the Council of Elders will be to guide us through the tension between metamodernism and postmodernism. We will have more than a few members of EC who will not understand this statement. All on the Council of Elders will understand, but they will not know what to do because nobody knows. Significantly, the attendees of the Austin Emerge conference are facing a similar situation.
There are some who may believe that hierarchies and power structures are the problem and indeed, they are very problematic. But this is postmodern thinking. Me stating this will probably offend some EC members who will react defensively. Others will dismiss me or oppose me and they will have very good reasons for doing so, which will in turn influence other members. It is my intention to not fight for any of my ideas as my personal action plan begins to take shape in my mind. I could be very wrong about everything. One thing I am convinced of is that my knowledge is very incomplete, as is everyone’s. That is why we need collective leadership. And that is why we need people willing to follow collective leadership and respect constraints imposed on individuals.
I did try to attend the Member Engagement Team meeting yesterday but was unsuccessful. I spent about 30 minutes trying to determine if I was doing something wrong or if the meeting had been canceled. My attempts to connect directly through the chat with a couple of team members got no response. I found it all rather puzzling. Perhaps it was meant to be this way. Perhaps it was not yet the right time for me to again become active at EC. I did notice that I had 5 messages in my chat and three dozen notifications but I left without looking at any of them.
This morning I am eager to return to EC. I have a lot of energy, too much energy because I am pacing the floor. I am in a very good mood and almost all my thoughts are positive. I am getting a lot of ideas, good ideas and some seem magical. I am seeing certain issues more clearly than ever and the new personal action plan for my EC activities is racing through my mind.
If this sounds good, it isn’t.
At one point in my life I met the diagnostic criteria for cyclothymia, a mental illness. I have had mood swings my whole life. Even now my emotions cycle. There is a short cycle throughout my day with my emotions going up and down. And there is a long cycle better understood as a mood which can last for days. Currently all of this is not impairing my life very much, not causing any big problems.
Most people almost never see me when I am very low or very high. But, of course, my wife does and at times she will say that I am being an asshole. And she will be right. And I will say that I am doing my best and trying to be only a part-time asshole. Were I a full time asshole I would be impossible to live with. And there was a time when that was who I was and my wife threatened to leave me.
This morning I do not care about EC topic areas at all. I like them the way they are but I am confident that I can adapt to any structural changes that may occur. I have an idea for launching a new Crew but I want to let it sit for a while, until my elevated mood dampens down. Sometimes my ideas fade away and sometimes they don’t and this matters.
If it does not fade away, I will share my personal EC action plan with EC members sometime in the next week or so. Likewise with launching a new Crew. I feel ready to go back to EC but I will probably not post or comment very much for a while.
Why am I writing this article? The main reason is applying therapy to myself, processing the intense emotions I was feeling. Writing helps me clear my head. My primary platform for this article is my website where I am telling the story of my life. And Emergent Commons has become an important chapter in my life.
Why am I sharing this article by posting it at EC? I want to be transparent, radically transparent. And I am hoping that it will somehow help EC recover from a low point.
For the record:
The message I received from a member prior to the Sunday meeting read:
Can you come to tonight's meeting, John? It would be good to hea your perspective.
I replied:
I don't have more to say than I put in writing for all to see. But I have a couple of hours to think about this. So at the moment, I am a maybe.
The member replied:
Thanks John. I know the perfect mix of people will be there.
For the record:
My written comment, referred to above, prior to the meeting was:
It seems to me that one of the core issues is... Generally, how much power do volunteers have? And it seems to me that there will never be consensus on an answer. My concern is that if volunteers have very little power, and all power lies with the members on all issues, the result will be a whole lot less action and a lot more chaos and I do not want to take any steps in that direction.
I have more than enough freedom at Emergent Commons. As long as I stay within the Community Guidelines, I am free to post what I want, respond to others as I want, create events as I want. I do not need to be freed from any power any of the volunteers have.
It is not possible to eliminate power imbalances. You (NAME) have power as a member of the Moderation and Conflict support team and you are using that power now, and what you are doing is quite appropriate.
It seems to me that this is more about (NAME) and (NAME) than anything else. And the projection of ourselves on to this matter. The specifics feel so trivial to me.
I would rather be focused on Breakthrough or Breakdown and finding the Third Attractor, a piece of which I have found here at EC.
For the record:
A day or two after the Sunday meeting, a member posted:
The first comment posted was:
Also if you don’t know what I’m talking about, topics are not hidden by default so if you haven’t done anything to hide topics they are not hidden.
The second comment posted was:
I understand this (topics) was brought in in the hope that people wouldn't decide to leave EC. I'm not against them as such, it's just that we don't really know why people leave so I suspect some aspect of "well this would make me leave and how and what this person posts" is inevitably thrown into the mix and decisions.
Human nature is human nature. I don't think it's wise to pander to the needs of an imagined or real minority due to the fact that something posted could be triggering. Butterflies are triggering to my ex wife. She's terrified of them, which my darker side finds absolutely fucking hilarious.
The different views around this caused a rather uncomfortable blow out between 2 members in the coordination meeting. It felt like something of a regression when one member said "it's all in your head!" to another, when the subject of control was brought up. I'd hope we could respect another viewpoint and concerns much better than that. It was a low moment in my opinion, and I hope that person recognises that as such and looks to reconcile it.
But anyways, better to make changes on a concession around actual feedback, surely.
Providing healthy and honest channels for that to be provide. Such as your poll, which is appreciated ????.
The next three comments were posted by me:
It was a low point for me as well, Joe, the very lowest point in my year at EC. Of course I know who the two people are that you are talking about. And I am reflecting deeply on my own behavior. And I note that you are only quoting one person, me, in your comment.
And, (NAME), I hope you reflect on what you have done in taking my comment made in a small meeting and bringing it before the whole community.
I would like to request that no more comments about this matter be made here until the Conflict Resolution Team gets involved.
Another member posted:
John Stokdijk Request denied! Joe didn't mention any names you did! You outed yourself, and then attempted to control further comments , and further, you want to waste the volunteers time with nonsense…
At this point I signed out of Emergent Commons and did not return for several days as I worked on this article, and many other tasks unrelated to Emergent Commons.