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2024-10-02non-possessive collaboration

Vicarious proselytism

2024-10-18

This piece comes from a reflection on a meeting of the Council of “The Gathering” (was “of Tribes”) yesterday.

I went to the Gathering of Tribes in Portugal in September and in general, overall, it was a great and deep experience on many levels. But one less-welcome characteristic still seemed to be present: some “tribes” seemed still to be there to gain members; to grow themselves, or, in a word, to “proselytize”. In some ways that is to be expected … many people have many (and varied) good ideas about how to regenerate, how to make the world a better place, or something like that, and it's hardly surprising that they would like others to join them. And sure, there were people there, not already committed to any one “tribe”, who may have been interested in joining one of the “tribes” there. The problem with proselytism is when a person is being persuaded to change allegiance from one tribe to another, from one cause to another, from one story or healing narrative to another, from one religion to another (the classic case). That is proselytism, and it is generally seen in negative terms.

This is exactly one of the challenges of the term “tribes”, and that is why I'm glad that looking forward to 2026 it is no longer a Gathering “of Tribes”, but more straightforwardly “The Gathering”, as in the revised domain name, the-gathering.earth. My point is that you can't really belong to and engage with more than one tribe at once, at least in the historical sense. The term “tribe” brings up images of people you actually live with — how many of us could sustain even a double life in this sense, of being simultaneously a member of more than one tribe?

Moving on to that other unusual term, vicarious — I mean it not just in the sense of experiencing something for another person, but also meaning taking some action on behalf of another. The two words “vicarious” and “proselytism” together make a kind of paradox, or oxymoron. If proselytism is adding to your own tribe at the expense of another tribe, it cannot be vicarious in a straightforward sense. And it is here, in this paradoxical juxtaposition, that I want to make the point that is relevant to non-possessive collaboration.

Imagine, now … what if, instead of trying to convert people to our own cause, or bring them into our own “tribe”, we took more care of them – listening to them, sensing just where they are and what they need – and helped them to discern where they would fit in best; where they would thrive; where they would be truly whole and healthy? 1) Rather than only the narrow interests of our own tribe, can we (that is, all the groups in this global regenerative movement) prioritise the interests both of each individual, and each group equally, not just our own? That would be served exactly by signposting people to the place of best synergy for them.

In our Gathering retrospective→prospective Council, the question came up, which groups should be invited to the Gathering in 2026? I didn't have a direct answer for this, but rather another question: Who are the groups, the movements, the organisations, that are ready to do all this that I am pointing to? Those are the folks who I would like to see at future gatherings. I'd like to see people who are awake, in their own way, to principles similar to non-possessive collaboration; who are just as concerned about other groups as their own; who think in terms of collective ikigai; of how their own contribution fits with the larger ecosystem, separate from which global regeneration is impossible.

How do we recognise such groups? I'm not sure; but we can learn a lot from asking

  • how do they treat new people coming along?
  • what are the boundaries and rules like?
  • how are they owned / managed / governed?
  • how are conflicts addressed, and potentially resolved?
  • do they try to define their mission etc. internally, or in dialogue with other actors in their ecosystem?

These are related to Elinor Ostrom's patterns or principles for Commoning, except for the first, which is specifically the area I'm looking at just now. As for the wider study of Knowledge Commons in this context, I would like to look beyond Ostrom. Please help me look deeper into this whole area of non-possessive collaboration, specifically here in terms of not being possessive of members in your organisation, group, or network.

p.s. I chose the phrase partly because Google cannot find any instances of people putting those two words together in the past…

1)
I often refer to the perceptive definition of health used by The Peckham Experiment, “mutual synthesis of organism and environment”.
d/2024-10-18.txt · Last modified: 2024-10-18 20:08 by simongrant