2025-09-15

So many negative words begin with “dis-”. I was thinking this morning particularly about “disorientation” and “disempowerment”, because I was feeling a bit of that. And then, reflecting that those two are powerful tools in the hands of those in power in any situation, to cement their power. Because, when you are disempowered and disoriented, you're in a kind of cognitive “freeze” state. You could see disempowerment as not knowing what to do, because nothing in your reach seems to change anything. And you could see disorientation as not knowing what to think.

Consider “gaslighting”. A person who is gaslighted¹⁾ is pressured into disbelieving their own senses; their own sense of reality. Or consider how, in current politics, a constant stream of disinformation makes it hard to keep a grip on what is real. If we are not empowered to find good sense, then we don't know what to think, what to do, how to respond. In effect, our agency is disabled; we cannot function properly. If we come to believe there is nothing we can do, a state that has been referred to as “learned helplessness”, it can be seen and felt as depression. The psychological state of “freeze” is close by.

Disorientation and disempowerment play into the hands of the confident peddlars of myth. If I am confused and don't know what to do, I'm especially prone to being told by a charismatic leader that I should be doing what he or she says I should be doing. That would relieve me short-term of the cognitive burden of uncertainty; though with the long-term price of discovering later on that what I have done doesn't align with what I believe, or with my identity, when I recover a sense of those.

In passing, I've already mentioned “disbelieving” and “disinformation”. There are others that I find significant in this context.

• disillusionment
• dissociation
• dislocation
• disorder

If we can see some of these dis- concepts as playing a significant role in current troubles and crises, then maybe we have something we can address. And then, I remembered someone recently (I think at the Festival of Commoning) that so many “co-” words are what we are into. So …

Lots of nice words begin with “co-”

• cooperation
• collaboration
• coordination
• commons
• commoning

and newer terms like

• co-creation
• co-living
• CoFi

But then, maybe we can invent a few more, taking suitable “dis-” words and coining (or promoting, or reviving) their “co-” forms.

I see disorientation as a very individual problem. Reorientation could be either way, but if you call it co-orientation it makes it clear that the way you find your bearings is in coordination with others. If you have, say, a deliberately developmental space, then the others with you in that space – your peer group – will be helping you and each other to orient to what is significant; what matters; what makes a positive difference; what is aligned with life.

The word has been used before, but I may not be aligned with past usage.

This hardly needs explaining, as it is so close to the idea of “power with” as opposed to “power over”. The word seems to have been used in roughly this sense.

Co-informing and co-information seem to have been used simply to mean “together with others”. But I find these terms more suggestive. To me, co-information suggests knowledge commons. And when we “co-inform” each other, it suggests to me that we are helping each other to make sense of the world. Indeed, to me this suggests ontological commoning.

I want nothing to do with the meaning of “closing offset order”! Unfortunately, we don't seem to have a current usage that matches with “coordinate”. “Coordinate” serves well enough as a verb, but what of the noun that results from coordination? “Order” is possible, but it does have quite some top-down resonance, and we want to avoid that. So how about introducing “co-order” as a third option: neither disorder nor top-down imposed order?

Credit to Tom Woodroof for suggesting, yesterday, that

'order' vs 'disorder' is more fundamental than 'co-operation' vs 'competition', and it's order (of a very particular sort - commons) that we're looking to build.

In brief, then,

• have a look at whether you are suffering from a kind of freeze of agency, or distress, brought on by disorientation, disempowerment, disillusion or disinformation.
• look to colleagues, collaborators, cohabitants, community members, your collective, etc. to change the appropriate “dis-” into a “co-”. Explore the co-orientation of collective ikigai; refer to a knowledge commons, or if it's not there, build one collectively to co-inform yourselves.

• knowledge commons
• collective ikigai
• ontological commoning