Agency

Reunion

I don’t understand racism.

I mean, I do understand it. Unconscious bias is unavoidable. Fears and resentments are part of the human feature set too. Acting cautiously when faced with something unfamiliar has helped humanity survive for thousands of years. So I understand a little distance when getting a first look at someone who seems a lot different than we are.

But to then judge someone on that difference makes me more than a little uncomfortable, and to condemn them as inferior or unworthy because of it seems cruel. Plus just morally wrong. Content of character and all that. I haven’t met anyone new who didn’t have more and more in common with me the longer we talked. I believe we all have the same right to walk this earth in our own ways (provided, of course, that our own ways don’t hurt someone else). And it’s incredibly arrogant to think that we alone see the truth of the universe. Talk about hubris.

What I don’t understand is why we don’t treat the world in general and the United States in particular as a big family reunion. Think of a potluck with barbecue and mole and pumpkin curry and flatbread and honey walnut prawns and seviche and falafel and pelmeni and injera and kugel and raclette. Plus baked ziti. Lots of baked ziti.

We could have massive soccer and softball games and the world’s largest three-legged race. We will need a few billion neon t-shirts though.

I’m an introvert, but I’d go to that.

I say reunion because we all split up thousands of years ago. As we left behind our great-grandparents to the nth power back in Africa, some of us went north and some went east. Some didn’t go anywhere and stayed put. And eventually we populated the world. And as we did so, we discovered how to survive in different places. We adapted to our environments. But at our core we remained largely as we had been. Including skeptical of new people.

So whether our particular ancestors walked across the land bridge or came by boat – forcibly or not – or migrated here after settling down somewhere else for a while, we all ended up back together here in this land where we are all immigrants. We aren’t really new people, just people long separated.

So let’s have the serious discussion about how many new people our community can successfully integrate each year. I am an includer by nature, but the resource limits that constrain us are real. So we will have to prioritize among the people who want to join us. And some of those need to be people fleeing dangerous places, because we don’t want to be complete assholes.

Let’s also not lose sight of the selfish need to bring in immigrants to make up the shortfall of new people we aren’t producing ourselves.

I really hope I get to be a grandfather. I remember my father’s reaction when my elder daughter, his first grandchild, was born. The joy. The affirmation. The complete, total satisfaction. He said as he reflected that he needed nothing else from this life.

I’d like to feel that way.

But whereas my parents have nine grandchildren I will likely have two. At best. If you’re a boomer like me (or even a Gen Xer like my brother), our kids aren’t having kids. And if you’re younger, you’re not having enough kids to sustain our community. Which is fine – I believe first in maximum agency, so you do you and I’ll do me, and together we’ll adjust. And part of that adjustment, at least for all of us concerned about having a healthy community, is to find ways to provide work and care and goods and services to all of our members,. And if we don’t make our own people to help with all that, then we need to import them.

But let’s not pollute the important discussion about who can join us and when they can come with xenophobic thoughts of worth. We are all worthy. And anyone who hints that we aren’t is either bigoted, ignorant, or cynically serving themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

And in the meantime, who wants to organize this amazing and wonderful family reunion?

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

I believe in Agency.

Letting every person make as many decisions about their life as possible.

I draw the line at full Agency when a choice or decision hurts another person, but until then I want us all to have discretion about what we do with our time and our energies. Let us each create the life we want.

Agency is just a fancier word for choice. I use it a lot, maybe to sound smarter than I am, but it really is the foundational value on which everything else I believe is hung. It’s like freedom, but less static. Freedom to me is lack of controls, whereas Agency implies action. Freedom allows choice but doesn’t demand it. Agency requires action, the act of choosing.

I talk to my children about intention too. Choosing with intention. To me, that’s even more what what Agency is about: choosing consciously and with intent for an outcome. You may not get what you hope, but you increase your chances, and that ups the odds of living a satisfying life.

I’ve not always used my Agency. In fact, I’ve been pretty negligent until recently about taking action to achieve a specific goal. Most of that is because I haven’t set intentions, but it’s also true that I haven’t had the courage to try for the ones I did set. I trusted the universe to take care of me, and that is a sure path to an underwhelming life. The universe is ambivalent to each of us; it’s not malevolent, it doesn’t want to screw us to the floor, but it’s not going to care if we’re unhappy with our lots either. It will march on in step with that taskmaster Time, blissfully ignorant of our frustrations.

No, it’s up to each of us to choose the life we want to live and then work to create it. Not one of us will get everything on which we set our sights – the universe seems petulant that way – but those who work most diligently and with clear eyes on their own prize will reap more of it than those of us who coast. 80-10-10 after all (80% of the time we get what we earn, 10% we get hosed, and 10% we get away with something).

We win at life when we don’t begrudge what we sacrifice for our choices, because instead what we gain with those very same choices fulfills us. We win when we make the benefit worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of foregoing other choices in favor of those that bring us the biggest returns.

My experiment in Agency is still in its nascent stages, and I am overwhelmed with doubts from time to time. But I have also experienced the exhilaration and excitement when I have a small success on the road to my larger intentions. Because I know that I made that little success happen.

I look forward to the rush I’ll get when I achieve one of my big goals.