Sweeping Change from the Inside Out

Despite the image at the top, this is not a post about any of the Pixar movies. They are terrific and helped me see the importance of feelings and emotions in political life—and a whole lot more which I will return to briefly at the end.

Rather, I’m going to use their title in a very different way to outline a social change strategy that I’ve been inching toward for the last forty years when I began thinking about what it means for interdependence to be the defining characteristic of life.

As we discovered in the Beyond War movement in those days, that was an unconventional idea at the time. Now, the evidence that we are all interconnected is all but inescapable.

Except for in our political life, that is.

That’s one of the reasons why a group of us are getting together this week to consider the possible way that evolutionary theory could and should shape international relations which I’ll write about next week.

Here, however, I want to make a more basic point and suggest that the reality of our interdependence should lead progressives and others to rethink strategies for sweeping social change.

And that’s where my version of Pixar’s title comes into play.

Nowadays, lasting and sweeping social change may best come from the inside out.

Not the other way around.

I had been thinking along those lines for some time, but it took the time I spent with the Mercatus Center and at a Rotary District conference which I wrote about in my two most recent posts for the inside out rather than outside in meme to really take hold.

An Outdated Assumption?

As regular readers know, I’ve been fascinated by—well, obsessed with—systems theory and paradigm shifts since I was an undergraduate.

In graduate school at the University of Michigan, I had the good fortune to work with two of the great social movement experts of the day—Chuck Tilly and Bill Gamson. They made one key assumption that I did not challenge at the time but do now and probably should have done more explicitly sooner.

Shortly after we met, Chuck realized that my grass roots organizing approach lacked either a theoretical or historical foundation both of which I’d need to do my doctoral research on the new left in France. So, he had me read Emile Zola’s?Germinal?(in French, since my language skills needed a boost, too).

It was the most popular of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels about life in nineteenth century France and revolved around a miners’ strike. There is anger aplenty among the miners. But there is also a sense of powerlessness.

Until Etienne Lantier shows up. An itinerant miner who has been fired from his previous job, Lantier lands in the village of Montsou where he gets a mining job and turns himself into a self-educated socialist. Along with a Russian anarchist who also lands a job underground and others, Lantier helps lead a strike that ultimately gets crushed. He escapes and goes off to Paris to organize for the Internationale.

Tilly and Gamson (who smiled knowingly when he saw me carrying?Germinal)?had what we would now call a theory of change in mind that they wanted me to master.

They succeeded.

Then—and now—most of us start with the assumption that kasting, sweeping social change has to start on the fringes.

With dedicated activists like Lantier who promoted ideas and ideals that would disrupt the status quo.

Gradually, support for change would build until some sort of tipping point leads the movement to take off. Admittedly none of us knew that term until Malcolm Gladwell popularized it at the turn of the century.

Still, we already understood the basic idea. Weird, unconventional people come up with new ideas and keep plugging and pushing them until they become conventional.

In more contemporary terms, think about the victory of the campaign for marriage equality? that Sasha Issenberg so brilliantly chronicled in his 2021 book,?The Engagement.

Two Things (At Least) Have Changed

Even when I was in grad school, I had trouble with one key assumption in the conventional wisdom–that we would have to use force of some kind to topple the “bad guys.” As someone who was—and still is—committed to nonviolence in all forms, any use of power “over” someone else is problematic.

In the last forty years, however, I’ve moved to a point that I began questioning the bigger assumption that change had to start on the fringes, Lantier-style, and work its way inward. In fact, I made a first version of that case to Bill’s graduate seminar at Boston College in the mid-2000s when I marveled at the fact that he was still teaching which I’m also rethinking because he was almost exactly the same age then that I am now!

The changes fall into two main buckets that weren’t as relevant in my Michigan days.

First, there is a lot more empirical support for systems theory, complexity science, and what some refer to as wicked problem or a polycrisis. Put simply, it is now far more widely accepted that “what goes around comes around.” There may well be times when we have to force those in power to change, but we also have to be aware that doing so has consequences.

Put simply again, when you force people to change, they tend not to be happy about. Although it won’t always work—but what will?—I’ve come to stress strategies in which we call in and/or turn toward the people we disagree with. In other words, Chuck and Bill were right. Power does matter.

But systems theory suggests that power doesn’t have to be something I exert over you. It can also be something I exert with you. To see that, just look at this figure of an interconnected network or system and realized that once you change any of its nodes, everything else changes too through a set of direct and indirect relationships that ties the whole system together.

Indeed, as my French got better, I realized that its equivalent word,?pouvoir, can be both a noun and a verb. In either case—but especially as a verb–it merely conveys being able to do things and does not necessarily imply either power over or power with.

I’ve chosen to emphasize power with in my own work. That, in turn, brings with it a desire to build broad coalitions that, more often than not, include folks who aren’t as fringy as I once was or Chuck and Bill would say change agents had to be.

That has been reinforced by one key change in the real world political landscape. Public opinion polls suggest that pretty much everyone is dissatisfied with the status quo—not just those of us on the left or right end of the political spectrum.

One body of research, however, suggests that what I sometimes jokingly refer to as the “grumpy middle” is not likely to be drawn to the kinds of solutions being proposed by either the self-identified left or any version of MAGA.

Although the evidence here is murkier, my grumpy middle is quite different from the so-called silent majority of my youth. The evidence suggests that people are looking less for finger-pointing diagnoses of what’s wrong that lay the blame on one side or the other but for potentially constructive solutions that have a chance of getting at the roots causes of the polycrisis—race, gender, climate change, economic inequality, migration, and more.

But that’s not the main reason why

If I change anything, everything changes

People in the middle are at least as pissed off as their colleagues on the fringes

Just in different ways

Why I Might Be Right

There are at least three reasons why I think an inside-out strategy might work now even though it would not have stood a chance back in my days in the new left—whose goals are still at the heart of my work.

First, the public opinion polls don’t lie. Unlike the case in the 1970s, there is evidence that a growing proportion of the American (and global) public realizes that we face serious problems that can’t be solved with “business as usual.” Climate change as reflected in the hurricanes of the last couple of weeks are but the tip of clichéd iceberg (sorry to mix meteorological metaphors). That’s true across the board in other policy areas as well.

This is all part of what feeds what I’m calling the grumpy middle—yes, I know that I will have to find a better term. Still, the bottom line is clear. Just about everyone I meet decries the lack of meaning in our lives and the lack of credible alternatives to that same business as usual.

Maybe, just maybe, an inside-out strategy that offers “meaning” and is linked to a new vision of a world we would all want to live in would get us started.

Second, there are interesting and overlapping changes afoot that you can see in the adoption of new management styles in some of our most dynamic companies and the growing popularity of mindfulness/emotional awareness. This isn’t the place to go into the “literature” on either of those topics. It might be enough to note both of these topics are now included (along with accounting and microeconomic theory) in the curriculum in all of the top MBA programs.

Maybe, just maybe, an inside-out strategy that offers “meaning” and is linked to a new vision of a world we would all want to live in would get us started.

Third, we’re seeing hints of change in places that I would not have imagined possible when I sat at Chuck and Bill’s intellectual feet. My wife and I are now active in Rotary. We were drawn to it because of its peacebuilding work. As we get more deeply involved, we keep meeting Rotarians who see the need to “change the world.” Few of them think in terms of wicked problems of paradigm shifts, but they could. And, who could be more representative of mainstream American than the Rotarians. (or the Kiwanians or the Elks or the Lions or the Odd Fellows).

There is a parallel understanding of the need for what feels like inside-out theories of change in the philanthropic community. Ever since I went to the Mercatus Center event, I’ve been talking with staff members at the New Pluralists organization. Similarly, while doing an Ecosia search for this post, I discovered the Boston-based?Barr Foundation?that explicitly uses the inside out meme to describe its work in supporting public and private sector leadership in the arts, climate change, and education, mostly in Massachusetts.

Then there is the?Inside Out Project?which I also discovered in the same Ecosia search). Initially created by the French artist JR who won the 2011 TED prize, its members have reached half a million people around the world who have contributed to making more than 2,500 publicly displayed black and white pictures on issues that matter to them all over the world.

Maybe, just maybe, an inside-out strategy that offers “meaning” and is linked to a new vision of a world we would all want to live in would get us started.

It Does Require Pixar’s Version, Too

I started by borrowing—actually stealing and changing the meaning of—Pixar’s title.

Let me end by returning to its original meaning.

You will recall that the hit movie explored the importance of surfacing our often hidden feelings and emotions through the lens of an eleven-year-old girl.

The more I thought through an inside-out political strategy, the more I found myself returning to Pixar’s original use of the term.

Although I don’t have time to get to it here, it’s all but impossible to do my kind of inside-out strategy unless you do Pixar’s, too.

And probably do it first.

NEXT TIME—An amazing workshop on evolutionary thinking and international relations.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily?reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.?