Moving Lots of People in Different, Little Ways

“HOPE is a VERB with its SLEEVES ROLLED UP!” - David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College

If you’ve been following my site for any period of time, you might have started to understand what I’m trying to get at - perhaps I’ve even become too repetitive on certain subjects. If I could sum up my site into a simple “thesis”, it might be something along the lines of: if we want to change the world, we have to move lots of people in lots of little ways. The ways that we move different people are, well, different.

Ronald Reagan was a mastermind of this. Barack Obama has a similar strategy. To move “conservatives” (politically), progressives need to figure out how to move them on issues that they are progressive on. Many evangelicals, for example, care deeply about poverty and employment. We need to take to them in terms of our values and reframe the debate. Conservatives don’t own the moral high ground on religious and spiritual issues, and indeed, the evangelical voting bloc is splintering. We can regain this ground - we have righteousness on our side.

If we work hard enough, if we are strategic, if we are visionary, and if we are effective communicators, all of these efforts - both qualitative and quantitative - will eventually add up and snowball into dramatic and wide-spread institutional changes.

Lots of people and events inform my thinking on this. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” In the book he draws upon many fields, from sociology, to psychology, to marketing, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. He focused on: the message, the messengers (including people with various types of personalities), and the context of the message.

Folks ranging from George Lakoff to the smartMeme Collective have taught lots of people in the movement that we need to be effective language warriors. Language, effective communicating, framing, messaging, memes (contagious bits of information that spread virally through society via social networks), and the creation of new progressive narratives are all a vitally important part of changing the world.

And then theres history and dozens of revolutionary and radical movements who’ve waged liberatory movements and conducted liberatory experiments in human social organization - all showing the change is indeed possible and that other forms of social organization are possible.

Basically, theres a grand, yet simple and straight-forward, theory of change, and it has supporting evidence in many fields of science, ranging from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. Its how human interact, grow, and transform the space around them. There are no statics in society. The category of “conservative” was as much a constructed and arbitrary one as any other political label. We just have to redefine the debate and we’ll start owning the right! And if we are effective in these tasks, and intentional about how we organize ourselves, then before we know it, we will be marching to freedom…