Author: pcostello

NSL were guests at the ATFP and APN forum with the Washington Center last night and lots of good questions came up. The one that we hear a lot is about NSL and normalization…that programs like ours pretend an equality of opportunity while hiding a disparity of power.

The team and the alums answered it well, saying that they give themselves permission to participate on NSL and then decide. For them, that is not how they experienced it. They claim the right to decide for themselves, contrary to the dogmas of those who are full of shoulds and should nots. Normalization sounds to them like a parent voice telling them who they can play with. They resent being treated like children unable to make their own adult decisions.

But there is also another answer which has to do with how you see power. When you think of power as armies and economies and tanks and guns, then there is clearly no balance of power between the sides. One is the occupier and the other is the occupier. But that is a limiting view of power if you think in terms of stories, where stories reflect and create asymmetrical power relations.

Think of the David v Goliath struggles of the last century, eg Vietnam, where the USA won the war and lost the story. Think of how the USSR collapsed. they still had power but the story collapsed into incoherency. Or think of the insurgencies that erupt with no military force but a power over hearts and minds. That is real power.

The battle for peace in Israel Palestine is being raged in the hearts and minds of the world right now, independent of how many rockets get fired or how many bombs dropped. NSL says that stories reach across walls and prejudices and break down barriers, they are a call to conscience and to claim a deeper humanity. The NSL team come to share stories, and there is no equivalence of someone who lives near the beach in Tel Aviv and can travel the world at whim and someone who lives in a refugee camp and can’t go anywhere. If you want to call the act of witness, an act of resistance, then that is what it is. But there is no sense of normalization or papering over the inconvenient truths. That would kill the story.

The real growth happens once one person decides to shut up and actually listen for a change. Then you see the power equation shift dramatically. Israelis are actually hearing and being changed by what they hear their Palestinian team mates are saying. And Palestinians are hearing for the first time the human story of the people who occupy them and how imprisoned they feel in a system that indoctrinates and conscripts them before they are barely old enough to make an adult decision about anything. When 18 year olds in the USA are leaving for college and a new adventure, 18 year olds in Israel are donning a uniform and learning how to operate an M16.

Yet NSL basically agrees with what the normalization critique is saying, but disagrees that the correct conclusion is non-engagement. It draws exactly the opposite conclusion. You speak truth to power, you witness, you challenge, you confront, you resist, you work to get a hearing in the halls of power and in the corridors of your enemies. You do not use lack of physical power as the excuse to not even exercise the moral power you do have, or expect the world to rally to the celebration of your victimhood. As we always say, Rage is not a tactic. If you want to change the world, you have to change the story. And if you have a story, you have power.

The new question the broadcasters put to the pundits before a election debate.
“She has to be more likable.”
“He has to be more Presidential.”
oh….thanks…how profound.
Since when did two bit pundits know what a candidate needed to do???? One can only Imagine….

Since the Bush-Rove days, the election strategy de jour is win by dividing. Appeal to the basest of bases so you get your ardent voters out to beat the crap out of the other side, and put gay marriage and abortion or God or Hillary as wedge issues on the ballots as extra incentive.

Then you win…just.. and in your very next breath say.. with no hint of irony or shame …its time to unite folks..I wasn’t serious..I was only scaring you to get your vote..I won …so now it’s all ok..what I said about migrants, women, mexicans..nukes, russia, just kidding…come on…please .let’s now come together as Americans.!!! Your vote has made me into a stateman. Crooked Hillary ..lock her up… is now a great public servant. We are all americans.

“I never said half the things I said.” Yogi Berra

“Its not what you said that matters
and its not even what you think you said
(which is sometimes totally different)
Its not even what your audience heard
its what they think they heard you saying.”

SO,

Unless you speak inside the story that shapes the Listeners Listening
you will trigger them back into their own preferred stories anyway
reducing you to the script they expected.  Nothing Changes.
.
Its not the story you tell that matters,
despite all our workshops and training
its the story you trigger
the story people listen to you through.
Story is the shape of our listening. Now that reminds of of something I read or maybe even wrote way back
the Shape of our listening

It is one of those quotable quotes- “that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it.” It looks good on a T-shirt and a bumper sticker, and its too clever by half. The irony of course, is that this interpretation of philosophers interpreting the world is also an interpretation.

The sleight of hand is to make you think that changing the world is different from changing what the world means. Yet, what great minds like Marx or Freud or Darwin do is not that much in terms of  heroic action. Take a voyage to the Galapagos Islands  and come home and write a book- see women with various forms of hysteria and write a case study, study the economies of the industrializing world at the British Library, and write a few hefty tomes- Yes, Marx does change the world but he changes it by seeing it through a different lens, understanding it as a hidden process of consciousness and liberation, and therefore ripe for revolution. He did what any good philosopher does, reinterpret the world, and thereby he changed it. He makes his own saying into a lie.

Nothing helps change more than the story that we invent that tells us that we are on the brink of it, or that  it is urgent because things are broken and desperate. Sound familiar? Washington is broken. Wall Street is running the show. Government is corrupt and bloated. Its what narrative practitioners so enjoy about any election year- that the headlines of any or all of the candidates echo the cliches that are as old as Plato and as hackneyed as Jefferson and Hamilton. Imagine a candidate saying, “Nothing needs to change, that we are changing too much, that we need to get back to what we used to do in the 1950’s.”   Won’t happen.

To change the world is the reverse of what Marx said because it means changing how we interpret it, just as he did.  If we, like him, interpret it as  ripe for change, and we convince people that we are reading history right, we too can muster the masses to our cause.  

Finally, this might make a good memo to the Presidential Candidates for 2016- if you want to change the world, help us change the way we see it. Don’t pander to our lazy habits of mind that don’t want to think too hard about the hard issues. Stop feeding our messianic delusions  by promising that you and only you can save us from Mexicans, Martians and Marxists. You might not change our hearts, but why not at least try changing our minds.

When combatants decide to share a personal story, one that comes out of the authority of their own experience, not parotting some tribal or religious orthodoxy, they begin to dismantle the wall of separation. They turn a wall into a window. Brick by brick, story by story, light comes through.
Underneath all the disagreements and bitterness, a shared human story gradually emerges.

The stories that feed war and fuel the military’s  propaganda machine can only work by stripping the “other” of their humanity.  For that reason, sharing a story from the heart becomes a profound act of resistance.

NSL’s goal is to create a Listening culture in the midst of a debate where people mostly shout past one another. At NSL, stories are treated as gifts, and where by modeling a narrative way, people can reclaim the capacity that war has stolen from them, the power to give people  back their humanity.

Go to Wall of Stories 

What if…. the old story- that Israelis and Palestinians can never get along, that they will always hate and mistrust each other, that violence is in their DNA, gets contradicted every summer in a small and secret Washington DC human laboratory? Its not at the NIH, and its not a CIA plot. Its not even Los Alamos! Its a bit of a secret, of course, and its fragile. Sometimes it blows up, but sometimes, sometimes, it works.

Who knew? And what difference could it make?

What if…. a small group of intrepid activists commit to a 7 week experiment every year, one that might prove the past to be irrelevant when they realize the one thing that unites them as young people is their future.

Like their elders, they can’t even agree on the past, but unlike their elders, they inherited it. They did not live it, and so, they don’t have to keep on reliving it. The future is a different country,, if that is what they choose to make it. For the first time, they are confronted with a choice they never thought they had.

What if…. these pioneers do it hard, struggle to hear each other and argue and cry and disagree, but yet, remain committed, remain at the table. Over time, they realize that there is something they are creating that does not blunt their differences but shows them glimpses of another way, hints of another possibility. What if this could become the new story? What if they as leaders return home to translate this new story into reality. That is what NSL is all about.

Are you a pioneer? Do you want to test yourself in a human experiment about difference? Do you want to explore the distant future up close, then NSL might be for you.

If you are passionate, ready to argue and to listen, eager to engage the other side, prepared to be shocked and made feel uncomfortable, convinced of course that you are always right but ready to admit you may be totally wrong, then NSL might be the summer of a lifetime, something not to be missed.

On the other hand, If you want a relaxed, polite and comfortable summer, meeting new friends and having fun, go to Miami. NSL is like a boot camp for change makers. You come thinking you will change the world, and return understanding that first, the world has to change you. And that is never easy.

If you are ready? Go here. http://www.newstoryleadership.org/how-to-apply/