Putin and the Power of Collective Action from Shared Awareness: A 12-Point Meditation on Our Current Moment

Half I: The Social Grammar of Destruction

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On this weblog, I invite you to hitch me in a meditative journey on the present second. We begin with Putin’s battle in Ukraine, unpack among the deeper systemic forces at play, have a look at the rising panorama of conflicting social fields, and conclude with what could be the rising superpower of Twenty first-century politics: our capability to activate collective motion from a shared consciousness of the entire.

1. Crossing the Threshold

“The world won’t ever be the identical.” These are, in accordance with New York Instances columnist Tom Friedman, the seven most harmful phrases in journalism. It’s not solely Friedman who has used them to make sense of our present second. Many people are doing the identical. Watching Putin’s invasion of Ukraine occur in real-time since February 24 makes most of us really feel caught and paralyzed by the horrific acts which might be unfolding in entrance of us.

It feels as if we’re crossing a threshold into a brand new interval. This new interval has been likened to the chilly battle period that led to 1989. Some counsel that Vladimir Putin is attempting to show again the clock by no less than 30 years in his effort to make Russia “nice once more.” I consider, although, that we’re in a fairly completely different state of affairs at this time. The chilly battle was a battle between two opposing social and financial methods on the idea of a shared navy logic that specialists seek advice from as mutually assured destruction — or MAD, a somewhat becoming acronym. The MAD “working system” labored as a result of it relied on a shared logic. It was grounded in a shared set of assumptions, and a shared sense of actuality on either side of the geopolitical divide.

At present, although, this shared logic and sense of actuality has been fractured. We see it domestically in lots of nations, together with, painfully, in america. Right here we’re seeing an erosion of the very foundation of the democratic course of as witnessed within the final elections. Since that election, we’ve got one get together who nonetheless is denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcomes, whereas actively participating in voter suppression (27 states have launched greater than 250 payments with prohibit­ive voting provi­sions since Trump misplaced in 2020). Add to that the Fb/Meta algorithm machine that helps the mass fabrication of shock, anger, misinformation, and worry, and also you see why this polarization and fragmentation quantities to an assault on the very foundations of democracy. The capability of societies to carry areas for making sense of complicated social points and analyze them from completely different views is in most nations below assault and dissipating.

2. Putin’s Blind Spot

After Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, Angela Merkel, the then Chancellor of Germany, talked to President Putin and reported to President Obama that, in her view, Mr. Putin had misplaced contact with actuality. He was, she stated, residing in “one other world.” This mindset of fragmentation, isolation, and separation is nowhere extra strikingly visualized than within the current pictures of Putin alone at one finish of an enormous desk and his staff (or sometimes a head of state), on the different finish.

This isolation (out of your staff, from individuals who assume otherwise, and finally from actuality), is clearly at odds with the more and more risky complexity of our real-world challenges at this time. Despite the fact that Putin, Commander-In-Chief of one of the highly effective armies in world historical past, might proceed to win all of the navy battles for some time, it feels as if this separation from actuality — that’s, the truth of his personal blind spots — have already sown the seeds of his demise. His blind spots appear to be the power of civil society and the energy of collective motion from shared consciousness.

The power of civil society exhibits up within the braveness and resolve of the Ukrainian folks — not simply the navy personnel, however everybody. The entire inhabitants has dropped the whole lot else with a view to collaborate on their collective protection and survival in a means that touches and evokes nearly all people. Putin and the Russian military have been evidently taken abruptly by this collective resolve. Their second shock was the response in Russia. Civil society has proven up there too within the type of anti-war demonstrations in additional than 1,000 cities throughout Russia; 7,000 Russian scientists signed an open letter in opposition to the battle inside just a few days after the invasion began. These seen alerts of dissent will not be large in dimension, but. However they’re an vital starting that might develop rapidly into one thing a lot wider and deeper throughout Russia, at the same time as Russian propaganda and suppression clamp down on any protest ever extra harshly.

On the night of February 24, the day the Russian military invaded Ukraine, the European Council, which contains all 27 heads of state of EU nations, met in Brussels. When the assembly concluded, they introduced a set of historic selections and sanctions: sanctions focusing on Russia’s monetary, vitality, and transportation sectors; a journey ban and asset freeze for key people and oligarchs; and direct navy assist for a non-EU nation. On issues of international coverage, the European Council should agree unanimously earlier than taking motion, and thus is infamous for occasionally NOT appearing. What had occurred that created such historic and unanimous selections? Why, on that night and all through the next week, have been the EU members in such robust settlement?

We don’t but know the complete story, however there appear to be two important enabling elements: (a) seeing the brutality of the Russian invasion and (b) a direct dialog between the EU leaders and President Zelensky from his bunker in Kyiv, by which he instructed his colleagues that it might properly be the final time they see him alive. These occasions facilitated an awakening on the a part of EU leaders: they realized that they’re very a lot part of the issue, that they have been funding Putin’s battle by shopping for Russian fuel and oil, and that they wanted to behave very otherwise going ahead.

This phenomenon, when a bunch of leaders begins to behave from a shared seeing and a shared consciousness of the entire state of affairs — somewhat than from a mess of summary and narrowly outlined nationwide agendas — is what I seek advice from as Collective Motion from Shared Consciousness (CASA).

Why have been Putin and his extremely subtle intelligence staff apparently unable to precisely assess and anticipate each the civil society response and the swift unity of the Western nations?

No one is aware of the reply to that query. However I’ve a hunch: as a result of Putin’s intelligence system, which can be sensible in analyzing current formations and forces, has a blind spot in relation to actions that come up from the coronary heart and from a shared consciousness of the entire. However that’s exactly the sort of collective motion that the courageous Ukrainian folks embody in such an inspiring means, and that’s starting to ripple out to the streets, villages, and cities in Russia and elsewhere, together with somewhat unlikely locations, such because the European Council in Brussels.

3. The Blind Spot of the West

Putin might have blind spots across the energy of civil society, and the ability of collective motion that arises from shared consciousness: however what in regards to the blind spots of the West? Let me be extra particular: IF it was that clear that Putin deliberate to invade Ukraine (as US intelligence had predicted for a lot of months), and IF it was equally clear that NATO might by no means instantly step in (with out risking an all-out nuclear battle), then WHY was it so inconceivable for the West to easily comply with Putin’s typically repeated main request: a assure that Ukraine wouldn’t be allowed to hitch NATO (identical to Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Eire, all of whom are members of the EU however not of NATO)?

What have been Western — significantly US — leaders pondering? What was the rationality of the Western two-point technique in opposition to Russia: (1) a long time of ignoring and discounting Russian objections to the assorted waves of the eastward growth of NATO, and (2) betting that Putin would change his conduct when threatened with financial sanctions?

That wager has all the time been a really lengthy shot. The Soviet Union operated below these situations for many of its existence. And at this time it merely strengthens the China-Russia alliance and financial integration. How is {that a} rational technique if — as US President Biden sees it — China is seen because the US’s main strategic rival?

Ever for the reason that first wave of NATO’s eastward growth to the borders of the previous Soviet Union, after which later inside these borders, a small variety of thought of voices within the US international coverage institution have warned that the growth might result in catastrophic penalties. Specifically, George Kennan, the important thing architect of the Western chilly battle containment technique in opposition to the Soviet Union, warned in a 1998 New York Instances interview after the primary spherical of NATO growth, that he noticed such a transfer as “the start of a brand new chilly battle.” He stated, “I feel the Russians will step by step react fairly adversely and it’ll have an effect on their insurance policies. I feel it’s a tragic mistake. There was no motive for this in any way. Nobody was threatening anyone else.” Robert M. Gates, who served as Secretary of Protection within the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, mirrored in his 2015 memoir that Bush’s initiative to convey Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was “really overreaching.” In his view, it was “recklessly ignoring what the Russians thought of their very own very important nationwide pursuits.”

Why was the Biden administration so deaf to the repeated Russian complaints? What would People say if, as an example, Mexico, have been to hitch a hostile navy alliance? What would occur if Mexico have been joined by Texas (a state that previously belonged to Mexico)? How would the White Home really feel if missiles in Houston have been pointed on the US capital? Properly, we are able to solely guess. However we don’t need to guess within the case of Cuba. The 1962 Cuban Missile Disaster immediately introduced the world teetering towards World Struggle III. What ended the disaster? The Russians pulled their medium-range missiles out of Cuba. That’s what everybody remembers. What nobody remembers is the second a part of the settlement with the Russians: the US pulled its personal medium-range missiles out of Turkey. That a part of the deal was stored secret so President Kennedy wouldn’t come throughout as weak to the US public.

This brings us proper again to Biden. Why is US international coverage perpetually unable to respect the safety considerations of one other main nuclear energy that has been invaded by Western forces greater than as soon as (Hitler, Napoleon) and that within the Nineteen Nineties went by one other traumatic expertise: the collapse of each its empire and its financial system (guided by the recommendation of Western specialists)?

What made the straightforward acknowledgment of those considerations so tough? Was it ignorance? Conceitedness? Or just an lack of ability to construct actual relationships with a maybe traumatized president of a rustic that misplaced 24 million folks throughout World Struggle II? Regardless of the motive, the actual fact is that THAT technique — no matter it could have been — crashed and burned.

Mentioning these shortcomings in America at this time is simply as in style because it was in 2003 to criticize the US invasion of Iraq (which, just like the invasion of Ukraine, was performed on false and fabricated pretenses). Nobody desires to listen to it. As a result of it’s a part of the collective Western blind spot: our personal function within the making of the tragedy that’s unfolding in Ukraine.

It’s price noting that George W. Bush, after launching the battle on terror in 2001, on the finish of his second time period determined to make one other main transfer: inviting Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO. That call seeded one other chain of probably catastrophic occasions that, 14 years later, in 2022, is exploding in our face.

Each of those Bush blunders resulted from the identical mental construction: binary pondering that’s primarily based on dividing the world into good and evil. It’s that paradigm of thought that prevented policymakers from conceiving of a 9/11 response apart from a battle on terror or a task for Ukraine apart from that of a state dealing with a hostile (and more and more remoted) Russia. Why not see Ukraine as a flourishing bridge that hyperlinks the EU with Russia, with each EU membership and deep ties to Russia, however with out membership in any navy alliance (like Finland, Sweden, Austria, and Eire)?

4. The Social Grammar of Destruction: Absencing

If we step again a bit to take a look at the deeper cognitive construction that’s giving rise to this battle, what can we see?

We see a system that leads us to collectively create outcomes that no person desires. I don’t consider that anybody on this planet needed to see what we now see in Ukraine. Undoubtedly not the Ukrainians. And definitely not the Russian youngsters/troopers who’ve been “duped” into battle, as a number of of them have described it. Maybe not even Vladimir Putin. He in all probability thought it will be as straightforward as his Crimean invasion in 2014. So why are we collectively creating outcomes that no person desires — that’s, a unclean battle, much more environmental destruction, and a brutalization and traumatization of our souls?

Determine 1: Creation and Destruction: Two Social Grammars and Two Social Fields

Determine 1 distinguishes between two inside situations that we as human beings can select to function from. One relies on opening the thoughts, coronary heart, and can — a.okay.a. curiosity, compassion, and braveness — and the opposite one relies on closing the thoughts, coronary heart, and can — ignorance, hate, and worry.

The higher half of determine 1 briefly summarizes the collective cognitive dynamics which have led us to Putin’s battle in Ukraine. The freezing and closing of the thoughts, coronary heart, and may have resulted in six debilitating social and cognitive practices:

· Deceiving: not telling the reality (disinformation and lies).

· De-sensing: not feeling others (caught inside one’s personal echo chamber).

· Absencing: disconnecting from goal (despair, a disconnect from one’s highest future).

· Blaming others: an lack of ability to acknowledge one’s personal function by the eyes of others.

· Violence: direct, structural, and attentional violence.

· Destruction: of planet, of individuals, of Self

These six micro cognitive practices symbolize an working system that manifests with many faces, considered one of which might be known as Putinism. What are among the different faces that we see, the place the identical cognitive working system is at work? Trumpism in fact is a significant one, as I’ve mentioned on earlier events. Regardless of some apparent variations, Trumpism and Putinism share the identical six cognitive core elements that outline their respective methods of working. A very heart-wrenching instance of the affect of Putinism on his personal troops got here in a textual content message despatched by a younger Russian soldier to his mom, proper earlier than he died:

“Mama, I’m in Ukraine. There’s a actual battle raging right here. I’m afraid. We’re bombing all the cities collectively, even focusing on civilians. We have been instructed that they might welcome us, and they’re falling below our armored automobiles, throwing themselves below the wheels, and never permitting us to move. They name us fascists. Mama, that is so exhausting.”

This reported text message tells us about deceit (“we have been instructed…”), de-sensing (“they’re falling below our armored automobiles…”), and destruction (“we’re bombing all the cities…even focusing on civilians”). His closing phrases “Mama, that is so exhausting” put language to the awakening of an consciousness that this path he discovered himself on — the trail of destruction — was profoundly mistaken.

The social grammar of destruction is shaping collective conduct on many societal ranges at this time. Contemplate the climate-denial trade. Within the early 2000s, the oil and fuel trade in america observed that almost all of the general public, together with the vast majority of Republican voters, supported the introduction of a carbon tax to higher handle international warming and local weather destabilization. They launched a marketing campaign that was properly organized and well-funded (with greater than $500 million), and successfully put the climate-denial trade on the map. One key technique was to discredit local weather science and local weather scientists by sowing and amplifying voices of doubt. It labored. The marketing campaign succeeded in turning public opinion within the US round. The intervention targeted on the early a part of the absencing cycle (deceiving by sowing disinformation and doubt), whereas the affect disproportionately hits probably the most susceptible, each now and sooner or later (by the destruction attributable to local weather destabilization).

One other instance is Massive Tech. The issue with most social media giants isn’t that they don’t shut down websites that amplify disinformation. The issue is your complete enterprise mannequin that made Fb a trillion-dollar firm. It’s a enterprise mannequin primarily based on maximizing consumer engagement by activating and amplifying disinformation, anger, hate, and worry. Fb, like Trumpism and Putinism, prompts the identical cognitive and social behaviors as I’ve mentioned in other locations: deceit (disinformation will get extra shares than actual data), de-sensing (echo chambers, anger, hate), absencing (amplification of despair), blaming (trolling), destruction (violence in opposition to refugees proportional to Fb use), all of which finally leads us towards self-destruction.

Final instance: 9/11. Like all acts of terrorism, the assaults of 9/11 embody 100% of the grammar of destruction (the recruitment and coaching of suicide bombers additionally observe these patterns). When that assault occurred, America had a selection: it might select to reply by opening or by closing the thoughts, coronary heart, and can. Everyone knows what occurred. It was the freeze response of the thoughts, coronary heart, and can that took priority and resulted in launching the “battle on terror.” Quick ahead 20 years. What resulted from that selection? 5 main outcomes:

· It price $8 trillion and 900,000 lives, and it left the Taliban and Al Qaeda a lot stronger than they have been 20 years in the past.

· It led the US to torture harmless folks, thereby violating the very values that the battle claimed to defend.

· It resulted in a complete home surveillance system that was unthinkable earlier than.

· It sowed a basic distrust in establishments that finally gave rise to home terrorism within the US, together with the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

· Lastly, and maybe most significantly, it prompted us to lose sight of the actual international problem of our time: the planetary and social emergencies that want new types of international collaboration for decisive collective motion now.

Clearly, the phenomenon that’s Putinism isn’t solely new. It’s manifesting on the geopolitical stage one thing that we’ve got seen earlier than in smaller contexts. We see it in Trumpism. We see it in our personal collective conduct in the direction of local weather change. We see it within the appalling remedy of Africans on the Ukrainian-Polish border. We see it within the unequal consideration by Western media to the battle in Ukraine in comparison with these in Sudan, Syria, or Myanmar. We see it each time we lose our means and collectively enact outcomes that inflict violence on others, be that direct, structural, or attentional violence. None of that’s new. What’s new is the expansion of this phenomenon over the previous decade or two, which is no less than partially associated to the amplification of poisonous social fields by social media and Massive Tech.

So, what can we see after we have a look at actuality by the lens of the 2 social fields, or the 2 social grammars, that I described above? We see that considered one of these fields has grown exponentially whereas the opposite one appears to have been crowded out. That is in fact why so many people reside with rising nervousness, despair, and despair. That’s the story of what I name “absencing.” Within the second a part of this essay, I’ll inform a totally completely different story, one that appears on the present occasions by a unique lens: the lens of “presencing” — that’s, the long run that’s starting to emerge by awareness-based collective actions now.

Half II: The Social Grammar of Creation: coming quickly

Due to my colleagues Kelvy Fowl for the visible on the opening of this reflection and to Becky Buell, Eva Pomeroy, Maria Daniel Bras, Priya Mahtani, and Rachel Hentsch for his or her useful feedback and edits on the draft. For different weblog posts try: homepage