Written by Charlotte Fischer, Director of Love and Power

Please note: I don’t think organising is or should be primarily about spiritual or in fact any personal development – at its core, it’s public and structural –  “the messy work of bringing people together, from different background ands and experiences, to change the conditions that they are living in”, as Alicia Garza writes. That said, I think that developing the capacity to do that work – the skills, attributes, appetites, and abilities to do this –  is its own form of personal formation and that that kind of leadership development in this work is both necessary and deeply meaningful. I’ve used the term spiritual here to be clear in both making it about the personal, and distinguishing it from various religious traditions in organising, which is also part of my practice and much has been written about already.

Judgementalness versus curiosity

On the rightly critiqued Myers-Brigg test, I come out an extreme J. J stands for judgement – people who view the world in terms of whether something is (ethically) good or bad, as contrasted to P or perceivers, who may take in information without assigning it that metric ( Myers-Briggs professionals would correct me by pointing out it’s technically a preference not a way of being – and me making it into a way of being may be evidence of a J personality in itself). 

There are many times in my life where being a J has been a blessing in my life. It has given me confidence and clarity in identifying and interrupting what I have understood as immoral behaviour, for example. 

Organising has both encouraged and tempered that quality in me. With its moral causes and other people to rev us on, organising has been a channel for this energy. Like everyone, I see terrible things in my life and in the news, but then I get to go to work and change them, and have other people and a method to do that work with.

However, there is a shadow side to my J-ness. Righteousness can become self righteousness, morals can tip into moralising. Amelia, a wise friend of mine, once said that she thought you always had to hold on to a 10% chance that you might, actually, be horribly wrong.   This, I think, is a kind of spiritual practice in itself – to not confuse one’s own views with an absolute nature of good or evil. 

The main practice that has tempered this is that organising requires curiosity, which is in some ways the opposite of judgement. Organising has cultivated that quality in me. It’s forced me to pause, to go in with a different lens, and to see possibility, not just what is. It’s made me ask questions instead of getting stuck in a place of right or wrong. It’s made me kinder, more tempered, less invested  in being right. Okun said about the market that it has place, it just needs to be kept in it.  I think a tendency to view things through a morality good/bad lens is much the same. 

A specific kind of ego 

Organisers need a certain kind of ego. An ability to believe we can make change, that is resilient to push backs and set backs – but an ego that is focused and rewarded by actual change made, not the public recognition of our role in doing so. We’re never on stage. We’re rarely in press. The reward is not public recognition – it is transformation of our lives and relationships. Our role doesn’t just encourage collaborative working – it requires there to be a team.

There are a lot of ways people can be alone in change work. One is activism. 

I watch people I love go down this route. They make some fantastic change. They write books I am glad are in the world. They also, however, often end up having to manage themselves as a brand, not a human – many of my friends have hired help to manage and monitor their social media. They fret about where they have and haven’t been invited. They feel an obligation to write on whatever issue is in the news, regardless of their wisdom, appetite, or what they have to add to it. They worry about their personal public image and power and its potential to be knocked off course by one mistake. And this is a required part of the role: George Goehl writes in his brilliant Fundamentals of Organizing that activists are about building their own power – organisers helping others build power.

Other people I know are lonely because what is in some ways (not all) a lack of ego-  they deeply care about their organisations and work and burn themselves out keeping groups alive and afloat, doing too much themselves. It denies others an opportunity –  Rabbi Sacks teaches, comparing the story of the Exodus where the Israelites ambivalently follow God’s signs and wonders, to the building of the Mishkan (tabernacle) where everyone is required to put something in – that we are not transformed by what we get, but by what we build. One of the things that most struck me about organisers when I first met them, was that unlike the scores of good people I grew up with who were doing good work in community but exhausted in the process, organisers were joyful. 

I think in a different life, both of the other paths could have been appealing to me – the martyr or the hero (and in some ways, aren’t they the same?). Organising has taught me that the kind of change I want to build is done with others – and so I have a role in it, but if I’m ever too focused on myself, I’ve built a personality cult, not an organising vehicle. Organising requires you to not represent yourself, but instead to be accountable to a base of people – actual people, not a theoretical movement of baying critics online-  invested in doing this work with you. It requires give and take. We measure and reward not our own moral purity, or being liked, or being right – but collectively solving actual people’s actual suffering. That focus  – on change not ego – is I think not one encouraged by the world. 

I see this with new eyes in the era of social media. If Johann Hari is right and every medium has within it a message 

“ Twitter [teaches you that firstly]… the world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn…. …How about Instagram? First: what matters is how you look on the outside. Second: what matters is how you look on the outside. Third: what matters is how you look on the outside….”

 then I want a different medium, a different way of being in the world. Hari himself writes “ I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas — the messages implicit in these mediums — are wrong.”. I think if we are building groups of people able to work together over the long haul to win significant change, it requires us to have a different set of practices than the ones common in social justice conversation online. 

Here are some of the ones I try to practise: a belief that we can all grow and change, a commitment and pathways to do that work of continual improvement, building a habit to be curious, and an understanding that like all long term relationships, there will be moments of challenge that we work through if we can.

Some of these require us to limit our ego. Valuing doing the work – morality as impact- over how it looks. A desire to win over being right. A commitment to the collective, not just the individual (and their “brand”). I think without those skills, which social media in many ways undermines, we can’t win. “You don’t make coalition because you like those in the coalition” wrote Audre Lorde. “You make coalition because none of us are going to triumph alone.”

The discipline of seeing the good and the possible very day 

In ‘lives I almost lived but didn’t’, there is a career working around the absolute worst of human nature – around mass violence, its impact, how we uncover and tell the stories of those who suffer and are silenced. I’m so glad there are people who do this work. Some of my own family were killed by the einsatzgruppen, the location of their graves only identifiable because of forensic skill. Some of my family were murdered in concentration camps, their bodies no longer existing in ways that would allow a burial. The work of telling the truth about violence is so important, and I am very glad professions exist to do that.

For a while, I thought that would be my path. I worked in peace mediation, I wrote UN funded guides on how to do oral history after violence –  and  I wonder sometimes how that might have affected me if I’d gone down that path . Not just the desensitisation to violence- but how I see the world as a place of possibility or of horror. The world as it is – the world as it should be. All of us have to decide how to hold a balance inside us. 

Optimism is in many ways, I think, not so much an attitude but a discipline in a time where we are surrounded by so much horror. 

In organising I get to see the best of people. The question in my work isn’t “what’s the worst thing that’s happened?” but “what do we want to do to change the things that are wrong?”. One question isn’t better than the other – both are necessary.  There are parallels between dealing with the effects of mass violence and organising – both are about surfacing stories deliberately silenced, both are about restoring dignity. But I get to focus on the part that encourages the best of human nature-  not holds accountable the worst. I think that we’re all affected, in minute and incalculable ways, by what we get to put our focus on and energy into every day – and I’m grateful for what organising lets me see. 

A year ago I left Citizens UK to build Love & Power. This piece is written in appreciation and thanks to my 11 years at CUK in helping me develop some of these spiritual practices.