Who Told You To Do That?
That yearning we feel to make a meaningful contribution to the collective, to drive change, to participate in community care and rhythmic reciprocity… what’s making us hold it at arm’s length?
Absolutely no prizes for guessing it’s… systemic factors. Inside Capitalism, if you’re gonna do something, you’d better do it in a way that’s correct & complete. Especially if what you’re doing is outside of what’s socially normal- psychological risk shoots up here, increasing threats to an already fragile sense of belonging.
Community Care is Ripe for Critique
In Composting, my collaborative group work on The Portal Collective, someone shared a story which I will now summarise badly. She spoke of a group of people going round run down apartment blocks and working to uncover beautiful tiles and similar features from the original building work, wanting to reveal something lovely beneath the ugliness of many of our modern shared spaces. (Do you know the term “landlord special” for a paint job?) And someone met them with…
“Who told you to do that?”
In the same conversation, someone else in the group was reflecting on a success they’d had with their local campaigning- getting the council to agree to making a particular tunnel pedestrian only. Whilst many families joined her for a celebratory play in the road, expressing their relief that their children’s journeys to and from school would no longer be dangerous, others were not so pleased.
And no- it wasn’t just people who wanted to drive through the tunnel. (Some) people who aren’t even car users were incensed. There was a sense of…
“What next?”
Something else that could significantly enhance children’s safety at the small cost of minor inconvenience to others? Where will it end? A liveable future, perhaps…
These people were not inconvenienced by the practical change, rather by the evidence that it’s possible for people to build power together to influence our shared environment.
As a group, we mulled over why people get their underwear in such a twist about this kind of thing, and here’s some of where we landed…
Many people actually need to believe that we are not allowed to do anything to improve our collective conditions
Committing to the idea that ‘there is no point’ in putting any energy into anything like uncovering elegant human creativity or seeking increased security for children is an all or nothing jam. If you want to absolve yourself of any responsibility for the things you enjoy complaining about, you must double down on the idea of our impotence. Otherwise your identity as a morally sound person is threatened and this is a big deal for most of us.
Of course it is largely accurate to say that there’s not much we can achieve in isolation. But when we organise ourselves, our impact is surely limitless- in fact, the evidence suggests this is the only way society has ever made progress.
And here’s another barrier- the mortifying ordeal of human relation. So separated are we from ourselves and one another under Capitalism that we are frightened of community. The conditioning has worked. I’m thinking, for example, of Margaret Thatcher and “No Such Thing As Society”. Of course, most of the messaging we absorb is far more subtle.
Hierarchies. Chains of command. Teachers. The curriculum. Managers. Leaders. Laws. Media. Government. Patriarchal, heteronormative nuclear family units.
Throughout our education and all the way through our adulthood. Despite initial resistance, many of us end up craving someone to tell us what to do, to resolve the unbearable tension of being an autonomous human with some access to critical thinking and resources in a late stage Capitalist hellscape where so many people suffer so deeply. Someone to put us in our place and keep us in our place, to reinforce our delusions.
People like the tunnel campaigner and the tile uncoverers disrupt this and introduce psychological risk in the process.
When I tell casual acquaintances about our Community Care Banks…
I often observe a similar discombobulation. We are Southend Care Bank, if you wanna check it out.
How are you paid? (I’m not- every single one of us, Co-Founders and Volunteers who take varying levels of responsibility for running the organisation labour freely. There is, of course, some degree of privilege in this, BUT this is not to say that everyone involved finds these unpaid working hours easily. I have a whole essay bubbling about the convenient assumption that people who participate in community care do so because they are champagne socialists and variously well resourced- another idea that permits people who do have sufficiency to hold responsibility at arm’s length until they have some mythical more)
Why do you choose this? (Because people need it and it felt like something we could access and sustain)
How do you get money for it? (To start with we just asked friends and friends of friends on social media. One of the reasons we had to transform from a grassroots structure to a Registered Charity was to be able to get enough money from other funding sources to meet growing demand)
What if people take advantage of it? (It’s hardly an advantage - or at least it shouldn’t be- to have access to toiletries, nappies and period products. I’m always left wondering if this same question is asked of people who are not impoverished by the state)
All amounting to the same sentiment…
Who told you to do that? What if you’re doing it wrong?
If we want to expand our capacity for collective contributions, we need to increase our appetite for justice AND our tolerance for being perceived as doing the wrong thing, or doing the thing wrong.
Developmental coaching can support this. If you wanna go rogue, you might like to start off with a one off Meet The Moment session.
Or maybe you’d like to affirm something for yourself by dropping me an email or a DM and telling me something you’re gonna do for your community, even though no one told you to.
