Just doing it for myself
And celebrating diversity
It’s been a rollercoaster of a year. Again. I’ve been to five continents. I’ve spoken to thousands of people, from kids in schools in the south of England to youth gathered from all over Africa and Europe in Ethiopia, to royal families, presidents, prime ministers and diplomats. It’s been a long year of traveling. I moved house twice. In addition I was part of the team in founding three startups, something that took a great deal of time and effort. It’s been a long year, and a fristrating year. In the end I did however learn a lot.
Now, at the end of the rollercoaster year I’m pretty much exhausted and burned out. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long, and have stretched myself too thin. All this because I want to be as impactful as possible.
Over the last month or so I have however had a couple of realisations that may be helpful as we enter 2018.
First; my primary asset in work and in life is me. If I don’t take care of me, there will be no impact-making, no traveling, no candle burning, no nothing.
Secondly; the change I want to make, the impact I want to have is all rooted in a complex question, and there is no one simple solution to complex questions— heck there’s no simple way to even define it.
So let’s start with the second realisation and backtrack from there.
The problem I want to solve is that of violent extremism. Violent Extremism is something that seems to be on the minds of a lot of people these days, yet nobody seems to have a particularly clear idea what it is.
Here’s how I define violent extremism: It’s the violent denial of diversity.
In itself that’s pretty simple — actually the idea is inspired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He’s a pretty cool dude.
This understanding is based on two things that may need clarification tho. First of all is diversity, by which we pretty much mean complexity, the fact that people are different, we believe in different things, we love different people, have different amounts of pigmentation in our skin, different haricolours, eye colours, lengths of toes, sizes of shoes et cetera. You name it, there’s variation.
Variation is good, but extremists don’t get that and so they reject it, often through a violent rejection.
Violence most of us understand as what I and others in the field of Peace and Conflict Studies as Direct Violence. The founder of the field Johan Galtung did however also mention something about two other forms of violence, namely Cultural Violence and Structural Violence. All three forms of violence can be violence in accordance with the way in which I define violent extremism.
Direct violence is pretty straight forward usually — think of it as terrorism (or as hate crimes). Structural violence can also be fairly easily figured out. Structural violence is when essentially discrimination or other aspects denying someone their freedom to fulfill their potential is built into legislation — apartheid was a fairly good example of that whole thing. Cultural violence is more the informal version of that, so basically racism, sexism, hate speech, stuff like that.
Some see cultural violence as a predecessor to structural and direct violence. The point anyways is that all violence is crap, and the violence I want to challenge is the violence that happens because some are unable to deal with the fact that we’re all different from each other — the violence of far right extrimists who can’t deal with people having a different skin colour or religion from them, the violence of islamists who can’t deal with the fact that not everyone wants to follow the same dogmatic understanding of their religion as them and so forth.
I loose track of myself and will write tons on this later. Violent extremism is however a pretty big, messed up and intense problem I want to solve. It’s a complex question — and so the answer too will probably have to be complex.
The last year there’s been very little space in my life for complexity. People largely want quick fixes and simple solutions, they want tweets, summaries, elevator pitches, 3 minute introductions and digestable 12 minute talks. We live in a fast-phased world, our attentionspans are short and our time limited, you get my drift…
The startups and a number of the other initiatives I’ve been involved with this year all suffered under this. They were all attempting to be bite-sized, estethic solutions to a massive, and hugely complex problem. To too large an extent they need to due to fundraising and marketing. What applies to companies and initiatives does however not have to apply to me.
The founders of the startups all had different interpretations of violent extremism and of the ways in which to tackle it and so the statups suffered. There were disagreements within the teams over the issue, and over which means were ethically legitimate to challenging violent extremism without we, ourselves supporting some form of violent extremism according to my (to be fair pretty broad) interpretation of the issue. Ethics I will not compromise on. Integrity I will not compromise on. This does not mean that the founders are bad people, or that the startups in themselves were bad, they were just not my thing.
The startups all claimed to be challenging extremism in their mission statements, yet each of them were tackling a tiny little aspect of the problem. That they were tackling smaller aspects is in itself fine and we need that. In fact that’s exactly what we need more of, which brings me back to my first realisation, myself as my primary asset to resolve a complex question.
While I’m no expert in business or fundraising I am an expert in countering extremism, non violence and peace-work. I’m also a pretty good storyteller and communicator. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve done a lot, I have a fantastic network, and a lot of experience. I’ve probably not founded my last company or organisation, I will continue to take part in a wide range of initiatives, and I’m open to advising anyone who are starting their adventures to try to make the world better.
It is however time for me to reassess my approach to how I work towards the goal of solving the complex issue of violent extremism. There’s a couple of elements to that.
So; I’m gonna work with others, but for myself. That means I’ll take the freedom to keep true to my principles and ethics. It means I’ll slow down when I have to to make sure we don’t loose track of the complex problem by trying to oversimplify it, while embracing the fact that we all need to work together and chip away at it in different ways. It means celebrating diversity, the diversity of approaches towards the goal, I think there are solutions yet to be found using various fundraising methods, through startups, organisations and initiatives. I think technology will play a major role in whatever solutions we’re trying out. So will narratives.
At the heart of it all however is the need for a celebration of diversity as the antithesis to the will to violently deny it. There are books to read, stuff to have fun with, things to create, drinks to drink, you name it, there is life in its complicated, complex beautiful mess. I want to uncover it all. Not always things that in themselves have an obvious connection to the problem I try to solve, but things that together might make up a whole that in some way pushes towards the goal of better understanding the issue, and figuring out various ways of dealing with it.
This means a whole lot more work for me. But hopefully work that is good for me, that doesn’t make me burn out. In an upcoming post I’ll write some about the first approaches and strategies to uncover the issue in 2018 — the first approach is writing this.
At the heart of it all I am a creator. I want to make things and experience things — not just for the benefit of others, but for the benefit of me. My work so far has given me the oportunity to do that. So now is the time to do that, to say to hell with it all, and to just do it for myself.
