A new democracy defined by joy, agency, dignity, wonder, and being in relationship

Reflections on three podcasts with James Bridle, Amanda Ripley, and adrienne marie brown — about hope, curiosity and complexity, relationships with self, others, and the living world, fractals, and radical imagination

7 min readFeb 20, 2023

On my flight back from San Francisco to Paris, I had that rare circumstance created of having the time and focus to listen to three long podcasts back to back:

I felt like like they were in conversation with one another, and it brought out some new ideas and questions for me. They wove similar threads about the deeper practices and culture underpinning democracy. In different ways, they each brought forth to me why and how we can make the next democratic paradigm one defined by joy, agency, dignity, wonder, and being in relationship — with others, and with our planet and all its species.

Hope

In the conversation with James, they reference a blog of theirs, “Hope needs a place to perch”. (Which does not seem to be a reference to Emily Dickinson, which is what had come immediately to my mind — “Hope” is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.) I do agree with them. They write:

“Hope needs a place to perch. To have any meaning, any validity, any use or power, it must be founded upon agency, upon the deep-seated capacity to change. To change first oneself — already a process of negotiation with the world — and then to change everything else.
To learn, to make relationships, to process, to move energy from one place to another: these are both fundamental requirements of a healthy organism, and necessary steps in building a nest for hope, for making it meaningful and actionable.”

It made me think of the way that Rebecca Solnit talks about hope in Hope in the Dark — that hope “is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction… Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” For we certainly live in constant uncertainty, and it is up to us to navigate it, tapping into our agency to try and make change possible.

Relationship with self and others

In all of these conversations, there is an emphasis on collective agency, as well as on relationships. Though there is also a recognition that we need to be able to change ourselves first to be able to change others or the world. Amanda Ripley references how we often need to reflect on and change our own behaviour and reactions to help diffuse situations of high conflict. adrienne maree brown and Baratunde also get into a rather deep discussion about the work and the self-care needed for us to be in positions of being able to truly be in and tend to good relationships and to care for others.

This resonates deeply as I feel like my ability to do the work I do today was radically enabled by a few years of work on myself with an amazing therapist, who helped me to reconnect with my body, find the words to describe my emotions, and have the courage to say them. Perhaps that sounds banal to some people, but it was a truly transformative and life-changing experience for me, and has also undoubtedly helped me to deepen my relationships and connections with others. It opened up new fields of interest in embodied cognition, phenomenology, neuroscience, and psychology, enriching even further my understanding of democracy and deliberation from another perspective.

Curiosity and complexity

Amanda Ripley makes an important distinction between “high conflict” (which is sometimes also called intractable conflict, which leaves us stuck and unable to resolve our issues) and “good conflict” (which is, in fact, generative and life-giving and necessary). In high conflict, emotions such as contempt and disgust dominate, humiliation is the most reliable source of it, and it often emerges in a situation where both sides exhibit some form of moral superiority. She and Krista Tippett of On Being discuss how high conflict collapses complexity, yet how it’s possible to prime our brains for curiosity and complexity.

How to handle situations where there is disagreement about facts is also something that comes up in conversations all the time today. Amanda makes it clear why a combative approach to try and explain why the other is ‘wrong’ with statistics and data never works. She tends to use Gary Friedman’s approach of ‘looping’ (meaning listening for the thing that seems most important to the other person who’s talking, then playing it back to them distilling it into most elegant language possible, and checking to see ‘is that right?’, which injects a little humility), followed by the honesty of “My understanding of this issue is the exact opposite. How do you decide who to trust?” Overall, one of my main takeaways from that conversation is about the need to create the deliberative spaces that can engender a sense of openness, curiosity, and ability to be surprised.

This chimed a lot with what adrienne maree brown calls “emergent strategy”, which has a number of elements and core principles that are about emphasising learning, constant change, and interdependence.

Relationship with the living world

However, it’s not just about us humans. I like how James reminds us that we’re not just in relationship with other people, but with the living earth and all species, which Baratunde also emphasises in his “How to Citizen” work as well.

If we recognise this, what does this then mean for re-thinking governance? I think this is one aspect that in the field of deliberative democracy, with reflections on institutions and processes that are very human-centric, we have not considered this and thus experimented with new approaches enough.

And there is a lot to learn. I am currently reading James Bridle’s new book Ways of Being for further inspiration. I’ve also been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Democracy of Species. She writes about the “grammar of animacy”, pointing out how in English (and many other languages), we distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns and verbs, ascribing gender to them. She contrasts this with the Potowatomi language, which through its language “reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.” In Potowatomi and most indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family, because they are our family. She writes:

“Rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate… Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one — with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognises the standing of other species. It’s all the in pronouns.”

There is certainly a lot to ponder in there. Without going off on too long a tangent, I will just point those interested in exploring further these ideas to David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous.

Fractals

Another beautiful source of inspiration from nature was in Baratunde’s conversation with adrienne maree brown about fractals, which is a reference to how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. It’s a reference to the idea of never-ending patterns in mathematics, and the fact that they are images of dynamic systems.

It gets across why it matters the way we practice democracy at home with our families, with our friends, in our organisations with our colleagues, in our local communities, all the way up to larger scales of community.

It resonates with the thinking that we’ve been doing at DemNext and our wider collaborators about bringing in democratic practices to the governance of other institutions like schools, local associations, public banks, cultural institutions, and other organisms that we are part of beyond government.

We are having some deep reflections also internally for what it means to us as an organisation to be living and embodying the democratic principles that we believe in when it comes to agency and dignity, political equality, collective wisdom, and common ground.

Radical imagination

I also loved adrienne pointing out that the definition of ‘radical’ refers to going down to the root, and her recognition that we are living in “imagination battles”. I completely agree with the fact that we need to be imagining new futures (have also been a fan of the work that Phoebe Tickell is doing on ‘imagination activism’), but that it is also a battle to enable new futures to emerge.

Conclusion: inspired and curious

Overall, I was left inspired and thoughtful after listening to these conversations. Would be curious to hear any reflections from you if you’ve also listened to some/all of these conversations as well. And would love to hear more recommendations on what else I should be listening to and reading right now.

Closing this little reflection with a poem by Rumi that was also referenced in the On Being podcast:

Beyond

-Rumi

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas,
language,
even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.