Rage, resentment, responsibility: harnessing feelings for positive impact

Polly Mackenzie, Chief Social Purpose Officer, speaking at UAL’s Library and Student Support Services staff conference.

Our core belief at University of the Arts London (UAL) is that the world needs creativity.

In our strategy we said we wanted to change the world with our creative endeavour. There are days when that is the most inspiring ambition I’ve ever worked under. And there are days when it feels hubristic. Because I look at the world around us and I wonder who am I — who are we — to imagine we can heal any of it?

I know that same tension exists in this room because I’m looking at colleagues who have told me we should do less: focus on the job in front of us. And I’m looking at other colleagues who have told me we should do more: mobilise every corner of the university in the fight for justice, no matter the cost.

One thing I love about UAL is that this debate often comes to life with big feelings: raw emotion and passion, and sometimes anger and frustration.

My hope is that this ambition we’ve set out — becoming a social purpose university — will not just enable us to have more positive impact in the world…

It might help us with some of those feelings, too — about each other, and even about ourselves.

I’d like us to think about three words today:

Rage. Resentment. And Responsibility.

Rage

I sometimes think that if you’re not angry about the state of the world, then you’re not paying enough attention.

Nevertheless, you will sometimes hear people in campaigning circles point out that while rage might be a great way to mobilise a movement, it is not a great strategy for securing change. Shouting at people tends to make them defensive.

I don’t think that’s the real problem with rage. Sometimes shouting at people is precisely what you need to disrupt the settled way of doing things. The real problem with rage is that it’s exhausting.

One of the saddest conversations I’ve had here at UAL was with a colleague in his fifties. We’d had a group workshop on social purpose and he approached me afterwards to say he was frightened. In his twenties he’d been a radical campaigner — marching, protesting, and building a huge sense of purpose and identity from his radicalism. But at some point he’d lost hope.

He told me that giving up was how he survived.

Everything I know about mindfulness and wellbeing tells me he made the right choice: the path to wellbeing is to experience joy in the life you have, and focus on the day to day experience of being alive. Campaigning for change is the antithesis of that: it is to foreground your dissatisfaction with the world as it is.

Every morning I walk past two posters in my neighbour’s window. The first reads Black Lives Matter. The second reads: No Justice, No Peace.

I know what the intended meaning is: if you do not give us justice, we will give you no peace. But every morning, I am reminded that it is too often the activist who surrenders their peace.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they use the serenity prayer to help members conquer their addictions and find peace. It starts: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

My colleague chose to give up campaigning and accept the things he could not change. He was frightened to give up the peace he had found that way.

Resentment

In my experience, acceptance is not the only way people cope with their disappointed rage. One of our strongest psychological defence mechanisms is resentment.

When the world is not as we want it to be, we find someone to blame.

We do this in our personal lives. And I’m afraid we do it in our professional lives, too: how often do we reach to blame another team when things go wrong?

As a psychological experience, resentment sucks. It comes from the French, re-sentir — to feel again. When we are stuck in resentment we keep feeling the pain, over and over.

Even worse than that — resentment is paralysing. We nurture resentment because it comes with an odd sort of comfort: the comfort in knowing that we ourselves are not to blame, so we don’t need to change.

This is the game Nigel Farage is trying to lure us into when he says we shouldn’t cut carbon in the UK because we can’t control China. It is true that China needs to stop building coal fired power stations. And of course, it’s tempting to use that as an excuse to carry on with our lives as they are. But unless we are willing to fully accept the inevitability of climate change, we are stuck with the pain of resentment.

There is only one way out: taking responsibility for things we can control. The second line of the serenity prayer couldn’t be clearer: grant me the courage to change the things I can.

Responsibility

I know that this team has done that: has taken responsibility for the things it can change. That does take responsibility.

This is a team that threw itself into a research project mapping our impact on the climate and biodiversity. That has pioneered better book covers, increased recycling and supported the growing number of students experiencing anxiety related to climate change.

This is a team that has recognised that the books we present to our students set a context for what is normal and has invested time and imagination in diversifying and decolonising our collections.

When students are in distress because the NHS is failing, or because there are no more maintenance grants, or because racism and prejudice is still too pervasive, you might want to scream. Maybe you do some days.

But you also take responsibility for the things you can control, and you deliver the services they need to the best of your abilities.

Social purpose

You might ask — what does our social purpose ambition change about any of that?

To answer that I want to turn back to the serenity prayer. It asks for the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. The courage to change the things I can. And — finally — the wisdom to know the difference.

For me: being purposeful means using our wisdom to redefine what we can change — to expand the realm of our responsibility beyond what we can directly control.

We cannot simply accept the world as it is — we cannot abandon our rage. We cannot surrender.

A doctrine of personal responsibility alone is not enough in the face of systems that cause immense harm to both people and planet.

For the sake of change, and for the sake of our own wellbeing, we need to make a shift from feeling we are powerless actors in a system we cannot control…

To believing we are agents of change in a system we can influence.

It’s about finding the sweet spot between rage and surrender. About replacing resentment with courage.

A social purpose university is one that takes full responsibility for the things it can control — but also seeks to influence the systems it cannot.

And it means the same for each of us in our unique roles, too: we take responsibility for the changes we can make, and we seek to influence the systems of which we are a part.

We don’t say: why is this other team failing? We ask: how can we help.

We don’t complain about the systems that hold us back, we help design new ones.

We don’t act with blame, we act with love.

I know even that can be exhausting. Sometimes it feels like ‘no’ has been said too many times. That is why we have made the commitments we have made to become a social purpose university.

These are commitments to reshape the way things work, so that you are supported and enabled to be the change you want to see.

Where we redesign the systems, the rules, and the processes that hold people back.

And where together we mobilise to change the context that prevents us from being all we want to be: the government’s policies, the practices of the creative industries into which we send our graduates, the culture and expectations of the society around us.

More than anything, this is an act of collective imagination. It will take time. But what better place to imagine a new way of working than at UAL — where imagination, ambition and creativity come together at unique scale?

To support us all on that journey, UAL has created a new Social Purpose Lab — a small team to help us all take steps on the journey towards fulfilling our social purpose.

• To improve the ecosystem that higher education and the creative industries operate within — by mobilising our community behind policy and political change.
• To nurture and nourish the cultural norms and mindset of mutual care, of solidarity, and of acting with purpose in all that we do
• To align our strategy, our operating plans and our internal systems with our social purpose, working with senior leaders, managers and teams to design better ways of working.
• And to support innovators, agitators and individuals to change the way they work, develop new ideas, and share their successes.

These are emerging practices. We’ve developed them in partnership with some of our academics — learning from what UAL does best.

Our aim is that this space to imagine better ways of doing things will bring you not just ideas but a sense of collective purpose, shared ambition and hope for the future.

The world really does need creativity. Together we can be the change we want to see.