“Nothing is harder yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Hello all,
I hope you have been keeping well and holding on amidst the various happenings in the world. Sending you all positive energy wherever you may be. I would also like to welcome new subscribers to the newsletter. Despite not having posted in a few weeks, I have been delighted to still see new signups showing up. I hope the archive of issues have been able to keep you busy and have not been found wanting!
While the newsletter was on hiatus, I spent quite a bit of time trying hard to do nothing and actually find some rest. It proved way more difficult than I thought it would! But, here we are, back, and hopefully better for the break.
Recent events around the world have gotten me thinking even more deeply about what sort of society I would like to see in the future. A world I would love for my daughter and her peers to grow up in.
I do not think I want that much. I am not asking for some utopia devoid of prejudice, oppression, pandemics, climate change or one where things like plastic rain didn’t exist. All I want is a world where we are collectively working together in a myriad of ways and places to address these problems while working on ourselves, as a society and as individuals. Every day I make the mistake of following some news trail, it makes me despair that this might ever happen - but then I remember that not everyone needs to embark on this work and certainly not in the same ways.
It is long, hard, messy work. There are no easy answers. Hashtags, reading lists, call outs, cancellations and blame are not tools that are amenable to the hard work of exploring possibilities and building things. I believe they could work if the foundations they were operating on were strong and built with “good” intent. I guess, it goes without saying that I do not think we are building on such a foundation.
We have danced this dance before, and at this point, the dance has become (or maybe always was) a part of the ritual that keeps this whole system going.
Andrew Kimbrell delivered a lecture called Cold Evil at the Schumacher Center in October 2000 and he hit on something that I think we need to be talking about a lot more. That the way we understand “evil”, for the most part, has become a bit outdated.
“...far from the simple idea of evil we harbored in the past, we now have an evil that apparently does not require evil people to purvey it.”
I encourage you to listen to the entire lecture as it is as timely as it ever was, but in summary, we have built institutions, economic and social systems, corporations, and more that perpetuate evil both without seeming to do so and without having the majority of people in them being explicitly evil. Part of the reason this is so, is because all the majority of us focus on is their outputs.
A bit of his argument is that even if something has conceivably good outcomes, as long as it is built on things we could consider “evil” such as oppression, ecological destruction, inequality, lack of diversity, racist or colonial frameworks - to name but a few - then we should still consider that a LOT of evil will be done and be obfuscated by the outcome. And in such instances, you don’t really need evil people to perpetuate evil.
An easy example is if a company like Amazon is judged solely by the fact that it continues to provide great customer service, instant delivery and returns to shareholders, it must on balance be “good” (maybe in need of some minor tweaks, or to use one of the words of the day reforms), despite exploiting workers and using its outsize influence to destabilise entire market sectors.
To fight to be made one of the winners in any such system that supports the existence of things like Amazon, would therefore be tantamount to condoning such practices in the first place. It would mean that our only grievance is that we are not one of the winners as opposed to being against a system that creates losers in the first place.
In this sort of environment, focusing our attention on individuals or groups of individuals as a means of eliminating negative things from society as opposed to the system that creates these sorts of things in the first place is not going to address the root causes. Police brutality and in particular, the disgustingly racist police brutality we have been seeing in America, or the horrifying incidence of rape and murder of women all over the world can only be reduced not eliminated by reforms or a system of punishments, these things cannot be stopped without going for the jugular.
And we do need to go for the jugular.
There are loads of organisations focused on and words written about these issues, and while a lot of people say it is possible to both do the demand-driven activism as well as systemic overhauling required without missing a beat, I think that there is a clear and present danger of most people getting satisfied by the one that grants instant gratification.
Whether that is a show of solidarity via social media or otherwise, a protest march, or even rioting and breaking things, we are all human beings and prone to succumbing to our biology. We didn’t really evolve to do hard work and focus on complex things for long periods of time. Our brains constantly simplify the world if we let them and we are prone to a whole host of cognitive biases:
Cognitive Bias Codex via
There is so much we must guard against, even as we seek to build fairer worlds. We must reject the simple road. We must embrace complexity and begin learning and teaching each other how to dwell in the ambiguity and complicity of the world we are co-habiting and co-creating.
Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the trouble” has been one of the mantra for Newtype ever since I heard the phrase, and even more so after I read the book. We must never absolve ourselves of complicity in these cold evil systems we participate in every day. We must all take up responsibility. We must not settle for black and white narratives (both metaphorically or literally). We must learn to rest and heal. We must learn to love and be loved unconditionally.
We should ask ourselves how and why these positions are still considered radical thousands of years after they have been preached time and time again.
Anti-racist, feminist, egalitarian futures that allow for the entire planet to flourish are possible, but they require us to transform into different types of people, aware of our weaknesses and strengths, awake to our potential as custodians and cultivators of ourselves, our species and our planet.
We need to move away from this all or nothing positioning that calls for us to hate and ostracise people who have done wrong and generates articles with headlines like this one about Erykah Badu when she talked about unconditional love and empathy for people considered monsters by modern day society. Loving our enemy, loving those that hurt us, loving those that do not love us back, that is a path society has really not tried yet and I do not think it is a coincidence that the people we consider wise and whole subscribe to this philosophy.
Empathy cannot just be about sympathy, it is about recognising another being and seeing them, even if we don’t agree with their choices and actions, even if we don’t speak the same language, share the same colour of skin or gender, or belong to the same species. We must move from, “Do no evil.” to “Do no evil; do good.”. We must continue to challenge ourselves and ensure that we are not also cold evildoers, unthinking and comfortable in the routine and social acceptability of our actions.
If there is one thing I hope I can do with Newtype, it is to provide a viewpoint and a few tools for others to use, build on and/or be inspired by to be able to embark on this journey.
I am reading a web comic called “Kill Six Billion Demons” that, despite its glorious title, is at root really about the complexity of revolution and the realisation that maybe, the only true revolution is one that happens on an individual level and is passed on from person to person. Not delivered from on high via fiat (either via shaming or otherwise forcing the elite into delivering it or replacing them and doing it ourselves). We can’t force true revolution, we can only cultivate it in ourselves and pass on those seeds to others. Revolution has to be treated like a forest reclaiming a territory, with all the diversity and messiness and connectivity that entails, not an all-consuming flame that razes everything to the ground.
We are slow, steady and resilient. We are legion. We do not need to fight, we grow.
Thank you for reading this and for subscribing in the first place. I hope that I can be a stop on your road to your own future.
“When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn't let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal. This is what Siddhartha has learned among the Samanas. This is what fools call magic and which they think is effected by demons. Nothing is effected by demons, there are no demons. Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goals, if he is able to think, if he is able to wait, if he is able to fast.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Virtua Playgrounds Session 2
The last Virtua Playgrounds Session was pretty exciting and spun off into the Newtype Discord server in the form of different groups (called Mass Field Sites) where participants explore various relational practices to do with decolonisation, unlearning and sharing various resources and more.
I will be hosting a second session where each Mass Field Site will be sharing some of their experiences, we will be opening more opportunities for new Mass Field Sites and I will be making an announcement regarding a beta test for a Newtype workshop.
The date is tentatively set for Sunday, 28th of June at 6pm. I will be sharing an Eventbrite link for people to sign up to (tickets are free!) later on in the week once all the details have been finalised.
The Vocab
With this back up and running, I will be resuming the normal publishing schedule this Sunday, and every fortnight thereafter until the next intermission. I look forward to exploring this idea space with you all soon.
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Library Recommendations
Wealth a Living Systems Model! Art Brock in conversation with Mark Finnern
A Delicate Activism - A Radical Approach to Change by by Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidoff (I have linked to this before I believe, but I think it is worth a second look).
Are Nigerians ‘Black’ Enough to Talk About Race? (A great read looking at the divisions among black peoples brought about by using the frameworks of oppressive cultures. Thanks for the link Tola!)
Angela Davis speaking on “Mainstream Feminism” (Angela Davis dropping knowledge as usual. Can be applied to any movement that does not address class and oppressive structures even as it pushes its agenda. Thanks for sharing this with me Niyi!)
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Newtype is based in Lagos, Nigeria but is available to work in wisdom ecologies all over the world. If any of this resonates with you, I am available for talks, workshops, consulting and organisational strategy.
The Newtype Vocab is work produced by Yegwa Ukpo under a CC-BY-SA license. So please use it however you like without asking permission: just give credit, and use the same license for derivative works.