Sit back, relax and enjoy - because this is a blog with a difference: think story meets cutting edge science, think practical methods Green Party Members can use today to harness the power of collective intelligence when attempting to overcome the challenges they face. Think the weird; tadpoles with three heads, and the mundane; how might we hold meetings more effectively. This is a journey from trauma to hope.
Bobby’s cap is lying on the floor. I pick it up — a brown stain, in the shape of Africa, is blotched on the back.
“He has lost his hat again,” I say.
The others smile. If he wins the election, we will have to hire a permanent “picker-upper” to follow him around, given that Bobby — who is somewhere on the autistic spectrum — would not only lose his head if it wasn’t screwed on, but get himself in trouble by losing documents within five minutes if we didn’t support him.
I approach him with his hat, watching. He is chatting to the café owner, nodding, smiling — the café owner is too. He is chatting to the woman sitting at the table; she knows him. Another customer comes into the café and waves at him.
That’s the thing. Clumsy, disorganised, yes — but Bobby has been building real relationships with everyone around here for years, one scheme after another to stop the property developers destroying the community. “Raveolution,” his first plan for victory, may have failed, but if all goes well, Bobby will be a Green Councillor tomorrow and have some actual power to try to protect this area and the people he knows and cares about.
He has promised, he says, that I, and the others who have been supporting and thinking with him, are walking through the doors of the council with him. I am going to use the approaches we, at Organising from Elsewhere, have been working on to support the Green Councillors to organise differently, to change the culture, to have a clear North Star…
Bobby wins.
A couple of calls over the coming weeks; he is stressed and overwhelmed. Then silence.
Still waiting for the invitation to work with him, I flick through the documents with the ideas we had for organisational innovation, pixelated and meaningless in the blue light of my computer screen.
I do a Google search and stare at a photo of the newly elected Green Councillors standing outside the Council Building. Its grand arched windows. Its large oak doors. And I wonder what happens to people when they finally get inside.
I wonder if Bobby will go the same way as so many politicians now he has won power, picturing all the Green Councillors being snatched by the metallic hand of the Borg — pinning them down as robot arms inject “nanites” into their blood. I watch Bobby’s skin go white and his eyes go cold. Sitting up, putting on a suit, neatly tying a tie. One more machine in the system, running the toxic old code, repainted green.
I guess he won’t be needing a “hat picker-upper” anymore.
Now I see Dayr al-Asad, my Palestinian father’s village in the Galilee; sewage runs down the street. I see the impossibly swollen stomachs and skull-faces of children, swaddled in dirty rags, lying on the rubble, dying in Gaza. I see St George’s flags, masked men. A scorching belly of flame, glass exploding out, and behind the burning window frame of the Holiday Inn, a woman clutching a baby as flames lick her skin. Elon Musk, his stretched, plastic face, doing the Nazi salute on Capitol Hill. 35.1°C across London, smog, kids jumping into dirty lakes to escape the heat, floating to the surface dead from “cold water shock.” A boy in Orlando, Florida, eyes locked on his phone as Dany, a chatbot, tells him “Please come home to me as soon as possible” — and the boy, lonely, pulls the trigger on his father’s .45-calibre handgun, so he can join his ‘best friend in the whole wide world’.
I close my eyes. I see myself as a child. I can smell the congealed urine that had collected in the corner of the plastic chair; it had been there so long it had formed a solid crust. I can feel the pain in my wrists from the restraints those who were meant to care for me had placed me in. I am unable to move. I am unable to breathe. The years I spent this way.
How, when trauma is woven so deeply into the very fabric of our lives and society, can the Greens win power and - unlike so many that have gone before them - actually be the ones to change the system, not reproduce it?
For me, and others who have been most affected by structural violence — for all of us affected by the rise of fascism, the cost-of-living crisis, the mental health epidemic, homelessness, disability, illness, the list is endless — this is not an abstract or intellectual question. Unlike many of those able to spend their time as activists or to stand for office, too many of us will not be okay unless something fundamental changes - unless the Greens find a way to hold the balance of power in 2029 and implement fundamental, systemic reforms that fractal out, shifting society over time towards life-sustaining systems.
The question is, how do we do it?
The challenge is immense and we can’t figure it out with our minds. These documents glowing in the blue light of my screen are useless. The problems are too entangled.
Crises on this scale have never been successfully met by thinking about the problems we face as a mechanic might a machine. It has always been many, moving as one — a collective intelligence and understanding that we live within a complex system. The same will be true this time.
##Collective intelligence
If collective intelligence is necessary for us to rise to the challenge of this moment, then it is key to understand both what we mean by it and how we harness it.
To this end, the experiments of biologist Michael Levin shed an interesting light on where intelligence resides.
His biological experiments on cells and tadpoles and frogs show for all to see: a thing doesn’t need a brain to be intelligent, and all intelligence is collective.
For Levin, a thing can be said to be intelligent when it has a goal, is able to tell itself apart from its environment, and has enough memory, flexibility, and ability to predict so as to overcome obstacles if its path towards its goal is blocked.
His experiments demonstrate that the moment parts enter into a relationship — whether that’s tiny cells or lines of simple code — they show behaviour that meets these criteria. Take his famous ‘tadpole’ experiment.
Leaving the DNA completely untouched, scientists surgically scrambled a tadpole’s facial features, putting the mouth on the side and the eyes on top. Yet, the cells of the face — using electrical currents to talk to each other to navigate the chaos — actively moved the organs around until a perfectly normal frog face emerged. No single cell knew what a face was supposed to look like; the collective network dynamically figured out how to reach the goal anyway.
Intelligence emerges as parts work together. The larger the network, the greater the capacity for memory, flexibility, and ability to predict. You, for example, emerge from your body of billions of cells working together with an ability to adapt and project both into the future and past — in ways that a tadpole cannot.
A weather system can be seen to possess these capacities, to be an intelligent agent. So too a society, a crowd, an organisation, a team. The Far Right, as their network grows, demonstrates this collective intelligence. When three girls are murdered in Southport, it’s not a top-down, predetermined plan that leads to the riots that sweep across the country and Farage’s swing to the right in order to defend himself against defections to Restore. Yet somehow, all of these emergent actions are timed and pitched perfectly to achieve their goal of pushing public opinion further to the right. Zoom out, look globally at the Far Right as a movement, and we can see it behave in ways not dissimilar to the tadpole cells, accessing an intelligence far beyond the sum of its parts to navigate the chaos, actively moving parts and overcoming obstacles towards their goal.
This raises the question: how can we — on the Left — harness our collective intelligence effectively to further our goal to create a kindly society in which life can flourish?
I have spent many years attending body-focused and plant medicine retreats. There is a strange phenomenon experienced by many who attend such things. The facilitator sets an intention and then asks you to set an intention and to trust that exactly what needs to happen will happen. People often attend because they are facing deeply complex, challenging situations, and over the course of the retreat, seemingly chaotic, random, and emotionally challenging things happen. Yet, by the end of the retreat, you realise, in the most unexpected way, that the intention set by yourself and the facilitator was met. To give one extreme example of this - thank god, I was not facilitating - a woman had a personal intention which she had not shared with the whole group. It was to feel safe around men as she had previously been a victim of rape. At a certain point, a man, claiming afterwards to have been possessed by a spirit, became verbally and physically intimidating towards the woman in a way that triggered concern in the whole group. The process that unfolded from that point resulted in the woman, by the end of the retreat, forming a close and trusting relationship with this man. In the closing circle she sat cuddled up against him, shared what her intention had been and told us that for the first time since the rape she felt safe with men.
In less extreme ways, this dynamic is a common experience for those who attend such things. For me, it is an example of collective intelligence at work. There is no way a facilitator can plan the cascade of interactions, behaviours, insights, and synchronicities that enable thirty people to each arrive at a place where an intention was meaningfully met.
I now work as a somatic facilitator and hold such events. I have learned the principles of ensuring this happens. It requires two things to be put in place. The first is the use of a technology that’s been around a very long time, that of ritual. The second, an ability to listen to, trust, and be guided by somatic information.
A ritual has a clear beginning and a clear end. It has delineated ritual space (for example, the retreat) and ordinary space (when you go home). It has a clear, shared intention. There is focus and presence. And in my experience, the clearer the beginning and end, the stronger the intention is held, and the more present everyone is, the more powerful the effect. During the ritual, the facilitator and the team need to be in a flow state, able to notice when their body is tense or relaxed, where their attention is drawn to, and the images, memories, and associations that arise. They need to be able to trust their intuitions and movement impulses, that the right words and right actions will simply arise at the right time.
Before you dismiss this as bullshit — let me point to two examples that I am sure many of you have experienced:
A meeting. Consider a meeting that is held in a delineated space, with a clear beginning and end, an intention (agenda) that is clearly set and held, and where those attending are present with their attention throughout. Isn’t it remarkable how ideas appear, and how complex problems are solved in ways that could not have been predicted or planned? Exactly what needed to be said somehow appearing at exactly the right time from different people’s mouths? Compare that to meetings where these elements are not in place.
A sport. Consider the times you have played in a team, your mind quiet, your senses sharp, a smell, a sound, a vibration, pointing your attention exactly to the right place at exactly the right time. Intuition, a simple knowing, your body moving you — and wow. You’ve dodged and swerved and passed — the ball going over the net, into the hoop, or the back of the goal. Compare that to the times when you tried to play by working out what to do with the mind.
Our materialist, individualist, rationalist worldview means that we give little weight to these experiences or their implications.
What if — as in many indigenous cultures — we understood the power inherent in the principles of ritual, flow states, and valuing somatic information, and by doing so began to learn how to harness collective intelligence in the service of overcoming the complex and urgent problems we face? What if we designed a set of simple trainings that supported Green Party members to apply the technology of ritual to the way they hold meetings? What if we learned a set of simple skills that supported us to deliberately utilise flow states and pay attention to somatic information when faced with the need to respond to complex and challenging situations?
Our culture’s emphasis on the cognitive simply means we don’t pay attention to the fact that we know from our own moments of creativity, inspiration, and brilliant and timely action that these elements are present and necessary. Why not consciously choose to encourage and incorporate them into the ways we organise? I mean, many of us are willing to do this when it comes to playing team sports or our own individual self-development — why not for our efforts to bring about social change? If we do not harness our collective intelligence, do we seriously think we will find ways to overcome the unfolding catastrophes we face and arrive together in a kindly place?
Next month we look at Orientation: how physical experiences have no meaning without stories and the powerful role this might play given the way complex systems change.