Intentional Society: The freedom of acceptance
Want to become a part of Intentional Society? Start with an introductory call Saturday May 15th, 11:00-11:55am Pacific Daylight Time (2pm Eastern, 6pm UTC)
As people come into contact with Intentional Society, one thing that garners a lot of comments (relatively) is the active acceptance of the rightness of people's intentions and decisons. Options and invitations are clear, yet come with explicit messaging that "Any answer is 100% okay, just let me know what you'd prefer" and "no pressure, please do what's best for you" and "it's alright to decline." This has made space for answers like "I think that it isn't what I'm looking for" or "admit to myself and you that I have too many things going on", and multiple expressions of thanks and appreciation for... I might say feeling respected?
I'm insistent that the inflow process is not a marketing funnel - that it doesn't have a goal of maximizing the number of people who come through the other side. My metaphor is osmosis - allowing people to be subtly pulled through membranes to where the balance feels right. Why would we want to tilt the scales of autonomy in people's decision-making, to disadvantage them relative to the greater system? As a "mission is the members" organization, we have no ulterior motive, no profit incentive, and every reason to foster an environment of enthusiastic consent and agreements for our cooperative explorations.
Yet adversarial interactions and relationships feature so prominently in our modern world! Salary negotiations, labor relations, 99.X% of all marketing... even non-profits fall victim to their survival incentives, and can fall into a simulacra of "working on the problem" while entrenching and institutionalizing the problem, because for an org to "solve the problem" would mean destroying itself. Or have you ever had a friendship that felt unbalanced, extractive, unhealthy in that one or the other party weren't being benefitted by the relationship?
With enough space in one's perspective, the "omni-win" solution becomes both visible and the only truly enjoyable outcome. (The Prisoner's Dilemma only works on prisoners!) At-will employment wins out over indentured servitude. People can become happier after ending a relationship that mean a lot to them. And if Intentional Society can at some point best serve the future of humanity or even all life by ceasing to exist, then I hope we will have installed enough antibodies to the organizational survival reflex.
To come back to individuals: People are who they are, they exist within the environments they find themselves in, and they do the best they can do. This is tautological, by definition - what else could have already happened other than what has happened? Something else would have had to be different, somehow, for anything else to have occurred. And we don't need to say that the reality that we are currently experiencing is "right" or "good" in order to acknowledge or accept it. We don't have to like anything in particular in order to be with it. Yet how much energy do we typically spend wishing that something were different?
Whoever shows up to Intentional Society events are the right people. "Right" here is shorthand for "whoever did show up, and we can be at peace with that." Whatever people decide to do, intend to do, and do, is the "right" thing for them to have done. I realize that the word "right" introduces an is-ought confusion of sorts, but I use it from the perspective that we mostly live inside of this fusion-confusion and perhaps it's easier to update our attitude than it is to disconnect our valence-judgement circuitry (if such a thing is even possible).
Anyway... feel free to check out Intentional Society, and then tell it "no." Feel free to carry that freedom towards setting boundaries in all parts of your life. Feel free to not take responsibility for anyone's disappointment in your decisions or your values. Feel free even to not feel free... but good luck with that if you've noticed that you are the one with the freedom, and the feelings, in the first place.
This week the IS dayboat is playing around with "Hot Seat," an Authentic Relating game of asking and answering questions. It's a useful way to explore where some of our edges are, and to practice boundary-setting!
Cheers,
James