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This is Roger Hallam, and you're listening to Designing the Revolution. This is talk nine, Sociability Theory. Okay, so we're starting to move into actually doing things, and in the last two talks, we were looking at proximity, this idea that the best way of doing stuff is to have things close together, all sort of make sense, and I thought of a little analogy that might help here, that we've got this big canvas, and we've sketched out a general plan, a general winner with a few lines on the canvas, and now we've looked at proximity, maybe you've got a first blob of paint on it. So what I'm going to do over the next two or three sessions is put a great big blob on it, because this is a big thing that we're looking at sociability here. It's probably one of three big things, sociability, action design, and deliberation, stroke, sortition. So I'll be coming on to these things. These are the big, big, sort of elements in constructing this revolutionary project. All sounds dramatic, but it is. Anyway, I should also say that I've moved prison, just to let you know, and I'm now with my activist friend, Dan, who I'm trying not to put off as I do this talk in his cell, but the good news is the TV is not going to be on, and with a little bit of luck, we'll be able to steam through a whole bunch of talks in the next few days, so all systems go. All right, so where are we up to? What I want to do in this session is look at the theory of what I'm calling sociability, and what that really means is looking in more detail about how people work, how people operate, what it means to be a human being. It all sounds quite deep and theoretical, but it's important because it enables us to see the world in a different way or be more aware of the way that we have been taught to see the world, and this is important because the way we see the world creates the limits to our imagination or intelligence on how we actually do design work. So the other aspect of it, of course, is that once you've got this theory, you then have to operationalize it, right? It's no point just having a great theory that sounds impressive and blah, blah, blah. Everything's about operationalization. In other words, what does it actually mean when you get up in the morning and you go out leafleting or you talk to people in meetings and all the rest of it? The other thing I should say at this stage is when I was doing research at King's College in London about this sort of stuff, I did start off with quite a different idea. It's not like I woke up one morning and went, oh, sociability, that's a good idea. I had all sorts of wrong ideas, as you might say. So what I'm going to share with you today and more broadly is what myself and obviously other people have developed on the basis of empirical observation. In other words, we go out, we look at the world and we see what's going on and if what's going on contradicts our model, our way of looking at things, then we don't get all ego about it and say, well, we're going to ignore the empirics. We're going to say, no, we were wrong and I was wrong. And now hopefully what I'm going to tell you is more empirically robust. In fact, it's probably I would say the central arc of how we're going to reconstruct society. So let's get stuck in, I guess. There's a few things I'm going to talk about, which I've sort of gone through before, but I don't think it does any harm to sort of develop them a little bit. So looking at this revolution in business, I think you probably got the hang of the idea here that I'm not looking at some traditional, reductive, political thing. In fact, it's not about the political as it's taught to us. What we need to focus on is the social. We're situating the political in the social. What that means is we're looking at how people operate in general social interaction and we're saying that out of that observation of how people talk when they're with the mates down the pub or in their family or when they're relaxing, that is really important. It's not irrelevant at all. It's really important because it enables us to reconstruct the political, as you might say. So another way of looking upon this is to see how the political is being constructed over the last 100 or 200 years. This is a little bit simplistic, but for the sake of argument, the political, particularly political science and how they talk about politics on TV, is they look upon politics as an out, as a subsection of economics. Economics has this thing about self-interest. Everything's about self-interest. Economics was only actually constructed as a discipline. I don't know quite when it was, but it was in the mid-19th century, depending upon when you want to set the date. In other words, it's quite a recent construction, social construction, a category. Economics hasn't existed forever and it won't exist forever. And you could argue that what we need to do is reclaim the critical for psychology rather than economics. In other words, in a similar way, it's happening to economics. People are realising that it's not all about self-interest, which I'll come to a bit more in a minute. It's about what is the psychology of the human person and how does that person, note I'm talking about a person here rather than an individual, how does that person actually tick? And once we know how a person ticks, then again, we can reconstruct the critical in a very different way. Arguably, we can sort of get rid of it in a certain sense. All right, well, that might sound a little bit abstract, so let's sort of concretise it a bit more. We've talked about this quite a bit, but I'll go through it again, which is there's an old view looking at human nature, right? The important thing here is human nature covers a multitude of things and lots of people throughout the last thousand years have had different theories about what it is to be human. The theory that we've all been taught, we've all grown up with is, dare I say it, just a theory. It's not going to last forever and it's got its plus points, its minus points, but it's not objective reality. So, for instance, I'll run through what we've talked about before. There's this idea that the individual is an atomised mind, right? It doesn't have a body, it's not influenced by its body, it's some sort of abstract entity and it's all about thinking. Secondly, this thinking is very similar to the thinking of a computer. It weighs things up, the pros and cons. In other words, it's a calculating machine. It's got costs and it's got benefits and it's sort of reduced down to what's sometimes called rational choice and, you know, it's got its pros and cons, but to put it bluntly, it's not the whole deal, as we'll come on to see. And then lastly, of course, it's got this bright idea that people think and make cost and benefit analyses outside time. Now, what I mean by outside time is it doesn't acknowledge that everything happens within linear time in the sense that you've only got so many hours in a day. So, we talked about this when I was discussing attention, right? You've only got so many hours in a day, you've got 5,000 decisions to make. Obviously, you're going to prioritise, you're going to have heuristics, you're going to have rules of thumb, you can't think about everything. So, this whole notion that we're in this sort of out of time, weird universe where these cognitive individuals compute things is pretty rubbish, let's put it like that. The interesting thing is, just as an aside, is that this, of course, this theory of human nature doesn't just sit around, it exists in society as a cultural entity. And it's a self-fulfilling entity in so much as people think that this is how humans tick. And so, they tick like that, or they try to tick like that. So, there's a sort of hilarious research which has been done on economic students in the US. So, all these economic students, they go to, you know, 101 economics and they hear about how human beings tick. And unsurprisingly, they absorb that culture. So, there's this research which shows that the most selfish people are economic students. Now, I'm not sure who they're comparing it, but you can see what's going on. They go, oh, I should think, you know, about myself and fulfil my own benefits and reduce my costs. And basically, that makes you a bit of a twat, as you might say, because you're not thinking about the wider social situation. In other words, it becomes an ideology. And this is one of the critical things about critical theory, right, which is to look at how society is constructed in a way that doesn't assume there's some foundation, right? There's these ideologies, there's these cultures, and you need to be aware of them. That doesn't mean, right, you're going to throw, you know, the baby out with the bathwater, as I've said, right, but we're not going to pretend this is something objective anymore. All right. So, we're going to come on to now reminding ourselves that these new theories about how the person operates, and this is going to form the basis of this practice of sociability. In other words, the fusion of theory and practice that is going to provide us with wholly new designs, very new designs about how to mobilize and get people on the go for the project we've set ourselves. Okay. So, I've mentioned these two things, but just to remind ourselves, there's the space, right? It's the social space, the human group, those eight to ten people in a meeting, your family sitting down for dinner, your bunch of mates down the pub, your, you know, human beings operate in small groups. That's the unit of analysis. It's not the individual, and it's not like the big macro design. The individual is important, the macro design is important, you know, social analysis, but what we're honing down on is what actually influences the human person. Well, it's this small group, and that means, as we've already mentioned, that we need to get out of the idea that people are good or people are bad, you know, maybe some individuals are, maybe some aren't, but as a general rule, people are good or bad in a general sense, according to what's happening in their social space. All right, then let's remind ourselves about this attention business. So, we just mentioned that human beings have limited attention, they have to make all these decisions, so they're not like computers out of time. They don't have a massive hard drive, they're pretty limited, they need to think about one thing at a time, and they forget stuff, and they have these rules of thumb, and it's all a little bit hit and miss. So, this is attention problem. So, you've got to get them into a situation where they're going to attend to what you want them to absorb and deal with. All right, so I'm going to move on to a few new ideas, or reorientate ourselves a bit. So, I'm going to throw a little bit of a semi-embarrassing sort of bombshell into the discussion, which is this notion of love. So, I'm going to be talking about love, and maybe you can talk about it in terms of care as well, quite a bit in the coming talks. So, first of all, what I want to say about this is that what I'm not talking about is this sentimental definition of love, you know, being nice to people, blah, blah, blah. I'm not talking about romantic love, falling in love with people, and all that stuff. I'm talking about, I'm trying to reconstitute the concept of love as in a more, what you might call, classical sense. So, there's, I've actually forgot the name of this guy, but the guy who wrote a book called, oh no, I've forgotten, oh yeah, The Art of Loving, should have written it down, The Art of Loving, and he used this classical definition, you can check it out, which is to love people is to seek their well-being. In other words, it's an act, number one, and number two, is it's an act of will, you actually will it, you don't just slop around loving people, as it were, you have to decide to do it. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because we're given this sort of inherited notion that people are generally self-interested, maybe they're just selfish, and every now and again, they decide to be altruistic and, you know, undertake acts of love towards each other. So, yeah, maybe, maybe not, but just to throw in for you to think about, is maybe it's the other way around. Maybe human beings, in its classical sense, adopt this notion of love as their default, and every now and again, they go and be selfish. Now, what's the evidence for this? Okay, so a few things. First of all, when human beings are born, they're totally dependent upon the love of others, in other words, the well-being of others, otherwise they're going to die. When you get old, and you move towards death, then again, you'll become totally dependent on others, in other words, love of others, that they express to you, their desire for your well-being. So, it's not completely ridiculous to think that for the rest of your life, you've got this, this pretty fundamental idea in your head that you exist in order to give love and to receive love. Now, this isn't necessarily like a big hippie notion, because you can say that if this desire to be sociable with others, i.e. to give and to receive, is thwarted, you're unable to do it, then it can turn to hate and a load of dysfunctions. So, I'm going to stop there on this one, because there's a lot of things to talk about. You can think about it a little bit, and it's quite an interesting little thought experiment to swap around all that cynical, you know, we're all out to get each other stuff, with this notion that we're actually, what we exist to do is to love each other, and if it gets thwarted, then we get into being selfish and destructive either to ourselves or to others. So, the last little point on this is the notion of a gift. So, there's a lot of anthropology on this, which you might want to look up, but the basic idea of a gift is not the modern economics idea, which is, it's a cost, you know, you've got stuff and you give some stuff away, some of your time or some material thing, and it's a cost, so really you shouldn't be doing it unless you're going to get something back. Well, that contradicts a whole load of anthropological evidence, which is one of the main ways in which sociability works, in other words, the social interaction of human beings, is people give things to each other, and it's hard-wired that once you've given something, you want to give something back, and what's occurring here is the desire and the need for connection and trust and knowing that the other guy is okay. So, again, let's, you know, let's just park that for a minute, but you can sort of see this happens all the time below the radar when people get, you know, when people, you meet new people, and like it happens in prison, right? I was in a cell, I was in a new cell because I'd been moved, I was with this guy, this guy was quite tricky, you know, I asked him if he could turn the TV down, he started shouting at me, he switched the TV up, you know, he switched the lights off, I couldn't do any work, and I was thinking, oh no, what do you do, you know? Anyway, you know, the guy was okay, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't on medication, he got lots of problems and all the rest of it, but a lot of people have been in prison. Anyway, you know, it doesn't take a lot of thinking about this, but I thought, okay, I'll give him one of my chocolate biscuits, and I did it instinctively really, I just thought maybe this is a good thing to do, gave him one of my chocolate biscuits, you know, suddenly he goes, oh, everything's fine, you know, starts chatting to me about his time in different prisons, decides I'm fine, switches TV down, you know, blah, blah, blah. So, this happens loads in prison, you're in with a new prisoner, and everyone knows the score, people give each other things, and it's a way in which you start to make a connection with the other person and check out that they're basically an okay person. And this is a microcosm of what happens in society all the time. In other words, it's evidence that what human beings need is something more than stuff and power, right? They need trust, and they need recognition. In other words, moving on to a broader point here, what human beings rotate around is what you might call meaning systems, right? And meaning systems provide purpose, identity, respect, and such like. So, just to give a little bit of a historical thing here, during the Enlightenment, you know, in the 1800s, the origin of this self-interested hypothesis came out of this idea that human beings are material things, and they've got this self-interest and all the rest of it. And obviously, loads of people even then worked out this was, you know, at best limited and at worst rubbish. So, you had this counter-movement called the Romantic Movement. And this was very much like promoting this notion that, no, no, no, what human beings need is meaning systems, respect, purpose, you know, mythical structures, religion, all this sort of stuff. And, you know, they had a good point, of course. And something I might want to just highlight here is this developed for the philosopher Hegel. And no, I'm not going to be talking about Hegel loads, you'll be glad to know. But into this notion that what human beings have done all through history, and, you know, I'm simplifying here. I'm sure someone will tell me off who's a Hegel expert. But anyway, what human beings have done through history is they've had this slave master relationship. In other words, there's been masters who control human beings who are made into slaves. And Hegel's point, as I understand it, is this is not a materialistic situation where the masters are fine and the slaves are fucked, right? It's not like that. What he's saying is the masters suffer from this as well, because what all human beings is what is they want recognition. And the last thing a slave is going to give in a relationship, a master-slave relationship, is recognition because he hates being a slave, obviously. In other words, the slave-master relationship, it might make sense from a materialistic point of view, but from a holistic human point of view, it's no good, apart from it being obviously immoral and all the rest of it. So what Hegel is broadly saying, to cut a long story short, is human history will end when human beings are able to transcend this relationship and act as equals in presence of each other, which is not like a mathematical thing. It's like a human living thing, i.e., when human beings are in a social system that provides for mutual respect. And then everything broadly will be hunky-dory. Okay, so maybe, maybe not. Who knows? But you can see where Hegel's coming from, hopefully. All right, so let's add another layer on, which is this emotion thing. Okay, so what I want to say around emotions, we talked about emotions quite a bit, is yes, human beings are run by emotions. It's not just reason. There's emotions below reason. Reason is a slave to the passions, as is the great phrase on this. But I want to highlight something else, which is, and this is another counterintuitive idea, is you might think that negative emotions, according to our materialistic conception, is a cost. People don't like having negative emotions. Maybe, maybe not. It's a little bit more complicated than that. And the counter theory might be something like people actually quite like being aroused emotionally and having this sort of fluidity in their head, like life's pretty boring and it's good when bad things happen because it makes you feel alive. You have a conflict. You're all sort of animated and such like. All right, so the last sort of element here, this way of looking about human beings, I'm not going to talk about this live. It's quite complicated. It's not really my area but you're probably aware that life is limited and there's this thing called death and this thing called death is coming along and apparently everyone's going to die. Well, it'd be ridiculous to think that that doesn't influence a lot of life and the social research, which is based upon Freudian-esque theories, throwing this idea that the reason we deny things like climate change or we enter into displacement activities or we lie, we do social lying, is because our whole life, to a certain extent, is based upon the denial and lying that one day this life is going to finish. And obviously, for a lot of us, a lot of the time, that's a terrible notion and we flee psychologically from that reality. So we're already hardwired, as it were, to create worlds and meaning systems that deny stuff that is unpleasant and the most unpleasant thing is death itself. So we should be aware of this. When people deny things, it's not some aberration. It's central to what it is to be human is to try and create some world which denies these horrendous realities that we have to deal with in life. And death is the archetypal sort of denial subject. All right, so let's just leave that one there and see like we've got what I'm trying to do here, as I've said before, is I'm not trying to say this is the whole deal. What I'm trying to do is get you to have more fluidity, get your curiosity up on what are these human beings trying to save up to, you know, and it's more pluralistic and there's a bunch of ideas and they've got a lot of empirical support and this idea that people just go out with computers every day is bollocks. All right, and you can see how this then feeds into this idea that this political notion of people vote for people who will fulfill their self-interest is rubbish. The political has to be situated in all these social complexities. And similarly with economics, you know, people don't just go out to try and get rich, you know, maybe they do some of the time, but a lot of the time they just want to be loved and want to love other people and there's a whole bunch of cultures that support that. All right, so I'm going to quickly give you two little examples, all right, which are quite fun, I think. So in the 1950s, the Conservative Party, the Tory Party in Great Britain was, you know, it was a big deal and I don't know how many members it had, but it definitely had over a million. It was the biggest political party in the UK and it was always ruling the UK. It was mega successful and you might say, well, that's weird, you know, why would a million people join the Conservative Party? Well, it turns out, simplifies somewhat, that if you joined the Conservative Party, and I think this happened with the Republicans in the States, you got to join like a country club or a golf club or, you know, these big social clubs that existed and they were really big in the mid-20th century because people didn't have telly and all that business. So obviously, you can see what was going on. People were going, okay, better join the Conservative Party so that I can get in with the, you know, movers and shakers in my community. Maybe, you know, if I'm a business person, I can make some deals. But more broadly, the situation was you just wanted to be part of a wider sociable situation, you know, a broader meaning system, which, you know, could make you a bit of money on the side and all the rest of it. In other words, it wasn't about the politics, okay? The Tory Party was an outgrowth, as it were, of a complex different sociability system. Second example. All right, so there's research in the States that thinks pretty hilarious. I may be laughing already anyway. So apparently, and obviously, this is just one bit of research, but, you know, it provides the basis of a whole bunch of different researches, including what I did at King's College. Okay, so it turns out that if you have a political campaign, you know, some NGO campaign, let's say, you set your meeting up. It turns out that 50% of people who go to the meeting don't actually go to the meeting because of the campaign. Okay, so let me say that again. 50% of people aren't actually that bothered about what the meeting's about. They're going for sociable reasons. They're not going for political reasons, as you might say. So, for instance, they might be going because either consciously or subconsciously they want to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Maybe they, you know, often are going with a friend anyway, so they're just supporting that friend. That happens a lot. Maybe they're just feeling a bit depressed and they want to get out of the house. They want to make some connection with other people. They just want to be sociable. You know, they've just heard it's cool going to this sort of meeting, blah, blah, blah. So one of the big dangers here, and I might have mentioned this before, but I'll probably mention it a few times, is if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a bit like me. You're a bit of a nerd, as you might say. And nerds are a very small segment of the population, as you'll find if you get out and get a life, as you might say. Most people are not like us. They don't listen to podcasts about revolutions. So you might be saying, well, I wouldn't. You know, I'd go to a campaign meeting because I'm clever and upfront and critical. Yeah, well, you would, but most people don't. So it's super, super, super important that when you're thinking about design, you don't fall into this, you know, common nerdy error of going, well, I'm going to design something which will appeal to me. No, no, no, no, no, right? You've got to design something that appeals to the people who aren't like you. In other words, you have to stop projecting your ego onto the world and go, actually, you know, I'm cool, but out there, there's loads of different people and I need to study them and work out how they tick. All right. So let's get on to this sociability word, OK? So at the end of the day, it's just a word, right? A word is a word is a word. If you don't like the word, that's fine. It's the idea behind the word. It's a concept. And what this concept is pointing towards is this complex different elements of human nature which point to the desire to be sociable, to be in a social context, to receive and to give, to interact, to have a meaning system. In other words, it's not about the individual. And this enables us to design social situations with a view to creating what you might call community. Community is a bit of a tricky word, but let's use that for the moment. In other words, an ongoing group of people who have connections with each other, some form of social purpose. And for all our purposes, that purpose is revolutionary transformation, resistance and what have you. OK. And let's just look at some practical elements of this very quickly. The first one is that this sociability works through people's bodies as opposed to their minds, right? The mind's important. No one's disputing that. But the fact of the matter is there's loads of research that says what people's bodies do influence their minds. Like a really major element of this is the act of speech. So it doesn't really matter what you're saying. What matters is you're saying something. It's the saying of something that connects you with other people, connects other people to you. And through that, you become empowered. You don't get empowered by the ideas necessarily. You get empowered through your body engaging in making sounds, which happen to be speech. So you can see that's like a body type thing. When you do nonviolence training, the nonviolence training, you know, the standard design is you move your body. You're sitting on the floor and you do role playing. In other words, someone comes along and pulls you across the floor. You don't sit in a group while someone says, if you do nonviolence, you sit in the road and someone pulls you off the road. That's rubbish. It's not going to really tell you in a deep bodily sense what's going on and give you the confidence to do it. Once you've role played it, and if you've done role playing, you probably know, right? Role playing is really powerful because you move your body and you find yourself, you don't work it out. You find yourself. In other words, your body, your mind tells you that you're feeling sort of okay about this. Another example is food. Like if you get together and there's food in the room, people are eating, they're doing things with the body, they're eating and this facilitates sociability. Why do people go to dinner parties? Why do you go around and eat in front of the telly with your mates? It's because this facilitates the sociability of the situation. That's what sociability is. Let's secondly look at giving testimonies. Okay, so this testimony giving a story, something bad happened and then things worked out, that's related to actual situations of social conflict. There was research done about the revolution that happened in Egypt in 2012. What the outcome of this research was pointing to is if people have been humiliated through political oppression, often it's, you know, understandably done them in and they're not going to be the people who are actually going to take political collective action because they're too humiliated by what's happened to them. The group of people, the social group that's most likely to take political action, move into resistance, you know, occupy Tahrir Square, are the people who have an emotional connection to them who observe their humiliation. In other words, you don't get mobilized because someone's done you in. You get mobilized because you see someone else being done in, which is sort of interesting because again, if you're self-interested, you'd just be going, well, tough, wouldn't you? But that's not how human beings work. The more sociability you have with people that have been abused, the more likely you're going to go, right, I'm going to do something about it. And it's that group that springs into action. So you can see how this... Oh, I've got my food. I'll be back in a minute. See you in a sec. Okay. So just had my dinner, back on the job. A last element here, okay, is ritual. So sociability is very related to people doing things together, right? Ceremonies, celebrations, music, song, you know, speeches, prizes, all this sort of stuff, right? It's all just the hills as we know. That's what people like to do, be involved in rituals, and rituals facilitate or are facilitated by the sociability element in human nature. So this is a world away from, you know, information, argument, pieces of paper, calculation, and all the rest of it. Okay. So hopefully you're getting a sort of sense of what we're talking about here. And you might think, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's pretty straightforward. Actually, it's not. So I'm just going to give you a slightly amusing example here. Even if you've learned all this stuff, you're still subject, or at least I am, and I suspect also other people are, you're still subject to this like inherited worldview, which means you make design mistakes, or at least miss things out when you're doing designing. So an example of this is the Insulate Britain campaign in the UK last year. So as you may know, groups of people went out and they sat on the UK motorways in order to get the government to put money into insulation, which is the number one thing in the UK to reduce carbon emissions. And then after they'd done it, or the night before, they would be in a sort of safe house. And obviously, from a cost benefit point of view, a technical point of view, you might say, this is just an instrumental matter, right? You've got to accommodate these people. They come out of the police station, they need somewhere to stay. You get them a house, they've got a bed, they have breakfast in the morning. It's organized. But you notice the whole analysis is material. It's about a material house, material beds, blah, blah, blah. It turns out that the materiality of it is pretty irrelevant. I mean, it's important, obviously. But what's really going on, of course, is that these people who've had this quite intense adrenaline-esque sort of experience together, they've been in a police station, they're let out, and they all have breakfast together. It's a massive, intense sociability experience. In other words, they all get massively connected to each other. They all start to love each other in that definition we used, which is to seek each other's well-being, appreciate each other, forms of friendship, solidarity, and such like. And this element was the key determinant, arguably, of their resolution, their collective courage to keep going because of the proximity and sociability of staying in a house together rather than going off individually and getting the bus home. So you can see how that works. Of course, those of us who are designing this, we didn't catch that one at all initially. We were quite surprised. I was going, like, why are these people still going? They've done their three, four sessions going on the motorway and now going on 10, 12, 13 times, whatever it was. Well, it was because once you got into this team and you've got this team spirit, which is facilitated by the physical design, then you've got this massive strength, which brings down regimes once things get going. All right. So before I finish, I'm just going to throw in the caveat, right? So what's this? There's a sting in the tail to all of this. And again, we're going to be looking at this lots and lots. So don't worry if you don't totally get it on your first outing, as it were. But what we're talking about here is mobilization, isn't it? It's like we're getting people together in order to engage in resistance, engage in civil disobedience campaigns, this revolutionary project and such like. Now, what you often find and arguably you always find is when groups get together, the main problem isn't designing and sociability. It's actually stopping what's called overbonding, which is too much sociability. Let's put it like that. In other words, people come together and they go for intense experiences because they're political radicals or whatever, and they build this identity, this emotional bond between each other. And they have an ideology and a way of working. And quite long story short, it stops people from wanting to join because they're not as good enough as them or it's intimidating, it's not welcoming, it's not too much of an in-culture, in-gang, out-gang sort of thing. And in the literature, it's called the paradox of political identity. So it doesn't necessarily have to be political. It can be any identity formation in society. But the paradox is what makes you successful, what makes you successful is what makes you unsuccessful. Hence the paradox. In other words, the easiest way to build up a movement is to get a group of people who are all the same, doing the same sort of stuff, get them to bond together. Loads of people know all the cultural cues, and they come into the movement and it grows really quickly. And then it stops because the market, in inverted commas, as you might say, of those type of people is limited. So let's say you've got a student movement. At a certain point, there's only so many students that are going to join that movement. And if you've got some working class guy who drives a lorry, going to walk into a meeting with a bunch of students, you don't need to be a genius to work out that he's going to be a little bit intimidated and be going subliminally. That's not really my thing. So just a little example of this. There was a campaign, I'm sure. It was a middle-class movement type thing, mainly white people, all that sort of stuff. And this black guy joined them, and he was cool, and he went out camera thing. And he was really good at it, as it happens, not least because they were knocking on lots of doors where it's a multiracial area. A lot of black people weren't opening the door, but he had a real talent for it. I think he came from an evangelical church, so he was used to talking to people. And then everyone thought, great, great. And then he joined the meeting, and it turns out that he's not that keen on gay people and gay marriage, I think it was. And the people in the group suddenly went, well, that's really bad, for all the right reasons. And then he didn't come back. And you might say, well, that's good because he needs to be challenged. But maybe it wasn't that good because maybe if they'd be more compassionate towards him and more welcoming and said, OK, this guy's got views, which aren't necessarily our views. As he integrated into that culture, taking one step at a time, then he might have modified his views or people would have accepted them. I'm not going to say what the right or wrong way of dealing with it is, but what I'm trying to say is the paradox of political identity is you've got this really clear identity, and then it was really difficult for people to get into it because people weren't welcoming anymore. And paradoxically, you've got this shutting off of diversity, which is one of the things lots of people talk about. All right, so how do you deal with this? So briefly, before we finish, I'm just going to throw in a few things for you to make a note of, because this is a big thing if you're going to be a designer or an organizer. So no-brainer response to this is as in a leadership position or as an organizer, you have to proactively and explicitly create an open culture, an open ideology, as you might say. In other words, you're saying, look, the point of what we're doing here is growth. We're bringing people in. So if people aren't quite like you, that's good. So this is the big rule of thumb. You know, you have your meeting, someone walks through the door, he's not like you. So your subliminal reaction is going to be, he's not like us. So what you need to encourage yourself into is going, the guy's not like us. Great. That's good. That's good, because you're going to create this wider network of different cultures and orientations, and you're going to get into new networks, outside the bubble, blah, blah, blah. So if it's a new person who's not like you, that's all the more reason to welcome them into the group, be kind to them, engage in small talk and all the rest of it. So underlying this, of course, is some sort of ethical and arguably spiritual ethos that has to be created in the social movement, in the project that we're engaged with. In other words, it has to be a moral commitment, an ethical commitment to treat people well who are different to us. And this is something we're going to explore more in terms of what leadership means in these spaces. A last little point on this, just throw this in, which, you know, I'm not sure whether this is that critical or not, but one of the, one of the, you can overdo this sociability business, okay? So I'll just give you a little example, like it's been shown in research that when men, I mean, all men and presumably quite a few women, but as a general rule, men, when they're having like an intense chat, they don't like to look into each other's eyes. So there's this research where when men are having a bit of a heart-to-heart, they like to be in the car and they're looking forward, they're not looking at each other. In other words, like there's certain cultural and arguably sort of locked in sort of tendencies of human beings to make connection, but they don't want to make a massive connection really quickly. Or maybe they just don't, right? But that doesn't mean they don't want to connect. So often what happens in particularly ideological groups or spiritual groups is you encounter people too quickly. So for instance, like, you know, in some groups I've been in, there's been this thing, you walk around in a circle and you look into each other's eyes. Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily right or wrong, but it's problematic if people don't particularly want to look into each other's eyes because they're people they don't know and they feel awkward and then they go, this isn't really my show, it's been too woo-woo, as we say in the UK, you know, and it's a problem. Now, that's a situational analysis, you know, if people have a spiritual orientation or they've known each other well and they've gone through a lot, it might be a good exercise. So you have to be careful about balancing sociability design with overdoing it as much as underdoing it. So a last point on here which is related to this is when myself and, you know, one or two other people set up Insulate Britain in the UK, what we were trying to do was create community through the connectivity of well-organized, high-impact actions. So a lot of people were quite critical and they said, oh, you're jettisoning all the XR stuff, you know, all the getting together, community building, personal work and all this sort of stuff, which is not entirely true. But the point is, is by just being well-organized and welcoming and these super basic sort of cultural elements, what we paradoxically did, I think it's fair to say, is build a community by doing the basics instead of piling on a whole load of cultural stuff which, you know, may have diverted us or slowed things down or such like. So it's a complicated business. So that's my conclusion. This stuff's tricky, okay. It's a bit like, you know, try it and work on it and, you know, change it around a little bit. And at the end of the day, the idea is to be consciously incompetent, as the phrase goes, you might come across that, you know, it's very difficult to get this totally right. But if we're aware that we're trying to create sociability and if we're aware that we're trying to avoid the paradoxical political identity, then it's like we know the landscape we're working in. We know what human nature is like, and we can work on our designs with a really solid theoretical foundation. And on that note, I'll finish because next time we're going to get into the ins and outs of organizing stuff with sociability in mind. Okay, thanks.