RC and the Climate Emergency
We are facing a dangerous situation. The climate emergency and our increasingly unstable and unworkable political and economic systems confront us with a threat to human existence that will likely reach a climax in the lifetimes of many of us. This has important implications for how we use RC.
I propose the following: that we make strategic use of the discharge process, do more work across constituencies, focus more on oppressor material [distress], and break down our large goals into practical, achievable objectives.
MAKING STRATEGIC USE OF THE DISCHARGE PROCESS
As we discharge distress and think more clearly, we become increasingly aware that our current political and economic systems are harming people and damaging the environment. With this awareness, it becomes inevitable that many of us will want to act to transform our societies.
Were it not for the climate emergency, perhaps we could take our time discharging our distresses—and then go on to change the world. However, given the current crisis, we do not have time to discharge all or even most of our chronic distress before we act. Therefore, we can consider using the discharge process in a more strategic way: to make intelligent decisions and act now to change the world, rather than waiting—waiting until we feel better, have cleaned up our distress, have eliminated our internalised oppression, and so on. We can decide to become activists first and discharge afterward.
We often focus on how people have restimulated us. We focus on our current upsets with people rather than on the early material that these upsets restimulate. I think we need to focus on and discharge the early hurts that have left us vulnerable to restimulation and stop treating restimulation as a new, current hurt.
Re-evaluation Counseling can be a base from which we go out and work to transform society. As we do this, we will encounter people’s undischarged distresses and oppressive patterns. Our activism will keep throwing up challenges that we can handle well only by systematically working on our early hurts. For example, the activists we work with, who may be decision-makers in their organisations, often have patterns of dividing, blaming, and excluding. We can exchange thinking with other RC activists about these patterns, discharge, and then interrupt the patterns.
JOINING WITH OTHERS
In RC we work to reclaim our individual power. However, the transformation of society will not happen because of one person’s actions. It is necessary to join with others and organise together for change. Also, we cannot just work separately in our own constituencies. We need to work across constituencies as a united front, both inside and outside of RC. This is already being done in Sustaining All Life and some other RC projects, and it needs to become a primary way of working. We will have to clean up mistakes as we go rather than allowing them to keep us separate.
DISCHARGING INTERNALIZED DOMINATION
We can focus on discharging our oppressor patterns, for example, internalised domination. If we focus mainly on internalised oppression, as generally happens when we work in separate constituencies, we can be pulled to act from a victim position. Many of us have done enough work on our internalised oppression to know how it holds us back. Our current challenge is to discharge our oppressor patterns. And focusing on internalised domination can be a powerful way to discharge our internalised oppression and move forward.
DETERMINING SHORT-TERM STEPS
Long-term goals can be a powerful contradiction to distress. But we also need to translate these broad goals into short-term steps so they can lead to concrete action. For example, Dan Nickerson [International Liberation Reference Person for Working-Class People] is getting RC tools into the hands of direct production workers as a practical step toward achieving the larger goal of ending classism.
Re-evaluation Counseling has a One-Point Program. It is to use RC to “seek access to one’s occluded intelligence and innate humanness and assist others to do the same.” This is all that is required to participate in RC. However, many of us will want to consider adding the above to our participation.
Gortahork, County Donegal, Ireland
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 211, April 2023)