Month: October 2024

Joining a movement, especially one that aims to defend human rights and make the world more fair and balanced, is a defining action in our times. Defining or confining? This is the question I have been exploring as I watch movements strengthen, especially movements that seem to oppose one another. Having two separate movements, pro-Palestine and pro-Israel, means that these two movements somehow oppose each other. Their very existence defines and solidifies the other. The many Jews or Israelis that join pro-Palestine movements are immediately coded as anti-Israel. And the opposite is true as well. Is it not possible to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel? Is it not possible to be pro freedom and safety for all? If you go and ask people of these two movements if they are for freedom and safety for all, most people will say yes. The problem is, each side believes that the other said will say no, that only one side deserves this freedom and security.

Because of this belief, the border between the movements becomes more defined. People demand to know who do you align with? Which movement are you a part of? If you speak up for the other’s freedom, you must be against ours. This divide is further driven by the urgency of the war, where people die or are threatened on a daily basis, and the imbalance of this scenario – being killed versus being threatened. And even now you must be trying to figure out which side I am aligning with, or perhaps you believe you have already figured it out. That is exactly the phenomenon I wish to point out – our need to figure out one’s alignment is a divisive force in itself. It means you will put me in a box and then confirm what you already believe, whether in agreement or disagreement with me. And nothing actually can change in that dynamic. And is it not change we are desperate for?

So how do we come out of the vicious cycle of division, separation and war? If even solidarity against war makes more war, how is change possible? This is the question not to be answered through a list of dos and don’ts. To get to a possible right answer, we have to first wipe off layers of wrong answers. How is change made impossible? What is my responsibility in making this change impossible? Where does my own fixed belief come from? Is there any flexibility around that fixation?

When I was working a lot with Erasmus+ youth mobility projects, there was an understanding that when people travel, they transform. A lot of people can remember their exchange periods in university times as the period that changed them, opened them up to a whole new world. Travel does that. Traveling helps us see that our own culture is not the only reality, and we can open up to new ways of seeing the world. This physical traveling can be done mentally as well – let’s travel to other belief systems. Why not travel to a different demonstration? Leave luggage behind. Find out what motivates ‘the other’ – it may not be what you think. Leaving luggage behind means leaving aside the assumptions you make about why people have aligned with that movement. Doing that gives the other person permission to do the same. We travel to each other’s movements, luggage free. In my view, this is the change that allows solidarity to fulfill its purpose. Solidarity needs wings to fly.

I have recently been reflecting on the belief that learning has to be counter-intuitive. I go back to my assessment committee’s statement of not being able to learn anything new from my work. In a previous blog post, I questioned this premise based on the lens through which the learning was taking place. How can we learn anything new when we have fixed ideas of what learning looks like? In the academic world but also more generally in what we perceive as learning, there is a popular idea that learning has to be counter-intuitive, that it has to shake up a belief in favor of a different belief. What we thought was X is actually Y. The learning that I examine in my own work is intuitive learning, which is in fact a type of learning that reveals what you always already knew but was hidden. The belief shake up takes place but does not get replaced by a different belief. What we thought was X is questioned, and that unlearning process dusts off an inherent intuition. In this way, the assessment committee’s claim of not learning anything new is true – no new belief was offered in this work, no new strategy. Even my concluding idea that dissonance can be a trigger for a learning process was not outlined in a clean 10-step program. In fact I did the opposite, nuancing each learning experience to show that this is one of many paths, preventing from privileging one belief system as the desired learning outcome and keeping the focus on the (un)learning process.

I am just one of many people who are shining a light on intuitive knowledge. While the insights from counter-intuitive learning are interesting, they risk promoting a dependence on a belief system. This is because one belief is countered with another, which presents itself as a higher truth. This makes it tempting to give more power to the belief than to your own powers of investigation. Maybe that is why this has gotten so popular and prevalent in academia – the knowledge is attached to the person who delivers it. This is played out in the citation game, where academics get points every time someone else cites their work. I am not denying the impact that scholars have made through their research, but as with so many things in the world these days, we have gone too extreme to the side of knowledge ownership, in my case being powers that decide what learning should look like or feel like. The trend of counter-intuitive knowledge, interesting as it may be, perpetuates this power dynamic. It allows for knowledge (and therefore power) to be concentrated in the minds of the few.

And just like other concentrated power structures currently in the process of being dismantled, this one is being shaken up as well, or at-least it has in my world. Ironically, by not receiving the acceptance of the power structures as to what constitutes knowledge, I grew empowered to share my work even more. This is not an act of revenge but of rewriting the script. Even though the assessment committee would have preferred a different narrative, I could not give them that storyline. It was my intuitive knowledge, the very thing I was writing about, that I trusted the most. My own experience transforming dissonance and being a facilitator of that process for others guided my way. This, I felt, was the truest form of empirical research that I could offer. As it turns out, it was also the way to call back my own power. And this is not just my own experience, but I saw this in my students as well. After they cleared the fog of the dissonance reduction strategies, they were able to feel their feelings and connect to their own intuitive knowledge. The learning process was revealing and unveiling, instead of adding more knowledge.

This of course is not an easy learning process, because we have years of conditioning in school where the teacher tells you what you should learn and how you should learn it. This works in technical subjects, but social dynamics, group processes, reflections on democratic decision-making are not traditionally a classroom focus. The students who come into my classroom have to swim in the uncertainty of not getting their knowledge from a perceived authority, a challenging process because it requires questioning the conditioning around learning. Those who manage to do so go through a process of detaching from a knowledge dependency. They are in fact learning how to be responsible, without strategies or moral guidelines, but the responsibility that comes with connecting with your own thoughts and feelings, rather than depending on external belief systems. This is the power that is being called back, the power to know and trust our own intuitive learning processes. By becoming aware of our habits and conditioning, we are less likely to be manipulated, tempted by conditioned notions of success or happiness. We become less dependent on learning counter-truths in order to gain knowledge and start to give more power to our own intuition, our own knowing. As I see it, this is the shift from ‘power over’ to ‘power within’ that has a great potential in changing how we relate to each other in the classroom and beyond.

Agreement is an immensely tempting way to connect. When someone agrees or shares our mindset, especially in the face of a different perspective, it is very a satisfying feeling. To hear someone express our own perspective confirms something in our identity. We claim, ‘yes, you are so right’, but the more gratifying sensation is that I am right, and you confirmed it. It gives a sense of belonging, that sense we have craved since childhood, that we are not alone, we have a community of people who share our belief systems.

In our current times, however, this agreement has become so tempting that it has led to increasing polarization. It appears to be one of the main ways that we find connection and build community. Rather than community being a group of people with whom you share a variety of life experiences, these communities have become grounded in their agreement. It becomes increasingly difficult to express disagreement in these circles. For example, I grew up in a Jewish community in the US, and I can now see all the different ways that this community has split up – those that support Israel, those that criticize Israel, those that distance themselves altogether from Israeli politics, etc. These used to be more entangled (and therefore probably more frustrating for many), but now people have found their homes in communities that better support their ideologies.

This is not necessarily a bad thing and is part of a growth process for people to find their space of belonging. But I would like to offer a limitation of this belonging and perhaps an avenue for a different type of growth, and that is connecting through disagreement. I explored this in my PhD as one of the results of lingering in dissonance, through a student that was able to reflect on how angry she got when a fellow student disagreed with her. She wrote in her reflection journal of trying to ‘win her over with clever arguments’, which was her way of trying to reduce the dissonance between the two perspectives. Dissonance means that there is a cognitive inconsistency that irritates the mind, that your own perspective is challenged by disagreement and you try to reduce that discomfort, in this case, by trying to convince the other person to come to your side. All of us who are addicted to social media know that this never works. The disagreement becomes stronger and stronger, and each person is actually confirming their belief with every agreement emoticon they get.

What this student, let’s call her Francesca, did is start to reflect on her dissonance reduction strategy – why am I so angry that she disagrees with me? What does that do in my system? Francesca observed that trying to convince her and ‘win’ was very frustrating. When she became aware of this and dropped the need to win, she could start to hear where the other student was coming from. This did not mean she then agreed with her, but she could hear her and therefore connect with her. It was actually possible to connect through the disagreement.

I describe this process here very briefly, but it takes a lot to do this type of reflection. A lot of what? time? safe space? courage? guidance? From all my years of practice and research, I do not know why some people can do this type of self-reflection and others cannot or choose not. But I have seen it to be possible in many people. Instead of continuing to argue, they turn inwards. The disagreement forces them to find a different way to connect, they use it as a creative force. They put the effort in because they know that there is something stronger that can connect people beyond their opinions and belief systems. This is the beauty of family, in fact, as we are often placed in a family with a diversity of beliefs and personalities. If agreement was the only way to connect, many families would be torn apart. Because of the great force of love, we can find ways to connect that go beyond these differences. And this love can apply more generally to humanity.

Imagine if connection was not only driven by agreement, how free would you feel to just express yourself? That you wouldn’t have to worry about losing your connection to people, that your perspective would be completely accepted? I am not just talking about ‘agreeing to disagree’, because I see that as another dissonance reduction strategy. I have often seen the ‘agree to disagree’ mantra used when people do not want to feel the frustration of the disagreement. They do not want to experience the dissonance, because it creates an unresolvable conflict. ‘Let’s agree to disagree’ means let’s not get into it. Instead of a greater sense of connection, it’s rather a keeping of the status quo. I know that in some cases, opinions are so charged that this is the only way for a certain relationship to survive. But it does nothing to deepen a connection.

If we stopped seeing agreement as the only way to connect, or rather faced our own fears of losing connection, we would be much more free to express ourselves. We would not have to worry about belonging or being left alone, and our perspective could be free to ebb and flow. We wouldn’t be bound by one ideology but could fluctuate and cross borders to taste different beliefs. This is a gateway into empathy, that we could understand and empathize with the life of another, without necessarily agreeing. Accepting, but not agreeing, is a powerful distinction. From there, we could find more creative solutions when disagreements turn into conflicts and war.

What if we could be resourceful enough to use every disagreement as a trigger towards greater connection? This does not mean that we have to go hug our enemy, but we use the other’s stance to observe what feelings come up in our own bodies. What is being threatened? What does the dissonance feel like? If there is one available resource these days, perhaps even unlimited, it is disagreement. So let’s exploit it – it’s free and widely available.