Dear Wade’s Wire Subscriber:
I appreciate your subscription and the occasional feedback some of you have offered. However, I’m suspending Wade’s Wire.
Support for my efforts has been lukewarm, and participation has declined, which leads me to this step. I’m also suspending the weekly FromWade. , the monthly Mutual Empowerment newsletter, and all other outreach efforts for the Compassionate Humanity Community website.
I’ll continue researching questions that puzzle me, write about my results (which will clarify my thinking), and put reports on these efforts on the website. To see changes to the site, you can visit What’s New.
If and when readers post or email me comments, I’ll discuss them. I may also engage in one-on-one interviews or small group dialogues and post them.
The site’s resources are a reference book for me. I use them to refresh my memory, draw on its content, and document my arguments.
Still, I resign myself to my relative solitude. It seems the site, as conceived, will likely never attract substantial engagement in the near future. Most people are narrowly focused and/or self-centered, and no one wants to collaborate actively with me.
Since 1967, I’ve dedicated my life to integrating the personal and the political. More recently, with colleagues, we’ve co-convened several workshops exploring how personal growth practitioners and political activists might learn from each other and improve their efforts by incorporating others’ best practices. As James Baldwin said, “The messiness of the world is reflected in the messiness of our interior lives.” I’ve also experimented with many methods that could help with these efforts and written about successful experiments.
The Compassionate Humanity Community project has promoted the following:
- Holistic reform.
- A network of small teams that affirm the System as the primary problem.
- Mutual support for self-improvement (especially unlearning the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit).
- A powerful grassroots holistic reform movement similar to yet more powerful than the union, civil rights, and women’s movements.
Many obstacles block progress on these goals.
Baldwin declared, “I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous, and people are not yet willing to pay it.”
In “Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet,” L. M. Sacasas, editor of The Convivial Society, wrote:
Human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition.
We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices [that] prevent us from thinking about ourselves.
Fear rules.
I may be ahead of my time or living in the clouds. Regardless, I’m alone or largely alone. I resign myself to this reality and pause to reconsider my tactics.
Bob Dylan wrote, “I’d become my enemy in the instant that I preach.” But what does it mean to preach, and what is wrong with it?
To preach is to strongly advocate a firmly held belief or encourage a specific course of action with intense conviction. It involves one-way efforts to persuade, convert, and recruit.
Certain situations, such as political campaigns, justify this approach. (However, even here, a less top-down approach that involves more listening and learning may be more effective.)
I fear I’ve been pretentious, grandiose, arrogant, and utopian — preaching and indulging in “the vanity of (my) endeavors.” I’m no polymath. I’m a “slow thinker.” My memory is limited.
Now, I’ll try to be more humble. I’ll continue to try to learn more, share my discoveries, discuss them with anyone interested, and listen to and learn from others’ thoughts and feelings. I’ll continue to pursue Truth, Justice, Beauty, and Virtue. I’ll do more suggesting and less proposing.
I’d like to inspire people to engage in deep self-examination and mutual support to reduce suffering and promote justice, but I don’t expect these efforts to achieve much in my lifetime. Maybe the website will be my legacy that others find valuable in after I die.
Regardless, my efforts reward me intrinsically.
Carry it on,
Wade
