Relation-values and emotions: Of Informers and Victims
In an abundant world, relations are much more about emotions and values than about agreements and constellations that enable material exchanges. This vignette is about one such emotional exchange K will never forget.
One of the things K does is run workshops to create scenario stories about the future. These stories are useful in very ambiguous situations, when mere trend extrapolations and a systematic evaluation of all possible alternatives is not possible. Many people and organizations do scenarios, but it is fair to say that people have a love-hate relationship with this way of thinking about the future. Some love it, some hate it, and most, K wants to add in the service of honesty, actually could not care less and wonder what all the fuss is about.
Scenarios are a difficult methodology, not because you have to be real clever to create them, but because the outcome is a set of equally plausible, challenging and diverging views of the future. 'A set of' means three to five. Since they diverge, by definition all but one must be wrong and chances are, even that last one does not really capture what eventually will unfold. Getting people interested, and even to pay for, something that is more likely than not not going to tell you what will happen is, well, difficult. Hence the elaborate dance, which rivals any mating display seen in nature, that proponents of scenarios perform when they peddle their wares.
It could be all so very simple: since no one knows what the future holds, the point cannot really be - to pretend - to know, but merely to provide room for a thought experiment of 'what would you do if this future world were to happen?' In fact, this book that you are holding in your hands is a kind of scenario exercise. Like you, neither K nor I really have a clue what the future will hold - if we did, we would probably be very rich and very depressed, or on television or all three together. Instead we are not rich, but happy, not on television and we invite you to consider if all the bits and pieces we talk about arrange themselves to look, and feel, like a world of abundance, then what would you do?
Some years ago, then, K had found a group of people in one of the former communist countries in Europe who wanted to develop a few stories about possible plausible futures for their country. And the future of an entire country certainly is a matter of significant ambiguity.
K assembled a mostly local team, they interviewed a large number of people and gathered thirty of them in a small village in a former vacation facility of one of the participating companies. It was a three day event, late in August, and it was hot. There was no air conditioning, so only the evenings and the nights gave, reluctantly, a bit of respite from the heavy heat.
The first thing you do when you create scenarios is to break up the large group into four small groups and ask them to come back, in a couple, three hours, with two drivers that are at the same time the most uncertain and the most important ones for the questions of the scenario exercise, in this case, possible futures for the country.
Sounds easy, doesn't it? But there are two difficulties: 'most uncertain' and 'two'. Somehow we are conditioned to be highly suspicious of uncertainties, real men not only do not cry, they also seem to have to know - even if they have to fake it. But the paradox is that to have any chance that what we do does have an effect, we actually need uncertainty. If everything were already certain then there is, quite literally, nothing you can do to make any difference at all!
Once that mental resistance is overcome, the next difficulty is 'two'. We are loath to commit ourselves to such a small number. We want options, choices, room to maneuver, ten, or more, action items! And so we have become 'list generators', forgetting in the process that some things are more important than others; and also forgetting that if you have ten or more key points that you have to act on - after all, they are key - you very well may be busy, but not necessarily effective.
The four groups during those hot August days struggled long and hard and eventually agreed that the two most important and at the same time most uncertain drivers that bounded possible futures for their country were trust and integration.
The next day, another hot day more suited to swimming in a lake or laying in a meadow, closing one's eyes and dreaming the day away, the four groups instead struggled with the definitions of trust and integration. The latter was easy and is no longer relevant to this vignette of relations in a world of abundance, hence it leaves here.
Trust, on the other hand, moves closer to center stage. The groups debated and argued and considered and rejected all day long and in the end agreed that trust, as they thought about it, had to be about the relations of outsiders, especially investors, to them. They felt that those outsiders did not trust them enough - and if this continued, then one kind of future for their country might emerge, but if somehow, they almost used the word miraculously, that mutual and apparently deepening distrust could be reversed, then quite a different future for their country might come about.
It was hot, there was no breeze and they were tired. So they wanted to fill in the details, the causality, the actors, the events and the contingencies to the next day. The group showered, had dinner, went for a stroll, relaxed and when night began to fall, most of them, K included, sat on the terrace, around a large table. Some had beer, some wine, some talked, some listened.
The conversation shifted to trust: how could it possibly be that foreigners were so distrustful? After all, had they not gotten rid of the communist dictatorship, pretty much all by themselves? Didn't that create a reservoir of goodwill? And then this: the foreigners come in, behave like they had just won the war and bought, well, actually more like stole, national assets at bargain basement prices. The group liked the tone and flow of that conversation. Remember, it often is easier to complain than to do something - and who really wants to do something on a warm August night, with a glass of wine in their hand.
The evening wore on, and it may have been the wine, or perhaps the obvious pointlessness of going over the same complaints, with the same arguments, or it may have been simple tiredness, but eventually someone said, and K does not remember who it was: "Did we perhaps do something - are we doing something now so that we are not worthy of the trust of others? Is that the real reasons others distrust us?" Once the loud and vehement and eloquent, for that time of day, assertions that this could not possibly have been so had died down, a second person, let's call her A, said: "I think there is some truth to this. We have never - unlike the South Africans, for example - tried to come terms with our own past. We installed someone who had obviously suffered at the hands of the previous regime as our president, and he in turn, assumed the authority, moral or not, I am not sure, of declaring on behalf of all the possible victims 'Let's forgive and forget the past. We have lost so many years, more than a generation, it is time at last to move forward.'" "Perhaps," continued A, "he was wrong, and we were wrong in letting him do this."
"No, he was not," said B, "because comparing us to South Africa is just absurd, We never had, and most certainly not during the last years, anything approaching the violence and terror of the South African apartheid regime."
At that moment, C, very quietly, but in a voice you have heard before, one that demands attention, one where the others become automatically quieter so that everyone can hear what is being said, well at that moment C said: "I feel it is impossible and actually silly to compare injustices. It does not matter whether we suffered more or less than the South Africans. I know for a fact that in this country there were, and there are, victims, because" and here, if that was actually possible, her voice became even more quiet, "because I am one of the victims." It seemed, at that time, that even the evening breeze, even the crickets held their breath, although K is now sure, it only seemed that way.
After a short while, C continued: "It is true I was not tortured, I was not sent to Robbins island, I was not even jailed - but I lost my job, perhaps because of what I said, perhaps because I never joined the party, perhaps because an informer needed my job, I just do not know. But losing a job in our previous regime, where everything was minutely and meticulously planned and assigned, well, it is not easy. I had to work for years doing something I was not trained for, I had no interest in, I was no good at and for which I got a fraction of my former pay."
Into the tense quietness, C went on: "I have no desire to know who was responsible for this, and I have no desire to confront or demand retribution from anyone, but I would like to hear from those who did inform why they did so, and how they live with this today. Because then I could in fact do what our president presumed to do on my behalf: forgive and move on."
After a long while, the conversation resumed, cautiously, tentatively at first, then ever more purposefully away from the moment of emotion, of fear and of pleading. Towards the safer and more familiar pro and con, the analytical, the detached and the impersonal.
Except that D did not participate, he only listened; but that he did intently. After the issue - since that is what it had become - had been examined, with intellectual rigor, from all sides, a lull occurred in the conversation. People held onto their glasses, lit another cigarette, some went to the bathroom, some to refill their glasses. Into this space D, looking down at the ground between his feet, said: "I was one of those; not important, I suppose, but I did inform."
The quiet attention reappeared out of nowhere, this time settling on D. Some leaned, ever so slightly, forward as if they were not quite sure what they had heard and wanted a kind of confirmation, at least a repetition. But D did not repeat, instead he went on "You asked to know why." he said, for a slight moment, more like a flicker, raising his eyes to look at C, "I guess with me it was as with most informers. You start because you get a little extra - a privilege, permission to travel abroad, a bonus at work, those kinds of things. Then you convince yourself it doesn't really hurt anyone. You are doing what the legitimate government wants to be sure you and everyone else is doing - you are reminded, eventually you remind yourself, and it is true, actually. Then the arguments about the 'other side', out to get you. So someone has to help protect what we have. And then, well then you arrive at the argument that no law abiding citizen has anything to fear - and in your mind you turn it around: Obviously, those with fear are not law abiding citizens, so it is your and the state's right, nay duty, to find out what they are up to." "How long did you believe all this?" someone asked. "Until the end. Even during the last demonstrations in 1989, I was not on the side of the demonstrators."
No one knew what to do, what to say or how to behave until C looked at D and spoke: "Though I doubt that I became a victim because of you, I am glad for what you said. How you deal with it, how you live with it, whether you were not so important, as you said, that's all your problem and frankly, I am not interested. But," and here she raised her voice, it became public in a way, "since no one talks about these times, these days, weeks, months, years, when we spied on each other, when we informed on each other, anonymously and cowardly, today we still do not trust each other. And discussions like we had during the day are fake; they are lies. It is much easier to blame 'those over there', investors, outsiders, foreigners. It is too painful to say I do not trust you, or you, or you" - and as she said that she moved her head and looked squarely at others in the group - "it is easier to say I do not trust them over there." Here she gestured as if she was pointing at people far, far away and most certainly on the other side of the border. "I feel," C continued and K noticed she was coming to the end, tired and drained not only from the heat of an August day, "trust is about us, here and now. It has nothing to do with others - that will be an issue only if and when we have relearned how to trust each other. I feel we are a long, long way away from that."
Cautiously, the conversation became public again - people agreed with C and added anecdote after anecdote of how true her point was, of how badly the basic fabric of trust in their society had frayed. Stories were told of connections between informers, banking and privatization, of letters from the old days being kept safely in one's drawers in case someone, quite possibly, needed to be reminded of something.
It was surprising to K that the conversation did not take place in their language (even though the workshop was held in theirs), but in English. As a courtesy to their guests? Or because it was just too painful to use their own language, which in a way, had been tainted by distrust, dishonesty and lies? K noticed, but he never found out.
It had become quite late, everyone was tired, and since the night had progressed far enough to get rid of the lethargic heat of the day, people went to bed. The next morning, the sun was bright and warm, the day well on it's way to becoming another hot one. The group went to work and to K's surprise, had the courage, even in the light of day, to stick to the redefinition of trust which focused on themselves and left, for now, the foreigners far, far away.
Reflecting on that evening now, several years later, K wonders what is the point? It must be that it is hard, very hard to deal with emotions and values in the relations between people. It is difficult between friends and lovers, it gets more so between strangers. While that evening in August many years ago may be unusual, the tendency to ignore, to leave out, to deny emotions and values in these relations is alive and well. It is what we did for thousands of years. We made our peace in order to survive - even with informers. In abundance, we survive as a matter of course. It is time, K thought, we started to learn the art of emotional, value-based conversations and relations.