We The People: The Most Important Question of Our Time

The now well worn and well quoted phrase originates in the preamble to the United States Constitution of 1787. It was written by Governor Morris, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Since then Courts and People have used it to support the intention of the Founding Father’s ideas for the American Republic. But along the rocky and slippery path of American history this “We” has become ripped and tattered and used as a weapon against “They” who somehow have been excluded from the “We.”

Who is We and who is They? Well it just depends upon what side of the street you are on. The divide is sometimes a mere few feet in small towns or a 10 lane highway in urban areas. But mostly it is the divide in ourselves, our primordial brain that insists on categorization and organizing and judging. Our insistence on controlling the opinions and habits and culture and traditions of others. Our deep seated fear that if we yield any ground, we will lose ourselves, that we will lose a war. Another word “war” worthy of note and reflection in our now very divided and partisan vocabulary. Finally it is our insistence that “They” become “Us”.

In Lesson 9 of Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny” he says,

“Avoid pronouncing the same phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone else is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the Internet. Read books.”

We have succumbed to ideologies - in itself a word widely interpreted. In its broadest sense it is used to mean a coherent system of ideas that rely on a few basic assumptions and reality that may or may not have any factual basis. These assumptions become reality through the patterns of thought originally seeded and now continually reinforced as we seek out those similar to us.

“These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth” (Manfred Steger and Paul James - Globalization and Culture, 2010)

So while these conceptual maps help us to manage a complex world, they also bind us and, like a car stuck in a rut, the faster we spin the wheels, the more acceleration we apply, thinking brute force will free us, the deeper we find ourselves. Only spinning wheels with no way out. My sense is that is where we are now - We the People.

So if we are brave enough or frustrated enough to understand the futility of just spinning our wheels, how do we pull out of the rut. One technique, some say, is to put the car into reverse - but that only utilizes the same method, drilling the same rut deeper.

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” (Albert Einstein)

I suggest that the careful use of language is the starting point. David Bohm, writing in “Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” observes how our language is structured in noun-verb-object that is:

“This structure implies that all action arises in a separate entity, the subject, and that..a verb crosses over the space between them to another separate entity, the object.”

The problem, Bohm notes, is that this way of speaking and thus thinking is fragmented and reinforces the concreteness of the fragmentation among us. It does not acknowledge the flow in the verb - we are not living the verb - we and others are, in our minds, either only the noun or the object. Our language informs our thinking. And our language reinforces our fragmentation.

What passes between us - the verb - should be the focus. He goes on to say: 

“..for the verb describes action and movements, which flow into each other and merge, without sharp separations or breaks. Moreover, since movements are in general always themselves changing they have in them no permanent pattern of fixed form with which separately existent things could be identified.”

If we live this notion that there are no permanent fixed forms, that there is flow between us, we create a space for constructive discussion to occur. Robert Frost said, “good fences make good neighbors” - maybe true with property; not so sure in human relations. 

As an aside for now, it is interesting to note how poetry often changes our perspective and our level of intimacy with ourselves and the world - changing our thinking and experience through the altered use of language structure as we mostly use it. The poet’s language reflects process, the revealing of a more intense and direct dialogue with the world, ourselves, and others. This discussion, however, will be for another day. Because there is so much richness in the topic, it deserves its own space.

David Bohm’s analysis of “verb” as supplanting noun and object as primary is beyond the scope of this piece. But what is critical is to practice a self-listening, to understand that our choice of words is very often creating and reinforcing those divisions that “we” claim to want to bridge.

So the next time you hear someone say, “they are destroying our democracy, they are causing all this chaos, they are the problem, they did this, if only they could see the other side, do something really simple - substitute the word “we” for “they” and see what happens both inside yourself and in conversation with the “other.” We are the People and we will rise or fall with each other.

By Susan Wright, Democracy Is Us Board and Council Member