Nanopolitics: from the pyramid to the circle
Love politics are ubiquitous in the realm of human political activity. They undergird the formation of organizational structures and often outlive them, as in the case of the bonds created in community to oppose the Standard Fruit Company and the eventual betrayal of the union representatives who took high salaries and became palatable to the Americans managing the interests of the Company. Love politics operate in any environment where people interact with each other, be they institutional, organizational, or communal networks. Wherever people experience a sense of caring, generosity, and well being, love politics are at work. They are part of a realm of political activity that has as yet been unrecognized by the West. In our culture, we talk often of micro and macro politics.
These two types of politics concern themselves with the function of organizational life from neighborhoods to international and multinational political bodies. Nanopolitics, the foundational level of this tiered political structure engenders micro and macropolitics. Nanopolitics is the realm of political activity that occurs between individuals and groups from which organizational structures emerge and are sustained. Nanopolitics is both foundational and ubiquitous. Nanopolitics is the matrix from and through which all human political activity takes place.
Western political frame and nanopolitics
Nanopolitics occur through the enactment of love politics and control politics. Control politics serve the purpose of arranging human behavior in order to sustain systems. These types of politics are not relationship based and often are in service to the creation of behavioral structures through which functions of government can be manifested. A perfect example of these is driving rules. We do not necessarily agree on driving on the right hand side of the street or just in one direction down a one way street. However, there is a cultural consensus about the need to drive in this manner and so we do it.
Police officers, towns, and states are financially supported to ensure our compliance. We are forced to pay money to be able to participate in the activity of driving. All aspects of communication and compliance are control politics. The same is true for dynamics that are not relationship based in all our institutions: schools, hospitals, universities, places of work, police, courts, Child Protection Services, and most places where individuals and their families interact with State-sponsored institutions. Another aspect of control politics is that they are fear-based. Although the initial creation story for these institutions like say for Child Protection Services is the protection of children from harm, quickly in the history of this institution, the politics of fear took hold.
Systems that had been initially used to acculturate Indian children were used to serve as the template that would provide the rationale for home removals and for the foster care system. The fear of the occurrence of the most extreme forms of abuse and violence in the lives of children create a system that more often than not enables these events at the hands not only of parents and biological family, but also at the hands of foster parents and institutional representatives. Instead of diminishing possibilities of harm, these possibilities are multiplied. Fear drives this system into the establishment of unattainable goals, unsustainable work loads, unloving work environments, and the fundamental neglect even of those for whom this whole system has been created.
Mainstream Western culture operates in hierarchies. The articulation of human political activity has also been theorized in this manner. The addition of the idea of nanopolitics to this hierarchical understanding of political activity is one step in the effort to build a bridge towards a different understanding of political activity. When enacting love politics, power does not operate based on hierarchies of class, position, race, gender and power all the time. More often than not, because love politics occurs only through the presence of relationships, power is shared, not wielded. Therefore, love politics operate circularly through relationships bound by love and that serve the purpose of supporting survival and well being.
Love and evolution
Love politics occur through relationships, within family and friendship networks, and occasionally small organizations or through the courageous prioritization of change makers lodged within institutional settings that are more often than not at odds with their behavior and their understanding of constituents. The enactment of love politics is often the reason why organizations and institutions have been created as in the case of this American democracy, Child Protection Services, public schools, and other institutions that serve the purpose of supporting vulnerable constituent groups. Love politics are often at the forefront and provide the organizing structures that lead to transformative social change as in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, the Feminist Movement, the GLBT movement, and the efforts to bring about immigration reform.
Love politics, however, are also different from control politics in the sense that they do not emanate from a place of fear, but rather a yearning to bring about a meaningful expansive and life affirming condition that is as of yet only experienced in the most intimate locations in one’s life. Whereas control politics creates fear-based reinforcing dynamics that create results counter to those that are intended, love politics engender human consciousness, creativity and expression, the conservation of culture as well as ongoing cultural evolution. Love politics allows us to embody love ethics and by definition these reproduce themselves through the enactment of love intimately, with friends and family and with others who are part of our communities.
Western culture, by way of the Greeks, the Romans, the Europeans, and the Americans, no longer have templates that are fitting for the creation of a system of government based on love politics. The Americans were preoccupied with the formation of a union that would continue to support the economic system of enslavement and could not therefore truly put to practice the type of community systems found among the Haudenosaunee people with which Ben Franklin was enamored. The White people would have found it impossible to come together and surrender the barbaric practice of enslavement for the opportunity to enact truly equitable systems of government like those found among the First peoples on this continent.
The current condition of social oppression and inequity in which we find ourselves living today is the result of the choices made by White people to continue to build an economic system based on control and fear Efforts to bring about civic and social innovations in the direction of the enactment of love ethics demands that this fact be recognized and accounted for. Inequity and oppression as cultural features of the West and have little to do with the natural condition of human consciousness. These are more like bad habits developed in order to create a social order based on fear and through which action is privileged and swift action revered. The way power works in the West is the vestigial pattern through which small groups of people learned to dominate much larger ones in order to create perceived safety, abundance, and absolution from responsibility for harm caused. It is time to stop re-enacting and enabling this pattern because we have reached a level of ubiquitousness that is endangering the planet because not enough of us are inclined to take risks, do more with less, and stand in full responsibility for the impact our habits and actions have on the ecosystem in which we live.
The wisdom and the pragmatic habits protected and conserved by indigenous peoples on this planet can provide for the rest of us the potential for remembering, learning, enacting, and evolving practices that embody this circular way in which power moves in love politics. Non-Western people organized/organize their societies differently. They had/have different Creation stories that embodied/embody different ways to organize community and government based on core cultural values that shape people’s understanding of the nature of the individual and its relationship to community; our relationship to nature; our sense of what it means to be children, adolescents, adults and elders; how to understand the place in which we live, our bodies, and how to produce and create objects; how to provide for our sustenance and thrive under the environmental conditions this world provides for us as a species, etc.
In the West, our default setting in all these ways of understanding ourselves and our relationships to the world we live in is dominance. We understand the role of the individual in community as that or individual versus community. Nature versus man. Young versus old. Man versus woman. Nature is there to provide for us the resources we need to eat, live, learn, create, and produce and not for much else outside the satisfaction of our needs.
It is not only possible to think differently about these relationships, it has been done and continues to be done differently by those folks who are still resisting the onslaught of the militarized effort to make the West our global culture as a species. Although this project of globalization is in its final phase, it is also falling short. It is failing to deliver the sense of personal freedom, abundance, and personal power that it guarantees. Now is the time to look beyond the West and to begin to undo this unquestioned expansion and cultural, interspecies genocide.
