In the business world, a company may hold a corporate retreat for employees for team building in hopes of producing better results.

The Georgia football team turned inward for players to get to know the guy across from them in the locker room or the person who they lined up besides or against on the practice field.

Skull sessions, they called them. It started last winter after an 8-2 season in which Georgia failed to win the SEC East for the first time since 2016 and the pandemic altered usual player interactions.

For three days a week, players met in small groups for as long as 20 to 25 minutes. They were held after weight lifting sessions. Coach Kirby Smart moved from meeting to meeting and assistant coaches rotated.

SocialWade Lee HudsonDecember 5, 2021compassion, communication, mutual supportComment

Root Wisdom from the Elders Circle

PersonalWade Lee HudsonOctober 26, 2021spirituality, compassionComment

Holistic Check-ins

SocialWade Lee HudsonOctober 13, 2021mutual support, compassion, communicationComment

East Point Peace Academy: Close but Not Quite?

By Wade Lee Hudson

Thus far, the activist organization that comes closest to fulfilling Systemopedia’s vision is East Point Peace Academy. The progress they’ve made organizing a national network of like-minded small teams is particularly encouraging.

However, ambiguities in their website content raise two questions: 1) East Point, might you clarify your written commitments to more fully affirm everyone’s essential equality? 2) Might you invite your supporters to collaboratively plan and convene a workshop to explore how to advance your principles, with the understanding that the participants will be invited to plan and convene the next workshop?

Talk With Your Enemy? Dialogue about Dialogue

By Alan Levin

…I have to admit to being a slow learner in being able to talk with people who disagree with me politically, especially if they are conservative or right-wing. A helpful teaching for me is that we are not our ideas. I am not my beliefs and therefore neither is anyone else. People are far more than any particular idea that they happen to believe. This is especially true of political thinking involving abstractions, complex sets of ideas that often have little to do with the deeper values and intentions that move a person through life….

SocialWade Lee HudsonMay 18, 2021relationships, compassion, politicsComment

On Human Nature

By Wade Lee Hudson

Assumptions about human nature shape beliefs about the potential for change. Reflections on human history and child development indicate that compassion and the desire to cooperate are more primal, stronger, and deeper than hate and the desire to dominate. Which instinct prevails depends on many factors, including training, social conditions, and personal decisions. As Sitting Bull said, “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”

When people feel secure, they’re more likely to be loving and cooperative. But when they’re insecure, they’re more likely to be hateful and domineering — and willing to submit. Insecurity hardens the tendency to form ingroups and outgroups. Healthy competition becomes vicious. The hope to improve your material condition becomes all-consuming.

Society can encourage one pole or the other — domination or cooperation — or it can nurture a balance.

systemicWade Lee HudsonDecember 16, 2020compassion, economic insecurityComment

The Human Crisis

SystemicWade Lee HudsonApril 22, 2020compassion, democracy, domination, moralityComment

Political Tribalism: “Ideologues without Issues”

…angry political tribes are tearing the country apart. Driven by primal passions, they call themselves “liberals” and “conservatives.” But their policy beliefs are secondary. What matters most is tribal victory.

Americans largely agree on most specific public policies. But highly committed political people are like die-hard sports fans. They’re identify with their team and feel a deep need to crush the “enemy.” Tribal leaders, in their quest for the power to dominate, manipulate followers’ innate instincts. In particular, they promise to protect their tribe from threats by conquering “the other.”

Political psychologist Lilliana Mason has marshalled considerable evidence in support of these conclusions.

politicalWade Lee HudsonJuly 21, 2019tribalism, compassionComment

A Holistic Masterpiece

A tour de force by Asoka Bandarage, Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society and the Economy is more in sync with my thinking than any book I’ve read. This excellent, well-written work presents a holistic framework that addresses both the whole person and the whole world. Published in 2013 with 68 pages of text and 17 pages of notes, this comprehensive essay, as described by its publisher, Palgrave Macmillan UK, offers:

An integrated analysis of the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and human well-being by investigating them as interconnected phenomena requiring a paradigmatic psychosocial transformation. She presents an incisive social science analysis and an alternative philosophical perspective on the needed transition from a worldview of domination to one of partnership.

The chapters are titled:

Environmental, Social, and Economic Collapse
Evolution of the Domination Paradigm
Ecological and Social Justice Movements
Ethical Path to Sustainability and Well-Being.

systemicWade Lee HudsonJune 17, 2018spirituality, systemic analysis, compassion Comment