Part of my process of putting down the master's tools has been to realise that much of how I've been taught to see the world isn't true. One of the big lies? The one about scale and what it would mean to be a successful activist. In a system that celebrates gluttony. In a world where enough is never enough. BIG is beautiful. Big is successful. And this idealisation of 'bigness' can seep into your activism work. I know it found its way into mine, affecting the way I thought about change and what I thought 'success' might look like.
The master's tools told me to find that magic formula for change and then scale that baby up. Roll that programme out. Create a toolkit so more and more people can follow the predefined masterful plan of engineered change. They told me that if I wanted to think of myself as successful I had better be influencing the people at the top. The big people. Have my work published in the big publications. Be on the big telly. If the noise I was making as an activist was worth anything then it had to be loud. Success was only at scale. Impact only counts if it's big. If it's small, if no one is talking about it, if I'm not influencing whole government departments, then I'm not having an impact. I'm wasting my time and your funding.
These master's tools weren't designed to make me an activist, they were designed to make me an engineer. To control. To have the audacity to believe that I could control. To lack the wisdom to realise control was neither possible nor desirable. The methods I was taught to use made heavy emphasis on removing my subjectivity, my own humanity, from the process. I had to be objective. So objective I was taught to write in the third-person, as if I was never there, which perhaps I wasn't. I was taught to dismiss efforts towards change that didn't use the same methods as me. To treat them with a superior distain. The correct methods demanded bigness. You needed to work with enough participants to achieve statistical power. The bigger your sample, the better your research. The bigger the sample, the more funding you needed - your project could be big even before you started!
Of course the cracks were everywhere. Looking back it felt like a game where intelligent people were incentivised to work without wisdom. But the incentives were there. You only got funded if you bought into the process. You only got published if you bought into the process. And when the methods we were using pointed towards an important truth they were added to the curriculum and called 'The Hawthorne effect' or 'The placebo effect' as if they were explainable anomalies in an otherwise perfect system.
I wasn't taught to celebrate the 'small' and I certainly wan't encouraged to seek it out as a source of power. If I was working on a smaller scale I would talk about how the work was replicable, how the 'intervention' could be used in other areas and with other people as if these things - other places, other communities, other people in other times and other contexts are reliably generic and stood no chance of resisting the masterful change I was engineering. I was taught to seek scale. Getting bigger, lasting longer, being the ubiquitous version of whatever I was doing was what success would look like. I would build the 'national programme', build the toolkit to be used everywhere. Like a mono-culture. A forest of trees planted in orderly lines. I was told that success looks like lots of the same thing everywhere because you've worked out what the 'best' thing is and you've rightly had the chance to distribute it at scale.
I no longer tell myself that story.
It was a story full of ego. It was based on an insecure desire to control that has been my cultural inheritance. It led to work that was far from being the most powerful work I've done as an activist. Now I look back and see it as a story about 'noise'. I was in close relationship with the kind of noise that can be generated in the 'halls of power', but back in the real world I wasn't changing anything.
These days I work differently. I've liberated my ideas of change, my activism work and my feminism from a fixation on scale and the kind of success that can only come with bigness. I stopped listening to 'the master' and started paying close attention to someone else because she has lots to say about being small and what she has to say can help shape our feminist activism.
Mother Nature tells us a very different story about change. A story of diversity. A story of things that naturally stretch towards being the fullest versions of themselves under the right conditions. This growth isn't through clever intervention or engineering, but through the thread of life force that runs through everything. This is a story where big and small are in an intimate relationship, so intimate that both depend on one another to play their part. It's a story where big and small are blurred, the closer you pay attention to the things that are small, the more complexity you realise they are holding. A whole universe can sit on a side of a rock, it just depends where you place your attention.
It's a story where seeds are the natural outcome of anything able to be itself. A natural result of a cycle completed. They are planted, not engineered. Tiny seeds landing in the soil through chance, through the wind, through where the animal that ate the fruit then redistributed the seeds in their excrement proving that in this ecosystem even 'waste' is not the end of the story. In this story big comes from small and small can bring down big.
Mother Nature tells us a story in which time is a major character, a story of seasons, of a time when it looks like nothing is happening at all. And yet it is. Here change happens in the dark as well as the light. It happens at our feet and it happens out of sight. It's a story where there is no end-game of 'success' as everything, big and small, comes to an end, and every ending is a new beginning. Breathing in is no more successful than breathing out. Your first breath is no more succe