Chip Hauss on How and Why Peacebuilding Starts at Home

Transcript:

Heidi:  Hi, this is Heidi Burgess, and I'm here with Guy Burgess and our good friend, Chip Hauss, who we have known for a long, long time. Chip lives in Washington, DC, and he's retired from teaching political science and doing all sorts of things in the conflict resolution field.

Most recently, he's been working at George Mason at the Carter School and also at the Alliance for Peacebuilding where, I'm sorry to admit, I forgot his title, so Chip, I hope you'll help me here. He is also a prolific writer and networker and has just come out with a book that's called Peacebuilding Starts at Home.

We really wanted to talk to him about that because the book is doing something very similar to what we've been trying to do with the BI website. And I chuckle because Chip and we have been trying to do the same thing for 30 years, but he does it with books, and we do it with websites. But we're running in parallel. So, I wanted to talk to him today about his book and other things that he's doing.

So Chip, welcome. Do you want to start out first by talking about your background and what you've done that brought you to the point where you wrote this book? All of your other books have been more academic, more for the scholarly audience. And this book is for the general public. So, that's a change for you. And it's a change that we want to do but don't know how to do. So I'm really interested in hearing you talk about how you got to where you are and where you hope to go with this book. 

Chip: So let me start with titles, which are boring, and then go to my background, which is even more boring, which I'll try to make a little more interesting. At AFP, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, I'm Senior Fellow for Innovation and have been on the board of directors since 2005. And so that means I am an emeritus member of the board, which means I can't vote, which is fine since we've had one contested vote in 20-some years.

My relationship with George Mason is —and there, I don't remember my own title—but I have some sort of visiting scholar role, though I am neither visiting because I live four miles away or a scholar anymore. 

And as you described the book, yes, it is my first attempt to write a trade book, to write a book for a general audience, which I've never really done before, though I've been able to make my living primarily as a writer for the last 30 years, since I moved to DC. 

The impetus for the book really is all AFP. When I joined the board 20 years ago, I always wanted us to work on issues inside the US, even though that's not where I spent my career. And we gradually realized that we had to do so. Shortly after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, we had a meeting with members who had offices in Baltimore. And they didn't particularly get excited about working in the US. And I kind of didn't lose my temper, but I got frustrated. And I said, "How dare we tell people in Burundi or Botswana or Belfast or Bogota that we can solve their problems if we can't do it in Baltimore." 

But as is AFP's wont, we never wanted to compete with our members. So we assumed that our members like Search for Common Ground and others that had projects in the US would be able to do the work that we felt needed to get done. And it turns out that as the situation in the US deteriorated over the decade since the incident in Ferguson, we found that our members didn't have the capacity to do large-scale work, paradigm shifting work in the US. We don't have the capacity either, but we decided that we had to seriously take the question on and fill in the gaps of what our members were doing.

I was asked by a colleague, Patricia Schaefer, on Christmas Eve in 2023 if we wanted to write a book together. She was in an airport trying to go somewhere for vacation, and I was checking email on Christmas Eve, which says something about both of us. And I said, "Of course." And it turns out we couldn't write the book together, given our very different interests. But I realized that I could write this book, and now I'm actually answering your question. We could write this book and use it as a tool to build what doesn't exist in the United States.

So the book begins with two things. It begins with an epigraph from Bob Putnam who taught my wife and me in grad school. And Bob says it was at an event at Georgetown where he looked out at the audience and said, "The future of the country is in your hands." He, of course, was right. No one in the audience really believed him. But the first sentence of the book is something like, "Peacebuilding starts at home. Is an invitation masquerading as a book." 

So what we're trying to do with the book and with the movement that we're going to launch early in the new year is to give people on-ramps so that they can accept Bob's invitation and truly make true the case that the future of the country literally, is in the hands of the Georgetown students who were in that room that night or the people who listen to this podcast or the people who pick up my book.

Heidi: So what are the gaps that you saw missing that you think that the book and/or AFP and/or all these folks can fill? 

Chip: Without boring you with a very long list, let me focus on two. I'll list the two and then go into each of them in a bit of detail.

The first is to try to reach everyday average Americans. My pipe dream of writing a trade book relates to that. The second is engaging in what I call "the peacebuilding pivot" in the book, which is the realization that people may not be drawn necessarily to conflict resolution and peacebuilding per se, but they care about climate, care about racial discrimination, care about culture wars, what have you. 

And we have to pivot toward them, and they have to pivot toward us. So let me do each of them. 

The first is how do we really build a mass movement? How do we really reach people like my sister who is retired and spends half of her life camping and going to folk music festivals? How do we reach people like Leslie or my stepdaughter who's a clinical psychologist or our neighbors in this new condo that we just moved into? We're developing a strategy. We can talk about this later in more detail if you want. We are planning to reach upwards of 10 million people by the end of the decade, where they are, and help them see that peacebuilding starts at home is something that literally starts at home that they "can do." as Liz Hume puts it on our website, without taking graduate-level courses. The impact that they have at home in their communities, with their families, in their workplaces can ripple out to the society as a whole. 

On the pivoting, one of the things I learned in writing this book is that there are a gazillion people, to be precise, out there doing very interesting work on climate, on pro-social activity, on evolution, on, you name the issue who are talking about. They are doing very similar things to us. And we don't know them. They don't know us. And what surprised me, especially after we joined Rotary, is that many of them are pivoting toward us. And we have to pivot toward them. We have to think about making race relations or climate change or economic affordability or what have you as central to what we do.

They're discovering that they can't do their work unless they do some conflict resolution, problem-solving-related kind of work in what they do. So, the funnest part, to create an adjective that doesn't exist, the funnest part of writing this book was getting to know —I'll just give you one example, a guy named Devin Thorpe, who is a retired investment banker who runs a website called Superpowers for Good and also helps people crowdfund investment in startups that work for social change.

And so I've gotten to meet all these really cool people. And what I'll be trying to do in the next months is to bring those two goals together. The reaching average everyday Americans by using people we are pivoting with. 

Guy: So I have a question that sort of fits in with that. When you talk about pivoting from various advocacy groups, whether it's climate, race relations, poverty, whatever, you run into the problem of how do you make peace between people who approach these substantive issues in very different ways? How do you make peace between true believers of the existential climate crisis and those who are asking well, you could call them climate skeptics, not crazy climate deniers, but people who are asking some thoughtful, very hard questions?

Chip: The answer is with difficulty, not quickly, gradually. And so let me step back from the question a bit and say that I'm not in any way suggesting that I have the answer to everything. My whole strategy, however, we may end up talking about it in the time we have left, works on the assumption that the crises that we face right now are not going to bring the system to a crashing end in the next six months, two years, five years, what have you. So if you are convinced that we need immediate action, whether it is to undo the damage that Joe Biden did or to undo the damage that Donald Trump is doing, if that's your perspective, I'm not your answer. If, however, you work on the assumption that we do have some time, then you can begin to build the kinds of relationships I implied a few minutes ago.

Let's use the example of climate. There are people on the right who are doing really interesting things in reaching out to people that are frequently referred to as climate skeptics or climate deniers. The most interesting and famous of whom is a woman named Katherine Hayhoe, who is a world-class climate scientist who is also an evangelical Christian, and her husband has, last I knew, an evangelical church in Lubbock, Texas because Catherine had been teaching at Texas Tech.

And if you know your Texas geography, which I don't, Lubbock, Texas is in the heart of oil country. An anti-climate culture. But what Catherine's been able to do in the evangelical and ranching communities around Lubbock is to talk about climate, not in terms of typical Al Gore left approaches, but looking at how climate is affecting the way Texans live now. Pointing out that Texas has the highest per capita use of alternative energy in the country. That it is in Texan's economic self-interest to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and to take advantage of the solar and wind opportunities that exist in West Texas, about which I know absolutely nothing, of course.

There's another guy who's a former Republican member of Congress from the upcountry of South Carolina, where they're explicitly trying to develop climate alternatives that appeal to conservatives. And those analogous folks exist across the board. You find them in places like Rotary.

Our rotary district here in Northern Virginia, I don't know for sure, but my guess is that a third of the members that we've met in our district, which covers Northern Virginia, voted for Trump. Maybe it's a quarter, maybe it's 40%, but it's not trivial. And Rotary becomes an interesting place where you can talk about your ideological differences, where you have something that already binds you together.

So again, if you're convinced that the world is going to hell in a hand basket between now and the midterm elections in 2026, I'm not your guy. But if you think about long-term strategies that work on the assumption that we actually have more in common than we realize, and we can build on what we have in common, I may be your guy. Sorry to misuse your name, Guy, but it happens. 

Heidi: This brings me to thinking about the challenge that we got several months ago. We wrote a post on it. We reflected on the assertion that accused folks who were doing what's become known as "bridge building" to be "fiddling while Rome burns." We got told that we, and you, and lots of people like us, are wasting our time focusing on the long-term when there isn't even going to be a long-term to work on—that we really need to be focusing on the current emergency. How do you answer that?

Chip: Again, with some difficulty. Let me answer that first by saying, as you know, I'm not exactly a conservative. I mean, my '60s left-wing credentials are impeccable. At the same time, and let me add to that, I suffer from a disease that is called being politically, clinically depressed. I'm watching less news on TV and reading the news less because everything is just depressing. And I can't guarantee you that Rome isn't burning. I really cannot do that.

 I also don't have a good strategy for what to do if Rome is, indeed, burning. I was asked 55 years ago, when I applied to be a conscientious objector. "What I would do (as a Jewish guy), what would I do about Hitler?" And I didn't have a good answer. I made one up that satisfied them, but I knew it wasn't good enough.

And it revolved around anticipating what was going to happen. I just bought a book called Seeing Around Corners about companies that anticipate change. But the fact of the matter is, we could have seen around the corner. We could have anticipated the changes that were happening. We didn't do it, and we're stuck with the mess that we're in now. And if you're convinced that the mess we're in now is the only thing to worry about, again, I'm not the person who has the answer for you.

Add to that another thing that worries me that you didn't raise. And that is, let's say, let's say the left succeeds in undoing what Trump has done. All that's going to do is piss off, if you allow me to use that term on this medium, the people on the other side.

The fact of the matter is that we're going to have to live in a country that is more or less this divided for quite some time. And so, if my victory comes at the expense of the other side and drives the wedges even deeper, which it would do now, I fear, then we're just going to make things worse. And so in the book, I start one of the chapters with a quote from Desmond Tutu, "If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies." And I firmly believe that.

I also draw heavily on a woman named Loretta Ross, who is a civil rights activist of our generation, who talks about "calling people in. And I like the work." I don't remember how much I use it in the book. There's also Chad Ford, who is a Mormon peacebuilder. Coming out of the work of the Arbinger Institute, he talks about "turning toward the people you disagree with." And you know I firmly believe in this approach because I've seen it work. I've seen it work in my own life. I've seen it work in the environments that I work in, that people are open to change. Again, I'm not going to get you there by the end of next month, but maybe by the end of the decade. 

Guy: Going back to your statement about folks who feel that we're in the midst of an existential crisis. And there are a lot of people who think that we're in different kinds of existential crises, but it's all pretty scary. But I'm remembering years ago we were involved in disaster preparedness efforts of one sort or another. The thing that you really need to be able to do when you're confronted with some sort of calamity, whether it's a giant flood or something much worse like we're now dealing with, is that you have got to have a vision, a plan for what are we going to do to respond to this disaster that gets everybody to work in the same direction and actually start trying to fix things.

And as you point out, if the response to the disaster is that all the policies of the Biden administration need to get reinstated, that will just continue the hyperpolarization and the political pendulum. But have you given any thought to a kind of unifying vision that we could say, "Okay, let's all unite around these principles that both the folks on the left and the right could see as a different and much more promising way forward that they'd be willing to work toward."

Chip: Yes. And you may not find the answer I'm about to give you all that satisfying, because it isn't. It isn't the great vision. I was drawn, and I literally start the book with this. I started the book with three videos, the first of which was put together by a bunch of Australians. It's called Australia Remade.

They went around Australia and did a listening tour, a real listening tour. They realized that the issues they were talking about, economic inequality, climate change, what have you, weren't getting enough traction. So they went around the country and they listened to people. And then they made about a two-minute video that they called "An Ordinary Paradise." And it is a vision of what all Australians could get around.

If you could change the narrator to an American voice, it would largely work here. It is not specific policy guidelines, but it's a set of goals. It's a country we want to live in. One of the lines in it is "we've been through a lot lately. This is what we could get behind." And this group in Australia has begun doing that in ways that would work in Australia, but wouldn't work here— like running independents in rank choice voting districts and things like that.

But the idea of the image, of the vision, the North Star in system speak, that you want to work toward is there. Actually, it should not be defined by intellectuals like the three of us, but to use the jargon of complexity science, it has to be emergent. It has to appear. It will come out of what the people bring together and decide what they want to do. And it probably will revolve around a world that provides decency and dignity and justice for everybody. It will revolve around a line we began developing around Gaza, but it's beginning to make sense everywhere, "status quo no more."

We need fundamental change and a world in which, using a line we started using at AFP 25 years ago, a world that "works for everybody." And it's what Rotary talks about. It's what other civil society organizations talk about. And it is not just peacebuilding. It is holistic. I don't know if that answers the question well enough. Heidi can push further.

Heidi: Well, I'm going to back up a little bit, although I do want to go forward too. But just a comment that you said that what you were advocating wasn't going to work for the people who were concerned about what's happening in the next six months. And I want to disagree with that, because I think that getting people to focus on the fact that, if they just dig in deeper on either the left or the right, it's not going to get us out of this mess.  But nevertheless, it is what some of the left is doing, as I'm sure you and our audience knows, the left's pretty divided at the moment. But there's a large number of people that figure the problem is that we haven't mobilized enough on the far left and if we push our far-left ideas strongly enough that we can eke out a victory in the next election. And they're really focused just on the next election without realizing or thinking about what that's going to cause the Right to do. And the folks who are digging in even deeper on MAGA aren't really considering or concerned about what the left's response is going to be.

So it strikes me that one of the near-term things that's really important is to get people to look at what's likely to happen from their advocacy efforts and whether that's really what they want to have happen, and if there isn't a better way. I very much think that we need to get people to understand that. Everybody does understand that the status quo is not working. Nobody's happy with what's going on right now, even on the right. The Trump voters aren't happy with what's going on right now. We have to change. How can we change? I don't think people have thought about that as much as they should have.

And I hope your book is the beginning of the change of this, that the way we need to change is we need to envision a world that's going to work for everyone. Or a nation or a state or a community that's going to work for everyone. That the 50% on the other side isn't going to go away. 

We have written for years about what we call into-the-sea framing, which was a term that was named after Yasser Arafat's supposed threat that he wanted to drive Jews and Israel into the sea. Many people have this magical thinking that if we could just be persuasive enough, the other side will just disappear. Either they'll leave or they'll realize that we were right, and they'll change their mind and become one of us, or we will so disempower them that they might as well not exist. That's what we call "into-the-sea thinking." And it clearly doesn't work in a country where you've got a pretty 50/50 split, and neither side is going to go into the sea. We've got to realize that we've got to live together. 

Another thing that comes to my mind is a fellow named Ebrahim Rasool, who was the South African ambassador to the United States. He gave a very powerful talk at one of the AFP annual meetings where he talked about the lessons that they learned in South Africa and how they could apply to the United States. And the first lesson was that "the other side is here to stay."

He explained that in South Africa, the blacks had to realize that the whites weren't leaving, that they considered South Africa to be their home too. Many of them were born in South Africa. There wasn't a place for them to go to. They weren't leaving. And so they had to figure out a way in which they could build a South Africa that would work for everyone. 

And that's absolutely true with the United States. We have to figure out a way of living and working together that's going to work for everyone. And this brings me to one of the questions that I have already sent you. One of the things that you do in the book, and I think this is fun, is you say that you haven't recovered from being a university professor entirely. So the end of each chapter has a homework assignment. The first homework assignment is for people to choose a problem that they really care about and figure out what the United States would look like if they tried to solve that problem and in your terms, they "nailed it." And if I remember right, the term nailing it came from Katie Couric.

Chip: Kelly Corrigan. 

Heidi: Kelly Corrigan! I got those mixed up. She talked about "nailing" some problem, I don't remember what it was. But the notion is you solve it perfectly. And so you had suggested that your readers come up with a problem that they really care about and visualize solving it perfectly. And my question to you is, what happens when half of the people say the problem is climate change. And half of the people solve it with the Green New Deal, and we completely cut out all carbon very quickly. And whatever happens to the economy, in the meantime, doesn't matter because we've cut out carbon. And other people say, "We've gotten people to realize that climate isn't the only problem, and we shouldn't be wasting our time and money worrying about climate when we should be putting all of our effort into race or, I don't know, fixing poverty. or affordability. So you have two very different images. Is having these very different images going to help us, or do we need a project more like the Australian one, where we develop a unified image? 

Chip: There's a lot in those questions and even more in the two pages of questions you sent me beforehand, which is by far the best set of questions I've been asked about anything ever in my life. And so let me respond by taking off from how I know Ebrahim Rasool, then go from there. So I met Rasool when he was the first minister, whatever they call the head of one of the nine provinces of South Africa. He was in the Western Cape. And he was in the US. He was brought by Tim Phillips of Beyond Conflict along with Ruth Meyer. They were young activists toward the end of apartheid. Ruth Meyer was the head of the National Security Service— the police. And Ruth, for a variety of reasons, realized that apartheid could not last.

Ebrahim grew up in a Muslim, given his name, not surprising, family, and realized that, as you put it, the whites were not going to disappear. And the fact that Trump has been trying to bring a handful of white South Africans into the country in the last year is a testimony to how small that number of white South Africans who could leave is.

So they reached a commitment, the two of them and others, that they would work together toward reconciliation and that that would take a long time. We're 30 years into it. It's far from settled. And that reconciliation had to include addressing not just the legal apartheid, but also the cultural apartheid, and also the economic apartheid and the educational apartheid and everything else that came with it.

So to get back to the question as you put it, one of the ways my own thinking has evolved over the years is that — I want to be a wonky for a minute— because one of the things that's missing in those two pages of questions you sent me and I finally realized I should have done more with in the book, is the sense that we have to ask a bigger question than any of the ones that you sent me.

It's important for people to begin to see that we live in a qualitatively different world than the one that the three of us grew up in, one that is defined by interdependence. And to go back to one of the dilemmas that you talked about at the beginning of the question, if I win at your expense in a world that is completely interconnected, in which "what goes around, comes around," is empirically accurate, in which my victory at your expense leads you to be pissed off at me and come back and get me directly or indirectly, we're not going to fix anything. Down the line, that suggests that if I want to win, I have to understand that a world of complexity and a world of systems thinking has to be the norm. And that's qualitatively different from the way those of us on the left and those of us on the right grew up. 

I'm now going to be an academic wonk in two ways for a second. I was exposed to systems theory and paradigm shifts as a college sophomore. And they have both driven my life ever since. Since I'm pretty mathematical, been able to play around with complexity science quite a bit. When you look at the work of a guy like Dave Snowden, he talks about the way you deal with a complex environment. You don't come in with a solution that you know will work. You probe. You see what happens. You sense what happens. You respond. And with your North Star in mind, you keep building until you get closer to where you want to go. This is like Robert Ricigliano's work on more simple systems. You tack toward the North Stars. So this has been part of what I do all along. 

The other thing I've learned, in my academic wonky life is that I can never convince anyone that I'm right. I could make my students agree with me on their final exams, and then they would go off to get a good grade. They would agree with me, but then go off and believe in whatever it was they believed in any way.

This was driven home to me on my first day of teaching, literally 50 years ago, this fall. I ended my first class at Colby, and a student came up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "Weren't you my camp counselor when I was 10?" And I had been. He was a delightful 10-year-old. And now here he was a 21-year-old college junior, my advisee, and by all evidence, a Republican. This was in 1975. Everyone's getting ready at Colby to vote for Ronald Reagan in the next election. It turns out Mark claims he never was a Republican. But I realized that as a faculty member, my job wasn't to profess in the sense of convincing people that I was right. My job was to help Mark, who I knew as a 10-year-old, now as a 21-year-old, get to where he wants to go. And since he and I still talk, and he's now 71, my job still is how do I get Mark to go where he wants to go? And now he's quite a liberal Democrat and is very much in the "let's screw the Trump people" camp. I've always wanted to build networks that are as inclusive as possible. 

Heidi: So do you help people go where they are? Do you advocate helping people go where they want to go, if they want to go places that you see as very destructive, such as supporting Trump's most authoritarian tendencies?

Chip: No. 

Heidi: Or on the left, supporting something that's sufficiently far left that you know that it's going to mean that the Democrats are going to lose. For instance, I just read a Tangle article the other day. I don't know whether you or our audience knows about Tangle, but it's wonderful, so I'll give it a plug. It's a online news source that shows what the left is thinking about an issue, what the right is thinking about an issue. And then there's a "my take" section at the end where originally the editor would give what his take was. Now he's spreading out the responsibility for "my take" to other higher-level people in the organization. It's very, very good. It's gotten Allsides stamp of approval being right in the center. It's really excellent. And he wrote an article, predicting the future that said that AOC was going to be the Democratic candidate in 2028. And my image, anyway is that I can't think of a better way of handing the 2028 election to the Republicans, than nominating AOC.  So whether or not you agree with me on that one, if you see somebody going so far left that you know it's going to counter their ultimate goal, do you still try to help them get there?

Chip: Now I have to really be clear in saying that I am not the answer for everything, for everyone because you've just nailed one of the things I don't really have an answer for. And that is that I suspect — I couldn't quantify it for you — that there are some people on the left and some people on the right who, what I just said about my former student, I wouldn't say. Wouldn't include in that. If you take people's worst assumptions about what the current president is like, I don't want to work with him. If you take the worst statements about what AOC is like to be true, which I assume are not, I wouldn't want to work with her.  I mean, I have people I went to college with who are rigidly left, who think I've sold out. It's very hard to work with them. It's just as hard to work with the people who think Charlie Kirk was the greatest thing that ever happened. But I suspect that that's a fairly small chunk of the American population.

So I choose not to work with some people. I mean, I choose not to work with a few people I've taught with. I choose not to work with a few people I went to college with. That leaves me with some huge percentage of the American population to work with. And that's also true at the micro level. As you know, we just moved into this new condo that will have 120 odd families when they're all sold. And we've had some issues with the developer and the initial management team. We were quite upset with what happened. And one of our neighbors started with the assumption that we should assume the worst of the developer, that we should because she's lived in condos before, that you're in a confrontational relationship with management. And my approach to dealing with that situation was, let's see what we can do to work this out with the management, and with the other residents. And I'm not sure I was completely right and it's still being played out. But my assumption always is that the vast majority of people want to find a solution that works more or less for everybody, more or less over time. And whether it's in the microcosm of our new neighborhood or in the country, I believe the same holds. However, it's much easier to do it starting where you are. Or as we were talking about before we started recording, the conflict over the old football stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado. It's just simply easier to make things work at the local level. 

Guy: I was thinking back about the first time that we really started working with you in a fairly substantial way and spent a lot of time together in the early days of the Iraq War. That was a time when there were a lot of folks in the peacebuilding community that were involved in the larger effort to bring peacebuilding ideas and democracy to the Middle East, something that turned out to be not very successful. And what seems sort of ironic at this point is a lot of the problems that we went to the Middle East to "fix" on the other side of the world have found their way back to the United States and we're facing them here. It is sort of a reverse contagion. Instead of us transforming them, they transformed us. But the way that we've been thinking about this reflects on folks who see the various issues, again, as an example, climate, or anything else as an "existential crisis" that requires going all out to do whatever it takes to win. What we've been trying to promote for them (as well as others) is something we call "the great reframing."

We are trying to get people to understand that it's the hyperpolarized politics where we just hate each other, that is the real threat to our future. And that if we don't find a way to diffuse that, even if it involves making some gigantic compromises on our primary issue, we're going to be in real trouble. The most terrifying article that I've read in the last couple of months, actually, was a story coming out of England about how England may be in the early stages of a civil war that involves the same kind of asymmetric warfare that we found in Iraq and Afghanistan, acts of sabotage and things like that that are actually happening. And there's news that France doesn't have large Christmas celebrations because they're too worried about terrorism. It doesn't take too much of a leap to see us going a couple of steps further and actually pushing at least a few folks into what amounts to an insurgent civil war in this country. The thing about that article is it made the possibility of civil war seem very real where I've had trouble imagining such a scenario before. But what I'd like you to reflect on a bit is the peacebuilding side of Peacebuilding Starts at Home is that we really are not too far from what could be a truly catastrophic violent conflict that starts generating all these terrible atrocities that drive enmities for generations. How's that for an upbeat question. 

Chip: Yeah, not only not upbeat, but also, not easy to answer. In my senior year at Oberlin, I was the head of the campus Students for Democratic Society chapter. And I think my response to that, to your question, will get me drummed out of the 1960s New Left Geriatric Society. But  I can't predict how dangerous the situation is. I look at what's happening in the UK and in Europe, which is what I worked on professionally as a political scientist. And  it's more worrisome than it's ever been. I look at what happened in Bondi in Sydney where I've been. And one of my best friends now is an Australian Jewish entertainment lawyer who lives in Hollywood, not in Australia. So these issues are sort of front of mind for me. I don't see them becoming civil war-ish quickly, but I can see you know I bought this book a couple of years ago, which I haven't read called Seeing Around Corners. When I look around corners, I feel quite depressed about the potential for the future. I mean, I don't think any of the three of us are likely to live long enough to see the United States degenerate into civil war, but it could happen in our kids' lifetime.

And again, if you anchor your life in systems complexity theory and paradigm shift thinking, I don't see a way out of the dilemma that we're in without moving toward a paradigm that puts solving everyone's needs closer to the top of the list of priorities. Or as I put it in the book, most of the people solve most of their problems most of the time cooperatively. We aren't going to ever get to a point where we snap our fingers and the world changes overnight in the kind of democracy that we created in this country 200 and some years ago. We 're not built to make rapid change that makes one side happy for long. We're just not genetically built to do that constitutionally as a country. But I wouldn't want to live in a country in which my side won all the time because it would produce the negative responses on the other side that would make life difficult. We're always going to be in a country where we make small steps. 

 We had the civil rights movement of the 1960s that produced significant change for some African-Americans, but not for women, not for gays. And we keep moving forward.  I don't know if it was Obama's term, but will we "bend the arc of history?"  And again, I've lost a lot of my 60s illusions.  We can't change the society overnight. But I think the same goals still exist. You both look bemused.

Heidi: I'm just trying to figure out where to pull us because we don't have that much time left. I think I want to kind of pull to one of the last questions we had, but drawing from what you said. The idea of paradigm shifts travels through the whole book.

And you've been talking about them your whole professional career, as have we quite a bit. We grew up in the same era. And we were both educated by similar people. So we got the system's perspective. But one of the things you talked about in the book is how movement building is different now than it was back in the '60s when we were involved. And my question was, how is movement building different? And how can what we do now move us towards a north star where we're all working for something where most of the people are happy most of the time? How do we get a movement that I think has to be cross-partisan? How do we get a movement like that going?

And one of the things that I asked in the questions I sent earlier is, do you see No Kings doing that? And if not, what should we be doing instead of No Kings? 

Chip: Let me try to answer that by starting with No Kings and related things and the conservative equivalence. I can't think of one, but I'll hypothetically make up one. I went to the No Kings demonstrations here in Falls Church and spent the time talking with people about what we can do to make things better in this area and helped one woman meet someone else who I knew was working on local affordability issues here.

I guess when I say movement building has changed, I don't necessarily mean because of the technology or the specific issues. We live in an online world. When I led SDS at Oberlin, we had next to no contact with SDS chapters anywhere else in the country, which meant that we ran it exactly how we wanted to.  We didn't have Zoom. It cost money to make long-distance phone calls. So you lived in isolation. And I don't mean to stress that.

What I mean to stress is that in a world that is interdependent and if I sound like a broken record (another ancient, outdated metaphor), but if I sound like a broken record, I want to, because we live in a world that really is interdependent.

So if I build a movement in the way that Chuck Tilly taught me to build movements in grad school from the outside in, I don't get very far. I mean, I'm always in opposition to somebody else. But if I try to build a movement Rotary-like from the inside out, if I try to do it, as Everett Rogers advises (which I talk about in the book), he talks about how ideas move through societies, how you get a population to adopt new ideas.  He started by looking at how corn farmers in Iowa adopted new varieties of corn seeds because that was the world he grew up in. But his models worked pretty much across the board to explain how new ideas get adopted in any society. And so what we're trying to do and we'll be trying to do is to create a movement that is more inside out.

Not everyone will want to be involved. And more importantly, if I've learned anything and this comes from my involvement in the Beyond War movement in the '80s, is that you have to change yourself first.

I discovered this quote from a guy named Ian McGilchrist yesterday, literally, listening to a podcast about Dan Coyle's upcoming book called Flourish, in which this guy, McGilchrist, who's a psychiatrist who lives in isolation in the islands off of Scotland, explained that how one presents oneself to the world changes the world.

The way I behave, whether it's with Mark, my first student, or my new neighbors or anyone I come into contact with, how I present myself to them changes the situation that we're in. It's very Dave Snowden complexity sounding. It's also very psychotherapy sounding, and I mean it to be.  I'm convinced, and I may not be right, that if we can start as we plan to do, with a few hundred people now, we can grow both in terms of the numbers of people we reach, but also in terms of the depth of their understanding of the situation that we're in fairly quickly and reach you know 10, 20, 30 million people by the end of the decade.

I don't know if that really answers the question all that well or not, but we have time, it looks like for you to ask me one or two more. 

Heidi: Well, that gets to one of the last ones we had about how do you scale this up? And I guess I would ask, tell me a little bit more about your thought about how you do go from 5 or 10 to 5 or 10 million relatively quickly, what's the plan?

Guy: I've got a minor addendum to the question, which is what I've been thinking about in terms of scale-up strategy is something that I call the" rock-bottom bounce." The idea is that at some point, it will be widely perceived that as a society, we've hit rock bottom, and people will start suddenly looking for answers. We've seen this over the years in the popularity of the Beyond Intractability site, where something will happen and all of a sudden people are interested in it. So that creates a window of opportunity. If things get really bad and people say, "We can't keep doing this," then what are the big ideas and the information that needs to be readily available that people might pick up on in a great big hurry?

And I think that, rather than the slow-building scenario, probably is more likely, or at least that's what I say when I want to sound optimistic— that's what I stress. 

Chip: So let me bounce off of— pun intended—your rock-bottom image, and then take it to Heidi's question on scaling and how we think this might happen, an emphasis on "think" and "might."

The rock-bottom metaphor applies a lot to people with substance abuse problems, including me. And you know sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can begin to recover. Luckily, I didn't get that far. But one of the things that you do if you spend any time in a 10-step or in a 12-step program is to encounter Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer, which was not written about addiction, but was written about fascism and war after World War I.

And this slides me into Heidi's question on how you scale. Niebuhr suggests that you accept the things you can't change. Not that you like them, not that you agree with them, but you know that's life. You can't change them. I can't change the fact that I became an alcoholic. That's just reality. But focus on the things that you can change and know the wisdom and have the wisdom to know the difference between the two.

Let's focus on the things that we can change. People's mindsets are changeable. And so what we're going to try to do is not start with 5 or 10, Heidi, but start with about 100 people who we know who have a pretty good sense of what Peacebuilding Starts at Home could all be about. I mean, it's not the gospel according to Chip Hauss, but — have you spent time with the rotary four-way test? Or have you spent time with David Sloan Wilson's pro-social movement? Have you spent time with Darryl Davis who is a black boogie-woogie pianist who brings people out of the Klan, who is one of my favorite people. So you start with those 100 people, 50 of whom are in the book, 50 of whom are not. They would include AFP staff, would include people in David's pro-social world or Darryl's pro-human foundation.

And you ask them in the course of the next six months to talk to at least 10 people and help them see that we need a new paradigm —in their own terms. I mean, David Sloan Wilson, who's an environmental biologist, is going to use a different language than I use. He's going to raise different issues.

In that 10 people include 10 people who are committed to doing the same thing in the following six months. So we start with 100 people in January. We're at 1,100 on the 4th of July. If those 1,100 or some subset of them go out and get 10 more, we're at 10,000 plus at the end of the year.

And if you remember your exponential equations from high school, you get to millions quite quickly. And if we ask some of them to donate 10, 20 bucks a year, and only 10% of them do that, you also generate significant income to use to do other things like prototypes. 

So Gretchen (my wife) and I, have been working with Rotarians in Portland who are doing just amazing work on racial healing. But they have neither the skills nor the interest to take that work and apply it elsewhere and replicate it elsewhere. And you wouldn't replicate it, but you would see what did they do as senior Rotarians to work on racial justice in a highly divided middle-sized city? You could you take it to Waco, where friends of mine have a family foundation. Could you take it to Portland, Maine, which has a different set of racial issues.

And so we would have the resources to do things like that. And a movement would emerge that would grow in size. And it would have to become another book I'm reading right now is called The Octopus Organization by a couple of people at Amazon who have a connection at the Harvard Business School that says, "think about an octopus." It's got eight arms. Its eight arms include eight brains. It's a fluid adaptable organization. Its skin literally changes as circumstances change. Can you create a business these authors are thinking about? Can you create a social movement that is more like an octopus that has multiple sensing elements, that has multiple brains, that yet somehow hangs out together? And apparently, octopuses can solve mazes and other problems that people give them.

But I'm only on page 50 of the book, so I can't tell you about that.  So that's where I think we're heading. 

Heidi: All right! So there's lots more that we could talk about. I might even talk about doing a second one of these. But is there something that I've missed asking that you really want to be sure that we get into this video before we close it out? 

Chip: Yeah. Two things. First, as you know, I don't like to do things that aren't enjoyable. This has to be fun, and it can be fun, even living at a time when it is possible to become politically, clinically depressed. So the first thing is that this has to be an enjoyable thing to do. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it at age 78. 

The second thing is that this still sounds pretty top-down. It's still you know Chip Hauss, the former professor, pontificating, and there is some of that. I mean, I know a lot. I've done a lot of things. But if this is going to work, and here's the second point, which is even more important than having fun.

It has to work for you—not you, Guy and Heidi, — but whoever it is who reads the book or encounters this movement elsewhere. We're going to have to provide on-ramps for people around the country to find their own niches — to find what works for them. And our job— I don't know how to describe an octopus' bodily structure. But there's something at the head of the octopus that coordinates the whole thing. Our job is simply to be that. Our job is not to say, "Here's the solution. Our job is to let each of the eight octopus arms or 48 octopus arms, whatever number we end up with in our octopi, do their thing. And our job is to simply be the coordinating tool. 

Heidi: All right. Guy, do you have anything you want to add? 

Guy: Just a thought, not so much a question. I'm trying to think about what the paradigm shift we need really looks like and how it can be phrased in a way that people can understand it. Ideally, it will be a rediscovery of an idea that's already deeply embedded in the wide diversity of cultures that already exist in the country. And I find myself going back to Karen Armstrong's Charter of Compassion project, which basically recognized that all the great religious teachings of the world feature some variation of the Golden Rule as part of their core teaching.

And we've been thinking, and I think a lot of the popular mythology of democracy, is that it's a power-over set of institutions where people can get together and they can get enough votes so that they can force everybody else to do what they want, whether it's reintroduce wolves in Walden, Colorado or get everybody to give up on plastic bags or lots of other things.

And that may all make sense. But the real test, and we have a little exercise on BI that asks people this, is are you treating your political opponents the same way you would like them to treat you if they win? And if we can make the shift from just trying to overpower people to treating people the same way we'd like to be treated, we'd be in a lot better shape.

Chip: Let me wrap by saying, of course, you're right.  I hadn't thought of Karen Armstrong's work in a long time, but one of the things that we did in the Beyond War movement was to talk in precisely those terms and say that in systems thinking, "the golden rule is empirically correct."  If I don't do unto you as I want you to do unto me  or whatever that phraseology should be grammatically, you're going to come back and get me. And so I learned as a teacher, that if I use those principles in the way I dealt with my students, or the way I dealt with the Pentagon—you raised Iraq—I spent a lot of time in the Pentagon after 9/11. And I dealt with them the same way. 

But let me end with the idea that you asked about when you asked whether I have a sense of what the new paradigm might be. We joined Rotary about four years ago because peacebuilding is one of its core organizing seven areas of focus. And at every Rotary meeting, they say the four-way test, and I haven't memorized it yet, so I'm going to read it. And it has the germ of the new paradigm in it. You ask four questions of anything, of all we say and do. "Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? And will it be beneficial to all concerned?"

My sense is that those 20, whatever. words comes close to being the guts of a new paradigm that is in keeping with the golden rule, which is found in all great spiritual traditions, as you said, Guy, and is also consistent with a world in which everything I do affects everyone and everything else indirectly. Even the military after 9/11 came to understand when they started playing around with it's in the book, the spaghetti map of Afghanistan that showed how everything was interconnected and that all the things we thought we were doing to prop up Ashraf Ghani's government, who we happened to get to know, was actually being counterproductive down the line, and you ended up with what we ended up with four years ago.

So my sense is that those 20 words of the four-way test really are the simple form of a new paradigm. And you don't need Dave Snowden's complexity science to get there (as much as I like Dave Snowden). 

Heidi: This is one of the several things that I want to explore more, so we may continue this at another time. But I think that's a good place to wrap. I'm wishing I had a hard copy of Chip's book to hold up and say, "This is Peacebuilding Starts at Home. Read it. It's incredibly thought-provoking and interesting and exciting. I don't. I bought it on Kindle. 

(Guy held up his phone to show the Kindle cover -- which has a picture of a house.)  

Chip: You may notice, if you put it back up again for a second, the cover I did not design. And only my grandson at age 15 realized that my publisher had played on the word "Hauss/house". . And in fact, they had. 

Heidi: That's funny.  I didn't notice either. Anyway, I hope people who watch this are intrigued enough to go get the book and read it. It's a fun read. Like Chip said, things have to be fun. And it's filled with interesting stories. And I hope that it starts this movement moving. So I want to thank Chip for writing the book. Thank him for taking the time to do this. And it's been great. 

Guy: Thank you.