Theory of Enchantment

What we believe

Systemic Change Theory of Enchantment maintains that the most complex system in the known universe is the human being, so there can be no “dismantling of an unjust system” if you do not take into consideration the human system and if you do not honor the human being who is at its center. More to the point, it is pointless to try and dismantle an unjust system if you fail to acknowledge the sacredness of the human being. This is the starting point from which all questions of justice emerge. Lack of awareness and respect for this system leads to disintegrated approaches to DEI.

Integration In the United States, we often think of integration as a racially-specific word given our checkered history. When we hear the word integration, we think about the desegregation of schools and businesses and the passage of legislation that put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. But integration as a philosophy encompasses far more than this. It is related to the word “integrity.” The dictionary defines integrity as “the state of being whole and undivided.” This is a crucial aim at Theory of Enchantment. We equip individuals and communities across diverse ecosystems with an ecology of practices so that they become whole. Wholeness is a state of being, one where the individual and the community are practicing a healthy relationship with the fullness of their complexity, their insecurities and their special talents, their baggage and their unique gifts, so that when faced with scarcity and suffering – which are inevitable aspects of the human experience – they solve for it together, holistically, and responsibly, instead of projecting the things they don't like about themselves onto their neighbor as a way to discharge pain. This approach is part of what made the Civil Rights movement so successful.

Many African-American communities in the South insisted on practicing a “spiritual discipline against the politics of resentment.”(1) They called out racist behavior while making sure they weren’t becoming racists, encouraged each other to withstand temptations to hate those who persecuted them, and went so far as to wish their persecutors well, perhaps most famously embodied by Ruby Bridges who publicly prayed for her tormentors as a six-year old child.

The capacity to do these things requires one to be integrated, and to have an integrated mind, body, and spirit. This means having the foresight to recognize that those who promote bigotry are victims of their own hatred. This is to say that even though they may be materially privileged, they are also suffering, just as those who are addicted to drugs may have the material means to access those drugs but are still suffering. It means having the foresight to recognize that bigotry, as James Baldwin once observed, is a way to cope with pain; and it means having the foresight to know everyone is susceptible to becoming bigoted when experiencing that pain. To see in this way requires a set of practices. We provide those practices at Theory of Enchantment.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Since 2020, these terms have become buzzwords in culture wars across the nation. They have been used to uplift people and disparage them; they have been used to invoke justice and perpetuate prejudice. In workshops and trainings across the nation, these terms have been used both as a way to surface pain in marginalized communities and as a bully pulpit to marginalize others. This may tempt us to think of these terms as vacuous at best, and malignant at worst. Nothing could be further from the truth. These terms are meaningful, powerful, and critical – but only when they are anchored in the spirit of integration we mentioned above.

Why Diversity Matters: One of the chief sustaining conditions of a healthy ecosystem is diversity. To quote Yale’s great professor of political scientist James Scott, “monocultures are, as a rule, more fragile and hence more vulnerable to the stress of disease and weather than polycultures are.”(2) This is true both in a natural habitat and in a business environment. If you want to build lasting products and services that surprise and delight your customers, you must survey and continuously test your products and services in the diverse environments in which your customers live. This will ensure your products and services are flexible, durable, adaptive, and able to withstand the test of time.

Real Diversity is not Mathematical Utilitarianism: Often what gets passed off as diversity these days is in fact a kind of cold, geometrical mathematical utilitarianism which manifests as quota systems. The thinking goes that if you can simply increase the number of people of color in your organization, then you’ll have a diverse organization. But this presupposes a grid-like mentality that reduces “an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation.”(3) Diversity is contextual, meaning it must reflect the local contours of the places from which it emerged as a question in the first place.

If all the employees in your operation think alike but look differently, you do not have a diverse organization. Diversity is not an aesthetic, superficial marker. To put it even more plainly, if I have a plot of land with six different-looking types of corn, that land will be decimated if it is invaded by a virus that is very good at attacking corn. In contrast, if I have a plot of land that includes corn, tomatoes, lettuce, and parsley, the land will be far more likely to withstand attack. Similarly, if I am trying to create a robust product I will be far better at creating it if I welcome colleagues who come from varied ways of thinking, seeing, and being that add dimensionality to the creation process. It does not matter if all my colleagues *look* alike in this context although it is also likely that they won’t. Their oppositional nature, from a philosophical perspective, will create resilience and make for a better testing process in the long run.

Both the historically segregationist policies of the United States and the quota-based approaches to diversity are two sides of the same coin. This was perhaps most eloquently observed by, of all people, Derrick Bell, who is widely considered to be the father of critical race theory, and whose critiques of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs Board of Education were rooted in an observation that that decision was ultimately a quota system.

(And here, it is worth noting that Theory of Enchantment is not defined as anti-critical race theory, but rather a separate and distinct theory that incorporates observations and kernels of truth from all traditions. In other words, when we speak about practicing diversity in a real way, we mean it. This means learning from everyone.) Bell writes about this in ‘Silent Covenants,’ arguing that enforced quota systems in education would lead to, “Students, teachers, and other personnel...reassigned; neighborhood schools...eliminated; parents would lose the power to decide how their children were to be educated; white as well as black parents who stressed education as a means of upward mobility would withdraw their children from public schools in large numbers; and public schools would lose community support...”(4)

In other words, simply reshuffling the deck of who is in a school by busing black students into white schools is not real diversity and in this context diversity exists IN SERVICE OF providing students with a high quality education, not for its own sake. It is anchored to a specific desired outcome which is a quality education. Without that anchor, it will lead to what W.E.B. Dubois warned against in 1933, namely, “a mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and no teaching of truth concerning black folk [which] is bad.”(5)

Similarly in business contexts, diversity ought to be seen as an instrument for fostering cultures of belonging and inclusion which lead to the development of robust, high quality products and services that can be offered to customers and partners alike.

Equity & Inclusion For reasons that are too detailed to go into in this document, the notion of equity has been corrupted in some circles into a term which roughly means “wealth transfer from people with white skin to people with brown skin.” It ought to be obvious that this is neither equitable nor inclusive. Nor does it challenge a hierarchy which was never just to begin with; it simply inverts it. What real equity entails is all people in a given ecosystem having ownership of the resources in said ecosystem. When all people feel like they can take ownership of a project, asset, or resource, they tend to be more responsible for that ecosystem. In a business context, this philosophy manifests in a products and services development process that has co-creation at the center of its ethos.

What do we mean by co-creation? In a truly diverse business environment, colleagues meet to hash out how to best provide a new product or service. They come at this question from invariably diverse perspectives and what is created is a synthesis of these perspectives, taking the best qualities of all arguments provided. In this way, true diversity, equity and inclusion actually depend upon and reinforce each other. This is how excellence is produced in business. Excellence requires an equitable environment where all stakeholders feel like they can take ownership of what is being produced and therefore take responsibility for it. Both your employees and your customers are your primary stakeholders who are involved in an incredibly sacred act of midwifing a co-created product/service/experience together. This is true no matter what industry you’re in. In such an environment, having a certain skin color ought not privilege you.

It is unjust to transform skin color into capital and then to try to use said capital to perpetuate systematic inequalities of power. This was unjust when white skin color was used in this way and it is unjust when brown skin color is used in this way. Nor is it just, in general, to claim that because you have access to exorbitant amounts of capital that you can make people do whatever you want. Such a principle is anathema to a truly equitable and egalitarian society. And generally speaking, the feverish desire for race-based equity as defined in this narrow way is simply an extension of this paradigm which has been with us since the days of Roman law. (6)

Supremacy

Which brings us to the issue of supremacy, an addictive drug we humans snort to cope with pain. As suggested earlier by James Baldwin, rank bigotry which stems from the belief that one is existentially better than another, is reached for as a numbing mechanism to deal with pain. This is the end all, be all of supremacy. This is true whether we are speaking of race-based supremacy, or wealth-based supremacy or gender-based supremacy. The whole, integrated human has no reason to look down upon another human being because she feels good and is content with who she is. She has learned to love herself, all of herself, warts and all. And it is through this incredible accomplishment that she is then able to love others, warts and all. This capacity requires practice.

Practice in a new way of being, a new way of seeing, and above all, a new way of relating to one’s self and to one’s environment without running to calcified stereotyping as a way to deal with the complex, seemingly chaotic nature of reality. These practices are what we provide at Theory of Enchantment. They run the gamut from how to properly relate to the unknown without being overwhelmed by fear to how to notice your parental baggage as it creeps up in the middle of a conversation with someone who is most definitely not your parent but who triggered memories of your parent because of the tone of their voice. They include practices that help you notice when you’re defensive and when you’re curious, when you’re stereotyping others and when you’re stereotyping yourself. They emerge from a plethora of world class wisdom traditions including Stoicism, Non-Violent communication, and Agape love, the pièce de résistance of the Civil rights movement. These subtle-yet powerful practices lead to a shift in framing for those who undergo it. And that framing produces Enchantment.

Enchantment

“Art is long and time is fleeting And our hearts, though stout and brave Still like muffled drums are beating Funeral marches to the grave.” - Longfellow

It is very easy to forget that we are mortal beings. After all, we live in an abundant society, at least from a material perspective. And yet we are mortal. One day we will die. We are so fearful of this fact that we make up things we think will make us worthy and even able to escape our ultimate fate. We attach importance to external aspects like skin color or accumulation of wealth as if this will save us from our ultimate fate. All the while, we avoid the present moment like the plague. But this is a mistake. If we could sit in awe long enough, in rapturous attentiveness to the present moment, we would glimpse the absolute miracle of what it means to be alive for this brief time. We would laugh. We would allow ourselves to become more playful. We would give thanks. We would dance. We would sing, and in this singing, we would become lighter, our burdens that much easier to bear, the heaviness of our mortal frames that much easier to carry. This capacity to sing even in the midst of pain, and to, by doing so, transmute it, is something that many traditions, including the African-American tradition, have taught throughout history. It has birthed entirely new musical forms that have since taken over the world. And it is this basic yet profound ability – to sing even in the midst of pain and to give thanks for the miracle of being alive – that we are inviting others to learn.

So while there’s a rich and long history behind why we called this organization Theory of Enchantment, the simpler and more profound explanation is this: The “chant” in Enchantment speaks of vocal rhythms used as a ritual to give people an inner sense of renewal in their daily lives. And we desperately need to be able to access that sense of renewal in these trying times. In a world of scarcity where we reach for the bottle, or become addicted to hard drugs or to hardness itself as it manifests in polarized outrage-machines in the form of social media, we drift further and further away from our own inner resources.

What we promise at Theory of Enchantment is to help you access what is already present within you. All you have to do is get still enough to listen. If you do, we promise you, you will hear the drumbeat. For though we are mortal, it is eternal.

(1) - Lasch, Christopher. The True And Only Heaven. Print, 1991.

(2) Seeing Like a State. James Carse

(3) Ibid.

(4) Bell, Derrick. Silent Covenants. Print, 2004.

(5) Dubois, W.E.B. Does the Negro Need Separate schools? Web, 1935.

(6) The Dawn of Everything: A new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow