A 'Better' Party

Here's a phrase you might like:

"If you want to change the world, throw a better party." 

Isn't it lovely? Perhaps you've heard it before (attributed to Rick Ingrasci). It seems deeply true doesn't it, whether or not you're versed in the various quirks of our psychology. Like many a good truth, it feels both soothing and rousing.

It’s also simple, and like any simple thing, there is much beneath its surface. If we don't plumb its depths, we risk wielding it simplistically, and creating a mess. 

To apply it in positive change efforts, we need to ask a few questions.

First, we need to clarify the terms:

1. What do we mean by 'change'? 

2. What do we mean by 'world'? 

3. What do we mean by 'better'? 

And then we need to think practically about what it means to 'throw' this party:

4. Where is the better party?

5. What happens to the current party?

6. How do people hear about it?

Each of these questions needs exploring, but for now let’s focus on two, which we should address first. Beginning with 3) What do you mean by 'better'?

The answer might not be what you expect.

The typical interpretation of 'better' is that it means an incremental improvement – progressing to an ‘improved’ state. 

This interpretation often assumes an historically linear trajectory of improvement, of progress, from bad to good, sad to happy, poor to rich. And here's the first thing we need to attend to when understanding 'better': this assumption is simplistic, and now understood to be misled – the product of a traumatised attempt to control complex systems that we didn't fully understand, and feared. 

As a result of pursuing this simplistic fantasy of linear ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’, humans have made themselves and the world around them unwell. Harm has been caused. Communities have been destroyed, cultures have been erased, species have been made extinct. Some things have ‘improved’ in that process of course, but at the cost of much suffering, and putting all else at risk. From a state of trauma, we have caused harm, making ourselves and our world sick. 

By acting from a place of sickness, we are damaging our world, whether you identify with that sickness and its behaviour as 'unhealed ancestral trauma', 'Wetiko', ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, the 'Cannibal Giant', the ‘Superorganism’, 'Moloch', the 'Dark Triad' or the ‘Disease of Separation’. Unless we heal ourselves, to act from health, we are simply going to keep harming each other and the world that supports us. 

We need to heal this sickness, we need to 'get better'.

So rather than thinking of 'better' as meaning 'progress' (in that misled sense of linear improvement), let's emphasise its other meaning: ‘better’ = 'healthier' / 'healed'. 

If we want to change the world, we have to 'get better'. 

If you want to change the world, throw a 'healthy' party.

Roseanna Smith

So to the second of the questions above: 6) How do people hear about the better party? 

‘Hear’ implies both being exposed to information, and being able to understand it.

For many people the appeal of the healthy party is immediately understandable. The healthy party meets our fundamental needs, including for joy, belonging and meaning, as well as offering a better-tasting, fresher-smelling, more nourishing life for us and our kin. So it meets both emotional and physical needs, in a way that is sustainable long term. 

But many people are blocked from understanding this because they are addicted to the current party.

Their addiction is to the various remedies we are offered for our trauma symptoms, which don’t properly heal us, leaving us wanting more. Things like fast food, celebrity news, luxury, entertainment, alcohol, opiates, shopping, war, outrage. These remedies are superstimuli: attractive but empty. They are Haribo instead of an apple, the TV show Friends instead of real friends, porn instead of sex. 

Numbed by these shiny but empty palliatives—these ‘fake’ remedies—and driven to keep seeking them, it can be hard to understand what’s good about the 'healthy party'. And not only that – much of the time people aren't even given the chance to try.

The current power-holders in the world—those with the most wealth and those at the top of big corporations, banks, energy companies and governments—are at the same ‘fake party’ as everyone else. They’re just in the VIP section, where their drinks are paid for by everyone else, and they get to choose the music. 

These power-holders’ addictions to wealth and power are just as misled and self-defeating as our addictions to Haribo and porn. Many of them know ‘better’, they know of the potential of a ‘healthy party’. But they therefore know that the ‘better party’ doesn’t have a VIP section.

If everyone went to the better party, the power-holders would have to give up their wealth and power, which is even harder than giving up Haribo and porn. So the power-holders are powerfully incentivised to keep the ‘fake party’ going, and they need everyone else to stay so they can keep getting free drinks. It is in these power-holders’ interest to keep promoting the ‘fake party’ and stop people hearing about the ‘better party.’ And it’s in their power to do so as they typically have significant influence, if not total control, over the mainstream channels of communication.

The power-holders are the ones writing the party invitations, and they aren’t going to promote a party where they no longer get free drinks or control of the music.

Our collective task is to help people hear about—be exposed to and understand the benefits of—the ‘better party’, despite attempts by power-holders to keep us at the ‘fake party.’ This means understanding the power-holders: how to get through to them to help them see how their incentives are self-defeating; or, perhaps more likely, just get through them. 

So, the phrase "If you want to change the world, throw a better party" suggests two actions:

1. Recognise that for the party to be ‘better’, it has to be ‘healthy’; and for it to be healthy, we need to heal, not just remedy. However you conceive of making the world 'a better place' through your work, if you are just remedying the symptoms, it won’t be enough in the end.

2. Be clear-eyed about the forces that are incentivised to block that healing, and work together to get through to them, or through them. There’s a good chance they don’t want to go to the better party, and don’t want us to either. So we might have to leave them behind.

There are more questions to answer, and a lot of what has been said here is obvious. I personally find it quite helpful to see things this way, perhaps you will too.

The fake party is dead. Let’s get together, get better, and throw a party we can all enjoy.

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