I've had that old Joni Mitchell line singing in my head for several days now:
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"
Watching the roads in western North Carolina wash away last week from record rainfall, and anticipating the storm surge soon to strike Florida from Hurricane Milton, I'm struck by how much we take for granted that things in our lives will just work - the systems and structures we depend on - until, of course, they don't. We often don't recognize their value until they're gone or broken or under threat.
Just as our bodies are made up of multiple supportive systems and structures - our internal infrastructure, if you will - so our societies and communities depend on systems of institutions, networks, and physical infrastructure to function smoothly and healthily. And as a problem in one structure - your heart or brain, let's say - has ramifications for all the other systems, so it is socially too.
Right now, our social infrastructure is under so much stress. But the response cannot be, "Do away with it!" You can no more excise your heart from your body and continue to function well than excise the supportive tissue of human flourishing. We need to repair it, strengthen it, heal it, nourish it.
Oxygen
"We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone."
~ Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems
I used to think that structure was the opposite of freedom. Structure confined, imposed, and limited. Freedom was spontaneous, expansive, and unlimited.
Then I began to see that structure's shape can channel freedom's energy, direct its streams purposefully toward an end. And then I started to understand how structure makes freedom possible.
Fuel
If you've been to any professional conference in the past ten years - business, education, healthcare, government, you name it - there's a good chance you've heard about the acronym VUCA. It stands for "volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous." It's a way of describing how many people perceive our current world situation. The acronym emerged from the halls of military leadership and strategy to help explain situations, especially in urban warfare, that were unprecedented (to use a word no one likes anymore).
All of these descriptors run on a spectrum from low to high. You could have high volatility, but low ambiguity, and so forth. But the claim is often made that our world today is tending towards "running high" on all four of these descriptors. That's when things really get nuts.
The point is that, in a VUCA world, many of our supportive structures and systems are constantly being stress-tested. And those structures then respond and react in tension or opposition with other structures, working against the others almost like a social autoimmune disorder.
We also make wrong assumptions that our human systems behave like mathematical constants, what mathematicians and scientists refer to as ergodic systems. Yet they almost never do: they are dynamic, not static, full of flux and contingency and rupture. They are "non-ergodic."
It's just another reminder that our human bodies - both individual and social - are not machines. We best discover more adaptive responses to that quality of our humanity.
I suspect many of us learn the value of structures in the negative - through a bad experience with, say, "the healthcare system" or "the financial system" or some such. I mean, how many hours have we all wasted on hold, only to be transferred to someone who can't help us, transferred back to who we started the call with, then transferred again - only to be disconnected and our problem left unaddressed?
The surprise is deep and pleasant when a system functions smoothly and efficiently, and then recedes into the background.
If I wake up in the morning and find the shower offers me no water, I can call the plumber. But who do I call to repair my community, my country, my church? When those systems are broken, who bears the responsibility to fix them?
No one person can bear the whole burden of repairing a broken social structure, but we each bear some responsibility. And if I abdicate my part, then I also increase the burden on my neighbor.
The converse is also true: doing my part makes it easier for all of us to fix the whole.
Heat
Boston's first female, and first non-Irish/Italian, mayor, Michelle Wu, says this: "During natural disasters or emergencies, the most resilient communities - places that suffer the fewest casualties and rebuild more quickly - are not the wealthiest neighborhoods or ones that have spent the most on physical infrastructure, but rather the communities with the strongest social infrastructure." How is your social infrastructure right now? What can you do to strengthen or repair it?
Some of us don't consider ourselves to be "institution people." We chafe against the notion. Institutions are easily critiqued, often mocked, and yet they perform important functions in our lives. Have you done anything to weaken these supports? If so, do you regret that, and have you found a way to mend what you helped break?
That's a wrap for my series on value. I'd love to know what landed for you and what didn't. In the meantime, be safe if you are facing down a storm, and if not, find ways to support those who are.
One final note, on the theme of social infrastructure: tomorrow is PANS/PANDAS awareness day. It's an autoimmune syndrome that has dominated my family's life - and my son's childhood - for many years. It's been an incredibly lonely and perplexing road for my family to walk. I hope you'll take a moment to learn about it, and spread awareness of the deep impacts it has on your neighbors and friends.
Until next week, I'll see you down the path.
Chad