I thought I would share some thoughts that I’ve been mulling over for quite a while now – certainly some 4 or 5 months – about the Jedi community, especially if and how we could work together to solve problems in a way that is satisfying to everyone.
I don’t need to tell any of you what a difficult problem this has proven to be and, just to absolutely show I know nothing new, I’m going to follow that up by saying that the reason this is so difficult is that everyone is different. Yes, that really is the main thrust of what I’m saying.
The problem is that people are so different that we might as well be 3 or 4 different species running around. I wish we were differentiated physically as in role playing games because it would be such a great reminder of the fact that by talking, we’re bridging; elves don’t expect dwarves to act like them, but focus on getting along instead, so it would be a relative relief for elf-like Jedi and dwarf-like Jedi to take as simple and respectful of a view to one another.
People are different, and hence Jedi are different, in the deepest possible ways, including how they experience the world, what their priorities are with respect to their communities and leadership, and what they feel is right or wrong. These beliefs are deeply entrenched, so that people themselves often don’t realize that they are looking at the world through a world view that is NOT universal, but they truly feel that what they see is simply what is. When they encounter people with other world views, then, they react as though the others lived in the same value system as themselves, but perhaps incorrectly, as though they needed to be nudged back onto a true path. Some very evangelical Christians do this in a clear and obvious way, but others do this in a more subtle way that is still perceived (and often resented) by those they encounter.
What are the different kinds of Jedi that make up our community? Here’s a non-comprehensive list, which I’ve made up by stealing liberally from sociology and religious studies:
Red Jedi
Members of this group are individuals who are, for the first time, learning personal power and confidence. Their strengths are that they value creativity, role playing, games, adventure, and fun, but their weaknesses include being impulsive and unrestrained. They like organized activities, working on teams under a strong leader, and, as Jedi, are martial arts oriented and physical in their training, if they have transitioned from role playing to training. Most young Jedi, in their teens and 20s, are Red Jedi. These Jedi were an enormous factor in early online groups, especially the transition from the earliest role playing or round-robin story boards to Jedi Realism. In remembering the frustration of that transition, it’s crucial to recognize that the Red Jedi who opposed those changes were correctly representing their interests. The fact that many groups split at this time is less of a statement about anyone’s personalities than it is about the fact that there were two groups at the time whose goals were incompatible.
A red community is loose and tribal. Think of the kinds of groups that young people form on their own. They are unorganized, but unite members based on common interests or activities. People move in and out of them at will, so the structure in the group is ever-changing. They often form around charismatic or strong individuals and they change very quickly as individual members grow and change, as resources change, or as people move in and out of the group. Red societies and red people are eclectic, experimental and fast moving. What's special about their creativity is that it's truly fresh, vibrant, unpretentious and honest, but they don't have a corner on it at all.
Blue Jedi
Members of this group think in terms of absolute principles and order, and feel that those absolute principles give meaning to the whole structure. They feel that societies, as a whole, should be orderly, punctual, and hierarchical. Additionally, they feel that the Jedi community, in particular, should be organized top down and are heartily in favor of rankings and councils. In real life they thrive in the military and like the idea of gated communities; their lawns are well cared for. Scouting and patriotism are very blue; a Blue Jedi’s training is like scouting to the nth degree, focusing on physical mastery and skills like CPR. On the other hand, words and books are also very important to them. Their strengths include a strong sense of responsibility, carry-through and perseverance, and especially a sense of duty and dedication that are truly Jedi-like. But they can be intolerant of the views of others, seeing the world in only black and white, as well as have a tendency to isolate themselves in their own groups. Gated communities are a very blue phenomenon.
The archetypal blue community is the Roman Empire, which serves as both a healthy and unhealthy example of what blue societies can be like. It was organized and hierarchical; its power was centralized. The point is not that blue societies are uncreative, because that's not true. On the other hand, creativity is focused in a certain, very disciplined way, into portraiture, engineering, and architecture, for example. Blue societies in the past have been rigid, but modern ones are less so; still, they are meritocracies based on a particular kind of value system that includes dedication to the order and structure of the group. The Romans used to call their most important virtues "pietas" (devotion to duty), "gravitas" (depth or substance of personality) and "dignitas" (difficult to translate, but having to do with honoring rank, importance, and prestige, probably both one's own and others), which gives an idea of where their priorities were. Most governments were blue to some degree until the modern era.
Orange Jedi
Members of this group are entrepreneurial, achievement oriented, and competitive. They are scientific and driven by ideas, so they read a great deal and hunger for information. Their training includes topics like meditation and Zen, which they see as ways of becoming powerful and focused. Their strengths include having good ideas, being progressive, strong, and accepting risk. However, they can struggle with maintaining relationships and may not be liked because they are seen as overly competitive, especially if they get wrapped in the appearance of success and are too eager to talk about the skills they have mastered or the experiences they have had. They may not know how to fit in with the other groups and, thus, feel frustrated; they support hierarchies, but others may see their interest as selfish and contingent upon their own rank. Orange Jedi are perhaps at the highest risk for leaving the community all together if they are unable to feel that they can communicate their views and feel respected.
The archetypal orange society is early America, which was founded on the humanism that sprang from the Renaissance. Look at our Declaration and Constitution, full of allusions to the rights and freedoms of the individual, and consider the separation of church and state that made America's early values truly revolutionary. Every time a presidential candidate talks about small government, they are touching back on the essential orange values we were founded on. We perhaps imagine that democracy is green, but it's not, at least not at it's roots. Orange societies organize power centrally, but with great concern for individual rights and sharing power among the members. They are creative too; look at the Renaissance, with it's blossoming of art, literature, and science. It was all orange.
Green Jedi
Members of this group are community oriented, concerned with people’s feelings, and likely to integrate spirituality into their paths. They are concerned with fairness and team building, empowering everyone, and cooperation or democratic systems. Their training tends to be holistic, as they do some physical work, but also healing, Reiki, meditation, and other things with a goal of personal growth over the acquisition of skills and power. They want to help others personally, by aiding, teaching, and training, but they see a big part of being Jedi as simply being compassionate. They are good at seeing past differences like gender, sexual orientation, and religion in dealing with others. However, their deep interest in communities can lead to a refusal to define values and acknowledge differences, even objective differences in things like experience and training, in a way that flattens communities and denies them of leadership and its members of ways to stand out or excel. They are extremely wary of organizations and councils and want to see just how these structures would benefit the community as a whole. They can suffer chronically from a non-localized sort of guilt about poverty, Chile, or the Holocaust that can be stultifying. They can also exert pressure to do as the group does – a Jedi form of political correctness. If someone feels that they have been accused of not being Jedi enough (and it wasn’t a blue comment about physical abilities, or an orange attempt at one-upmanship) then it was probably a green Jedi pushing that person to adopt more of the green’s own community values and the corresponding Jedi virtues.
The US began to go green when things like civil rights, labor protections, and the New Deal began to be enacted in the 30's, 40's and 50's. America is not a green country now, but a mix of orange and SOME green. In fact, the greenest kind of community is probably the consciousness-raising group, in which power is decentralized almost entirely. Imagine the members passing a "talking stick" to each in turn so everyone has an opportunity to speak about any issue at hand. It's not that green communities don't have leaders (they do), but those leaders use influence, and not formal power structures, to guide the community. Greens have their own kind of creativity, which often has a kind of free-flowing, organic feel, as it often attempts to make a spiritual statement.
Yellow Jedi
Members of this group are complex thinkers. They are adept at handling diversity and balancing contradictions or embracing paradoxes and enjoy doing so; they approach issues in ways that no one else has considered. They have a very deep moral system and a strong sense of right and wrong which they have developed through all this thinking. They are strongly focused on motivations as well as actions, and will insist, like Galahad, that right action is only possible if the heart is pure. They value the group, but the need for safety, success, or acceptance within it are less than for some of the other types. They feel less the need to belong, which is good, because they often maintain a low-profile and are less likely to belong fully. Their Jedi training is likely to be multifaceted, but focused on the spiritual aspects; they are likely to be meditators, yogis, and mystics. Jedi in this stage may support structures like councils because they value diversity and growth so much, but only if the membership is inclusive and the values unimpeachable. This type of Jedi has great vision, but is prone to internal struggles, even depression. Their slow consideration of problems and their alternative ways of framing solutions may appear as weakness to some of the other Jedi types who may find it difficult to understand them.
Now, I know of at least one Jedi in this community of each of these types. And it’s crucial to understand that for every one of these, given their own set of priorities, their own viewpoint is in fact THE natural and correct one. Each one walks around feeling like everyone else must be crazy; each one wonders why they can’t reason with everyone else. The funny thing is that our conflicts are so predictable if you only look at it as an Orange Jedi arguing with a Blue one; a clever screenwriter could be given character profiles and write the script. What’s not funny is that we’re not learning from these exchanges, so we’re repeating them again and again.
If we know these things about ourselves and others, can we do better? Can we take the other person’s viewpoint into account and find common ground? Do we have the courage and conviction to do so? Because the single thing that goes wrong with communities these days (marriages, circles, councils, what have you) is that people lack the dedication, the commitment to the group, to continue trying to talk things out. If we aren’t willing to try hard enough, we may as well not try at all and break up into affinity groups rather than trying to have an overall organization. That might be fruitful; we could each have our own organization, titles, and goals, meeting cordially at gatherings, but otherwise pursuing our own interests. There would be less fighting and more would get done, although we’d give up the strength of the diversity of the group.
Yes, the strength of it, for we could no longer learn from one another leaving it far less likely that anyone would grow to be a whole Jedi rather than a two dimensional caricature of one. None of us can imagine what a whole, real Jedi is like. We only see our own little bit, just like the three blind men only saw their own little piece of elephant and came to far different conclusions about what an elephant is. Only together are we whole. But do we have the skill to get anything done together? That’s the hard part.
I want to acknowledge that, in different parts of our lives, we can be operating out of different 'colors' so to speak. We can also change colors at times and we can be in transition between two, so the system is a simplification.
An example of people operating out of two different colors would be my students, who are red most of the time because they're in their late teens and that's a typical pattern at that age. It's taken me a little time to realize that despite being primarily red they're green with respect to their outlook on racial issues -- a big topic here in Savannah, where the population is about half black and half white. There are significant economic differences between the two parts of the community.
People who cast me as yellow but with green moments will have me pegged 90% of the time, so to me talking about race and other differences is just being honest. This is very yellow, which celebrates differences in communities. It's taken me some weeks to realize that my students really want me to approach them by ignoring the differences and create a green environment where everyone is the same. When I used an argument in class from the National Rifle Association (NRA) website about gun control, they were uncomfortable with the one line that said gun control unjustly affects women and blacks. They thought it was a cheap shot, but they didn't really want to talk about it enough to pin down the issue. When I asked if it would have been ok to say that if the article had cited statistics showing differences in crime against women and blacks, they didn't think that would make it ok. They didn't want the differences mentioned at all.
This is hard for me, because it's not my natural viewpoint, but having figured this out can be a help to me. I can now choose whether to present the material anyway, knowing it will make them uncomfortable, or avoid it and find other topics that they feel freer to talk about.
That is also my natural viewpoint, that conscious knowledge about what to expect from others gives me power to choose my path and affect outcomes, hopefully for the benefit of everyone involved. I think we probably all know this on a basic level. We've all given backrubs, for example, and have probably figured out that men like their backs rubbed more firmly than women. If I'm rubbing a man's back, I know to press harder than I would enjoy, so he likes it better.
What this means really is that, at least on this simple level, we can do better than the golden rule. Doing unto others as I would have done to me is sensible if I don't know them at all. As soon as I get to know them, I'll find out that they have different priorities than I do. If I can give them what they want instead of what I, myself, would want, they'll be happier.
One thing I'm hoping to convey is that I think, on some level, Jedi have similarities, which we need to build on if we want to have a strong community. I hear some of the same points expressed again and again by community members, like the wish that the dialogs we have together could be more respectful and productive. But the blues among us want to award meaningful titles, and this is in basic conflict with the green desire for a completely egalitarian community. The reds want to come and go among us without having obligations and the oranges want to see results - they want to get things done, which means people have to show up. Some of the things we want are just basically in conflict. If we don't consciously approach working together with the attitude that we are responsible for meeting many people's need, which are totally different from our own, and so must compromise, we'll forever be locked in a quarrel about who's right.
I think we can find ways to provide for people's basic needs and make all of our types happy, at least happy in the way of a many-year marriage. It isn't a fantasy anymore, and you don't get everything you wanted when you were dreaming about it as a teenager, but the relationship is strong and fulfilling and brings lots of joy as well as occasional sorrows. It's worth working on.
I wonder if people would be willing to take just one small piece of the puzzle and talk it over from the point of view that we're doing a mini-UN thing, really trying to resolve diverse viewpoints and really working from the mandate that we need to care for others as well as ourselves. I'd love to see 5 or 6 people pick a color that they feel they can fairly represent, whether that's their 'only' color or just one that they understand well. If we had at least one person for each, we could see what we could come up with that was acceptable, perhaps not perfect, to all the viewpoints. What can we really commit to as a rainbow Jedi group?
It might not work, I agree, but, I think in trying it, we'd learn a huge amount. Down the road, we could create another scheme which would work better using that knowledge.