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15. From collaborative responsiveness to collaborative empowerment Thomas Andrew Bryer

Collaboration. Responsiveness. Power. Empowerment. Equity. Equality. Deliberation. These words reflect a range of values and processes that are value driven. They are also words with generally positive connotations. However, in practice, they might not rise to the level of posi- tivity that shines from them, and they might even conflict with each other, thus rendering some as antithetical to the others. This chapter explores possible directions of public governance in consideration of these simple-sounding but value-laden concepts. To set the stage for this prognostication, I will begin with a bit of science fiction to illustrate the potential pitfalls of empowerment, or the positive glow of equality and equal voice but also the dark holes that can swallow their light.

In his novel Supernova Era, Cixin Liu wrote about a world that is placed under the complete control of children aged 13 and below. This turn of events was instigated by a supernova event in which a star exploded and flooded earth’s atmosphere with radiation. The radiation killed all humans over age 13, as their ability to regenerate dead cells was insufficient, unlike the younger population. Thus, children were put in charge of all aspects of life and society, including government, industry, agriculture, et cetera.

With the help of technology, all two million surviving children in China, where the novel is set, are enabled to speak at one time in a small handful of thematic voices. In real-time, millions of children spoke to the country’s newly appointed young leaders vis-à-vis a com- puter named Big Quantum, which is read and listened to all voices, coding their input, and delivering succinct messages to the leadership regarding the will of the surviving masses, broken down according to the percentage of unique voices fitting within a variety of themes. It was a machine-driven content analysis. Liu describes this process after the assembled children present their vision for the future of China:

And so the country launched into a huge debate, the biggest ever seen in human history, in which direct participants numbered more than 200 million. Across the vast territory of the country, children could be found on the phone or at their computers shouting or typing away, each of them vying to contribute their 1/200,000,000th part toward the world of their dreams. (Liu, 2019, p. 164)

This is not so feasible in contemporary times, year 2020, although technologies can likely be developed and deployed for such a purpose. The power of Liu’s example is in its description of a collaborative process that gives every participant (200 million in this case) an equal voice and massed opportunity to shape leaders’ deliberations and final decisions. It is not an expert-driven process and does not consider expertise or experience in separating “good” ideas from “bad” ideas. As Liu further explained:

The smaller of the two competing groups of children had a larger average age, but tragically, Big Quantum’s summarized statements did not (or could not) take age into account, and so the larger

Handbook of Collaborative Public Management, edited by Jack W. Meek, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucb/detail.action?docID=6481961. Created from ucb on 2022-11-18 20:41:02.

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group held an absolute advantage. And thus, with a huge number of younger children taking part in the debate to determine the fate of the country, the least rational and most capricious formed a highly dangerous social force. (Liu, 2019, p. 164)

In reality, year 2020, this discussion of direct democracy might conjure impressions in our minds of national election results that defied expectations, including Brexit—the British vote to exit from the European Union—and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. The tyranny of the masses, or stated differently, mob rule, can threaten the stability of society. Yet, it is the masses for whom we look to advance our public governance from what we can call “collaborative responsiveness” to “collaborative empowerment.”

Collaborative responsiveness mechanisms potentially perpetuate societal power imbalances and particularly the position of service recipients as passive clients. In the context of Liu’s story, collaborative responsiveness conceives the position of children as threats if given too much power. It conceives the position of non-expert citizens as threats in the same manner. A collaborative empowerment approach, in contrast, reduces organizational and collective constraints on individuals by emphasizing values and processes of equal voice, deliberation, and political education.

However worthy of a goal this might seem, in abstract, the idea of the threat of the masses if given too much power might be real, if governance systems are not built to bend, adapt, negotiate, and, as necessary, resist empowered citizens who threaten stability without suffi- cient foresight. In summary, collaborative empowerment is risky but with reward of genuine democratic legitimacy, existing always as on the tip of a needle, likely to collapse under an overzealous or authoritarian State that overcorrects or freezes in the face of citizen pushback.

The closest we, as a society, have come to collaborative empowerment is the process of the 21st-century town hall meeting, which still requires substantial physical space and human facilitation to guide the dialogue and deliberation, and is thus limited in the number of people who can participate, even though potentially numbering in the thousands.

In the sections that follow are: (1) more detailed discussion on the concepts of collaborative responsiveness and collaborative empowerment, (2) application of these ideas in the context of poverty amelioration policies in the United States that sought “empowerment” of the poor, and (3) final reflections, perhaps answering Liu’s implicit big question: if the country is left to the control of the non-expert (“children”), can it survive? Or, asked differently, what is the function of the expert in a collaboratively empowered world?

COLLABORATIVE RESPONSIVENESS AND COLLABORATIVE EMPOWERMENT

There are three concepts that need to be defined individually before addressing the two core ideas expressed in the title: collaborative, responsiveness, and empowerment. The intent here is to provide definitional clarity, at least within the context of this chapter, before embarking on the deeper discussions of collaborative responsiveness and collaborative empowerment, how they differ, and what the risks and opportunities are of each if their principles are put into practice.

Collaborative is a bit of a buzzword and is assumed to be superior to practices within public governance that are driven by single organizations or, presumably worse, single organizations

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From collaborative responsiveness to collaborative empowerment 243

acting without alignment on the same issues across populations or for the same populations across various issues. For example, multiple homeless-serving organizations that do not share resources or coordinate services across time and place are likely to lead to a fragmentation of the social service delivery system that satisfies few, if any, of the numerous needs a homeless individual or family has (e.g., housing, employment, healthcare, education, job training, drug addiction, mental health, language training, transportation, et cetera). This fragmentation can lead to cost redundancies, inefficient service delivery, and the exposure of multiple cracks through which intended service beneficiaries can fall in their search for an evasive holistic solution to multiple needs. Efforts that are collaborative are designed to address problems that are wicked, meaning problems that defy a single organization or indeed sector solving the problem alone.

Other words that have more-or-less come to reflect the same idea of organizations working together are several, though each might align with different intensities of working together. Collaboration, for example, is conceptualized as part of a “three Cs” approach to interorgan- izational working together, with the two other Cs reflecting less intensive joint efforts being cooperation and coordination (Cigler, 1999). Network governance is another related concept, which has been advanced as a means to link multiple organizations to achieve benefits for organizations, the network itself, and for society (Milward & Provan, 2006), as well as for individuals within organizations (Bryer, 2007). More recently, the notion of collective impact has surfaced and become popular to also reflect the unique power individual organizations have when they strategically work together through joint activities, sharing of resources, and open communication (Kania & Kramer, 2011).

So as not to belabor the point and distract from the core purpose of this chapter, the working definition of collaborative here is the strategic and active joining of disparate independent individuals, organizations, or systems to accomplish some desirable output or outcome. This is a broad definition but satisfies our need herein.

Responsiveness is an idea that has been held as a primary value in public administration for some time (Saltzstein, 1992), though increasingly it is an idea that shows itself to be more complex than a simple notion of government, and/or related public service organiza- tions, meeting or trying to meet the needs of service recipients. To be responsive is to be held to account, and the object of responsiveness need not be individual beneficiaries but can include, from an organizational perspective, standard operating procedures, the goals of individual workers in organizations, demands of individual clients or customers, as well as potentially the will of a collective group engaged in some kind of group deliberation (Bryer, 2007). Responsiveness takes on further additional meaning when it is not the act of a single organization but multiple organizations acting together in a collaborative context, or network responsiveness.

Some scholars have sought to define responsiveness as more than a unidirectional action of public administrator or administrative agency toward the object of response. Prysmakova (2019) most recently has sought to move in this direction within the network context; Seigler (2015) considered this possibility within the context of social media engagement between local government agencies and citizens. Indeed, reading these relatively recent dissertations will introduce readers to the latest literature on responsiveness. Despite these efforts, respon- siveness remains in much public administration literature as a unidirectional action as framed by Vigoda (2002). In this sense, the idea and act of responsiveness is potentially constrained by short-term demands set within established laws, rules, and procedures. To be responsive

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to a citizen, group of citizens, or group of stakeholders today has no necessary bearing on responsiveness to the same groups or individuals in the future or in different service domains.

Prysmakova (2019) suggests an approach that can help avoid this short-term trap by establishing multiple criteria of responsiveness that go beyond traditional measures, such as trust, relational consistency, and genuine communication. Though a substantial step forward is made by reconceptualizing responsiveness in this way, it misses a critical component that might prevent sustainable perceived legitimacy and satisfaction or, if we can be so bold, the happiness of citizens and stakeholders with respect to (networked) governmental action. This is where the notion of empowerment emerges as both an antidote to short-term and unidirec- tional responsiveness and a path forward to transform governance operations that are distinctly embedded within systems that strive to be more deeply democratic.

This last point is significant and worth discussing in segue between the notions of respon- siveness and empowerment. Woodrow Wilson (1886) quite famously wrote about how a skilled public administrator in a democratic system can learn his or her craft from a peer operating within an authoritarian regime in the same manner a hunter can learn how to sharpen the blade of a knife from a murderer. Neither the democratic administrator nor the hunter needs to share the intent or value-system of the dictator or murderer, but they can learn the craft of, effectively, being responsive. A government can generally satisfy citizen and stakeholder needs leading to complacency of the citizenry within a dictatorship. The tools of the public administrator in many if not most respects are easily transferable between the democrat and dictator; the approaches deployed to be responsive can be transferred in the same manner. Empowerment, on the other hand, is uniquely fit for the administrator in a democracy.

Like collaboration and responsiveness, empowerment has been defined in numerous ways. In practice, empowerment is a word cast about by politicians often without depth of meaning or intention to follow through with the full transformation of systems that are required to realize it. As noted in the introduction, empowerment is a feel-good word, which makes it a rhetorical tool that is popular in its promise, if not substance.

I once used the word or some variation of it in a community participation process I facili- tated; I was speaking before a packed church with a few hundred faithful in attendance about upcoming community meetings where they would have the power to be heard, ask questions, and receive answers. Almost in unison, the assembled masses responded by exclaiming “amen!” (Bryer, 2014). When Howard Dean was seeking the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for the presidency of the United States in 2004, his pitch was to empower those who have been left out. In 2020, Elizabeth Warren used similar language as she sought her party’s nomination for the presidency, “empowering the people” and changing the systems of governance to reduce power of the elite. These examples are not given to question the integrity of politicians or community engaged scholars who exercise rhetorical flourish by promising empowerment; they are given to show the looseness of the word and underlying concept in practice.

Specific definitions of empowerment are available from which we can build. For example, Arnstein (1969) defines empowerment as opposite to manipulation, portraying these extremes metaphorically on a “ladder of citizen participation.” Power, she argued, is a relative concept and only exists for one person as a component of power held by another. At the bottom of the ladder, citizens have no power relative to governing authorities. They are subject to manip- ulation and other therapeutic forms of non-participation. Further up the ladder, citizens are “given” more power by authorities, including tokenistic strategies of informing, consulting,

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and placating. At the highest rungs, authorities share power through partnership, delegation of certain authorities, or ultimately, control. With such variation in meaning, it becomes clear that it has been and continues to be easy for politicians and others to throw the word “empow- erment” around with abandon. Yet, these cavalier promises rarely deliver the substantive meaning as defined by Arnstein.

Bryer and Prysmakova-Rivera (2018, p. 104) define empowerment in a more subjective frame, as a:

… state of mind. If a person feels powerful, they will be able to reach beyond their self- or other-imposed constraints and achieve what or succeed in ways they did not think possible. … There is a problem with states of mind, though. They tend to not be fixed and can be manipulated. They are malleable. The feeling of empowerment is not the same as actual empowerment. We can create institutions and systems that allow the poor to have seats at the proverbial table, but unless those seats are more numerous than tokenistic and constructed to be the same height as all other seats, then the empowerment is false and symbolic.

As might be somewhat clear from the preceding discussion, collaborative responsiveness and collaborative empowerment are distinctive. Most fundamentally, one is, despite efforts to reconceptualize it, driven by or at least controlled in significant ways by experts and other professional stakeholders. This makes the people more open to manipulation as defined by Arnstein (1969) on the ladder and expressed as a reservation by Bryer and Prysmakova-Rivera (2018) as an empowerment state of mind.

The other opens governance processes to the uncertainty of demands from the multiple publics that exist within the space of any and every public policy issue of concern within indi- vidual communities or a society as a whole. Further, collaborations that are empowering will also be responsive, only with clear and measurable legitimacy from stakeholders both within and outside the collaboration unlike collaborations that are responsive without empowerment. To make clear this broad discussion, we turn to an extended example of poverty elimination policies and programs in the United States.

COLLABORATIVE RESPONSIVENESS AND EMPOWERMENT IN THE WAR ON POVERTY

Poverty is the epitome of what has been termed a “wicked problem” (Rittel & Webber, 1973). It defies resolution by a single organization or sector within society. Multiple agencies, levels of government, private sector actors, and individuals are required to mobilize and leverage complementary and supplemental resources to address the multifaceted issues associated with individuals and families who are poor. Historically, those who experience poverty are also those with the least societal power—considering both political and economic forms.

Levels of poverty faced by individuals or families can be assessed in three ways (Bryer & Prysmakova-Rivera, 2018). The first and most obvious is subsistence poverty, which is the access individuals have to material resources, such as money/income, housing, and food. Second is agency poverty, which is the extent to which an individual feels empowered; it is the confidence an individual has to meaningfully contribute to the strengthening of communities (Bryer et al., 2013). The third is status poverty, or the extent to which others in a community or in society as a whole consider another to have legitimate power to present his or her or

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their own interests in a credible manner, without a re-presentation by another as an elected or self-appointed representative. To holistically address poverty requires not only responsiveness to not only subsistence needs but full and genuine empowerment to address status and agency concerns.

This was not achieved from the start of the American “war on the sources of poverty” launched through the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 and subsequent laws at the federal, state, and local levels. Instead, as Moynihan (1969) argued, what was implemented was less Maximum Feasible Participation of the poor, as written in the EOA, but, as per the title of his book, “maximum feasible misunderstanding.” Public engagement practices merely served to coordinate the powerful (Moynihan, 1969). In other words, the practice took the agencies in urban and rural areas that were already working to serve the needs of the poor and ensure they were well aligned in their efforts.

As explained herein, these practices are early examples of the principles of collaborative responsiveness. To the extent these existing agencies and technical experts on poverty sought to mobilize the poor themselves, their “success” was more short-term and harmed long-term potential for sustainable empowerment of and meaningful responsiveness to the poor. As Bryer & Prysmakova-Rivera (2018, p. 51) note:

Following implementation of Maximum Feasible Participation of the poor in the 1960s and 1970s, public opinion turned against the poor; they were labeled as greedy and lazy, entitled without work ethic, or even societal parasites … their status shifted, not from the forgotten to the cared for but from the forgotten to the despised.

Subsistence poverty may have improved somewhat, but agency and status poverty became more entrenched.

Since at least the Reagan administration, an alternative approach to combatting poverty has taken hold, dominated by labels applied to the poor such as lazy, shiftless, and so on. The alternative approach is, to write it bluntly, the argument that the poor must simply work harder and smarter, and they will solve their own financial and quality of life dilemmas. Thus, the state of anti-poverty programs and policies in the United States are dominated by a responsive- ness or collaborative responsiveness model and are subject to manipulation (and limited or no opportunity for reducing agency poverty) and/or stereotyped labeling of the poor (and limited or no opportunity for reducing status poverty):

We thus have two approaches to empowerment for the poor: “Up by your own bootstraps” model, and the 1960s Maximum Feasible Participation/Manipulation model. These are competing views on what is possible with the poor, and neither presents a particularly flattering image: one suggests the poor are lazy, and their lack of empowerment is due to their own lack of efforts, and the second suggests the poor are pawns and may not actually know what is best for them. Though there are likely to be, indeed most definitely are, subsets of the population of poor people who reside at these extremes, most, we suggest, are in the middle somewhere: hard working, eager for comfort if not success, and capable of self-empowerment and self-presentation of interests without hand-holding or prodding. (Bryer & Prysmakova-Rivera, 2018, p. 50)

In calling for a 21st-century war on poverty, Melish (2010) argues that the poor themselves are not engaged successfully to present their own interests in the allocation of federal resources intended to alleviate poverty throughout the nation. Instead, professional interest groups effectively use those living in poverty like pawns without actual empowerment that could have

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From collaborative responsiveness to collaborative empowerment 247

ended multi-generational poverty cycles (Bryer & Prysmakova-Rivera, 2018). To transform this system, we must create sustained empowerment, which requires dealing with barriers in both government and citizens. To overcome these barriers and facilitate the using of power requires engagement with and leveraging resources from multiple organizational stakeholders across sectors in society. Existing powerholders must choose to relinquish power and enable the previously powerless to take up power. This is not an act of giving power but an act of stepping back and facilitating others to step in. However, the traditionally powerless must also be willing to develop agency and use it, claim status and leverage it.

Furthermore, once the door is open and invitation is made, citizens will expect that if they take the time to participate, to act with and through their power, they will help shape decision and policy outcomes. If they find that their power is fleeting or merely symbolic, they will potentially drop out of all future governance processes, giving up on using whatever power they might have had available to them. This idea has been termed a “democracy bubble” (Bryer, 2011).

COLLABORATIVE EMPOWERMENT: OPEN THE DOOR, KEEP QUIET, AND STAND WITH THE PEOPLE

American composer John Cage is known for writing pieces that challenged existing notions of what constitutes music. Among these boundary-pushing compositions was one called “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds.” The performer of this piece enters the stage, sits at the piano, and proceeds to sit silently for the amount of time indicated in the composition title. Cage’s message was that music can be found in disorganized sound like the kind heard in the audi- torium during performance of this piece: coughing, whispering, nervous laughter, crinkling of candy wrappers, et cetera. In the same manner as legitimate, valuable, and meaningful music can be found in what otherwise might be assessed as cacophony, citizens who make many noises and offer numerous seemingly unrelated and disparate suggestions for improving quality of life can also form into a symphony with meaning, if government authorities are willing and able to listen.

We saw this in the novel of Cixin Liu. The two million children’s unique voices were syn- thesized by a supercomputer to form a discrete set of idea and policy options for government leaders to consider. As Liu’s story unfolded, though, it became clear that the ideas, however well organized, of uninformed children/citizens can lead to catastrophic results for society. The experts, collectively, across organizations and sectors, must be able to open space, keep quiet to let citizens speak and meaningfully be heard without interruption or judgment, and allow for a neutral analysis of citizen expressions.

This brings us back to a question asked in introduction: What is the role of the expert in the collaboratively empowered world? To put it in the frame of the Kettering Foundation’s David Mathews, government and related technical and policy experts might act to be with the people, rather than of the People, by the People, and for the People, as Abraham Lincoln described in his Gettysburg Address. Mathews (2019, p. 12) explains:

A “with” strategy goes beyond consulting with citizens who are beneficiaries of a government program. Moreover, it isn’t the same as transferring government responsibilities to nongovernmental organizations; it isn’t devolution. A “with” strategy fosters reciprocity between what citizens do uniquely and what governments do. It is based on evidence that governments at any level can’t do

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their jobs as effectively without the complementary efforts of people working with people. That is because there are some things that can only be done by citizens or that are best done by them. Democratic governments need working citizens.

This “with” notion, in contrast to its alternatives, is a useful concept for final reflection on the possibility of democratic empowerment in governance processes. Fundamentally, we can suggest that Lincoln’s of, by, and for formulation is akin to a responsive, or collaboratively responsive, government: of the people suggests fellow citizens are empowered, by the people is seen in direct ballot box decisions, and for the people suggests representatives (political or administrative) are deciding. As noted in Follett’s (1918) differentiation of power-with from power-over, with is akin to a system that collaboratively empowers citizens and government officials.

Government with the people has the potential to do what of, by, and for have not been able to accomplish. The people of the United States are as divided as they have ever been, with those divisions playing out and exacerbated by the real-time communications of social media and other emergent communications technologies. These divisions, this disunity, facilitate peoples’ distrust in institutions and distrust in each other, as we see manifested in various forms of social unrest, across the ideological spectrum, in the United States in 2020.

I argue that government of, by, and for the people (AKA collaboratively responsive gov- ernment) is not capable of reducing or eliminating distrust and facilitating empowerment in mind and/or action. And with distrust come pressures that reduce freedom for subsets of the population, as some people, some “others” are what we can call “included-out” citizens (Bryer & Prysmakova-Rivera, 2018; Catlaw, 2007; Erni, 2016). These others, including, for example, those living in poverty, in actuality, are not given the opportunity to be part of government, in government, nor to be represented by the government in an ongoing and sustainable way.

My further and perhaps more provocative proposition is this: As a matter of social and political concern, in order to facilitate genuine empowerment, governments should not try to create more trusting relationships. Trust, at least blind trust, is a remnant of a “responsiveness” strategy and culture—people trust the government because elected representatives must be acting in the peoples’ interests. This is not necessarily the case for all people, as we saw in the illustration of poverty policy. Instead, to facilitate genuine empowerment, governments should facilitate skepticism. To be skeptical and to have the felt and actual ability to question authority is the mark of a person with power (Dalton & Welzel, 2014).

Looking at the first proposition, there are three limitations of the of, by, and for (aka: in collaboratively responsive government), and they concern issues of representation, power, and responsiveness. To be “of” the people assumes the need for legitimate representation of all the people, in all their diversity. The model of representation is based on the loop model of democracy in an electoral context but applies as well to the idea of the representative bureau- cracy (Krislov, 1974). In the electoral context, voters, the people, elect officials to various government posts; in those posts, the officials are charged with developing and/or imple- menting policies that align with the interest of the people; if the people are satisfied with their representation, they will vote to re-elect the officials or others like them. In a representative bureaucracy context, if citizens are not satisfied that public administrators who demographi- cally are like them are also substantively reflecting their interests through official actions, they can complain and potentially hold elected officials to account.

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The loop model falls short by assuming citizens have either ability or access to infor- mation to make proper judgments regarding the quality of their representatives. In other words, the accountability link between the representative and represented is not as strong as the model implies. Those who lack agency and/or who lack status in society are not able to self-present their own interests or hold their representatives to account. Due to lack of self- or other-perceived credibility, they have high agency and status poverty. In such a position, they require active representation of others.

Legitimate representation, though, requires consent. In the loop model of democracy, consent is considered granted through majority will as expressed through the vote or some other mass expression of voice, such as in a protest or petition. This, however, is a rather weak form of consent, as it is based on individual and mass perception of desire and may not be rea- sonably informed. In fact, the requirements for a university researcher to conduct an interview with a citizen are more onerous, as the citizen must provide “informed consent” attesting that they understand the purpose of the research, the risks involved, and any/all rights and respon- sibilities they hold. In the act of voting, there is no such requirement.

For legitimate representation of the people to occur, the represented must be able to hold the representatives to account. Such accountability is possible only if the represented are informed enough to be able to interpret whether the representatives are acting in their interests, in the interests of another, or in self-interest for themselves. If such discernment is not possible there can be no true consent, even if the people vote for one candidate instead of another or one political party instead of another. If the vote is not informed, any action that results from the accumulation of votes is not consensual. The representation is not legitimate, as the lack of informed decision-making renders holding representatives accountable problematic. For gov- ernment to be sufficiently “of” the people is thus difficult, without informed and sustainable empowerment of the full diversity of individuals living within a society.

There is, however, a fine line between empowerment and manipulation in government by the people. Citizens can be symbolically engaged in governing, giving them the feeling of power without actual empowerment to influence decision-making. We see this in standard involvement approaches, such as public hearings, town hall meetings, and various forms of online input. This fine line is the reason government by the people is as problematic as gov- ernment of the people. Large swaths of the population are not given the status or agency to be treated equally in formal participatory and decision-making processes.

Government for the people is equally problematic, given the complexity of the bureau- cratic or public administration environment. Contemporary administrators are pushed to be responsive not just to diverse citizens but to a range of equally legitimate bosses and causes, including rules and procedures of agencies, demands of elected officials, their own public service ambitions, and so on (Bryer, 2007). The contemporary administrator must carefully negotiate responsiveness to all of these forces, including the force of citizen expectations and requests that would come through enactment of a with or collaboratively empowered strategy for public governance. To be responsive to all competing demands is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Not unlike the by strategy, the with or collaborative empowerment strategy, requires that all citizens be seen as equal in their status and agency, regardless of differences such as values, education level, or personal wealth. Government must perceive the ideas of all citizens as legitimate, lest citizens invest time and energy to express their views, however unique or unusual, and find that nobody is paying attention. As the phrase first used during apartheid

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in South Africa and picked up by various social justice movements around the world reads: Nothing about us without us is for us. The “us,” all of us, need to know that when we speak, people in positions of public leadership and responsibility are listening.

The with strategy also requires a certain communal sense of “us” or “we.” This is also a challenge, as expressed by Rabbi Lau-Lavie (2017) in a National Public Radio interview for the program, On Being:

It’s this Talmudic parable about a ship that is sailing, and there are many cabins. And one of the people in the cabins on the lower floor decides to dig a hole in the floor of his cabin, and does so, and sure enough, the ship begins to sink. And the other passengers suddenly discover what’s going on and see this guy with a hole in the floor. And they say, “What are you doing?” And he says, “Well, it’s my cabin. I paid for it.” And down the ship goes.

[It’s] a story in the Talmud that talks about human responsibility in the Jewish sense—that we’re all in the same ship together. But I’ve been wrestling with it and … talking about what does it mean for us to be that person? Where have we been only focusing on my cabin and me-me-me-me-me-me-me, and where are we are not part of a “we”? And how is that true of every single one of us, and how that is true in some ways of America, and how the narcissistic, me-focused, insight-driven, my own needs and aspirations in this age have taken hold of us that the sense of public and communal and responsible-for-other, including the limping and the weak at the edges of our camp, in some way has not been looked at as religious traditions have taught us to and as the Bible again and again reminds us: Remember the Other. You were the Other. And then the question is, what is the “we,” because the boundaries of what is “we” are shifting.

These shifting boundaries mean a with strategy should not be built on the idea of establishing trust-based relationships. Government of, by, and for the people has fostered active distrust. To be collaboratively empowered with the people requires not the opposite of uncritical or blind trust; it requires skepticism and a willingness to engage. Skepticism can help citizens ask critical questions of each other, and such critical questions can facilitate learning about and understanding of diverse interests and values. With willingness to engage, citizens can uniquely find space for dialogue and deliberation with each other to find solutions.

But the space for dialogue must assume distrust exists. It must assume some in the society will actively seek to delegitimize the voices of others. It must assume that there will be forces that intentionally or unintentionally manipulate some individuals and groups to feel powerful when they are not and others to feel weak when they are powerful. To be with and empowered is for citizens to be skeptical of government, for government to be skeptical of citizens, and for citizens to be skeptical of each other—yet be willing to engage with one another, none- theless. This will lead us to ask each other difficult questions, demand difficult answers, and find solutions to wicked problems in a way that leverages the unique skills, diverse beliefs, horrible prejudices, and debilitating aggressiveness toward others that is found within and across societies.

To respond to Cixin Liu: children, or non-expert citizens, can be empowered to help rule the world. The world’s institutions and leaders must be open, ready to listen and not always speak, and to demonstrate a belief that while consensus may not be achieved, there are riches to be found in ensuring all voices in society are heard. They must also remain skeptical that any one voice or set of voices will try to dominate and reduce the power of others. To be col- laboratively empowered is for government and citizens to be forever vigilant, lest power falls to manipulation and continuation of the poverties that plague the world.

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From collaborative responsiveness to collaborative empowerment 251

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