The Disengagement Divide
“Here’s my theory: Disengagement is the issue underlying the majority of problems I see in families, schools, communities and organizations and it takes many forms, including the
ones we discussed in the “Armory” chapter.
We disengage to protect ourselves from vulnerability, shame, and feeling lost and without purpose. We also disengage when we feel like the
people who are leading us -our boss, our teachers, our principal, our clergy, our parents, our politicians aren’t living up to their end of the social contract.
Politics is a great, albeit painful, example of social contract disengagement.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are making laws that they’re not required to follow or that don’t affect them, they’re engaging in behaviors that would result in most of us getting fired, divorced, or arrested.
They’re espousing values that are rarely displayed in their behavior. And just watching them shame and blame each other is degrading for us.
They’re not living up to their side of the social contract and voter turnout statistics show that we’re disengaging.
Religion is another example of social contract disengagement.
First, disengagement is often the result of leaders not living by the same values they’re preaching. Second, in an uncertain world, we often feel desperate for absolutes. It’s the human response to fear.
When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into “compliance and consequences,” rather than teaching and modeling how to wrestle with the unknown and how to embrace mystery, the entire
concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms.
Faith minus vulnerability equals politics, or worse, extremism.
Spiritual connection and engagement is not built on compliance, it’s the product of love, belonging, and vulnerability.
So, here’s the question: We don’t intentionally create cultures in our families, schools, communities, and organizations that fuel disengagement and disconnection, so how does it happen? Where’s the gap?
The gap starts here: We can’t give people what we don’t have. Who we are matters immeasurably more than what we know or who we want to be.
The space between our practiced values (what we’re actually doing, thinking, and feeling) and our aspirational values (what we want to do, think and feel) is the value gap, or what I call the disengagement divide.”
Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
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And this, too.