When We Become Ungovernable
I’m going to attempt to unpack a phenomenon I have observed in myself and a growing number of those I do life with. I want to give it a name because lack of language can inadvertently lock us out of experiences. Wittgenstein says you cannot enter worlds for which you do not have the language and I, for one, take naming things seriously. It is an act of dominion entrusted to us since God brought the animals to Adam one by one so that he could watch him name them. That, as personal quirks go, is a living, breathing image that occupies prime real estate in my mind: God standing back, wearing a proud, indulgent smile, watching Adam come to terms with the full measure of each beast and baptise it accordingly.
It is risky, this naming business, because to misname is to have misseen and therefore to have misunderstood. But we can’t not engage in it. If misnaming is a transgression, not naming is a dereliction of duty. As Toni Morrison pronounced once upon a Nobel lecture, “language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.”
That is why I wish to draw your attention to a phenomenon that besets us as we grow older: we become increasingly ungovernable.
For most of our lives we have been willing to exist under the auspices of the collective body of norms and rules that govern the systems we want to be a part of. Willing to participate in the rites of belonging that secure our place, our position and our participation. A job within an organisation, say, or membership in a club. We do so even when we do not agree with everything prescribed within the system. We understand that it is the tradeoff that we need to make to secure our participation or membership, and by our calculation, it is worth it.
Then one day something shifts. Or flips, I cannot decide which.
Maybe it’s not so sudden. Perhaps an old rusty screw fell off undetected and a coming apart ensued. Slowly a hinge became loose and the whole edifice began to creak. It just took a while to notice.
At first we may serve our emerging discord as a tentative question: a “what did you mean by that?” In time it swells into gentle pushback of the “how about we look at it another way” variety. Eventually, though, it morphs into the full blown defiance of: “that makes absolutely no sense to me.”
It is a becoming rather than a willful revolt. Something we come into. Step into, maybe. It takes us a minute to find our bearings but then we shrug off our misgivings and realise that we like it here and we like who we are here.
That is how we become ungovernable, and how ungovernability begins to complicate everything everywhere all at once: at the office monthly review meeting when someone says something idiotic; with the sales agent at the electronics store selling us the phone we suspect isn’t worth the price tag; with the nosy aunties at the family gathering; in traffic when the Matatu driver tries to bully us out of the way. We begin to turn up in ways that are unfamiliar and disconcerting to others, and frankly, sometimes even to ourselves as perpetrators, because although this emerging ungovernability is ours, we only know that we wield it, it is new to us too, and we do not yet fully grasp the how and the why.
This is what happened to me. One day I looked in the mirror and thought to myself: “The problem is me.”
It was, in the first instance, with regards to my career. I was in transition but I could not find anything remotely interesting to me within my usual hunting grounds. I realised that I had changed, therefore my encounters with the job market had changed. I had evolved in ways that rendered me no longer able to fit into standard issue corporate slots. I had become ungovernable. It was a great relief to be able to articulate this to myself. The first step in solving a problem is, after all, formulating it correctly.
At first I thought it was just a me thing because I’m given to off kilter me things and I was content to finally name it, embrace it, and forge forward in the light of it. Soon, however, I began to encounter many fellow ungovernables lurking in the woodwork, just a conversation away, some established, some emerging. All experiencing something that had happened that they could not make unhappen. All entering into their very particular era of ungovernability.
Jonathan Haidt says that human beings are not just social beings but ultrasocial beings, like ants and bees. There’s a solid basis for this argument and our ability to cooperate and share intentionality are a core part of what makes us human. However, unlike the ants and the bees, we retain an individuality in us, a sense of our own personhood and of being independent of everyone else. That sense of individuality can trigger what I call the Elijah syndrome, the sense that you are alone in a very particular experience. What a relief and sense of kinship in recognising that I was not the only one living in my era of ungovernability.
Ungovernability is not the same as rebellion. Rebellion is oppositional to the system but is still oriented towards it, standing braced, hackles up, but still connected inexorably to it. Like a teen rebelling against her parents. Ungovernability is more self-possessed. It carries an air of nonchalance. It does not stand facing the system but at the door of the system, facing outward. It is an exit from, not a battle with. It wants, in many cases, to continue to engage with the system, but it needs new terms.
It is not always the case, for example, that we hate the work, or the organisations we work for, or the institutions we participate in. It is that we need new ways to engage with them because we are no longer who we used to be. Our terms of engagement need revisiting and revising.
The question is how we make that happen. Organisations and institutions are what organisations and institutions have always been and working with or within them demands a level of governability. Which means our options are to build our own institutions and systems, to swallow the pragmatic pill and return to the system knowing what it will cost to bear the weight of it, to renegotiate our terms with the system if it lets us, or, to learn to weave in and out of these options as the hour and circumstance demands without feeling the compulsion to explain ourselves.
The point is that this journey begins by understanding the phase we are in and naming it. What we name we begin to understand, and only then can we master it. To name a thing accurately is where the hope of freedom begins. To know where we are is to know where we can go next.