Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [40]
We risk being lonely. Maybe this is even harder. Changing yourself often means taking independent positions that those closest to you cannot accept. For me, this meant deciding I no longer wanted to be married. At the prospect of being on my own, I experienced the greatest pain and terror I had ever felt. I can’t deny that I do feel lonely sometimes, but I came to realize that many of the most important things I wanted to do, I could only do alone. Yes, I do work in a team. I enjoy our meetings, making plans and reacting to each other’s work. But when it comes right down to getting the words on the page, it is me and the typewriter. I came to learn also that there is a reward for being alone in order to do what I believe in: I feel connected to others who share my vision, not only to others at the Institute but to a growing network of people throughout the world.
We risk being wrong. Taking controversial positions is hard enough, but how do we deal with our fear of being wrong? Part of the answer for me was discovering that those learned academics and government officials—whom I had believed—are wrong. They may be mostly correct in their statistics, but how useful are statistics if their questions are the wrong questions? Those “experts” intimidate so many of us and use their grasp of trivial detail to avoid asking the important questions. (In Rome in 1974, all the experts were asking, “How can we increase food production?” But I had already learned that many countries were increasing food production faster than their population grew and yet had more hunger than ever.)
In learning not to fear being wrong, I had to accept that to ask the important questions is to ask big questions—and this inevitably entails crossing many disciplines. If you have read our book Food First, you know what I mean. The material spans dozens of disciplines, from anthropology to climatology to nutrition to economics. When you ask big questions, it is impossible to be an “expert” in everything that you study. But instead of being paralyzed by that realization, I try to keep in mind the advice of a wise friend. “If you ask a big question you may get something wrong,” Marty Strange told me. “But if you ask a small question—as most narrow academics do—it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong. Nobody cares!”
My positions have changed as I have learned. In the process, I have become more convinced that acting out of sheer emotion, even genuine compassion, is not enough. If we are serious about committing our lives to positive social change, we must always be learning, and accepting the logical consequences of what we learn as a basis for what we do.
Yes, we must be able to risk—risk being controversial, risk being lonely, risk being wrong. Only through risk-taking do we gain the strength we need to take responsibility—and to be part of the redistribution of political and economic power essential for a solution to needless hunger.
But How Do We Learn to Take Risks?
Few people change alone. As I have already suggested, we must choose friends and colleagues who will push us to what we thought we could not do. But we must select friends who will “catch” us, too, when we push ourselves too far and need to be supported. Wherever we are, we must not be content to work alone. Only if we experience the possibility and the rewards of shared decision-making in our own lives—in our families, our schools, our community groups, our workplaces—will we believe in the possibility of more just sharing of decision-making in our government and economic structures.
Second, we must learn to associate risk with joy as well as pain. Despite my parents’ struggle against racism and McCarthyism through the Unitarian church they founded, the cultural messages were so strong that I grew up believing that the “good life” we all are seeking would be a life without risk-taking. This was my “sailboat” image of the