AHP Perspective

TOWARD A POLITICS OF TRUST:

Our Only Way to a Healthy, Hopeful, Human Future!

, John Vasconcellos

The true leader is that person who seeks to inspire others
to become their own leaders.

I n 1986 I co-led a weekend workshop with Carl Rogers at the University of California, Irvine. I was first introduced to Carl and to his vision and his process by my first therapist, Jesuit psychologist Leo Rock at Santa Clara University, back in 1966. It was the same year I began campaigning for the California State Legislature.

It was also the beginning of my dual odyssey,now spanning 36 years,of searching out who I am as a person and how I can most faithfully and authentically serve the thousands of Californians who elect me. Rogerian psychotherapy was the source of personal insights and tools which enabled me to survive the most painful transition of my life.

From there I went on to experience other pioneers and processes that constitute humanistic psychology and inspire what I am now proposing as a whole new approach to politics.

The late Œ'60s and early '70s were times when many individuals and much of our society were engated in radical personal, social, and cultural transformation.

All of these efforts continue today and constitute the basis for the historic confrontation between orthodoxy/hierarchy and what Willis Harman called the "New Copernican Revolution",signalling that many of us had shifted our basic sense of ourselves, from negative and violent and needing to be controlled to positive and innocent and deserving of liberation and self-realization.

Esalen Institute during that period was of course the place for what was awakening in human consciousness. It was there, at Esalen, that I discovered the groundbreaking work of Sidney Jourard, Jim Fadiman, John Heider, and Will Schutz,together with weekends elsewhere with Abe Maslow, Rollo May, and Jim Bugental. I must admit that while I never experienced her workshops, I enjoyed becoming friends and partners with Virginia Satir, with whom I learned so much.

Each of those humanistic pioneers, in her/his own unique way, deepened my appreciation for the humanistic worldview. Since then I've employed the vision, values, principles, and practices of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement in what I've undertaken in my 36 years as a California State Legislator, my own personal journey "toward becoming a person."

My humanistic approach to politics was met with nurturing support by some colleagues and constituents, while it was dismissed and scorned by others. The many friends I have beside me to ensure my heart stays open, amidst all the awful cynicism and corruption of politics, help make being in politics possible to endure. Partnering with Carl Rogers in our 1986 workshop affirmed all that had grown within me those 20 years. It further deepened and confirmed and empowered me to have ever more faith in myself, to risk having faith in others, and to have faith in the innate goodness of all of us human beings, all as a basis for practicing politics in the State Legislature and beyond.

I'll never forget the words Carl expressed that weekend at UC Irvine for they touched me deeply and still serve as the grounding vision for my politics. Carl declared, "I've been doing psychology for 60 years, and I've come to believe that we human beings are innately inclined toward becoming life-affirming, constructive, responsible, and trustworthy."

What could be further from, more contrary to, our experience of the mainstream traditional politics of both of our major political parties today! This simple yet profound proclamation of the innate trustworthiness of our essential human nature informs a whole new series of policies, programs, and political processes built upon trust and aimed specifically at building social capital through nurturing the realization of our life-affirming capacities. It establishes a new framework for effective cross-sector collaboration, new measures for assessing the quality of life of our citizens and communities, and a new legislative agenda based on personal empowerment and a deeper sense of our own inherent trustworthiness.

This year 350 of us gathered at the University of California, San Diego, to celebrate the 100th birthday of our friend and mentor Carl Rogers. Our reunion was precious, joyous, and deeply inspiring. It was also practical and timely, occurring amidst what may well be the most serious political crisis and challenge our human race has ever faced.

Our symposium provided a forum for us to employ the theoretical lens of humanistic psychology to examine the root causes of our most pressing social and political problems, and to propose alternative solutions that are faithful, healing, and constructive. Participants joined together in boldly addressing such large-scale concerns as poverty, racism, school violence, divorce, domestic abuse, warfare, pollution, globalization, and the recent collapse of credibility in so many of our pillar institutions.

One clear outcome of the symposium was the universal recognition that we as a global society must work together to overcome the fundamental barriers to inner and outer peace that we, each and all, are faced with as human beings. The way we choose to practice politics and involve ourselves in shaping our system of governance will determine whether and how our vision and our hopes and dreams be realized or shattered once and for all.

I expect you could join me in attesting to the current sad reality of our traditional politics. We boast of our "new economy," we cherish our "new demography," we revel in our "new consciousness"; yet we are stuck with the same old politics, a politics rooted in cynicism and mistrust, a politics blind to its routine betrayals of our human spirit.

Politics today is plagued by a systematic pathology characterized by an utter cynicism toward our human nature. Informed by the (sometimes unconscious) belief that we humans are evil and dangerous and inclined toward wrongdoing, far too many politicians and voters seek to tilt public policy toward restricting, controlling, and punishing society rather than toward liberating and empowering each of us to cultivate our self-actualizing capacities and potential. Ultimately this cynical view of human nature corrupts the very heart of democracy by taking power away from the People and placing it into the hands of domin-ation-based politicians and inef-fective government bureaucracies.

Clearly, this "Big Brother"/ "Strict Father" approach to governance neither serves to inspire us, nor to enable us to solve our problems. It's little wonder we're failing to get at the root of our problems, and why so many of us feel disconnected from our political leaders, from the daily affairs of government, from the political process itself. Yet never before have we so desperately needed to come together in a collective effort to identify a new faithful vision and design an entire new political agenda to heal the social epidemics we find facing us today. It is essential that we in humanistic psychology join our forces and work together to envision a new politics and commit ourselves to its design, implementation, and mobilization.

What vision better informs such a new politics than that one expressed by Carl Rogers?,that "we humans are innately inclined toward becoming life-affirming, constructive, responsible and trustworthy."

So I invite you now to join me wholeheartedly as a partner in the project that represents the final and most ambitious undertaking of my personal and political odyssey. As I fast approach my 2004 retirement from public office, I find myself wanting to leave a lasting living legacy that will preserve and sustain this emerging new vision of governance and leadership which I've come to call the Politics of Trust.

The Politics of Trust inspires each and all of us to work together to restore trust in ourselves (self-esteem), trust in each other (inclusion and diversity), and trust in us working together (collaboration),all together transforming our political processes toward sustaining life and growth. Informed by the vision of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement, the Politics of Trust champions the virtues of self-esteem, inclusion and diversity, and collaboration as pragmatic alternatives to the cynicism and divisiveness so predominant in politics today. Above all, it offers a progressive reorientation to governance that begins with faith in our capacity for self-governance, and proceeds to reclaim the self-realizing potential of our human condition as its primary concern.

Only in a democracy can we

choose a new way to govern ourselves. Our own Declaration of Independence reminds us of what the early Americans fought so hard to establish,our unalienable right to alter our government to more accurately reflect our needs and wants as a society.

The time has come, for us to fully assume our capacities, our rights, and our responsibilities to save and restore our democracy. We owe it to ourselves, and to our children, to wholeheartedly involve ourselves in the struggles of our day, to recognize that each of us is always a politician, that our sense of ourselves, our vision, and our passion, our aspirations, and our apprehensions, all determine the character of our politics. A friend of mine put it so eloquently and simply: "The politics we do is who we are."

Let us now boldly broadcast our faithful vision of our human nature and potential. Let us insist upon transforming every system of governance to better reflect our innate potential and who we are becoming as persons. Let us begin with the revolution within ourselves, with reclaiming our own self-esteem and empowerment.

Then let's act together to transform every institution, all the way from our families through the United Nations, to recognize, nurture, and support the realization of our innate capacities as human beings to become life-affirming, constructive, responsible, and trustworthy. May we inspire each other to grow ever more faithful and bold, caring and compassionate, visionary and active as persons, as friends and neighbors, as leaders and as partners, toward advancing and moving into the political mainstream an utterly new Politics of Trust!

JOHN VASCONCELLOS is a California state senator, (916) 838-9496. To make a tax-deductible donation to the John Vasconcellos Legacy Project or to become a member of the Politics of Trust Network, visit www.PoliticsofTrust.net