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Community Member As 'Lightning Rod'

by Harvey Baker

OVER MY YEARS AT DUNMIRE HOLLOW, I have several times heard people who were leaving or had recently left say, "I could never live in Dunmire Hollow again as long as So-and-So lives here." The person named always seemed the most difficult to live with-often angry, insensitive, abrasive, or some combination of these. It seemed curious to me that, after the first such person left our community, these remarks were almost immediately directed at a different community member.

Similarly, I was always the slowest in our community, sometimes generating impatience from others. Then Bill began living with us, giving new meaning to the word "slow." Suddenly I was only "kinda slow" instead of "real slow." The group's impatience with slowness began to be directed at Bill.

From these and other experiences in small groups, I have made the following observations:

1) Given any small group and any personality characteristic, there is always one person in the group who has the characteristic the most. (OK, there might occasionally be a tie.) This is not a very profound observation. At any given time, someone is always the shortest, tallest, thinnest, smartest, loudest, or whatever.

2) When our group attaches negative labels to the characteristic (e.g., anger, insensitivity, laziness, "materialism," even certain leadership qualities), the person at the extreme attracts all the group's negative energy about that attribute. We can call this person the "lightning rod": the person who sticks up the most gets the heat.

3) We exaggerate the degree of dif ference between the person with the highest amount of any characteristic and the rest of the group, which masks the presence of that characteristic in everyone else. The extreme person then defines/embodies the concept for the group. For example, we often react most strongly to attributes (such as coveting material possessions) in others that we dislike in ourselves. By rejecting another who is identified with that attribute and pushing that person farther from us, we lessen our own internal tensions. We reassure ourselves that we're not really materialistic, he's being materialistic (with a point of the finger). There is also the reassurance that everybody else in the group agrees with us; that must make it true. Our focused attention can create a downward feedback spiral that actually increases and hardens the person's negative behavior. If the person is already judged, convicted, and punished for being worse than they really are, the person might as well indulge in as much of the behavior as they want. This further distances the extreme person from the rest of us.

4) Only when the "angriest" or "laziest" person leaves does that negative quality seem to magically spring up in another person, though it was there unnoticed all along. Our focused attention can make the previously unnoticed characteristic now seem extreme, and can again create a feedback spiral that worsens the person's negative behavior.

5) The more closed and isolated a group is from the rest of the world, the less people outside the group count compared to people inside it. The more we focus only on our small group, the more personal differences are magnified within it. The more the internal differences are magnified, the more extreme the lightning rod effect can be. On the other hand, the more we see our group as a part of the whole human race, the less the lightning rod person is perceived as extreme, diminishing our negative energy toward him or her. When we work within this larger global perspective, we realize that in our group, the extremes are actually very close together. On a theoretical scale from 1 to 10, we might encompass an actual range from 3.2 to 4.8, though we would make it feel like a range from 1 to 10. If the "4.8" person leaves the group, we might have a new range from 3.2 to 4.5. Yet our tendency is to magnify that new range so it still feels like a range from 1 to 10. And, as noted above, virtually all the expansion occurs between the most extreme person and the next most extreme.

Our societal model is to demonize, isolate, and exclude such "extreme" people from our lives and our groups. It's so easy to think, "Our group would be so perfect if only So-and-So were gone!" Unfortunately, we now see that once we start down this seemingly easy road, there is no end to it until we are a group of one person. It is clear that the same mechanism, the same distortions, the same tendency to isolate and exclude can operate in couples just as it does in larger groups. (And even for a group of one, the struggle can go on internally as we try to wall off or exclude parts of ourselves we don't like! "I'd be perfect if only I ...") The other option is to take on the often difficult, potentially unpleasant (and often surprisingly rewarding) task of dealing with each other and ourselves. This task is made even more daunting by the momentum that groups of people can build up by mutual reinforcement. It's hard enough to change our personal ways of operating; changing how our groups operate can be downright intimidating. Besides having to pit our individual energy against the considerable energy/momentum of the rest of the group, we risk being labeled extreme in our idealism. In fact, being the extreme person for an officially good characteristic can leave us a target for cynicism, envy, and marginalization.

Fortunately, if we need motivation to improve our group behavior, there are a number of possible benefits we might receive by intentionally changing how we treat such "extreme" Lightning rod persons. Instead of isolating and excluding, we can recognize the same tendencies in ourselves, build bridges to the people at the edges, and believe they have contributions to make to the group. Consider the possible benefits:

First, as our groups operate with more integrity, avoiding scapegoating, gossip, and demonizing, we learn to trust them more, and put ourselves more whole-heartedly into them and their operation. As we operate our groups in ways that honor and uphold both the group and all its members, we can acquire both a stronger sense of self and a better feeling of ourselves as part of an effective, honest, caring group.

Second, we may get opportunities to practice better interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, tolerance, and so on, in minor situations, preparing ourselves to use (and trust) these developed skills in more difficult times. At one point many years ago, our community doubled in size very quickly. When the newcomers began to squabble among themselves, we discovered that they had little commitment to the idea of conflict resolution, had not learned conflict resolution skills, and had not developed trust for the process. They completely blamed the other person/people in the conflict, accepting no responsibility for their part in the struggle. Those of us caught in the crossfire decided to bring in an outside expert to increase the trust, commitment, and skills. We were frustrated but not surprised that those who most needed the help refused to participate. We continued to put slow steady pressure on them to grow in this area; most of them chose instead to leave the community. Calling in an outside expert in a crisis has a low probability of success. Developing deep experience in dealing with smaller personal and interpersonal problems can carry us through the bigger challenges that might otherwise tear us apart.

Third, the "extreme" person may be doing valuable work for us in identifying problems and calling for our attention and resources to resolve them. Many times we would rather ignore problems, hoping that they will go away. The person who always is first to get uncomfortable and start making noises can be seen as negative or a troublemaker. In the early days of our community, my woodshop partner David was the one person who always brought up the problems, especially the interpersonal ones. Being impatient and fairly loud, he would confront the problem persons) before the rest of us had really gotten on board, and tended to be more brashly confrontational than the rest of us were comfortable with. As a result, he started being seen as more of a problem, and less of a positive force in the group. Once he realized what was happening to him through this process, he asked the rest of us to begin to take more of the load that he had been carrying. We accepted that we had more responsibility for identifying and correcting problems than we had been fulfilling. Our request to him in return was that he try his best to back off and let us learn to do the work at our own pace and with our own style. This is not easy work for most of us to do; it's a lot more comfortable to work in our garden and keep our head down. The turning point for me came when I realized the pain my inaction was causing my friend David. If others of us can share the work of identifying and confronting problems, we spread out a load that can burden and isolate an individual.

Fourth, the person may be keeping group discourse open to a range of options that would be closed to discussion if their perspective were lacking. What could be interpreted as laziness might provide clues that the rest of us are working too hard and inefficiently, facing imminent burnout. What might seem to be bourgeois materialism in an ascetic community could be a call for a slightly wider range of lifestyle options that would increase the community's long term stability. In our community, there is Andy, who is blessed/cursed with always being able to see both sides of every situation. It often feels to others that he is just playing devil's advocate to stir things up. When the rest of the group was smoothly moving to a happy consensus to buy a dump truck, he seemed frustrating and irritating with his repeated "A dump truck isn't much good without a way to load it" observation. We bought the old dump truck without considering his comment, sank a bunch of money into it, and then discovered that he was right. We sold the dump truck for the price of its new tires.

Fifth, we might discover someday that we are in the uncomfortable position of being the extreme person. Will our group value us and build bridges to us, or will it isolate and exclude us? I know which feels better; I guess it's time to get to work building a more understanding and compassionate group culture.

Harvey Baker, a founding member of 25-- year old Dunmire Hollow community in Tennessee, has been active in the Fellowship for Intentional Community since 1986 and a board member since 1988. He is past president of the Communal Studies Association, in which he's been active since 1986.