I’m enjoying our monthly Team Human “Kibbitz Room” sessions a lot. They serve as a cross between a Quaker meeting hall and a Reddit ask-me-anything, where our community members bring up the issues and ideas concerning them. What makes them so special for me is that they provoke ideas I wouldn’t normally have, or even bring long-forgotten experiences and stories back to the surface.

This week we discussed a whole lot of stuff together - local currencies, ballot initiatives, citizens councils, and other strategies for local resilience and civic participation. Someone asked what sort of governance model will work, especially right now as so many people seem to be leaning away from democracy and toward one form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism or another.

And while we were discussing that question, someone else asked about the way our online networks create the sense that we have to conform to other people’s expectations of us. Many people are demanding that the rest of us make very particular statements on one issue or the other, or else risk their condemnation. It’s as if we are not allowed to bear witness in silence or, worse, reject inflammatory responses in favor solidarity. Only one set of words will be accepted.

As a way of contextualizing this state of affairs, one community member shared a story about how when she once posted a strategy for experiencing more joy life, someone replied with a ferocious attack on her, lambasting her for implying that others should be happy. And she realized that it doesn’t matter what she says — people are always going to find a way to be unhappy or attack others because of where they are in life.

Those two threads came together for me. First, it got me thinking about governance itself as a cop-out. I’m glad we have governments and all, but they are less an objective than a fallback position for circumstances where community and compassion have failed. We set up a system of some kind to make sure no one falls through the cracks, or to organize roads and schools and things we can’t do without some, temporary structure.

Weirdly enough — and maybe the Middle East crisis and all of its unnecessary human suffering under political gamesmanship has me thinking about the Hebrews lately — I recalled and shared a story from the Bible that applied to both of these dynamics.

I had been doing a deep “meditation” with a couple of guides holding space. I was thinking about my experience of broken-heartedness over how so many people in the world are acting right now, and feeling quite like a failure. It was as if all the books and writing and speaking and teaching, and all my Team Human energy has been for naught: we’re still battling each other, even on college campuses, about how to label atrocity rather than standing together to build our collective future.

I thought of Samuel in the Bible. He’d become the head priest of this tribe of Hebrews. And for a spiritual people, this is supposed to be enough. There was the law (developed by the rabbis) and it was adjudicated by judges. But there was no monarch or anything like that. And after Samuel retired and put his sons in charge of things, the people got really unruly, and demanded that Samuel get them a real king. (1 Samuel 8, for people who are into that) Everybody else had a king, why not us?

Samuel tries to warn them that a king will eventually abuse his power, take the best fields, turn their kids into servants, make weapons of war and turn people into soldiers. But they insist they want a king over them.

That leads to this wonderful scene — it genuinely brings tears to my eyes — where Samuel goes to God and apologizes on behalf of the people. He believes he has failed God. He wasn’t good enough at making the law, ethics, compassion, and faith compelling enough on their own. And he blames himself for failing to live up to his responsibility.

And God, who we know can be one mean deity in those stories, tells Samuel not to sweat it. He says to meet the people where they are at. Give ‘em a king. In so many words, (and with a little bit of later commentary), he says “just pick the tallest guy and put a crown on him. That’ll be their king.” It’s where they are in life.

That story, developed over a couple of thousand years of oral telling, addresses both of the issues. First off, politics is necessarily a compromise of our highest human ideals. Government is never the thing in itself, it’s a last resort, often a popularity contest, in which some person ends up getting a crown. But the only thing making that leader truly special is the crown itself. That’s why we put a crown on them! It’s symbolic. Temporary. A social construction enacted for people who aren’t quite able to coordinate their actions without some kind of direction. It’s a stage, not an endpoint. A means.

More important, Samuel is being told not to take responsibility for everybody else’s agendas. I’m one of those people who spends way more time responding to angry comments than positive or even contributive ones. As if I owe something to them, or am obligated to make sure they understand why it’s okay to seek solidarity with someone they may see as an enemy, why it’s okay not to weigh in on every subject — especially the ones where one has nothing new or intelligent to contribute — or how bearing witness in silence and compassion serves a real and tangible purpose.

We are responsible to one another, for sure; but we are not always responsible for one another. That’s a job for a king, not a burden for a human being.

Anyway, here’s a link to the Team Human conversation where our community wrestled with these issues and much much more. Please have a listen.