The Potential of Potentiality
How can we realize our collective potential for social change? Maybe we need to think about potential not as a latent or unrealized quality or capacity, but as an action and a practice.
On the Edge
I’m on edge these days. Reading the news, I find myself worrying about the potential for things to go wrong. Very wrong.
Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The destructive power of climate extremes. The rapid melting of polar ice. The potential consequences of recent and upcoming elections. Many of the direct and indirect results of our action and inaction are unsettling, and in the case of war and climate-related disasters, heartbreaking.
Continuing along current trajectories is potentially devastating for people and nature. It’s daunting to think about this, and it’s humbling to acknowledge that I too contribute to these unsustainable trajectories.
It doesn’t help my edginess that I’m currently visiting my mother in Sarasota, Florida. Don’t get me wrong - I love seeing my mother! However, this time Hurricane Milton is also planning to visit. The potential for things to go wrong feels too close to home. To thousands of homes.
Stepping back
Stepping back from the edge, I remind myself that millions of people are working for peace, justice, and sustainability. Almost 20 years ago, Paul Hawken described this “blessed unrest” as the largest social movement we’ve ever seen on the planet. And it’s been growing since then. This is wonderful — and we need much more of it.
Yet despite the millions of people who care about global well-being and recognize that what we do now has implications for the future, we are not realizing our collective potential to transform systems at the speed and scale that is necessary to take us back from the edge.
I think about this often, and am wondering whether we can avoid going over the edge with a slight shift in perspective, among other things. What if we were to view our potential for quantum social change not as a latent or unrealized quality or capacity, but as an action or practice. In other words, if we focused on potentializing — actualizing a potentiality through everyday practices that shift systems and relationships.
The Potential to Change
There is no doubt that we have the potential to change, and there’s no denying the power of collective action and social movements. Action and agency are critical, but it is the type and quality of agency that makes a difference for life-enhancing social change.
Movements are made up of people, and both research and experience tell us that individuals and groups have the potential to change. The human potential movement, which emerged in the 1960s, drew on humanistic psychology and the work of Abraham Maslow, who emphasized that every person has the capacity for self-actualization and self-realization. Through diverse methods and techniques, people can reach their full potential.
Positive psychology emphasizes the importance of a growth mindset for realizing the full potential of individuals. As David Yeager and Carol Dweck write: “people who hold more of a growth mindset are more likely to thrive in the face of difficulty and continue to improve, while those who hold more of a fixed mindset may shy away from challenges or fail to meet their potential.”
If individuals with a growth mindset can realize their full potential, what about the collective? Can we embrace a collective “we can do better” mindset to actualize our potential for an equitable and sustainable world?
Actualizing a Potentiality
According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, the collapse of a wave function brings about an actuality from a potentiality. Extending this to the social realm, Alexander Wendt argues that the structures that we often take for granted are being “pulled out” of the quantum world of potentiality into the classical world of actuality by agents. His quantum social theory describes how “the whole exists merely as a potentiality (a wave function), and as such is not “real” in the usual sense. It only becomes real in its expression (collapse), which actualizes it into something classical.”
It feels to me like we are expressing (i.e., collapsing) a wave of potentiality into a real mess right now. How can we do better? Perhaps the potential lies in the ways we actualize alternatives every day, not in theory but in practice. Potentializing. This makes me think of the power of individual and collective agency that generates fractal patterns of change. In an indeterminate and entangled world of potentiality, when individuals change, the collective changes too.
Potentiality as a Way of Life
In writing about ethics and agency from a quantum perspective, political scientist Laura Zanotti reminds us that our understanding of the world shapes the way we believe we fit in and make a difference through our everyday actions:
Social change then is not to be conceived as deriving from abstract aspirations to bring about a pre-determined, alternative notion of justice and the certainty of a luminous future, but from attempting practical ways of addressing people’s concerns that maybe start putting a dent on the structural violence that affects them.
Drawing on Karen Barad’s work on agential realism, Laura recognizes subjectivity as an intra-active becoming. She makes the case for a “radical assumption of responsibility and careful and prudent reflections on the forms of materialization of matter we may induce.”
In advocating for this practical, everyday solidarity, Laura links ethics with political agency:
[t]he political is not limited to a dichotomous struggle between oppression and freedom. Agency exists as a way of life, a reiterative activity of opening or foreclosing different possibilities of materialization of matter, not as a relation of push and pull aimed at imposing force on a mass. We are entangled with, constituted and transformed by the very processes we aim to transform.
This gets to the heart of quantum social change, which is grounded in a recognition of our intra-connected nature and the power of our entangled, fractal-like agency. Monica Sharma reminds us that every person has this inner power, and that it goes by many names: full potential, self-awareness, inner capacity, wisdom, and oneness. To me, oneness articulates this space beautifully. Yet Monica is quick to point out that “Essentially, this space is wordless. It is a way of being.”
Hmm. If our way of being is our potential to make a difference in the world, I/we still have to actualize it. This involves transforming systems and cultures across scales, and recognizing that we are “mattering” in every moment. I’m reminding myself of this as I mail in my Pennsylvania ballot for the upcoming US election. And I’m thinking of our collective transformative potential with some humility as Hurricane Milton moves closer and closer to the Florida coastline.
“We never step out of ethics, as our being in the world contributes to its unfolding. An intra-agential ethos speaks to how we may imagine living creatively and responsibly.”
— Laura Zanotti
Yes, what we do in the moment contributes to the next moment - the potential, becoming. Whether we are observing and listening, or moving beyond that into some other action. Hard to know, what the outcome will be, but we need to realize that what we do matters more than we know! (As your book reminds us in so many ways.)
At this moment, I hope you are safe, knowing you were just recently in Sarasota, not know if you are still there. It is scary, seeing the power that these hurricanes unleash. Made more real in our awareness, at a distance, when we know people in their path. Sending care.
I appreciate how you said…”…the heart of quantum social change…is grounded in a recognition of our intra-connected nature and the power of our entangled, fractal-like agency.” Monica Sharma reminds us that every person has this inner power, and that it goes by many names: full potential, self-awareness, inner capacity, wisdom, and oneness. To me, oneness articulates this space beautifully. Yet Monica is quick to point out that “Essentially, this space is wordless. It is a way of being.”
In my experience these kinds of realizations can be a powerful foundation to shift IN to while we consider the potentiality of a collective of quantum buddhas. Ever since you posed this possibility, i have been contemplating how a collective of buddhas would look sound and BE powerful together if we can do more to treat Mother Earth and her collapsing ecosystems as if they MATTER more than WE have been doing. I also trust what Barbara Esterlin says about how we ALL have agency and can leverage our strengths together to move through any collective despair about our losses - when we remember to be engaged with Self and wisely resource our nervous systems. My most inspirational moments in advocating for the planet is when my tiny little seaside community rallied on behalf of our disappearing green belts watersheds and sacred forest land with local artists so called environmentalists and the humans who love our natural world. I found this not to be a thing we only talked about doing but we made it a practice to engage on a daily basis with the stunning beauty of the earth the ocean the mountains and the sky. How could we not fall in love and do everything we can to protect her from our own most voracious tendencies? I still feel angst over the daily invasion of plastic yet i continue to fuel my self with others who are not over activated crusaders but neighbors, sisters brothers who write letters to the editor make phone calls to the city council members our mayor our senator and our governor stand in protest over exploiters and land grabbers, paint sidewalks and walls with murals and mosaics. Maybe this is the meaning of sanskrit word “bhakti” - a dedicated practice in action within an ever expanding community of quantum buddhas 💕🙂i can say i don’t know for sure but am happy to continue the inquiry to see what evolves. Like you said, karen…”If our way of being is our potential to make a difference in the world, I/we still have to actualize it.” Yes, i do believe This DOES involve transforming systems and cultures across scales, and recognizing when we are doing just that - on a scale that has tremendous potentiality for our Mother Earth to reset or even reverse a downward trajectory. So Lets go quantum you creatives