Fix Your Imagination, Fix The World
True first steps to changing the world.
This may be the most chilling anecdote about human programming that I’ve ever heard:
Imagine you are in prison, and seeking parole. You know the following things:
A key part of being given parole involves showing rehabilitation.
Showing rehabilitation means agreeing that you were right to be sentenced in the first place, and the sentence was more or less fair. You have changed, and therefore your sentence should be reduced.
Thus, the narrative you present must be that the system itself is fair, you agree with it, and you have correctly abided by its rules.
If you challenge the narrative, your chances of gaining freedom plummet to near zero. The parole board is extremely unlikely to view itself as an agent of an unfair system. For the most part, members of a parole board are former judges, wardens, and DAs. Very few people want to believe they have spent their lives working for an unjust system.
If you act like you respect the system, but in fact you don’t, you’re also less likely to be paroled. People on the parole board have very good BS detectors.
And yet you know that, analytically, the system is racist. Black and Hispanic males receive longer sentences than White males. Black and Hispanic males are also less likely to receive a sentence of probation. Black and Hispanic people are also more likely to be denied parole.
You can argue why that is, or say something like, “the system isn’t racist, it just has outcomes that favor one group.” Whatever helps you. Basically, it’s racist, whites are the supreme beneficiaries, it’s White Supremacist.
And yet - to be paroled you must agree that the system is fair. That agreement is a kind of programming. You must argue your case from your heart on that basis.
Emile Suotonye DeWeaver figured this out while serving a 67 years to Life sentence in the California state prison system. He concluded,
Whatever your skin color, in order to be paroled from prison, you must become a White Supremacist.
It’s a scary conclusion, derived from a severe logic. I went icy when I first heard it. For Emile, though, that was only the start. He looked at that programming idea, and took it a great deal further.
He’s written a book about this, and much more, in “Ghost In The Criminal Justice Machine,” a book about programming of all sorts, and the means by which we can change ourselves, and society. Much of the writing is based on his own experiences in prison, but his subject touches us all.
It was published last month, and this week I caught up with Emile on his book tour at Clio’s Books in Oakland, a fine spot for a beverage and some thought -about how we are all conditioned to think in certain ways, and why. About the challenge of imagining and enacting a different reality.
“Ideology is important, but it’s not more important than reality,” he said. “Reality is important, but not more than integrity. Moving toward hope is the North Star.”
Emile’s language was inflected with the current metaphors of computing: The cultural algorithms we obey, the way we’re hard-wired for certain things, the importance of data and memory in changing the program. In this respect he’s right in tune with an Artificial Intelligence Venture Capitalist I knew, who told me that writing was “programming people to do things.”
In Emile’s rather different experience, in prison and beyond, the programming comes from the overall culture, and its underlying ideology. The parole board example demonstrates how cultural power supports an ideology of white supremacy over other groups.
I first got to know Emile when I was teaching at San Quentin State Prison.1 The child of an African-American physician and a Nigerian lawyer, at the age of 18 Emile killed another young man in an altercation. He was 20 when he was sentenced. Soon, by his own account, began to think about what had led him to his predicament, and what might lead him out of it. It took decades, but that time and effort of re-imagination still represented a better future than the one he otherwise faced.
What Emile calls “The Imagination Problem,” which he says we all have, amounts to this: Any projection of the future we make is based on our past experiences. That is limiting, particularly if those experiences are constrained and negative. We need to rebuild ourselves in new ways, if we are to have a basis to imagine something truly different.
“I realized my imagination had been hijacked by the structures I’d grown up in,” said Emile, who over the decades in prison became a journalist, an activist, and an essayist, among other things. He was pardoned by Gov. Jerry Brown after serving 21 years of his sentence.
The cultural structures he began to examine included violence and control, hierarchies of power across race and gender, continual urgency, fear, and constant threats of punishment. Getting away from those began with imagining a different future, a big task.
“I had to focus on what I wanted most, which was to get out of prison. Then I realized that everything argued against it, and I’d have to live in both of those realities in order to beat The Imagination Problem, and start imagining different possibilities.”
The first step, and one at this point in our culture of digital frenzy we could all benefit from, was to slow down. “The (culture’s) most weaponizable thing is the source of urgency every day,” he said. “I started experimenting with doing the opposite of everything I’d been doing. Meditating. By getting to prison I was all the way into the culture of violence, so I never carried a knife.”
This was a big deal. At the time he was at High Desert State Prison, where race-based riots and punishment based on race were common. He persevered, developing ways of sensing and avoiding trouble, and probably just getting lucky. “The human organism is survival-based,” he said. It finds ways.
Gaining some control over his own dilemmas gave him room to examine the larger system. “In prison the power disparity that exists between people and the state is pretty clear, it doesn’t have to hide,” he said. “If you’re outside, you have to wade through the propaganda to imagine alternatives.”
That larger Imagination Problem, not about himself but about society, is the heart of his book. When we are subject to crime we call a cop, he says, in part because there’s no alternative to the police when we are confronted with violence. We can’t imagine one, and there are many interests that want it that way.
Even typing that feels subversive, which makes me wonder if he’s got a solid point.
Fortunately, Emile also provided a path out of that confusion. “You have to understand the ideologies that drive you in order to take them off the table. We inherited this world, and there’s no reason to feel shame. When you take the ideologies off the table, you can start to imagine something else.”
Brilliant. I'll definitely checkout Emile's book
Thank you, Quentin, for sharing your experience of my event!