The neurochemistry of engagement
The most exciting piece I've read on organizing recently was Engagement versus Participation: A Difference That Matters by David Hoffman and others. I highly recommend it, and it's availabe here, but costs money. It focuses on a deeper meaning of "engaged" which is more than just political or being involved in community. In something called a Peak Experience Exercise, students were asked to identify times in their lives when they felt "engaged" in the sense of "empowered" and simply "alive". The experiences that the students related had several common elements: risk, spontaneity, novelty, challenges that match skills, community, and creative action. What I like most about this is the crossovers with psychology and neurochemistry. In the discussion of how risk can create feelings of engagement, for example, I was reminded of PEA (phenylethylamine), a neurotransmitter which is linked to both love and danger (or risk-taking). I think we need to recognize that the motivation for civic engagement can be a very basic psychological one.