Persuasive Curiosity: Rewiring Your Brain for Prosocial Activism

“Trauma not transformed will be trauma transmitted.”      ~ apologies to Richard Rohr

There are some people in the world whose courage in the face of life-threatening danger is breath-taking. Malala Yousafzai is one of them. Shot in the face in an assassination attempt by the Taliban for being an outspoken advocate for education for women in Pakistan, she continues to this day to champion the rights of women and girls to an education the world over.

Another courageous champion I’ve recently come across whom I long to be like (when my brain and body become sufficiently integrated in ways that don’t so easily allow my adrenal glands to be the boss of me) is Deeyah Kahn. Deeyah is a Muslin activist and filmmaker. Here’s something she said in a recent interview:

I’ve been an anti-racist campaigner pretty much most of my life, having experienced racism from childhood. It’s personal to me, and I’ve responded in all sorts of ways — being angry at racists, shouting at them, confronting them, protesting against them, self-righteously shunning them. I’ve done all that, and I’m not sure what difference it made.

So I wanted to do something I’ve never done before, which is try to see if I could sit down with people who hold views like that and see if it is possible for us to move somewhere from that point, from sitting face to face. Because it’s really, really easy for everybody involved to hate each other from afar, to judge each other from afar, but it’s much more difficult to hate up close and personal.

The Seduction of Abdication

When confronted with the ignorance and hatred in the world, my first impulse is to turn away – to abdicate, to leave the finding of solutions to such problems to others. “Not my current life karma.” “Others are better equipped for this battle than me. Let them fight it.” “You can’t fight ignorance with ignorance.” I have a million narratives that my brain can generate to make me feel okay about turning away. But abdication is not integration.

Deeyah Khan

Deeyah Khan took a different turn. Instead of turning away, she became curious. She honestly wondered – What kinds of experiences go into the making of a white supremacist? What makes them think and act the way they do? Honoring that cultivated curiosity, she inserted herself into their organizations in the context (pretext?) of wanting to make a documentary film about them. White Right: Meeting the Enemy was the Emmy Award-winning result of that authentic inquiry.

Emergent Curiosity

Curiosity is something we’re all born with – provided early Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) don’t traumatize that impulse and inquisitiveness out of us. Growing up with caretakers who don’t condemn, who constructively channel our inquiring natures (you know – the toddler who constantly asks “Why?”, “Why?”, “Why?”), who are contingently available to soothe us and help us self-regulate when our adrenal glands flood us with stress hormones – that kind of early life experience will invariably work to keep our inherent curiosity alive. 

Gene Knudsen Hoffman

When we can be curious and feel safe, we can often go into novel situations without an excessive flooding of stress hormones. We have access to fluid intelligence to allow us to creatively construct circumstances and contexts within which our curiosity can safely operate. For Deeyah, embedding herself inside a group of white supremacists became possible in the context of making a documentary film about them with a team around her. There is “safety in numbers.” With no other agenda but to find out what makes white supremacists tick, the simple act of being fully present to various actors in the movement allowed a number of them to expand their thinking and eventually move off their polarizing positions. 

Gene Knudsen Hoffman was a Quaker activist, mystic and “compassion junkie.” She is probably best known for her observation that, “An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.” In the simple, non-judgmental hearing of an “enemy’s” story, new brain wiring has the space to grow, blossom and make unexpected connections. It can happen in an instant. Or over a lifetime. When it does, it looks and feels like magic has taken place – persuasive curiosity! By Deeyah Khan simply being genuinely curious about what makes a person hate Muslim people whom they don’t even know, she “persuaded” them to take a closer look at how so much of their early Adverse Childhood Experiences – their early traumatic conditioning – was driving their current circumscribed life perspectives, and being transmitted to the world around them.

P.S. If you’re tired of Google ruling internet search, you might try Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees. It’s not the same as confronting white supremacists, but its intention is to reduce suffering.