Our petty temples.

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“Many groups and organisations have a ‘difficult’, ‘disturbed’ or ‘impossible’ member whose behaviour is regarded as getting in the way of the others’ good work. There may be a widely shared belief that if only that person would leave, then everything would be fine. This view is very attractive, hard to resist and tempting to act upon.”

— Anton Obholzer and Vega Zagier Roberts

In the English market town I grew up in, there was a small Indian Sikh community which my family were part of. Every Sunday we would go to the gurdwara (temple), in a building that used to be a bank and still had echoes of grandness.

The congregation was perhaps a hundred people on a normal day, maybe two hundred for a religious festival, packing the pristine white sheeted floors of the prayer hall. There were always lots of other kids, of all ages, and, after the interminably long service and the langar (the communal meal), we would sometimes run around the large prayer hall and play fight (which is also how my two older brothers happened to break my arm, but that’s another story).

I remember this very fondly (the playing, not the arm break), in part because it felt slightly improper, almost transgressive in such a serious place of worship.

And it was a serious place. Deadly fucking serious. On most Sundays, one of the temple elders would stand and give a long, rambling lecture, seemingly unbothered by the back-aching service we had just sat through and the stifling temperatures (it was always too hot inside regardless of the season).

This talk was not a sermon; the priest had already given one of those. This was one of a handful of men on the temple committee who, knowing he had an audience as captive as a group of prison inmates, would take it upon himself to speak about the ills and sins of our society, usually directed at the youth in the community - me and my young peers. I’d like to say I listened without judgment, but mostly I sat there thinking “I wish this prick would shut up so I can have my lunch.”

What I came to find intriguing about this whole scene was the idea of a committee that was essential to the functioning of the temple, one that seemed to confer immense status on the men who were part of it (and they were always men). They would strut around the temple and the town, chests and chins jutting out slightly, speaking with an assumed authority that even as a kid I found baffling and slightly irritating.

I found this strange little fiefdom even more curious when I learned that there were elections for this committee every few years. And not just elections, but separate parties who would push for control of the temple. Actual separate political parties, warring factions, seeking to run a small temple that served a couple of hundred people on a peak day.

These parties would actually campaign, speaking to people like my mum and dad at the temple and social events, sometimes even knocking on doors to explain their particular philosophy for running the temple; their philosophies are best summarised by that famous lyric from The Who: ‘Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss’. Nothing ever changed, regardless of which party was in charge.

At times, these parties and their ideological differences erupted into open hostility: shouting matches, denunciations, men being restrained. “Ooh, they’ve gone too far now”, some of the adults would say, and my siblings and I would often reflect that the whole fucking thing went too far a long time ago.

I naively assumed all this would fade away once my parents’ generation had to relinquish control as they grew older and passed away. Instead, most of that old guard merely handed down this unnecessarily divisive political system to their sons, who are now the temple elders and are themselves in the process of handing this over to their sons. Some of the old guard are still there, clinging to their meaningless power like daft elderly knights protecting the ruins of a castle.

Looking back, I remember observing these men who obviously appeared physically huge to me as a child and were often of a large stature even by adult standards, over six feet and with broad chests - yet I felt them to be somehow quite small at the same time. There was something I found shrunken and petty about their desire to tightly control our small community, like children fighting over an ant hill.

And how completely misguided. It was a community that, at its best, thrived on love, co-operation and respect rather than rigid orthodoxies. By the end of my childhood, this atmosphere of the collective had faded significantly, replaced by gossip, individualism, self-interest and greed.

There are many reasons for this decline in communitas, but one of them for sure was a petty and toxic desire for control amongst those who had claimed power.

Does any of this sound familiar?

There is a cultural obsession with hierarchy and status that feels unique to the British and to Indians, perhaps entwined by their colonial history. I often joke that you could bring a group of Indians together to do something as simple as make a cup of tea and within minutes, some of them would form a committee and a few minutes later someone would announce an opposing committee.

The fact that these political parties fighting over a small temple even formed in the first place was perhaps the very beginning of my interest in groups and the psychology that forms between the people within them. What happens when several humans join together in some way goes far beyond the sum of their psyches; something larger, more complex and largely invisible exerts an influence on the individuals within the group.

Consider a typical romantic relationship, in which two people bring their love and desire for each other but also all of their baggage, their small and large fears and anxieties, their expectations, their entrenched ideas about things like money and emotions, some of which are deeply embedded since childhood. These will be tested and triggered in a variety of ways as their relationship deepens, from who pays for a meal to how they should raise children.

This requires some work for the relationship to be sustained and grow, whether given the label of ‘work’ or not. Each of the couple will need to become conscious of what they are bringing and how it impacts their relation to the other, as well as what they are collectively creating between them- the third entity of the relationship, which can contain something that is not wholly of either of them. Multiply these dynamics by several more people, and you begin to see the inherent challenges of both leadership and building culture in an organisation.

Anywhere there is a group of people that has come together, they will always be accompanied by the shadow of powerful forces: power, desire, envy, hierarchy, control, fear and more. Most of this will be unconscious, since hardly anyone lives in full consciousness of who they are, what they really want and how they really respond to the world around them.

Some of these will be individual, some will be collective in the sense that they emerge from the group coming together. No matter how well-intentioned or even well-trained people are, this is inevitable. Even highly conscious and self-aware groups of people will participate in unhealthy, dysfunctional and potentially destructive dynamics. Even communities of practising Buddhists have become violent or abusive.

In his early experiments with group psychology, Wilfried Bion did very little other than to bring a group together and then pay attention to what emerged. His accounts are quite fascinating to read. There were challenges to his perceived authority, interpersonal conflict between members of the group, unlikely alliances forming, and hostility towards specific individuals for no apparent reason at all.

From what I’ve heard, some group analysis programmes at the Tavistock continue in this tradition: the group session is opened, the group session is closed, and in between what happens is dictated by the group, with all sorts of strange dynamics playing out.

I’m reminded of ‘Rhythm 0’, the performance art piece by Marina Abramović which she first performed in the 1970s. In it, she stood in a room next to a table with 74 objects of various forms. For six hours, the audience was invited to follow these simple instructions:

There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.

Performance.

I am the object...

During this period I take full responsibility.

What followed was disturbing and revealing. Gestures were gentle or symbolic at first, but within a couple of hours random members of the public, mostly men, were inflicting violent and perverse acts upon her. As these acts escalated, a group formed around Abramović to prevent her from extreme harm:

‘Faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marina’s head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between the audience factions, and the small protective group gathered around her in a circle to protect her.’

The power of the piece for me is how people respond to nothing more than a collection of objects and a passive human. In this liminal space, they reveal their own projections, finding themselves doing previously unthinkable things. The same thing occurs in groups, most visibly in mobs, but also in boardrooms, government offices, even the bland project rooms of consulting firms: decisions and actions that might be unspeakably wrong to outsiders are gradually normalised within the powerful and invisible entity that is the psychology of the group.

In a less visible but still powerful way, I saw this play out in the Sikh temple of my youth, with numerous decisions made that ran counter to the interests of the community and were sometimes harmful in the long-term; yet they were decisions that did serve the interests of the group that made them, the ruling committee, temporarily satisfying their need to feel powerful and important.

The clues to this underlying group psychology are often in seemingly insignificant tics or norms that have formed, revealed in surface-level interactions or challenges. They can be incredibly small and subtle - a tussle over ownership of a document, friction over who deserves more credit for a piece of work, tension in a meeting as two or more people attempt to control the agenda with none of them being honest about (or perhaps even aware of) their intentions.

They can also be larger signs like the desire to expand one’s team or remit solely to project the presence of power and the competing fiefdoms being built within a supposedly joined-up organisation, or a team who jealously guard information or are known for being difficult to deal with by other parts of the organisation.

Perhaps the most familiar example is our own families, where roles and hierarchies are established very early on, sometimes even before we’re born: the parent whose views cannot be challenged, the sibling whose rule-breaking is tolerated because they’re the ‘wild one’, the sibling who is preferred by the parents, the sibling expected to stay quiet and obedient. These are often fixed in place and can be left unquestioned for the rest of our lives or take many years for this unspoken system to be reconfigured.

What is the antidote to the powerful gravity that a group can exert, one that can subvert even our own individual morality and best interests?

How can we harness the power and beauty of the collective without losing our individual judgment and avoiding the extraordinary harm and violence that can emerge?

Imagine an organisation, a group or a family where the members regularly come together to work through whatever needs the light of attention. They meet frequently, sometimes with an agenda, sometimes not, but always they meet to be in relationship with each other and to keep cleaning up whatever needs to be attended to, akin to opening windows to air the house and cleaning the dust in the dark corners where it will have accumulated out of sight.

Imagine these gatherings being not to work on the external goals of the group - growth, profit, or anything else - but to work on the group itself. Imagine a community or country of people doing this.

This should not sound revelatory or far-fetched, yet this is the work most commonly neglected in organisations of all kinds. It is often assumed that a mission, values, a set of policies, processes and employment contracts can do most of the work of ensuring that a group of people operate well together; that they will build strong, trusting and honest relationships with each other enabling them to pursue a common goal and work through all of the tensions, dysfunction and stress that inevitably occur along the way - because of some words on pieces of paper or a weekly team lunch.

It is also the work most commonly neglected in any group of people: a family, a friendship group, a community, a political system.

Amongst all the other things that need to get done in a busy group of people in cultures that fundamentally prioritise output and external results over everything else, it is not hard to see why this sounds like a luxury or even a pointless exercise - but, paradoxically, this open-ended and relational work is in fact the foundation for everything a group of people would hope to achieve together.

This may sound fantastical, but these practices exist and are actually very simple, practices that have been used for centuries all over the world. My good friend and colleague, Dave Bingham, has been doing this work for many years in all sorts of settings from organisations to high-security prisons, continuing in a long lineage that has served people everywhere.

The real work of any group and individual within it is to be able to work towards something without losing their humanity; to pursue a shared goal without losing sight of what is most important of all, the flourishing and protection of life.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

Contact me to: 

• Make sense of what’s going on with you, your work and your life through my coaching practice.*

• Make sense of what’s going on in your organisation through group work, workshops and strategy sessions.

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At the heart of my work is helping individuals and organisations to figure out what is really going on.

You can also find out more about my work with men & masculinity here.

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[main image, from sparksresearch.com]