The Power of Joy

When we started working on Citizen Joy, we always assumed that we would be discovering people and organizations out there whose work involved tapping into the power of joy. Here are two examples I’ve discovered recently.

First, there’s the work of Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of the 2019 book, The Aesthetics of Joy. On the website for her book, Lee has a great summary of why joy can be such a powerful force, in a piece entitled, “Joy is an Act of Resistance: How Celebration Sustains Activism.” Writing a year before the 2020 presidential election, she identifies six ways that joy can sustain activism: providing a propulsive force; creating unity; reclaiming our humanity; disrupting expectations; promoting resilience; and giving rise to hope.

Take joy as a propulsive force: “What dictators know is that joy has a propulsive force, and that anything that gathers and channels that energy threatens to upend the rigid control of a population. Music, dance, art, eroticism: all of these fuel an emotional response that creates momentum, one that can be hard to control.” So it’s not surprising, as Lee notes, “It’s a curious feature of autocratic regimes that forms of joy are often banned.”

And psychologists have shown that things like communal singing or dance “create a physiological experience of community, one that can be profoundly unconscious. Studies show that even when strangers move or vocalize together, they become more generous, more altruistic, and more willing to sacrifice their own needs for the good of the group.”

Or check out the work of Citizen University, a great example of a non-profit organization that “equips Americans to be civic culture catalysts.” Eric Liu, one of the co-founders and current CEO, was a White House speech writer for President Bill Clinton, and the President’s deputy domestic policy advisor. Liu and co-founder Jená Cane got started in 2012, and over the years have developed a series of programs all designed to provide “the ideas, tools, connections, and spirit to catalyze your community.”

The focus of Citizen University’s programming is on building a culture of “powerful, responsible citizenship,” in contrast to “a culture of hyper-individualism, cynicism, and powerlessness…. We need to focus on culture — the narratives, norms, behaviors, values, and habits of the heart that add up to our collective sense of who we are — because culture must be changed if the changes in structure are to be enduring. It sets norms about whether we are meant to be creators of our future or mere spectators.”