Consider this an addendum to my previous post.  There, I waded into the aid system’s #MeToo / #AidToo deliberations.  Across the aid system we see agencies dealing with ‘bad apples’, holding difficult conversations and exploring initiatives that promise improvement.  This recent IRIN panel discussion and accompanying articles explore a number of ‘solutions’.

A caution: we should heed the lessons of past experience and avoid false binaries.  Great that the system invests in pruning the bad apples and building better safeguarding or whistleblowing programs and procedures.  But it must equally maintain a healthy dissatisfaction with such an approach, understanding that such reforms mollify calls for deeper changes, and hold steep opportunity costs in a overstretched system.

Deep changes? Easier said than done, as illustrated by my previous blog’s three suggestions.  Nobody disagrees that the system also needs to address more fundamental causes.  The problem is the rarity of plausible suggestions. Can I defend my offering of ‘food for thought’ if the system cannot and could never swallow it?   Do we already know that my call for deep changes is a call for pigs to have wings? NRC’s Joel Charny responded to my blog with a tweet that’s hard to disagree with:

Thanks, Marc. We could all use more humility. The problem is that messiah complex coupled with the marketing imperative to maintain or grow leads us down path of delusions of grandeur. Why did Save shield Justin Forsyth? Because he was fulfilling his mission to slay Oxfam.

— Joel Charny (@CharnyJ) March 8, 2018

The problem is that messiah complex coupled with the marketing imperative to maintain or grow leads us down path of delusions of grandeur.

I have raised some of these concerns myself. What if we can’t dump the savior routine, because it runs through the heart of our authority to act, our model of recruitment, and our financial support from the public and donor agencies? In other words, what if we are addicted to being messiahs?

Until February 4^th, I had no answer.  Now I have two, adapted from the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA EAGLES.  That’s right, I’m from Philadelphia and the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The first is the story of being an underdog. Jason Kelce’s profanity laced speech captures it perfectly. Nobody believed the Eagles were any good because, because, because. So even though they had the best record, earned the top seed in the playoffs and held home field advantage, few of the pundits or even the money guys (the Vegas betting houses) picked the Eagles to win its first playoff game, its second playoff game or the Super Bowl itself.  After their first playoff win against Atlanta, star players Chris Long and Lane Johnson wore dog masks. It built miraculously from there, solidifying and motivating a team, capturing a public. Underdogs. That was the story and that was the team’s fire.

For us humanitarians, the point is that as an underdog, as opposed to as a savior, we would be free to engage honestly with the public about aid’s complexities (read: snafus, failures, missed targets, bad behaviour, unintended consequences, etc.). We would be free to play the role of sidekick. We would be free to take risks and fail.  And the public would love us (read: fund us) because we are underdogs, trying our best against insurmountable odds.  As this Forbes article notes:  There’s something intrinsically human about the tale of an underdog, and it taps into our capacity to hope for the future and dream big.

The second is one of Eagles head coach Doug Pederson’s mantras: “An individual can make a difference, but a team can make a miracle.”  If I think about my own performance, I wonder if I was too often trying to make a difference rather than aiming for outcomes of more collective, outsized dimensions. An old story: Aid strategy, be it programmatic design or systemic transformation, needs to be steeped in (rather than selectively blind to) an analysis of aid’s political economy. I now think that we also need a parallel analysis, one that comes to understand aid through a political – psychological analysis of the humanitarian. Making a difference may sound good, but it doesn’t seem to be adding up.