Staying True to Yourself as an Act of Remarkable Resistance
Putting honest poetry into the world, even under pressure
In 1940, a few months before she passed away in Toronto at the age 71, the anarchist activist and author Emma Goldman published a pamphlet entitled “The Place of the Individual in Society.” Like so much of her writing, it contained some remarkably prescient observations. Here’s one of them:
The minds of men are in confusion, for the very foundations of our civilization seem to be tottering. People are losing faith in the existing institutions. …
Individuality may be described as the consciousness of the individual as to what he is and how he lives. It is inherent in every human being and is a thing of growth. …
The very essence of individuality is expression; the sense of dignity and independence is the soil wherein it thrives. Individuality is not the impersonal and mechanistic thing that the State treats as an “individual.” The individual is not merely the result of heredity and environment, of cause and effect. He is that and a great deal more, a great deal else. … [H]e is not a part of this or of that; he is a whole, an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole.
In trying times like those we’re immersed in today, mass movements—fascism, communism, etc.—come along to impose an identity that significant numbers of people who are struggling to find themselves in society sign up for. Emma Goldman reminds me that going the other direction—helping each person have a meaningful, values-aligned, vision-focused life—is a far more regenerative way to work. Rather than immersing ourselves in a mass movement in which adrenaline and anger energize, we can embrace the harder but far more rewarding work of slowly but surely becoming ourselves.
Organizations that can effectively support that work over time, both culturally and systemically, are almost certain to be healthier and happier places to be a part of. Ultimately, helping to make that happen is our work. As Emma and her colleague Max Baginski said at a talk in Amsterdam back in 1907: “[T]he true function of organization lies in personal development and growth.” Or as my friend and longtime customer Carly Sharp keeps telling me about our work here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), “You don’t just grow businesses. You grow humans!”
How does one help others stay true to who they are? One unexpected possibility is to approach the world as a poet. Last year, I wrote a lot about learning to take a poetic approach to leadership. But in today’s enews, I’m taking that one step farther and applying a poetic approach to the whole of our lives.
In the spirit of seeing life as art, which I wrote about in the pamphlet “The Art of Business,” I’m reminded of what Gustav Landauer said of anarchists: “We are poets.” Like most of the ideas this turn-of-the-20th-century German Jewish pacifist-anarchist brought into the world, I like it. It’s an expansive entrée into figuring out how to lead the lives we want to lead. And into making a difference in the world. Thinking poetically allows us to more effectively bring together the magic and the mundane. As poet Carl Sandburg—who, like Emma Goldman, once spoke from the famous soapbox in Chicago’s Washington Square Park (aka Bughouse Square)—described it, “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.”
Per Emma Goldman’s encouragement to find meaningful paths to become ourselves—or, as she put it, “an individual whole, a growing, changing, yet always constant whole”—I’d like to suggest that thinking poetically makes more life paths possible. It encourages us to look in all sorts of remarkable directions. As the Doors’ Jim Morrison once said, “Real poetry opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”
The door that’s been suiting me of late leads me to the somewhat mysterious, historically fascinating, now-Italian town of Trieste. Back in 1911, the Triestino poet Umberto Saba published a manifesto that, even 115 years later, has caught my attention. Saba was born in March of 1883, and he was 28 when the manifesto made its way around Trieste’s literary community. His mother was Jewish, which would later become a far bigger factor in his life than anyone had previously anticipated. Saba was considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century in Italy. His published poems were known for their vulnerability and honesty. In 2009, in a New Republic piece entitled “Life Is a Poem,” poet and essayist Rosanna Warren wrote that Saba was “a poet of mysterious and difficult simplicity. … Like his native city [of Trieste], he is difficult to situate and to define.”
Saba’s 1911 manifesto, “What Remains for Poets to Do,” contained a recommendation that seems straightforward: “[P]ursue what until now has only rarely and partially been accomplished: honest poetry.”
The last two words of Saba’s statement have been on my mind for weeks. When a government regularly makes massively untrue statements, making honest poetry becomes a rather radical act of resistance. As novelist George Orwell warned in his 1949 book, 1984, “Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country.”
The idea of writing honest poetry in our lives—literally, metaphorically, or both—may seem easy. A single concept, two simple words, five short syllables. Who wouldn’t want that? But writing—and living—honestly, even under the best of conditions, can be difficult. Doing it under duress, especially in settings where autocratic leaders (in companies, countries, or both) are pressuring us to abandon our values in order to conform to their views, is infinitely harder.
Sometimes people’s lives quickly and clearly coalesce around making honest poetry. From the outside looking in, the shift appears intuitive. These “poets” seem to have little hesitation in doing what their inner voices are calling them to do. Myroslav Marynovych, one of the only living Soviet dissidents left in Ukraine, seems to be one of those people. Marynovych is one of Ukraine’s leading public intellectuals and an educator at Catholic University in Lviv. He’s made a life out of writing very honest poetry, often in the face of great adversity. In fact, the honesty of Marynovych’s lived “poetry” put him in prison. As Marynovych said in a speech at Catholic University last summer, “Just being yourself … that was the main crime at that time.”
Per George Orwell’s warning, this is a truth that everyone living in the autocratic reality that is Russia knows all too well. One does not just share honest poetry in public. As the amazing early-20th-century poet Osip Mandelstam once opined, “Only in Russia poetry is respected—it gets people killed.”
Back in the mid-’60s, Myroslav Marynovych tried to protect himself by telling his friends not to say anything in his presence that might be deemed suspect by Soviet security services. He wanted to be able to state, with honesty and conviction, that he didn’t know. That helped for a bit, but the pressure to conform grew ever stronger. Over time, he explains, the “‘loop’ of lies became unbearable.” The KGB tried to bribe him by offering him a well-paying job and a nice apartment, but he continued to turn them down. In frustration, one of the agents looked at him and said angrily, “Who is not with us is against us.” In response, Marynovych said, “O.K., then I will be against you.” Marynovych paid a steep price for his honest poetry: seven years in extreme-security camps and another five in what Russians refer to as “internal exile.” While in the camps, Marynovych continued to be true to himself, speaking his truth to Soviet power by participating in a wide range of hunger strikes and other resistance actions in support of human rights.
In the forthcoming pamphlet “Why Democracy Matters,” I share how I have been carrying Timothy Snyder’s small book On Tyranny in my shoulder bag pretty much everywhere I go for nearly two years now. Leaving it in there all this time was an early sign that, at some not-quite-conscious level, I knew that things were not going well in our country. That tyranny, aka autocracy, was becoming a real possibility.
Lesson #1 on Snyder’s list of 20 things we can all do to resist tyranny fits well with this discussion. Snyder, who also authored the foreword for Marynovych’s 2021 book The Universe Behind Barbed Wire: Memoirs of a Ukrainian Soviet Dissident, urges us all to do the following when autocrats come to power:
Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
In other words, don’t cave in just because it seems convenient. When our actions are out of alignment with who we are because we’re giving in to pressure to conform, we are indeed obeying in advance.
Of course, saying we should stay true to ourselves is, in my experience, significantly easier to say than it is to do. Thinking about Myroslav Marynovych’s simple and decisive act of courage, and his determination to stay true to himself under enormous pressure to abandon his values, gives me chills. “Just being yourself” in autocratic, abusive, or unfair settings can be a crime in and of itself. This means that staying true to ourselves is an act of active resistance.
The second element of dignity is to be authentic without acting out. And to give other people the encouragement, support, and space to do it, too. As Snyder writes:
The risks that [Marynovych] and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. … In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.
It’s this last point that’s on my mind. What it’s like when singing an old folk song or telling someone you love them in the “wrong” language can mean going to prison. I can’t say for sure that I would have the courage that Marynovych did if I found myself in the same circumstances. Many people, I know, do not. The 20th-century psychologist Rollo May seems to agree. He writes about what makes it hard for many of us to write honest poetry of our own:
Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.
…
Finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men. … One person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him. This is what our society needs—not new ideas and inventions; important as these are, and not geniuses and supermen, but persons who can be, that is, persons who have a center of strength within themselves.
This last bit—“persons who have a center of strength within themselves”—seems a positive prerequisite for the creation of honest poetry. Marynovych clearly has this center of strength. I hope I can follow in his courageous footsteps. When I start to feel overwhelmed at work or when thinking about the state of the world, I remind myself that finding and regularly returning to that center of inner strength is the key to almost everything I hope to do.
The idea of writing honest poetry with my life reminded me that the freedom to be true to oneself is more important than ever. It matters to now-well-known public figures like Marynovych. It also matters to young people struggling to grow into themselves (as we all do), people I admire such as Carly Sharp’s amazing 14-year old daughter, Amaya.
To be clear, I know this is a freedom I’ve been fortunate to have in a society dominated by straight white males. I’m aware that I have a better income than most and get to work in a caring, creative workplace I co-lead and have spent 44 years helping to create. I know that the way I experience things is very different from what most other people experience. People of color have been subjected to racist biases, negative beliefs, and an array of legal codes and restrictions that are based on those biases and beliefs. Same for the many people whose sexuality does not conform to the “norm.” Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” written after the killings of Black Americans in that year’s Red Summer, is one poignant and powerful example.
The bottom line? Autocratic settings make it very risky to live in ways that feel true to oneself, at least outwardly. Staying rooted in values and vision, in making our own honest poetry a practical reality, becomes a radical act of resistance.
The same challenge can come up in companies as well. People tell me all the time that they can’t even come close to being themselves at work. Keeping quiet, pretending, and posing become the norm. A Zingerman’s alum who recently moved to Minneapolis to take a position in finance in a large company shared a story about this last week. In the days following Alex Pretti’s killing, demonstrators were filling the streets en masse. Meanwhile, in this person’s office, “No one shares even a single thought. It’s like little-to-nothing is going on outside.”
This thinking about the courage and clarity to be oneself also reminds me why, as a University of Michigan student so many years ago, I immersed myself in studying anarchism. One of the main things that convinced me to do this—and still calls me to do it today—is anarchism’s focus on encouraging people to be themselves. As Emma Goldman writes in her 1934 autobiography Living My Life:
Anarchism insists that the center of gravity in society is the individual—that he must think for himself, act freely, and live fully. … If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others.
Speaking of anarchism, Nestor Makhno was one of Marynovych’s spiritually aligned Ukrainian ancestors. Makhno led an anarchist resistance army in Ukraine from 1918 to 1921, effectively fighting off the Bolshevik regime in Moscow for longer than any other resistance. In his 1920s essay “The Anarchist Revolution,” he noted that “the idea of anarchism, the teaching of a renewed life for man as an individual and as a social being, is therefore bound up with man’s self-awareness and his awareness of … injustice in modern society.”
Makhno also understood one of the things that I hope to convey in “Why Democracy Matters.” The work we do to make democracy a reality in the workplace is a prerequisite for making democratic constructs possible on a much larger scale. The more we’re true to ourselves, the more centered, grounded, inclusive, and effective our society is likely to be. It’s true in the workplace, and it’s true in the world around us. As Makhno writes, “The freedom of any individual carries within it the seed of a free and complete community.” From free-thinking, self-actualized staff members we make great organizations. The inverse is also true: Great organizations encourage the development of self-actualized, free-thinking individuals!
The 10th of Timothy Snyder’s lessons in On Tyranny is to embrace the truth. As he writes:
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
If we aren’t living in ways that are true to ourselves, we are starting, even unwittingly, from a place of untruth. I’ve done it. There is so much pressure not to do what Myroslav Marynovych did. The untruths can start in small ways. Over time they add up to big problems. In the Substack newsletter he published last Sunday, Snyder wrote that, “One answer to a big lie, to a Nazi alternative reality, are the small truths.”
During World War II, when the Nazis came to Italy in 1943, Umberto Saba found himself in an especially tough position. As a Jew, he was in great danger, but he refused to leave the Italy he loved or do a fake conversion to Christianity. He practiced what he preached. He went into hiding in Tuscany and continued to write throughout. After the war, Saba returned to Trieste, where he continued to write until his death in the summer of 1957.
Over time, the great poet of Trieste continued to work at being true to himself. In the context of all of what I’ve written here, these lines from Saba’s 1929 poem bring my main point alive:
The separate threads of life my parents gave me
I twisted in a single thread, in peace.
Part of what we’re able to accomplish in our lives, of course, depends on where we’re doing it. To a great extent, I am who I am because of the contributions of the ZCoB. Looking at Umberto Saba’s great work, I’m reminded that Trieste has always seemed like a magical town to me. Truth is, I’ve been fascinated with Trieste ever since I was a kid. I had its stamps in my collection! And I’m still drawn to it now.
In part, I was taken by Trieste because the city, like me, didn’t seem to fit in. It was moved from one country to another over the years, ruled at various points by Austria, Yugoslavia, and Italy. Between 1947 and 1954, it was a free city, the 20th-century equivalent of medieval city-states. Somewhere I still have a binder that includes postage stamps from that era.
Jan Morris, who wrote one of the best-known books about the city, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, described it as a place that existed “in the fold of the map”, a city that seems to those who don’t know it to be insignificant, and yet, has a special essence: Trieste’s energy, its authenticity, its honesty, enchants those who take time to know it. Morris described it as an “existentialist sort of place, and its purpose is to be itself.” Sure enough, over the centuries Trieste has somehow stayed true to itself, an imperfect but intriguing town that’s unlike any other, a city that exemplifies the idea of writing honest poetry, something that one of its own, Umberto Saba, challenged all of us to do.
Trieste, Morris writes, has a hard-to-place sort of magic: “Visitors tend to leave it puzzled, and when they get home remember it with a vague sense of mystery, something they can’t put a finger on.” That magical, or maybe mysterious, feeling is what Morris came to call “the Trieste Effect,” or “Triesticity.” As she explains:
When a suggestion of Trieste is summoned so exactly into my consciousness that wherever I am, I feel myself transported there… It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere … a sweet melancholy [that] illustrates not just my adolescent emotions of the past, but my lifelong preoccupations, too.
Jan Morris, it turns out, was someone who, for most of her life, didn’t fit. Born James Morris in Wales in the fall of 1926, Morris married, had children, and built an exceptionally successful career in journalism. She climbed Mount Everest as a reporter, published nearly 20 well-received books, and came to be called “The Correspondent to Everywhere.” In 1972, at the age of 46, Morris had gender-reassignment surgery in Morocco. Then, living true to herself, she continued to write and work for another 20 years. Morris published Trieste in 2001. In it, she describes herself as a “lifelong aspirant anarchist.” Jan Morris died in 2020 at the age of 94. Two years later, the Times Literary Supplement published a piece about her entitled “Capturing a life less ordinary … a writer who crossed every frontier, geographical and personal.”
So, how do we stay true to who we are? I have no easy answer to offer. I have written a lot about it in Managing Ourselves, in particular in Secret #31. Staying true to ourselves is also about honoring our essence. It’s about clarity around ethics and values. In particular, getting clear on your philosophy provides a good frame for figuring out your ethics, values, essence, and more. Spending time in self-reflection and solitude helps a lot. In the pamphlet “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy,” I arrived at the belief that “philosophy = values + mission + beliefs.” The clearer we get on all that, the quicker and more honest the “poetry” is, the better we feel, and the healthier the ecosystem we belong to becomes.
As I wrote in “The Art of Business,” every choice we make, every sentence we speak, every time we roll our eyes, and every word we write is, in essence, akin to another brush stroke on the painting of our lives. As business and leadership thinker Carol Sanford, another person who persisted in being true to herself with creativity and determination, suggested we can do this work best and in a regenerative way when we “reconcile toward elegance.”
That elegance is generally not well received by powerful authoritarian leaders. Writers of honest poetry like Marynovych, Snyder, Saba, and Morris really seem to piss off autocratic rulers. Then there’s Mohamed Tadjadit, a young Algerian fruit seller who started writing poetry in his spare time at his market stall. In 2019, he went to protests and began to read his poetry aloud, an act of bravery. One piece included this pointed comment on the authoritarian rulers of his country:
The ignorant took power.
They placed justice under money’s weight
And made freedom forbidden.
In a late-November Observer article about Algeria, Steve Bloomfield explained that Tadjadit faced life in prison or even the death penalty for the honesty of his poetry. Being true to himself had put him in the autocratic government’s crosshairs. He is not alone. Whether it’s in companies or countries, people who write honest poetry appear to provoke people who have too much power. As Bloomfield writes:
Poets don’t threaten democrats … but dictators feel differently. Over the past few years, poets in Eritrea and Iran, Russia and Egypt, China and Myanmar have been locked up because their words were deemed too dangerous. It is the paradox of dictatorships that they are enormously powerful and yet fear they can be undone by verse.
To me, all of this means that the current situation in our country calls on any of us who are willing to continue to make our poetry and our lives as honest—and hence as powerful—as possible. When we do, business will be better, communities kinder and more collaborative, countries more caring.
In a sense, Trieste could be a poetic image, a way to symbolize the calling we have in our hearts to be true to ourselves. In the current, stressed-out state of the world, Trieste is a place I want to imagine and internalize. A place where, instead of pushing people out, everyone is welcomed in. As Morris writes in Trieste, “Honesty is still the norm here, manners are generally courteous, bigotries are usually held in check, people are generally good to each other.”
Tying all this together, Morris describes what is possible in a wonderful way:
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.
At the end of Trieste, Jan Morris issues a call to action, calling in all of us outliers, people who push themselves to keep writing honest poetry, even under duress, to come together to create something peaceful, something special, someplace positive, a place where aspiring autocrats have no following and where every person present is supported and encouraged to stay true to themselves:
Citizens of nowhere, unite! Join me in Trieste, your capital.
Honest poetry for the ages. I hope to see you there!
Find your truth and live it
P.S. On March 25 and 26, I will be co-teaching with my good friend Gareth Higgins! Gareth is an Irish author whose life is inspiringly honest poetry. He authored the amazing How Not to Be Afraid and also co-wrote The Seventh Story with Brian McLaren. This will be the third straight year we’re doing this special two-day ZingTrain seminar, “Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs.” It is an uncommon opportunity to learn from Gareth’s great work on the power of storytelling in our lives and blend it with deep work on beliefs, the kind I detailed extensively in The Power of Beliefs in Business. Both Gareth and I speak and teach regularly around the world, but this is the only time we do it together. Telling better stories is a powerful way to support the start of what you want to make in your organization.
P.P.S. In the context of what I wrote above, consider coming to ZingTrain’s two-day Managing Ourselves seminar! The next one is April 27 and 28. It’s guaranteed to leave you closer to living your own life!
