“It couldn’t happen here.”

“It couldn’t happen again.”

“It couldn’t happen to me.”

Are you sure?

How sure are you?

I’m in a workshop right now on the business of food — a topic rife with cultural, economic, and political challenges.

Several days ago, I was having a conversation with some classmates about how we might help to better connect producers and consumers to each other in our various countries and contexts.

As we were chatting, I realized how deeply I’m habituated to assuming that cultural change must flow from political change: until we get the politics right, how can we possibly get a better food system?

I’m all for better politics and policy, but what if that approach is exactly backwards — or a cultural exercise in waiting for Godot?

If we focused on bringing farmers and eaters together over a delicious meal, rather than arguing over particular policy preferences at the highest levels, could we build a better food system — and see our way toward a healthier politics in the process?

At Christmas in 1999, my grandparents gave me a copy of The Century for Young People.

That book was my treasure trove for years, and parts of it stick with me still.

In the past several years, I’ve frequently recalled a sidebar that featured the recollections of a man who’d joined the local Klan as a child because it was the thing to do.

“Hate is the easiest emotion to teach,” he recalled. In the face of obvious difference, it’s much easier to plant the idea that people who don’t look, speak, or worship like us are wrong and therefore hateful.

A century later, we’re going to have to learn all over again how to leach hate out of our culture after it’s been let loose.

It is also ancient wisdom that the greatest gift we can give anyone is agency.

Power-seekers never wish to expand agency. If you give a man a fish, he’ll be dependent on you tomorrow.

Making things better isn’t a matter of listening to the loudest complainers and seeking to solve their problems. No one can win that game.

Wise people — true leaders — enlist people in their own emancipation. They know it’s better to stand out in the rain and catch your own fish than to learn dependency because you couldn’t stand the weather.

In these days of impact and innovation — especially social impact and innovation — it’s worth asking some old questions.

Is innovation always and everywhere good?

Is it wanted? (Do the people you’re “disrupting” welcome the disruption?)

Where’s the line between “scaling impact” and simply imposing your “solution” on more people?

What if, instead of trying to interrupt, disrupt, or impact people, we simply sought to influence them by our own good example and let them change their own lives as they see fit?

In a networked world, as Seth Godin has been saying for years, “ideas that spread, win.”

Sure, we can “debate” (or deplore) what’s wrong with Those People or The System as a whole, but that’s usually an excuse for abdicating our own real and potential influence.

Who will you encounter next — in real life and online? How will they experience the interaction?

How will each of you change as a result?

“How do you know what you know?”

“How confident are you in your assessment?”

“What would it take to change your mind?”

If those questions aren’t on the table, the debate might not be worth having.

If you can’t get a worthwhile answer to them, you’re not having a debate at all.

As ever, there is no shortage of bad news in the world.

It’s arresting. It’s aggressively marketed. It’s what everybody’s talking about. Some days, it feels like an emergency.

It’s worth pausing to ask whether this sort of news is new, and whether it’s worth paying attention to.

Being informed is one thing (and not a bad one). Being overwhelmed is another. And being overwhelmed is inimical to the kind of optimism we need to make things better.

Making things better always requires optimism — deep, abiding optimism that is informed, uncynical, and resilient against the inevitable challenges we face in real life.

Nothing ever goes all right, all the time. Our challenge, therefore, is not to hide behind either rose-colored glasses or a total surrender to cynicism. Taking ourselves off the hook isn’t brave, and it’s certainly not going to make things better.

The Romans used to say “dum spiro, spero.” “While I breathe, I hope.”

Of course, the Romans didn’t have cable news or Twitter. If breathing alone does not bring optimism, that’s understandable. In that case, though, why not try a different posture: dum laboro, spero. While I work, I hope.

Great work itself is an act of hope — and through the work, more hope tends to come.

It might not make the front pages. But not much great work ever does.

Truth-telling in public is always difficult and sometimes dangerous work.

In many cases, however, it is a true vocation — the thing we can’t not do.

As Dag Hammarskjöld wrote, the supreme test of life is to have faced it fully and not run away. And so, for the truth-teller, the question quickly becomes how to sustain herself in her vocation — her public service — day after day without running away.

One option, common to philosophers and poets, is what Leo Strauss called secret writing. In order to avoid Socrates’s fate, the philosopher (or social gadfly) writes in coded language that’s simultaneously obscure to the authorities and clear to others who are in on the joke. Or, as Emily Dickinson wrote, the task is to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Walter Brueggemann, in his sermon “The Secret of Survival,” describes a different kind of secret testimony. After dressing down the people of Jerusalem in the strongest possible terms — leaving no doubt as to his meaning — Jeremiah retreats to his own room, throws himself on the floor, and breaks down in tearful, fearful prayer-conversation with his God. He is at least as afraid for his people as for himself: he can see how badly they have strayed, and he is calling as loudly as he can for them to return to uprightness.

Jeremiah might sound quite sure of himself in his public prophecy, but he is racked by deep insecurity and vulnerability — and he lets all of that out in the privacy of his room.

The secret to Jeremiah’s survival, then, is his ability to live with the enormous tension between his prophetic work and his personal fears. Both are authentic and true: he is concerned for his people, and he is sorely burdened by his vocation. And, as Brueggemann wisely points out, he couldn’t tell his truth in public if he couldn’t also express his deepest fears just as clearly in private.

Political life often requires a similar kind of courage. Politicians must learn how to write and speak a vision that is true but not yet fully realized — and also how to sustain themselves in the struggle to inch reality a little closer to the vision.

Truth-telling is an art. It must be done, and it’s worth learning how to do without running away.

Cultures, like institutions, periodically lose their way. And, over time, they develop archetypes for who shall call the culture back to its senses and how.

The cultural inheritors of the Abrahamic and Greco-Roman traditions — generally speaking, Western and Islamic societies — stand in the prophetic tradition. We rely on our prophets and philosophers to do the difficult and often dangerous work of pointing out where we have strayed and exhorting us back onto the correct path.

Unlike sages, who tend to retreat from the world in order to renew themselves or the culture, prophets confront the culture head-on. And, despite how uncomfortable they make us, we depend on gadflies and jeremiads to urge us beyond ourselves.

And, unlike utopians, the basic trope of the prophetic tradition is to recall a time when things were right with the world: Rulers were just. The economy worked for everyone. The culture was healthy and walking upright in its truth.

Even as we grow increasingly un-churched and de-institutionalized, the cultural memory of the prophetic tradition still runs deep. There is an accepted form for these messages: what once was right has now gone wrong and must be set right again.

If you want to engage in the difficult work of bending the culture, it’s worth understanding how to create a narrative that resonates with our subconscious memory of how these messages — and messengers — are supposed to sound. It’s also worth choosing your origin story carefully: memory is deeply personal and part fictional, and there’s no such thing as precisely winding back the clock.

We might need to return to what we used to know when we walked in the old ways, but we are a new people with new experiences. The question is how to recover the old wisdom in our own days.