What the Town Could Not Say:

Gendlin, the Felt Guard and the Politics of Attention...

I was present on 25 August 2006 at the first Focusing Institute Summer School at the Garrison Institute in New York State when Eugene Gendlin gave The Town and Human Attention. Twenty years later, listening to the United Nations meetings in New York, I find myself asking: what became of that Town, and what does it now require of us? In September 2026, the Gendlin Centre of the International Focusing Institute convened its own panel (Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, Akira Ikemi,  Kevin Krycka, and Bill Gayner) to reflect on this same article. Attending that conversation alongside the speeches at the UN is part of what moved me to write this piece. This article extends that question into artificial intelligence, moral agency, organisations and concentrated power.

The concern is not that structures, organisations or technologies are inherently wrong. Human beings need structures to teach, cooperate, preserve learning, and act together. The danger begins when a structure no longer remains answerable to the living process that generated it. It then becomes devoted to its concepts, procedures and self-preservation. Generative AI systems that produce new text, images, sound, video or code by drawing on patterns learned from very large bodies of existing material can intensify this tendency by making inherited categories appear objective and by allowing human beings to displace responsibility onto systems they created and chose to obey.

Gendlin gives us a philosophy of living process, the implicit, interaction and fresh thinking. Zygmunt Bauman gives us a social diagnosis of bureaucracy, moral distance, liquid modernity and the privatisation of responsibility. Jürgen Habermas asks what conditions allow public speech to seek understanding rather than compliance. Hannah Arendt distinguishes power created through people acting together from violence that destroys a shared world. Riane Eisler distinguishes systems of partnership from systems of domination. Read together, they illuminate a central ethical problem: how do we remain bodily, relationally and morally responsive when institutions, political rhetoric and technological systems make responsibility harder to see and locate?

This question cannot remain inside teaching and therapy. It must be tested where words organise public reality, institutions distribute power, and decisions determine whose lives are protected and whose suffering becomes distant or unspeakable. The speeches delivered at the United Nations in September 2026 provide a live test. In the same chamber, language was used to threaten annihilation, humiliate dissent and claim exclusive possession of truth; it was also used to demand equality, expose colonial structures and insist that every life has equal worth. The Town has to enter this world.

The Town in brief

In The Town and Human Attention, Gendlin proposed that a new human activity was emerging after the economic eras dominated by agriculture and industry. He called its product interhuman attention. The Town was his name for the broad and still largely unselfconscious community developing the quality of that attention through Focusing, psychotherapy, dialogue, Nonviolent Communication and many neighbouring practices.

Gendlin described the Town as wider than any single school or method. He told those of us listening, “Learn everything else; please don’t just do Focusing and urged us to continue reading the news even when it hurt (Gendlin, 2006). His hope was for a different world in which people became more aware of one another as people. The invitation was not to protect Focusing from the world, but to let the world enter and alter our thinking.

Twenty years later, attention has indeed become central, but in two radically different senses. It is cultivated as presence, listening and relationship; it is also captured, measured, redirected and sold. Social media, political communication and commercial platforms compete to shape what becomes visible, what disappears and which categories organise public understanding. AI brings a further stage: attention, language and judgement are increasingly mediated by systems that can produce language a user may experience as understanding, although no bodily situated listener is present.

The present question is therefore not whether Gendlin’s Town arrived. It is what happened to human attention after it became both a relational capacity and a commodity, and whether the Town can remain human within technological and institutional power.

Living process and organisational form

Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit offers a precise way to approach institutions. A living process always carries more possibilities than any concept or structure can contain. Structures are necessary, but they arise within process and must remain capable of being changed by it. As Gendlin put it, “Process makes structure, and can change and expand it” (Gendlin, 2012, p. 3).

Any institution can become structure bound when its categories and procedures cease to interact with the present situation. A hospital can become organised more around administration than care; a university more around measurement than learning; a professional body more around continuity and credentials than the living development of its practice. These are possibilities inherent in organisation, not findings about any particular institution. Structures can sustain valuable work, preserve knowledge and protect standards. The question is whether they remain open to modification by what present situations disclose.

This is not a rejection of organisation. It is a recognition that no organisation can contain the whole process it exists to serve. A living institution needs some way for the experiencing of its members and the realities it encounters to affect its structures. The risk of self-protection exists wherever continuity, public identity and responsibility must be held together, but risk is not proof that a particular organisation has succumbed to it.

In The Obedience Pattern, Gendlin shows why ideals alone cannot keep an organisation alive. A movement may begin with liberating aims yet come to be shaped by its hierarchical mode of organisation. The problem is not cooperation, teaching or guidance as such. Gendlin says that people need company, help and instruction. The difficulty begins when another person’s judgement, an institutional role or an established procedure replaces the inwardly arising process it was meant to support.

Gendlin did not pretend to offer a finished solution to this organisational problem. His hopeful direction was to discover how people can organise with, rather than by suppressing, the inward development of more than a few individuals. Read organisationally, this means that authority and procedure must remain provisional and answerable: they should enable people to participate in forming the structure, to question it and to carry it forward from what the present situation newly requires.

AI and accelerated institutional life

AI enters at precisely this vulnerable point. Institutions have always classified people, standardised decisions and divided complex situations into administratively manageable parts. AI expands this capacity enormously. It can rank need, calculate risk, predict behaviour, select information and recommend actions at a speed and scale no human administration could achieve.

The danger is that the limitations of institutional categories become concealed by technological sophistication. A decision appears objective because a model produced it. Yet the system still reflects choices about data, objectives, classifications, thresholds and ownership. It can reproduce the past with extraordinary efficiency while presenting the result as innovation.

AI has not independently taken control. Human institutions are installing it as a managerial authority and then sheltering behind its output. Responsibility has not disappeared; it has moved. It becomes concentrated among those who design, own and commission systems, while those applying their recommendations are invited to feel less personally responsible.

The algorithm recommended it. The model predicted it. The system would not permit it. These phrases sound as if agency belonged to the machine. But a human decision was made earlier and less visibly: to give the system authority over the present situation.

Gendlin was not wholly outside the discussion of artificial intelligence. In Crossing and Dipping, he explicitly considered AI and argued that the real situation to study was the computer-person system, not the computer imagined in isolation. What he did not encounter was generative AI embedded at today’s speed and scale in communication, education, employment, administration and public life. Applying his philosophy to that world is therefore an extension of his thinking, not a historical claim about what he himself concluded.

No recorded or inferred account of a person can contain that person’s living intricacy. AI processes explicit traces, patterns and already expressed material; it may supply words that enter a human process of crossing: Gendlin’s term for what happens when two intricately organised contexts enter into one another so that something not contained in either alone can emerge. That crossing occurs in living experiencing. AI does not bodily live the consequences of its answer and cannot assume moral responsibility for what people decide to do through it.

The double edge of social media

Social media belongs to the same technological system, but it is not only an instrument of domination. The platforms were built largely to capture attention, collect data and sell prediction and influence. Yet people can use the same infrastructure to bypass established gatekeepers, preserve testimony, show events as they happen, organise solidarity and bring previously excluded voices into public life. In this sense, the machinery of the system can be turned back upon the institutions and political authorities that once exercised much greater control over what could be seen.

This is particularly important for younger generations. They are not simply receiving a political world selected by broadcasters, newspapers and official spokespeople. They are choosing creators, witnesses, journalists and communities across national boundaries, often encountering images and testimony that unsettle the language of governments and conventional media. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 found that social media and video networks had, across the markets studied, become the most widely used route to online news. Instagram was the largest social platform for news among 18- to 24-year-olds, and online news video had overtaken television news in most of the countries surveyed.

This changes political framing. A civilian recording, a Palestinian journalist’s report, a soldier’s testimony or a young person’s explanation can enter millions of lives without first passing through an editorial institution. The person who was previously spoken about may now speak. Official categories can be challenged by faces, names, relationships and direct witnessing. What had been kept geographically and morally distant can become part of the viewer’s bodily situation.

But this freedom is never complete. The platform still arranges the field of attention through algorithms, ownership rules, moderation systems and commercial incentives. We choose, but we choose from a field already shaped for us. Content that provokes fear, rage or certainty may travel further than patient investigation. Falsehood can circulate beside testimony; images can be removed, decontextualised or manufactured; dissent can be mapped through surveillance; and creators who appear independent can become financially dependent upon the same system they challenge.

Social media is therefore neither the liberation of the Town nor simply its enemy. It is a contested environment in which interhuman attention is simultaneously widened, manipulated and sold. The task is to preserve its capacity for witnessing and connection while developing habits of verification, multiple sourcing, reflective pause and accountability. The felt response to an image matters, but it must cross with context and evidence. Otherwise the apparent freedom to choose can become another form of algorithmically organised obedience.

When changed perception is answered through law

Once testimony and new political framing begin to produce organised refusal, power may answer not only by controlling information but by changing the legal category through which dissent is seen. The United Kingdom’s treatment of Palestine Action is a difficult example. Elbit Systems is Israel’s largest arms company, supplying an estimated 85 per cent of the drones used by the Israeli military and about 80 per cent of its land-force equipment, marketed as “battle-tested” in Gaza and the West Bank (Break the Chain, n.d.); the Filton site made drone components for that supply chain. In February 2026, a jury acquitted six activists of aggravated burglary over a 2024 action at that factory, without reaching verdicts on the criminal-damage counts; at a later retrial, four were convicted of criminal damage alone, not terrorism. The aggravated burglary charge itself required proving intent to injure people inside the building, which prosecutors could not sustain. At sentencing, however, the judge found a statutory ‘terrorist connection’ under section 69 of the Sentencing Act 2020, with major consequences for punishment and future legal status. One may recognise the extensive property damage involved and still be concerned that the category of terrorism is being extended beyond violence intended to terrorise a population, to reach politically motivated damage and support for a protest organisation. ‘Terrorism’ does not merely describe conduct; it can place a person beyond the boundaries of legitimate political speech.

The wider proscription of Palestine Action intensifies this: expressing support for the organisation became a terrorism offence even where the conduct itself was peaceful. UN experts warned the United Kingdom against using counter-terrorism law against protest that is not genuinely terrorist, and a broad range of lawyers, clergy, health workers and citizens objected or deliberately risked arrest, not unanimity, but a social refusal of the state’s proposed category: a declaration that the meaning of dissent cannot belong entirely to the authority that prosecutes it. Germany has since staged a comparable test: five activists, the “Ulm 5,” have been held in pre-trial detention since September 2025 over a similar action at Elbit’s Ulm offices, facing charges that include membership of a criminal organisation, carrying a potential sentence of up to five years (Al Jazeera, 2026); as of this writing, their trial remains unresolved, so what it will settle about the same legal question is not yet known.

Here the Town becomes public. In a Gendlinian sense, refusal can begin when the official category does not fit the whole situation and people decline to silence that non-fit. In an Arendtian sense, isolated concern becomes power when people act in concert. In a Habermasian sense, law loses democratic legitimacy when its classifications are insulated from open reasons and challenge.

Bauman and moral distance

Bauman gives this inquiry a social and historical dimension. In Modernity and the Holocaust, he showed how bureaucracy, technical rationality, classification and the division of labour can enable terrible outcomes without requiring every participant to confront the moral meaning of the whole. Each person performs a limited task. Responsibility moves upward, downward or sideways. The human being affected by the process becomes distant from the person carrying it out.

This is closely related to Bauman’s account of adiaphorization: actions are removed from the sphere of moral evaluation and treated as technical, procedural or administrative matters. Questions of right and wrong are displaced by questions of efficiency, compliance and successful execution.

AI can deepen this moral distance. The engineer develops a component. The data scientist tunes a model. The manager purchases a service. The official follows a recommendation. The organisation cites policy. No participant experiences the final consequence as wholly theirs, yet the consequence remains entirely human.

“Modernity did not make people more cruel; it only invented a way in which cruel things could be done by non-cruel people.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments, pp. 197–198)

Bauman’s disturbing point is that atrocity need not depend only upon unusually cruel individuals. Distance, classification, specialisation and obedience can separate an action from its human meaning. The person who supplies data, approves a target, writes a policy, transports a weapon or repeats an official category may encounter only one fragment of the process. The whole result can then appear to belong to no one.

Bauman’s liquid modernity adds another dimension. Collective problems are increasingly presented as individual responsibilities. People must manage their anxiety, maintain their employability and adapt to conditions they did not create. Institutions retain the power to organise insecurity while individuals are instructed to become resilient within it.

This creates a challenge for therapeutic and educational practices. They may help people recover agency, relationship and voice. But they can also privatise suffering by helping individuals regulate themselves inside conditions that remain unjust. The question for Focusing is whether it enables people to respond more fully to the world or merely to endure it more successfully.

Language that opens and language that closes

The movement from Garrison in 2006 to the United Nations in New York in 2026 is, for me, a movement from Gendlin’s invitation into its present test. I heard him ask us to keep the Town open to the world; I now hear public language being used both to widen the human situation and to close it. The connection is not merely geographical. It asks what kinds of words allow a shared world to form.

For Gendlin, words do not simply label an experience that is already finished. We experientially know more than we can say, and “language is implicit in what one cannot say” (Gendlin, 1985, p. 144). When a fresh phrase comes from the bodily sense of a situation, it does not merely describe that sense; the interaction between words and experiencing moves, opens and develops it. Public language can work this way too: it can keep checking itself against what does not yet fit, letting meaning carry forward through encounter rather than settling into a fixed account. It can also impose inherited concepts, authorised histories and relations of power so thoroughly that the situation appears closed before other experiencing is allowed to matter.

Thinking at the Edge (TAE) makes this relation between experiencing and language into a disciplined practice, developed collaboratively out of Gendlin’s theory-construction work by Mary Hendricks-Gendlin and colleagues (International Focusing Institute, n.d.). It works with what needs to be said but is at first only an unclear bodily knowing, moving between felt intricacy and exact words until language says something the established alternatives could not contain, especially relevant to public questions that arrive already divided into approved positions.

TAE describes this openness as a practice one person, or a small group, can undertake deliberately. The same openness is what a public sphere either allows or forecloses at a much larger scale, which is where Habermas’s account of communication becomes useful. Habermas distinguishes communication oriented towards understanding from strategic communication directed towards producing an effect. His account is that “reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas, 1984, p. 287). This does not mean that public speakers must agree. It means that claims should remain open to reasons, evidence, challenge and possible revision. When language is used chiefly to intimidate, mobilise, humiliate or secure obedience, the listener is no longer treated as a participant in meaning. The listener becomes an obstacle, an audience to be activated, or an enemy to be defeated.

The difference is not between strong and gentle language. Moral clarity may require anger and unambiguous naming. The test is whether the words keep reality open to evidence and to the equal humanity of those affected. Language closes discussion when it declares one speaker the sole possessor of truth, converts criticism into treachery or cowardice, reduces whole peoples to threatening categories, or presents submission and destruction as the only possible choices.

This brings the inquiry back to the United Kingdom’s treatment of Palestine Action, discussed above, as a test of exactly this: whether the Town’s language and communication skills can keep a shared world open under real institutional pressure, or whether a category imposed by power closes it first.

The United Nations as a test of the Town

The United Nations should not be understood only through its failures. It was founded after the catastrophe of world war to prevent future war, reaffirm human dignity and rights, uphold international law and recognise the equal rights of nations large and small (United Nations, 1945). Those intentions remain valuable. The UN still provides one of the few public places where nearly every nation can speak before the world and where conflict can, at least in principle, be addressed through words rather than annihilation.

Yet the institution is also shaped by colonial history, unequal veto power and the interests of powerful states. It can therefore be understood as a global but deeply unequal town square. At the time of writing, the eighty-first session of the General Assembly is continuing; the speeches examined here belong to its General Debate, the annual series of national addresses delivered at the opening of each session. Those speeches have repeatedly displayed the tension within the institution: some invoke dialogue, law, equal membership and shared vulnerability, while others announce power, identify enemies and place coercion above reciprocal accountability. The question is not only what positions are expressed there, but what kind of human relationship its language and structure make possible.

The clearest structural inequality lies in the Security Council, where the five permanent members, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States can each defeat a substantive resolution with a single veto, whatever the rest of the world decides; only procedural votes escape this power (United Nations Security Council, n.d.). The General Assembly can debate and recommend when the Council is paralysed, but it cannot reverse a veto or grant its own recommendations the same binding force. That paralysis is especially visible over Gaza: in June 2025, a ceasefire resolution backed by fourteen votes failed on the single US veto, just as the US had vetoed Palestine’s UN membership the year before (United Nations in Palestine, 2025; UN Media, 2024). Iran shows the same structure from another angle , in 2026 Russia and China vetoed action over Iran while the United States was itself a party to that conflict (United Nations General Assembly, 2026) , so the body responsible for peace is governed by powers whose own alliances and actions may need scrutiny.

Changing this is legally possible but structurally protected: amending the Charter requires the agreement of every permanent member whose unequal authority would be reduced (United Nations, n.d.). Here the UN’s living purpose and its inherited structure meet directly: the institution can hear what present situations disclose without being able to let that change what it is permitted to do.

The closing of public space

On 24 September 2026, as delegations walked out before his address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened with the words: “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now” (Netanyahu, 2026), converting dissent into a defect of character rather than a position requiring an answer. The speech went on to organise reality through closed alternatives: “we have no other choice”; the conflict as a “battle against the barbarians”; criticism recast as “the war for truth.” Fear, survival and truth were fused into a single narrative in which alternatives to force became almost unthinkable.

He also held up a Starlink terminal, offering it to the Iranian delegation for use “when they inevitably defect” , dissent against Iran celebrated as freedom, dissent against his own government dismissed as cowardice. Technology here served not as neutral communication but as an instrument within a struggle over who may define truth.

The suffering and historical trauma carried by Israelis are real, as are the murders and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023. The question is what happens when trauma closes the field in which present action can still be judged, and it is this closing itself that I want to name here. By the Felt Guard (a term I have coined here, arising from my own felt sense in writing this article, as a way of beginning to understand the tragic and inhumane actions being taken and the silences and evasions that continue around these actions) I mean a protective organisation of experiencing that permits only those feelings, meanings and interpretations compatible with safety, while other aspects remain difficult to feel or say. Historical experiences of persecution and threatened annihilation may contribute to a protective way of organising present experience in which evidence of existential danger is more readily admitted than evidence that complicates it. This possibility must be approached carefully and cannot be assumed from outside. The guard deserves respect as protection, but it cannot be granted sole authority over other lives or public policy. Historical suffering does not make present power morally infallible.

The same closing movement appeared two days earlier when United States President Donald Trump presented Iran with a stark binary: “Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly?” He also declared, “While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace” (Slattery & Pamuk, 2026). Peace was personalised as the achievement of the powerful leader, while the destruction of another state and the lives within it was presented as the alternative he alone might choose.

The two speeches arose from different political positions and should not simply be equated, and describing their language does not require a psychological diagnosis. What they share is a family of rhetorical movements.

Two days after Netanyahu’s speech, the chamber answered him directly. Iceland’s foreign minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir named the source of her words before redefining it: “We have heard the words ‘moral cowards’ from this podium. To me, moral cowards are those leaders around the world who refuse to sit down and negotiate a just and lasting peace”, going on to name leaders who deny humanitarian access and disregard international law (Gunnarsdóttir, 2026). The rejoinder did more than answer an insult with an insult. It refused to let one speaker fix, for the whole room, what courage and cowardice would mean, and offered instead a definition anyone present could test against their own conduct rather than simply receive, the kind of open, answerable claim this essay has already distinguished from a monopoly on truth.

Several rhetorical movements recur across the speeches examined so far, each narrowing what a listener can still think. Moral disqualification turns dissenters into moral cowards, making it hard to hear protest as a reasoned position. False binary reduces the field to a deal or annihilation, making lawful and nonviolent alternatives hard to imagine. Existential necessity insists there is no other choice, foreclosing any question of proportionality or consequence. Civilisational division casts the conflict as civilisation against barbarians, making it hard to recognise the humanity within the enemy category. Monopoly on truth declares the speech itself a war for truth, making it hard for evidence or testimony to alter the account. What connects these five movements is what they do to the listener: each narrows a plural audience into a single required response, replacing the power that arises through people acting together with the logic of command.

Arendt on power, violence and plurality

“Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert”.  (Hannah Arendt, On Violence, p. 44 ). Arendt’s distinction changes the meaning of strength. Power is not simply the capacity of a leader or state to compel. It arises when people act together within a shared world. Violence may be instrumentally effective, but, as she wrote, “Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it” (Arendt, 1970, p. 56). Military superiority can demolish buildings, borders and institutions; it cannot by itself create consent, legitimacy, reconciliation or a durable peace.

This is where Arendt’s account turns on something easy to miss: politics only exists at all because people are not identical to one another. She calls this plurality, the fact that different people inhabit the same world from positions that cannot be reduced to one viewpoint. A speech that divides the world into those who affirm the leader’s account and those who are cowards, liars or barbarians attacks the conditions of politics itself. It replaces the difficult labour of a shared world with the simplicity of command.

The walkout during Netanyahu’s speech was an instance of public refusal. It demonstrated that the speaker could not compel recognition merely by occupying the podium. In Arendt’s terms, however, symbolic action becomes power only when people continue to act in concert. A walkout without legal, diplomatic, economic or humanitarian consequences may express a moral boundary yet leave the structure of domination intact.

Eisler and the domination partnership continuum

Riane Eisler gives a further language for this contrast, a way of naming how a whole society organises relationships and power, not just how individual leaders speak. “There were no names for these social configurations,” she writes, “so I called one the domination system and the other the partnership system” (Eisler, n.d.). Domination systems organise relationships through rigid ranking, fear, force and power over. Partnership systems emphasise mutual respect, participation, care and power sharing. No society is purely one or the other; the distinction identifies a direction of movement.

The speeches of threat, humiliation and annihilation display a domination logic. But domination is not confined to military language. Colonialism shaped borders, ownership, legal categories, institutions and the location of decision-making from the beginning; extraction, the removal of resources, labour and wealth from colonised territories, was one of its mechanisms, not its whole meaning. Those formations continue in unequal financial systems, Africa’s exclusion from permanent Security Council membership, the devaluation of care, and the concentration of AI infrastructure and decision-making in a small number of corporations and states. Eisler’s caring economics asks us to value what sustains people and the natural world rather than treating care as an invisible resource beneath the production of profit and power. The same United Nations meetings that produced this domination logic also produced its opposite, voices speaking, in Eisler’s terms, from the partnership direction.

Countervoices from Ghana and Barbados

Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama gave that direction a voice: “No race is superior. No nation is inferior. No child’s life is worth less because of the language they speak, the faith they profess, the colour of their skin, or the land of their birth.” He called Africa’s absence from permanent Security Council membership “fundamentally unacceptable in the 21st century” and stated that reform was not a favour to Africa but necessary for the UN’s legitimacy and survival (Mahama, 2026).

Mahama also asked the international community to “stop using diplomatic euphemisms to veil the human carnage” in Gaza, while condemning acts of terrorism by Hamas and insisting that moral standards cannot be selective. This is an example of language attempting to hold more than one suffering and more than one responsibility without turning either into permission to erase the other.

At the UN high-level meeting on inequality, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley asked who participates in growth, who owns its assets and who shapes its rules. Citing the unequal distribution of new wealth, she stated: “Greed is man-made, and therefore, if it is man-made, it can be unman-made” (Mottley, 2026). Her words connect present inequality to slavery, colonialism, international finance, the silencing of small states and the danger that AI may further dehumanise economic life.

Mahama and Mottley do not offer a sentimental language without conflict. They name violence, historical exploitation and unequal power directly, while keeping open the possibility of a shared world. In Arendt’s terms, their appeals invite people to act in concert rather than submit to command. In Gendlin’s terms, they allow more of the situation to function: lives excluded by inherited concepts enter public meaning and can change what action implies. This is an empowering use of language because the listener remains a participant, not merely an object to be mobilised.

Taken together with Gunnarsdóttir’s rejoinder to Netanyahu, these voices mark something worth noticing about this particular General Debate. Gunnarsdóttir’s direct response was a notable moment of words answering words within the chamber, rather than merely restating a prepared national position. Whether that kind of exchange becomes more common or remains a single instance is not yet knowable, but its appearance is itself a small sign of the Town entering this space.

The word genocide as an institutional litmus test

Institutions reveal themselves not only through the positions they adopt, but through the realities they permit to be discussed. Genocide is a legally defined term and an immensely charged historical and moral word. It must not be used carelessly, but neither should it be made unsayable in advance. In September 2025, the UN’s own Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza (OHCHR, 2025), while South Africa’s separate case alleging genocide remains before the International Court of Justice, which has ordered provisional measures but not yet reached a final judgment (International Court of Justice, n.d.). Separately again, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (International Criminal Court, 2024), though for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not for genocide as such, three distinct bodies, through three distinct legal processes, each finding serious grounds for accountability over the same conduct. Whether a person affirms, rejects or remains uncertain about the word genocide’s application in this particular case, the evidence, legal reasoning and human experience must remain available for open examination.

In some therapeutic, experiential and professional communities, organised political violence is treated as outside the proper field, as though psychological and philosophical life stopped where war, colonialism and state power began. Philosophy as a whole has, of course, produced extensive work on genocide. The concern here is narrower: what happens when a community devoted to experiencing has no shared language or public space in which the word can even be explored. Bauman helps us see that moving a reality outside the moral field creates distance; Gendlin helps us see that forbidding the word can prevent experiencing from finding the fresh articulation through which the situation might become more fully thinkable.

When a sensitive word is removed from shared discussion because it may divide members, threaten reputation or disturb belonging, the institution may appear calm while the conflict has merely been displaced into private spaces. The felt sense then arrives together with a felt guard, admitting into shared awareness only what naming the word would not endanger: attachment, standing or membership within the institution.

This is a litmus test because a practice devoted to human attention should be able to remain present when experiencing does not fit established language. Open discussion does not mean compelling a collective conclusion, ignoring antisemitism, silencing Palestinian testimony or treating accusation as proof. It means creating conditions in which difficult words can be investigated without equating inquiry with disloyalty. If the word cannot even be examined, the structure has begun to determine in advance what experiencing may become speakable.

But allowing a word to be examined is not the same as trusting whatever felt sense first makes it speakable to settle the matter on its own. The individual felt sense that opens a difficult word to inquiry still has to be tested for whether it is morally, and not merely experientially, right, the question this essay turns to next.

The felt sense and moral rightness

Focusing is often described as though the felt sense knows the right way forward. There is truth in this, but it becomes dangerous when simplified. The felt sense can carry an implicit knowing of a situation as bodily lived. It may know that the available way of saying it is inadequate and imply a next step that deliberate reasoning could not invent. But experiential rightness is not automatically moral rightness.

Nor does felt rightness indicate value rightness. ( Eugene Gendlin, Values and the Process of Experiencing, p. 186)

Gendlin’s sentence is decisive. A bodily shift tells us that something has fitted, differentiated or carried experiencing forward. It does not prove that the resulting interpretation or proposed action is just. A person may feel relief when words finally acknowledge hatred, fear or the wish to escape. The fit matters, but it does not turn the feeling into a moral command.

It helps to distinguish several kinds of rightness that Focusing can produce, which are easy to collapse into one. Experiential fit is when words or an image fit what is actually being felt. Process rightness is when something opens and a stuck process can move again. A personal next step is what presently seems like the step this person needs to take. Moral rightness is different from all three: it asks whether the action is responsible towards other people and the larger situation. These forms may overlap, but none of the first three guarantees the fourth, nor can they be collapsed into one.

A morally necessary action may initially produce fear and tightening because it risks conflict, reputation or belonging. Silence may produce bodily relief because it avoids those dangers. Relief can therefore mark release from inner conflict without establishing the moral adequacy of the action chosen. Moral adequacy here means more than personal sincerity or inward fit. It asks whether an action has taken sufficient account of other people, foreseeable consequences, unequal power, relevant evidence and the wider situation. It requires provisional moral discernment that remains open to correction, not a claim to moral purity.

A felt sense is a sense of the whole situation as presently bodily lived by this person. It is not possession of every aspect of experiencing. If another person’s or another people’s experiencing has been excluded from my social world, my body cannot already carry those unencountered aspects as though they had entered my life. New aspects become implicit through interaction. Testimony, history, evidence and participation matter because they alter the situation in which experiencing forms.

The felt sense therefore has a moral dimension but not a moral code. A moral dimension means that our sensing and acting always occur in relation and affect who can speak, participate, suffer or flourish; responsibility is already at stake. A moral code is a fixed set of rules that determines right and wrong in advance. To say that felt experiencing has a moral dimension is not to say that the body contains a complete ethical rulebook. A code could itself become structure bound. Ethical direction must be tested by whether a movement enables fuller interaction and living or requires narrowing, deadening and exclusion. The indispensable question is not only whether my life is carried forward, but whose life is carried forward and whose life is stopped. This raises an uncomfortable further question: if felt experiencing carries this kind of moral weight, what happens when the very process of testing it becomes another authority to obey rather than question? Gendlin confronted this danger directly.

The obedience pattern and the felt guard

Gendlin’s The Obedience Pattern provides a powerful safeguard against turning felt knowing into another authority. He proposes obedience to the inwardly arising process only through a “rather rebellious dialogue” (Gendlin, 1984, p. 189). Obedience to an external will can become the opposite of power, choice and freedom. Even Focusing instructions must not be followed mechanically. When an instruction feels internally violent, his advice is to “stop but don’t run away” (pp. 201–202). Even this dialogue is provisional rather than a rule once granted: the obedience he describes holds only “over a series of steps, and then not always” (p. 190) it must keep earning its authority in each new situation, not receive it permanently.

Gendlin is careful not to oppose inward freedom to human relationship. We need others’ knowledge, care and instruction. The criterion, however, remains whether what comes from another person allows inwardly arising steps to form. Guidance becomes self-defeating when receiving help requires someone to surrender the very inward development that the interaction was meant to foster.

This is also a social and organisational insight. Obedience can become mixed with care, expertise, spiritual aspiration and belonging, so compliance may feel like the price of receiving help or remaining in relationship. A teacher, leader or procedure can contribute knowledge without becoming the final authority over the person’s experiencing. Gendlin’s rebellious dialogue can therefore be read not only as an inner practice but as a way of holding the relationship between living process and organised authority. The same rebellious, provisional testing applies to something closer to home, a related but distinct phenomenon that needs its own definition here: the felt guard.

The felt guard, introduced earlier as a term I have coined for this article, is not a diagnosis and cannot be identified from bodily signs alone: tightening, heat, hesitation, numbness or loss of language may equally belong to fear, guilt, shame or grief. What distinguishes it is its protective function and its selectivity; it always seems to be protecting something: bodily safety, attachment, belonging, livelihood, identity, another person, or the stability of a family or institution.

Its messages may sound like: Be careful. Do not use that word. You may be misunderstood. You could lose standing or belonging. People like us do not say this publicly. Yet the felt guard should not be equated with the sentences it produces. Those sentences are what its protective work presently permits into awareness. The institution or family does not have to censor the person directly when anticipated consequences have already become part of how the situation is bodily lived.

A felt guard may be shaped by present danger, but it may also carry history. Where that history includes real, lived danger to a people or a family, its messages may sound starker than ordinary caution: They cannot be trusted. We are not safe. Intergenerational trauma research describes transmission through attachment, family roles, inherited warnings and silences, and continuing discrimination, not, so far as the evidence yet shows, through any genetically transmitted memory or ready-made meaning. Embodied inheritance is real; it just needs describing through relationship and culture rather than reduced to a genetic message.

Gendlin’s philosophy nevertheless gives a way to think about this. If the body is an interactional and situational process, then family history, collective history and learned danger can function implicitly in how a present situation is lived. They need not appear as a remembered event. They may appear as a limit on what can safely form, a sudden change of subject, an inherited rule of silence, or a bodily certainty that visibility brings danger. Structure-bound process, and the instruction to stop but not run away, are part of Gendlin’s own philosophy, and especially relevant here.

Because the guard is protecting something, trying to break through it can confirm the very danger it anticipates. It needs a series of pauses and patient returns. One can stay beside the sense of too dangerous, too disloyal or not yet, ask what it fears would happen, and wait without demanding disclosure. A later pause may reveal another layer of what is being protected and what conditions would permit more safety.

This work was never only solitary to begin with. In Gendlin’s philosophy, interaction is not an aid brought in afterwards to help an otherwise private process; a felt sense forms interactionally from the start, so it is no surprise that a companion, a therapist, or a fellow member of the Town may sometimes recognise the gatekeeper’s presence before the person carrying it can name it themselves: a sudden change of subject, a deflection into abstraction, a pause that closes too quickly. Recognition from outside cannot itself dissolve the guard, and naming it too directly can make it hold its position more tightly rather than less. What another person can offer is company at the threshold, holding the pause open a little longer, so that what the guard has been keeping out has more room to come forward in its own time.

Nor should this process be assumed to end in release. A felt guard may, after patient interaction, allow more of the situation to be felt and said. But it may also remain unwilling or unable to relinquish its position, however long the pause or however trusted the company. This is not necessarily failure. Some situations are too dangerous, too costly, or too unsupported by the surrounding world for the guard to stand down, and it may be protecting something that genuinely cannot yet be risked. The task, then, is not to insist that every guard eventually yields. It is to keep company with it honestly, respecting what it is protecting, without mistaking its refusal for the final word on what is true.

The aim is not to defeat the guard but to develop a relationship with it in which more of the whole situation can gradually be felt. Neither the guard nor the first feeling behind it should be granted final authority; both need time, interaction and moral testing.

Gendlin frames the rebellious dialogue as something one person practises inwardly, in relation to their own felt sense. But the felt guard is rarely only personal. In a family, an institution or a whole society, one person’s guard reinforces another’s: each senses that others are also not naming the thing, and takes that collective silence as further confirmation that it cannot safely be named. Stanley Cohen called this the paradox of states of denial, the capacity of whole societies to know and not-know about atrocity at the same time, sustained not by ignorance but by an unspoken agreement about what may be acknowledged (Cohen, 2001). Isabel Menzies Lyth showed the same pattern inside institutions, where procedures can develop whose real function is to protect members from unbearable anxiety, so the guard is built into the institution’s routines and job titles rather than living only in individuals (Menzies, 1960). At the level of a whole society, this is compounded by pluralistic ignorance: most people may privately doubt an official account, yet each assumes everyone else believes it, so the silence itself becomes evidence to every individual that they alone are out of step (Prentice & Miller, 1996).

A rebellious dialogue conducted by one person cannot, on its own, move a guard of this size. What breaks it, when it breaks, is closer to what this essay has already discussed about witnessing and social media: a photograph, a testimony, a journalist’s report or a survivor’s account reaching enough people that the private doubt becomes visible to itself. This is how a moral compass moves in a society, not because those in power are persuaded, but because enough people’s private “this doesn’t fit” becomes visible to each other at once, so the collective guard can no longer mistake its silence for consensus, as is being shown today.

If a felt guard is never purely private, the same must be true of the felt sense it protects, which raises a question about Focusing’s own practice: how far has it lived up to its own philosophy of interaction?

The individualisation of Focusing

Gendlin’s philosophy is not individualistic in its account of the body. The body is not a sealed interior confronted by an external world. In his words, “The body is a situational system. It is an interactional system” (Gendlin, 2000, p. 259). Yet Focusing has often remained within teaching and therapy, where the felt sense can be received as an individual’s private bodily knowing and its social, political, historical and ecological aspects can recede.

The difficulty is not attention to the individual, which is indispensable, but detaching experiencing from the situations and relationships that constitute it. Structural suffering can then be translated into personal regulation: an employee becomes more resilient while the workplace remains exploitative; a professional manages moral discomfort while continuing to enact institutional policy; a witness learns to tolerate helplessness while responsibility remains elsewhere. A life-forward step may instead need to become relationship, refusal, public speech, solidarity or action.

This does not mean replacing experiencing with a political doctrine. A felt sense can carry only the situation that has entered this person’s living. It cannot contain testimony never heard, history never learned, evidence kept out of view or another person’s life treated as irrelevant. Reading the news, encountering those most affected and learning from other disciplines change the situation that can be bodily sensed. The inner compass becomes more adequate by crossing with relational, historical, legal and material realities.

TAE and the public life of the implicit

TAE offers a bridge from inward sensing to social and philosophical inquiry, one Gendlin himself insisted on. It helps a person work from aspects of experience that do not fit established language, while requiring those aspects to become communicable concepts that others can question, use and carry further. This makes it especially valuable where inherited political terms offer only fixed alternatives.

TAE is now entering academic teaching and research rather than remaining solely within therapeutic practice. Freedom to Make Sense at the University of Iceland and the Iceland University of the Arts brings embodied, experiential and mindful inquiry into philosophy, education, climate questions and interdisciplinary research. It asks how people can think from their own experiential knowledge while bringing what emerges into forms that others can examine (University of Iceland, n.d.).

Marta Fabregat’s Sensed Ecology is another relevant development. Emerging through TAE and the Philosophy of the Implicit, it explores bodily relationship with land, weather and the more-than-human world (Fabregat, 2023). Neither this ecological work nor shared academic inquiry requires the claim that a group possesses one felt sense. People can develop meanings together while remaining differently situated. Shared inquiry can form without becoming a collective body that speaks with one authoritative voice.

The same questions arise wherever a living practice is organised and taught. Professional roles, standards and durable structures can support continuity, ethical care and the transmission of learning. A community informed by the implicit can also let present experiencing, new knowledge and voices that do not fit established language participate in its continuing formation. This is not disloyalty to a tradition; it is one way a living tradition remains alive.

That same question, what a shared inquiry asks of the person inside it  is not confined to intellectual practice. It is what any community asks of its members simply by virtue of their belonging to it.

Belonging without surrender

Human beings are social creatures. We survive through families, communities and cooperation. We join organisations because they embody qualities we want to stand for: care, justice, professional integrity, learning or shared responsibility. The danger begins when agreement on certain tenets is converted into a total identity.

I may join an organisation because I value Focusing and relational attention. Membership does not mean that every future decision, alliance, silence or public position necessarily represents me. This is a general tension within group membership, not a statement about a particular organisation. Because belonging matters, disagreement can still feel like a threat to one’s identity and relationships.

Social belonging connects people through particular purposes and allows difference within relationships; institutional conformity converts partial agreement into a total identity and treats dissent as disloyalty. Belonging changes through interaction and recognises that a person exceeds the group; conformity protects an established position and claims authority to represent the member. Belonging supports responsibility; conformity encourages obedience and delegated responsibility.

A humane organisation would therefore distinguish shared tenets from presumed total alignment. It would protect dissent, state clearly when a position is provisional, and refuse to treat membership as consent to everything said or done in the organisation’s name. Belonging need not require possession. I can belong to a group without permitting it to exercise my moral responsibility for me.

Nor does declining to adopt a collective political position automatically create freedom of speech. Members may still fear being called biased, divisive or disloyal, particularly where relationships, status and professional belonging are involved. No official prohibition is required for a felt guard to form. The question is whether people can raise politically difficult experience in shared spaces without being presumed to speak for the whole community and without being quietly moved beyond its public hearing.  So what, then, is being asked of Focusing people?   “TAE has a social purpose. It is not true that merely developing as individuals will somehow change the patterns in which we must live”. ( Eugene Gendlin, 2004, p. 5)

What is asked of Focusing people

Focusing people are being asked to carry embodied attention, fresh language and responsibility into the social world, not merely to develop inwardly. What is asked of them is neither political uniformity nor withdrawal into private experiencing. The task is not to produce one correct collective position or to claim a group felt sense. It is to bring the capacities developed through Focusing, pausing, listening for what does not fit, finding fresh language, resisting premature closure and remaining open to being changed, into public and institutional life.

 Distinguish experiential fit from moral rightness. Treat the felt guard as something to explore rather than automatically obey. Keep institutional structures answerable to the living processes they serve, creating the dialogue that lets difficult experiencing reach institutional decisions rather than letting bureaucracy or technology disperse responsibility until it belongs to no one. Protect dissent and non-fit, especially when consensus forms quickly, without converting agreement on basic tenets into presumed total alignment, and stay open to being changed by those whose experiencing does not fit the institution’s established language.

Allow social, political, historical and ecological aspects of experiencing to enter teaching and practice and use AI as an instrument without giving it moral authority or using it to conceal human decisions. Keep charged words , genocide, occupation, colonialism, annihilation, open to evidence-based examination rather than tests of loyalty, and analyse political language for how it humanises, excludes, threatens or closes down alternatives. Cross inward sensing with testimony, history, law and public evidence, carrying embodied attention into public action so that listening does not substitute for responsibility. Focusing can help people remain with complexity and non-fit; TAE can help them create language where inherited concepts fail. But these capacities become socially meaningful only when they allow silenced experience to enter public life, protect honest difference and contribute to action for which human beings remain answerable.

The decisive question for any use of AI, institutional procedure, political speech or community response is whether it carries the living process forward or replaces that process with an established pattern. Does it allow more of the human situation to enter? Does it increase participation and responsibility? Or does it make silence, distance and obedience easier?

Keeping the Town human

Gendlin’s hope for the Town remains possible, but it cannot be maintained by preserving Focusing as a protected method. It requires carrying the philosophy of the implicit into the places where attention, power and responsibility are being reorganised.

The Town’s contribution is not speed, information or efficiency. It lies in embodied attention, relationship, fresh thinking and the capacity to remain with what has not yet found adequate language. Gendlin reminds us that no system or category exhausts the living situation. Bauman shows how systems fragment action until no one feels responsible for the outcome. Habermas asks whether our words seek understanding or merely produce effects. Arendt reminds us that power grows from acting together and that violence cannot create legitimacy. Eisler asks whether our institutions move towards domination or partnership and whether they materially value care. Together they leave us with a demanding task: to belong without surrendering judgement, to use structures without becoming structure bound, to use technology without permitting it to define the human, and to remain responsible when institutions make responsibility difficult to locate. The Town cannot claim moral authority merely because it practises attention. Its adequacy must be tested by what that attention enables us to see, say and do. What carries life forward here, for whom, and whose life, voice or future is being stopped so that my own movement can feel right?

A question for the Town

Any community or institution can usefully ask how its language and structures respond when living experiencing exceeds familiar concepts. Can the person who does not fit remain present? Can difficult realities be explored without prematurely assigning a collective position? Can the organisation learn from what it hears? Can belonging survive honest difference? Offered as continuing questions, these may help organised life remain faithful to the living processes it was created to support.

The Town must now enter the places where language prepares, justifies or conceals violence; where AI and bureaucracy divide responsibility; where colonial histories continue inside present institutions; and where care is subordinated to profit and power. It must remain inward, because action without inward contact can reproduce the patterns it opposes. But it cannot remain only inward. The future of the Town may depend upon this further movement…

About the Autho

Patricia Foster is a Coordinator, Focusing Trainer and Therapist with The International Focusing Institute and an EAP Certified Person Centred Therapist. Her work brings experiential philosophy into Focusing training and Person Centred and Focusing Oriented therapy.

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