Black Elephant

An invitation to one of the best things I've ever been part of.

Because I need a little more time to finish writing the next installment of our book club essays on Caliban & The Witch (it will post on Monday, 27 March), I thought I’d take this time to finally tell you about an amazing project I’ve been hinting at for quite some time.

As you maybe remember, I’ve mentioned a few trips to Paris in the past few months. Big cities are quite soul crushing for me, and Paris is just below New York City on my list of urban nightmares in which I hope never to be stuck. However, the last two times I’ve been there, I actually enjoyed myself.

Both times, I was traveling for an event. The very first time I was invited there, the French railways shut down on strike so I instead hung out with old gods in Trier. The next time there were no strikes, and despite having no real idea what I was actually going for, I eagerly got on the train from Luxembourg to Paris. And, despite all my previous feelings of that city, what happened that evening changed my view completely.

I was there for a Black Elephant dinner “parade.” What this meant was that I’d sit around a very large table with eleven other people and, over dinner, open up my soul to strangers who no longer felt strange at all.

Black Elephant is an idea, a philosophy, a social “network,” and maybe the biggest reason for optimism I’ve found in the last few decades. It was started in part by a man named Felix Marquardt, a man who for years was known in European high society as a kind of globalization junkie. He was one of the networker sorts at the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, and hosted a series of events called “The Atlantic Dinners,” bringing together prime ministers, presidents, financiers, and TED-talk sorts to discuss how to fix the world.

Sounds awful, I know. In fact, when I first got an email from Felix in September of last year, I was stunned. Why on earth was this guy emailing me, and why the fuck did he want to talk? The only thing that calmed me a bit about him was that he’d mentioned he was friends with one of my heroes, Dougald Hine.

So we talked, and though I didn’t really understand what he was on about yet, something he’d said about the way the world has become addicted to power, to consumption, to oil, and to social media resonated deeply with something I’d been thinking about for quite some time. At that time, someone I care about deeply had just hit “rock bottom” with an addiction that was destroying their life and harming those who loved them. That person had decided to quit the addiction, and the thing I’d noticed was that it had taken hold as a kind of opiate for a much more complex ailment: alienation.

It’s been said that the opposite of addiction is connection, and this is a powerful truth. Also, though, addiction is like a patch of “invasive” blackberry or other plants in a place you don’t want them. Sure, they crowd out other plants, but, while there, they fill a void or patch a wound in the ecosystem. The first question any gardener needs to ask is not “how do I get rid of these plants?” but rather, “why did they take over here, and how do I put this all back into balance?” Alcohol, cocaine, pornography, painkillers, social media, overeating: these are all addictions which arrive and take over because there’s something we are lacking. They’re literally opiates to numb a pain, to help us get through. But like all opiates, they only hide the underlying problem and can never actually heal us.

Felix talks openly about his own experience with addiction. But his is not just the usual story we hear everywhere when people decide to heal rather than self-medicate. He noticed that his own addictions mirrored the addictions of the globalization junkies and the societies they believe they’re anointed to manage. It’s not that there’s no one behind the wheel, but rather that we’re all drunk-driving ourselves to environmental collapse. We’re addicted to oil, to energy, to profit, to products, to lifestyles, to technology, and especially to false optimism and even more untrue stories about ourselves, about progress, and about who we really are.

And so, Felix and others with the same vision started Black Elephant.

It’s really hard to describe what Black Elephant “really” is. It’s being called a social network based on connection and emotional vulnerability, and that’s a good start. But it’s also a ritual of deep and indescribable magic. When inviting someone I admire into the network, I told him “it probably sounds a bit like a cult, but it’s more like an emotional vulnerability tupperware party.” His response was amusing: “nah, sounds totally like a cult. I’m in.”

What happens in a Black Elephant “parade” (named this way because “parade” is one of the names for a group of elephants, the other one being a “herd”) is maybe easier to explain. Over video conferencing (90 minutes) or over in-person dinners (three hours), a group of 6 to 12 people answer two or three questions they received beforehand. These questions are emotional intelligence prompts, such as:

• When was your first experience of feeling loved?

• What is your relationship to your ancestors like?

• When was a time you walked away or withdrew from something, and what did you learn from this?

Each of these parades has a host (and sometimes a co-host) who starts the discussion. After an initial round of short introductions (with specific de-emphasis on career accomplishments), the first question is asked. Each person is given three minutes to talk, and that person then passes the question on to someone else of their choosing until everyone has answered.

There are a few important structural rules to the parades which help create the space or “container” of the discussions:

• We listen, and do not comment nor interrupt.

• There are no right or wrong answers

• What we say and who was in the meeting stays in the meeting

What arises in these discussions is a kind of wild magic I don’t fully know how to describe. By the end, you feel not only deeply connected to the others but also to yourself as well. I smile for hours after a virtual parade and for days after an in-person dinner parade. I feel less alone, less “strange,” less alienated, and most of all more human and more alive.

All of this is why I was deeply thrilled when I was asked to be one of the parade hosts. I currently host a weekly virtual parade, and will likely start a second one in a few weeks. I’ll also be going to Greece in June for a Black Elephant event, and am hoping to soon start hosting in-person dinner parades here in Luxembourg.

What I’m doing with this post is inviting you to be a part of Black Elephant.

Initially, it started with just a few people updating spreadsheets of contact information to invite people to parades. Now, there is an internet platform, in beta development, which is a much better way of organizing things.

Before I give you the website, I want to make sure you know a few other things.

First of all, Black Elephant is completely free to join, as are the virtual parades. Special events (such as the one in Greece, called Meta+Physics) and in-person dinners are fee based, and there are plans to possibly expand the platform to offer subscription-level perks like local guides for travelers. There is also a business-to-business side where organizers will offer Black Elephant-style meetings for cultural events and large organizations. That’s where funding is expected to come from to support the free side of it.

The parade hosts are quite a diverse lot. Some live in Africa (the chief organizer/CEO of Black Elephant, an amazing man named Abdi, for instance), many are in Europe, and one lives in the US. Parades are available thus far in two languages (English and French) with more I suspect coming soon.

To join the network, you’ll need to first participate in one virtual parade. How this works is that you join the waitlist on the site, and then you will be invited to a parade. Once you’ve experienced your first one and if you want to participate in more, you’ll receive an invite to make an account on the platform. From there, you can sign up for parades as you like. If you really, really like it and participate in many, you can also ask to be trained as a parade host so you can also run your own.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the web platform is currently in beta and there are only a handful of organizers at the moment. That means you might have to wait a little bit after joining the waitlist, especially if hundreds of you (or even thousands…) reading this sign up after this post.

And a final note: I’d love to have you in my parades! I only host one a week at the moment, but I’ll increase this if there are a lot of sign ups. But also, there are a lot of really amazing, kind, and deeply intelligent people hosting currently, so I highly recommend joining parades based on your time availability, rather than the host.

So, now, if this sounds even half as amazing to you as it’s been for me, you can join the waitlist and read more about Black Elephant here.

Hope to see you there!

—Rhyd