Letting the Darlings Go
Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director
Years ago, as part of a graduate program in fiction writing, I was called on to read work in progress to an audience of my colleagues and faculty. After one such reading, a faculty member approached me, shaking her head. This was a particularly well-respected writer, whose work I’d admired. She was also known for her bluntness. I was more than a little nervous.
She wasted no time before saying, “Kill your darlings.” Then she looked me dead in the eye, and continued, “You’re too attached to the characters you’re writing. That story will never find its way if you can’t let them go.”
That story never did find its way, and eventually I stopped writing fiction in favor of other forms of writing. Still, I remember “Kill your darlings.” The violence in that metaphor notwithstanding, it has served me well as a writer.
Many years after that conversation, I was introduced to systems practice, and learned paradigms—beliefs and perspectives that making sense of the world—are the most profound drivers of systems behavior, for good and for ill. I also studied what some systems thinkers refer to as archetypes of human systems behavior. I recognized in two of them the same trouble I’d had with that story.
The “limits to success” archetype is when strategies that have worked very well bump into some kind of limitation, often new or newly expressed. Then that first strategy stops working, sometimes starts creating more harm than good. But people really love those first strategies, and have a hard time letting them go. Afterall, it worked really well for a while, and besides it feels familiar and, well, just right.
The ”fixes that fail” or “fixes that backfire” archetype begins with a solution that works in the short term, or in part of the system, but creates or contributes to long term negative consequences. Very often, people keep trying the fix because it just makes so much sense.
Human beings need to make sense of the world. Psychologists consider sense-making an essential human activity because it creates a roadmap for how to behave. Without making sense of the world, it’s hard to know who I am in its context. It’s hard to know what to do in order to thrive. That uncertainty is frightening.
So paradigms become darlings. Letting them go feels dangerous. “Killings darlings.” begins to feel less like a metaphor and more like a threat.
Paradigms that drive strategies for social justice can feel especially precious, because they offer familiar, often time-honored certainty -- and tolerance for uncertainty is low with stakes as high, for many, as life and death.
But what if a paradigm for social change has reached the limit of its success? What if it backfires in the long run? What if it’s outlived its usefulness, as the system becomes more complex?
What if knowledge of histories, structures, data, and stories have reached limited success in our collective efforts to dismantle racism? What if mandated self-reflection about bias and privilege, with all its short-term gains, turns out to be a fix that fails, with unintended, harmful consequences?
What if the paradigm of simple right and wrong, good and bad, worthy of life and disposable is as alive on the so-called political Left as it is on the Right? And what if that paradigm leads to fixes that backfire, tragically so?
It can be terrifying—well, it can be for me—to question the paradigms that help me make sense of the world. But I want to find my way to a story of more thriving and ever more peace. So I may need to let go of my darlings.