The Fellowship of the Ecosystem

In a conversation this past week, we were asked an important question about our work on citizenship - we are paraphrasing it slightly differently from how it was asked:

What if your work on skillful citizenship produced a class of citizens who saw themselves as ‘first citizens,’ people who are more citizen than others?

‘First among equals’ syndrome is a real possibility. Kings are overthrown and replaced by revolutionaries who soon anoint themselves as the sole representatives of the people. Even North Korea is called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

None of us is about to become dictator for life, but the question is more than a theoretical one for us. We are in the early stages of a fellowship programme that will support cohorts of ecosystem thinkers. How do prevent a situation where our fellows become ‘first citizens?’?

If the fellowship fails, then our worries will fade into the earth, never to be raised again, but what if the fellows succeed? Will they fight over the ring of power amongst themselves? Will they lord it over others in the name of decentralization and sustainability? The question goes beyond the design of our fellowship, to the design of ecosystems in general:

We are a species obsessed with power, and it’s foolish to expect that obsession to vanish when hierarchies are replaced by networks. So how can we design for the inevitable?

We always seek the ring, even those who claim to be unaffected. Power is patient; it seeps through the smallest cracks, slowly turning a flat plain into a steep pyramid.?

From the Fellowship of the Ring: The dominant recurrent metaphor in LotR is that power is conceptualized as an object. This metaphor is most apparent in the One Ring: to possess the Ring is to be powerful, to lose it is to lose power, and to seek it is to seek power.

When we think of fellowships what are the words that come to our mind?

Hedge Q: Can we design ecosystems in which power is mutable and participatory, not permanent? How can fellows help everyone in an ecosystem become more skillful?

Fellows as friends. Fellows as trustees. Facts and Felts

There are many kinds of fellowships. Some give you money to write a book. Others recognise the importance of your work and reward you for it. But there are other meanings of the term too. Monastic orders in some religious traditions have monks playing a role that’s more friend than priest. Like St. Francis and his followers:

The brothers lived a simple life in the deserted lazar house of Rivo Torto near Assisi; but they spent much of their time wandering through the mountainous districts of Umbria, making a deep impression upon their hearers by their earnest exhortations.

A friend can be more knowledgeable and more skillful than you, but they aren’t your lord and master. They can offer solutions to your problems but they can’t order you to obey them. It’s the affection between friends that compels you to act as they do. Trustees have more power than friends, but even they aren’t your rulers. Gandhi wrote extensively about about the wealthy being trustees of society in his writings on ‘economies of need’ instead of ‘economies of greed.’ In 1942, he said:

I have no hesitation in endorsing the proposition that generally rich men and for that matter most men are not particular as to the way they make money. In the application of the method of nonviolence, one must believe in the possibility of every person, however depraved, being reformed under humane and skilled treatment. We must appeal to the good in human beings and expect response. Is it not conducive to the well-being of society that every member uses all his talents, only not for personal aggrandizement but for the good of all? We do not want to produce a dead equality where every person becomes or is rendered incapable of using his ability to the utmost possible extent. Such a society must ultimately perish. I therefore suggest that my advice that moneyed men may earn their crores (honestly only, of course) but so as to dedicate them to the service of all is perfectly sound. Tyen Tyeyektena Bunjhitha is a mantra based on uncommon knowledge. It is the surest method to evolve a new order of life of universal benefit in the place of the present one where each one lives for himself without regard to what happens to his neighbour.

A few years before that, in 1939, he wrote:

Supposing I have come by a fair amount of wealth - either by way of legacy, or by means of trade and industry - I must know that all that wealth does not belong to me; what belongs to me is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better is the right to an honourable livelihood, no better than that enjoyed by millions of others. The rest of my wealth belongs to the community and must be used for the welfare of the community. I enunciated this theory when the socialist theory was placed before the country in respect to the possessions held by zamindars and ruling chiefs. They would do away with these privileged classes. I want them to outgrow their greed and sense of possession, and to come down in spite of their wealth to the level of those who earn their bread by labour. The labourer has to realize that the wealthy man is less owner of his wealth than the labourer is owner of his own, viz., the power to work.

Can our fellows - and in general, those who are in leadership positions in ecosystems - see themselves as friends and as trustees? How do we design for those outcomes? We believe that designing for the ‘right’ emotions will play an important role in ensuring desirable outcomes. Whether friend or trustee, the care for the community comes out of bonds of solidarity between the leader and their community. That feeling of being one comes first, and the relative prominence of the friend and trustee comes second.

Felts are as important as facts.

The cognitive skills of the leader are clearly important: they might be problem solvers, and remover of obstacles, but it’s their emotional stance that truly embeds them in that ecosystem. We haven’t answered the original question: how do we prevent first citizens from emerging? But there are signs of progress:

Skillful citizenship is as much about feelings as it is about facts, and cultivating those feelings of solidarity should be an important aspect of the ecosystem fellow’s training.

The Learning Problem

We want to pose the design of our fellowship as a learning challenge:

How can modern societies?learn?and?adapt?and?create?new institutional structures that respond to our economic, political and ecological conditions?

Our current educational practices produce an atomized free agent - the meritorious candidate - who plays into the hands of predatory capital. If we want to reorganize society to have fellows who are friends and trustees, we need to reorganize education, for our educational institutions are the crucible of society as a whole. That reorganization doesn’t have to be within the formal system.

If the promise of college education was a degree, a white collar lifestyle and a stable professional identity, the new social contract should be a lifelong learning, an ecological lifestyle and an adaptive personal identity. We will end this note with three ideas for keeping the new promise:

1. Disaggregate degrees into discrete skills. Information and content are commodities.
2. Strengthen?people to people?mentoring and apprenticeship. The breakdown of trust is the biggest problem we face. Neither companies nor unions are providing that layer of trust; we have to create trust networks in which we engage as peers and citizens. The?learning network?has to be at the core of the new society.
3. Create platforms for binding people and small institutions together so that they can bargain for benefits as a network rather than as individually insignificant players.

The technological infrastructure for creating these networks is already available; what we need is the social will and organization to make it happen.

The Gallery of Imaginary Objects

Throughout history, civilizations have commemorated their knowledge through the use of symbols and totems, and given the tremendous significance of our granular understanding of matter, it is fitting that we celebrate this achievement through similar means. With this in mind, we have conceptualized the Carbon Totem, as a reminder that all life is founded upon the element's remarkable ability to form multivalent and enduring bonds.