A Rising Tide

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights before the dark hour of reason grows - John Betjeman

I have just dropped into the MiVote office located on the Eastern edge of Melbourne’s central business district. The journey from my home in Eaglemont, surely one of the city’s most pleasant middle-class suburbs, through the scenic surrounds of Studley Park that curves serenely around an arm of the Yarra river, takes me about twenty minutes in light traffic. I am conversant with every inch of this route since it is the way we drive three times a week to shuttle my 5 year old son to and from his school in Abbotsford.

Living in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, in addition to owning a family home in the rice paddies of northeast of Thailand, and travelling all over the world in my job as CEO of Centre for the Future, gives me a certain outlook - one where I witness everyday routines that unite us as a family, but one that also allows me to grasp the gravity of the human condition.

This outlook is shared by relatively small numbers of people. For in spite of our increasing propensity to travel long distances for work and leisure - enabled by an extensive global transportation infrastructure comprising passenger jets, expressways and high-speed trains – a majority of people still spend most of their working lives within the confines of small neighbourhoods – invariably determined by the need to access schools, hospitals, offices, sporting venues, entertainment facilities, and retail outlets.

In an age of rapid urbanisation, neighbourhoods like ours are the equivalent of the village – they define contemporary living in most countries. We venture out of our cocoons from time to time for vacations and special events. But mostly we spend our days within these community enclaves.

By and large the situation is the same today as it was 60 years ago. I vividly remember old Bob Bishop, a gamekeeper for Lord Sheffield’s estate near Fletching (a small hamlet in East Sussex where I spent most of my youth) had never been to London – barely 40 miles distant. His entire life was spent in the environs of the parish and he had absolutely no desire to venture into what he wryly referred to as “them foreign parts”. Familiarity was consoling to Mr Bishop. He was acutely aware of the discomfort he might feel in unusual surroundings. So he stuck to what he knew, secure in a community where everyone respected him, and where he knew every person by name.

I later learned that this was by no means uncommon. In post-war Europe many people preferred to just stay put - wherever they happened to feel most at home. Only later did we begin to feel the urge to venture further afield once again.

In almost every part of the globe there are people who still live like that – some by choice in picturesque settlements and out-of-the-way places, some in skyscrapers in the the busiest of cities, but many others trapped in ruins, uncertain of when the next drone-guided missile will shatter their traditional way of life.

Places are important to us. A sense of origin, purpose and destiny remain important factors in shaping our identity throughout life, while the communities in which we dwell, even for those of us who are tenaciously peripatetic, are more than just incidental. They are vital elements in defining our humanity, imprinting our deepest sentiments of social affiliation, and bringing peace of mind in times of disquiet.

These days a majority of people seem content to amble through a life marked by the seasons, punctuated by the distractions we can assemble between birth and death. During the course of each unique passage we do the best we can - for ourselves and for our families. We work when we can, make the most of any leisure time, indulge in an occasional holiday, reflect on the nature of our circumstances, and work out, often from bitter experience, how to cope with life’s obstacles. But for most of us an awareness that the ride is short, and will soon be over, arrives too late. Suddenly it is evening, and the promises of youth are forgotten.

That cannot endure. A human life is more than the sum of its diversions. From the age of thirteen I savoured every precious hour, using my very existence as the premise for exploration and adventure. Today my life is pure dance - expressing far more than a vain desire to live just a few years longer. Of course the point of dancing is the dance itself. Each day I meet people who inspire me with their own dance. They too are set on remembering and experiencing what it means to be human and alive.

Life is far easier for some than others of course. The struggle of surviving in war-torn Aleppo, where each day is filled with dread and death, is inconceivable to those who have not suffered the terror we inflict upon each other in the name of liberty – a euphemism ensuring the occidental mindset is not seriously threatened. And although my friends often hear me complaining about slow internet speeds, or the lack of etiquette on display from young people today, everything in this city of mine works. I can walk the streets safely. In an egalitarian society such as this there is no higher authority preventing me speaking my mind. And there is an abundance of clean water, electricity, fresh air and nutritious food.

What then gives me the effrontery to suggest things are not looking good for my grandchildren? What gives me the right to complain about the state of the world when my own life is so gratifying? Why am I alarmed about the human condition in all its paradoxical agony when others are not or brush aside the truth? What and where is the evidence that the world-system is not working as it should?

The culmination of so many years of seeing the world through a polyocular lens and thinking in terms of reinventing whole systems from first principles is now manifesting in Centre for the Future and an agenda for creating a world that works for everyone. But the foundational impulse can be traced back to my own and others observations of what is not working and why. I am most concerned about three crucial facets to be found in the civilisational model:

1. Entanglement

Science is the most reliable lens we have for understanding how the world works. To ignore science is to remain wilfully ignorant. Quantum science affirms that everything we experience is intertwined. Events exist within a single energy field even though they might resonate at different frequencies. We call it the web of life.

Without exception all the emergencies facing us - including a burgeoning population, endemic poverty, the threat of pandemics, global heating, debt, the destruction of natural ecosystems, warfare, religious fundamentalism, the refugee crisis, and famine, for example, are inextricably linked - their separation merely a cruel illusion.

As Joe Brewer, writing in Kosmos magazine, recently stated: Climate change cannot be addressed in isolation from the wealth-hoarding of capitalism that has made the world so unequal. Terrorism cannot be tackled in the absence of deep inquiries about what happens when money is treated as more sacred than life or spiritual tradition. Peasant farmers kicked off their land in India share a common plight with sex workers trafficked into the Netherlands alongside illicit flows of money, drugs, and guns. And so on.

Systemic analysis, strategic foresight and design thinking are therefore essential tools if we are serious about overcoming such perils. They demand fresh approaches too. Yet we continue to use the tools and methods with which we are familiar to address events separately and haphazardly.

In part this is habit. We are reassured by using the tools to which we have become accustomed. We also have a tendency to compartmentalise issues, reducing the system-in-focus into its most basic elements, trusting that this knowledge is complete and will therefore aid our comprehension of the whole.

2. Economic Growth

Since the Reagan – Thatcher era adopted Milton Friedman’s theories we have been encumbered by necoclassical economics. This model, and its neoliberal political counterpart, quickly became divorced from empirical reality. Yet even now, when we have knowledge of its destructive qualities, and can see it crumbling before our eyes, we refuse to accept its tragic end-game. The truth is simple enough. Decades of declining wages, rising inequality, entrenched unemployment, low social mobility and increasing economic insecurity, now fuelled by a real or imaginary enemy, have conspired to create a patriotic frenzy that neo-Fascist populists like Trump (US), Duterte (Philippines), Hanson (Australia) and Le Pen (France) are taking advantage of in all their angry, indignant, self-righteousness.

The dilemma between free market neoliberalism (growth) and redistributive socialism (fairness) has framed much of our political debate for decades. But it is a totally false proposition. If we go back to first principles we see the economy is actually an evolutionary and adaptive system of cooperative problem solving through economic inclusion. In his influential book The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker defined prosperity as “solutions to human problems”.

In that context capitalism should be the institutional system for rewarding cooperative problem solving and evolving new and better forms of cooperation and solutions. At the moment it falls far short of that ideal. But it does give us clues as to how we need to think differently about a new theory of economics given the complexity and dynamic messiness of the world we have created.

In order to succeed, an economy founded upon neoliberal precepts requires continuous growth. Without growth everything else collapses. The logic of growth at all costs asserts the sole measure of progress to be a rising GDP - the aggregate price of all goods bought and sold during a given period of time. This is the fundamental flaw underpinning modern capitalism and it is the single most urgent issue we should address. That does not mean getting rid of capitalism. But it does mean adopting a different mantra based upon Beinhocker’s definition in order to rid ourselves of its more predatory temperament.

3. Competition

Growth and competition are partners in crime. Growth is easily accomplished when competition paves the way. And in many instances competition is the most crucial driver of growth.

Competition is innate in human beings - a natural corollary of our instinct for survival. It helps us endure in a relatively harsh world. In large part competitive policies and conduct are responsible for encouraging innovation. It is etched into our social norms to such an extent that we take its virtue for granted. There is no doubt that without competition, we would be a weaker and more vulnerable species. But it can also be a destructive force. When competition exists in isolation, divorced from any sliver of cooperation, and when its more grievous aspects are ignored, the outcomes will inevitably be socially damaging.

Today competitive behaviour insinuates itself its way into every part of society’s fabric. It dominates thinking in ways we least expect, and do not necessarily acknowledge. It is a distorting mirror in which winning is everything. In many sporting spectacles, especially where big money is involved, winning has crushed sportsmanship. After all nobody wants to be a loser. Only winners reap the rewards. And so employment is competitive. Sourcing a bank loan is competitive. Access to health care is competitive. Purchasing a home is competitive. Education has become a hotbed of competition, particularly across Asia where learning can start as early as 2 years old, while universities have created a competitive culture that defers to authority and precedent rather than promoting true inquiry and original research.

Life in our communities has become so competitive that we are insensitive to its effect on our thinking. And that is dangerous. Numerous wars and conflicts can be traced back to expressions of intolerance, petty jealousies and “bad blood” brought about by needless competition, while countless calamities have occurred to individuals due to a lack of empathy, bruised egos and damaged pride.

It is also the foolishness of trusting in an obsolete leadership model that relies on individuals taking action to save the rest of us which galls me most. In a rising tide of hate, bigotry, and conflict only the converse can usher in peaceful evolution and that requires a level of cooperative stewardship that is light years away from our stock standard approaches to leading and leadership.

Solutions

Potential solutions to the problems of entanglement, economic growth, and excessive competition are relatively straightforward as long as we can substitute a new context for the shifts that must occur. We need to find culturally acceptable ways to set aside contrived differences, mechanisms that customarily divide us, and reinvigorate cooperation across physical, emotional and ideological boundaries. We need to apply whole-of-system design thinking to the problems we share, for only partial solutions will be found within conventional disciplines. Instead of responding to systemic crises with talk, modelling and measures aimed at causing the least offence to some parties, we must locate constraints within the system as it is currently designed to operate and change these in ways that are systemically convincing. And a collaborative stewardship praxis, based upon empathy, and a common desire to improve one or more aspects of the human condition, must replace obsolete leadership behaviours.

The best antidote to these current conditions is empathic humanitarianism - a fusion of love, inclusion, generosity and compassion. But theorising is easier than practice. It is far more difficult to break free from the decades-long conditioning that has us believe what we have now is the zenith of what is humanly possible, that alternatives are not feasible, or that the status quo applied with a little more rigour, enthusiasm or efficiency, is really all that is needed for humanity to be in a state of enduring global bliss.