WHY? The most important three-letter inquiry of our time

Introduction and Summary

This post was originally written in January 2017 and has remained relevant to our situation today. I suggested then that the most important act of any would-be change agent would be to ask “why don’t we ask why more often? ” Today I would include some observations on "why, after a pandemic that confirmed the vulnerability of tourism, are we settling for more of the same that aggravated the problems we face today? But as I think you'll see, the answers I proposed 6 years ago apply to that question too. This essay suggests that, if we’re to avoid the fate experienced by dinosaurs,?the act of asking the right questions, and not rushing to quick fixes, might ensure we come out alright. Economists can’t help but some philosophers and poets could come in handy.

Time & health warning:?this post is longer than usual -?a 10 minute read. It's designed to throw a spanner in your wheel of your busyness and encourage you to invest in some thinking time. It doesn't contain a list of fixes but is inspired by some advice given to a young man by a poet and philosopher far smarter than me.

Defining Insanity Again

It’s common parlance to apply the word “dinosaur” to those of us not appearing to keep up with the times. It’s also an ironic choice of analogy. We humans (the?sapiensvariety) associate dinosaurs with having small brains, huge appetites and overly large bodies that contributed to their demise. Yet, as a total species, dinosaurs have survived 230 million years with their most successful branch – birds –outnumbering humans by a factor of several hundred.?The main branch was wiped out by a meteor that collided with planet earth and there wasn’t much the dinosaurs could do about it. They were lucky – out in the jungle chomping away at a juicy leaf or hapless mammal one minute; unconscious, wiped out the next - an instant, efficient change of guard.

The species?Homo sapiens?– a name we have assigned ourselves – only emerged from the hominoid version of primates a mere 200,000 years ago yet, from then to now, has brought us to another cataclysmic milestone in earth’s history – the Sixth Mass Extinction. Our impact on other life forms, made in the equivalent of geological seconds, far outweighs that of the dinosaurs but our destiny could be the same. Unlike the dinosaurs, however, our passage to extinction, should it happen, will be extremely messy and take a long unpleasant time - unless each of us choose to wake up, grow up and step up now.

The crucial difference between the two species is that, unlike our distant reptilian cousins, we will be the cause of our own demise. Being wiped out by an asteroid was simply bad luck for the dinosaurs. Creating the conditions that undermine our own life support system and threaten the survival of humanity and countless other species is simply plain stupid. Continuing with business as usual in ways that aggravate those conditions has to be insanely suicidal.

Insane because all the immediate challenges and wicked problems facing humanity in 2017 are man-made so they can be un-made. Every institution, organization, association, operating system on the planet is the result of human vision, imagination and thought and therefore can be re-envisioned, re-imagined and re-thought. We even have the technology and the money to feed and house our entire population and regenerate the ecosystems we have damaged so effectively in less than 200 years. Anyone who’s half awake, with just half a brain and a Facebook or Google account knows this. But life, known in current society as business goes on as usual.

Surely the only question we have to ask of ourselves at this point in history is. “Why do we continue?” “Why do we pretend that tinkering with a flawed system will produce a different solution?” “What are the root causes?” “Why, when our hearts know that it doesn’t have to be this way, are we so slow to wake up?”

So why are we not asking WHY enough?

I’d like to suggest there are at least 3 reasons why we’re not asking the more difficult “why?” or “what for?” questions:

1.????The prevailing system disempowers those most affected by decision-making.??A huge gap between “the public” (a nice word for the masses) and the “experts” is widening in parallel with the equality gap.

The sheer complexity of every aspect of life today means that very few of us feel we know enough to form considered opinions let alone judgments so we fall back on what we feel, what we experience directly and our sense of the mood of the group we wish to belong to (as gathered largely from what see on the telly and read on social media).?And that position is perfectly understandable given that 90% of all human knowledge ever created has been produced within the past three years, so how could any of us be expected to keep up? A recent survey in the UK showed that 88% of the people surveyed indicated they found it difficult to impossible to following the economic discussions undertaken by politicians and media, effectively disenfranchising their rights to express an opinion to experts.

In tourism, for example, residents of a destination are often the last to be consulted on decisions regarding the way a destination is marketed – there are branding and media experts brought in for that; destination planners?(if you’re lucky) and speculator-developers-investors (if you’re not) determine what should be built and when; management franchises operate “the plant” with personnel who circulate the globe with no affinity with the places they are sent to and specialized agencies are hired to recruit and manage the workforce - all knowing that their success will ultimately be related the extent they help the economy grow, regardless of the consequences. These experts all have ways of naming the place – as “product,” “experience,” “asset,” “investment,” or “brand.” Residents, on the other hand, simply call it “home.”

2.????We’ve been persuaded (indoctrinated) that “it’s the economy stupid!” and that we stupid ones don’t have the expertise to fix it.?Should the economy fail – and it’s been globalized - then all else will break down. Our world, our societies form part of one larger system, an?Econocracy ?– a term coined by some bright economics students with the audacity to question the relevance and validity of what they are taught.?Authors of the book of the same name, define econocracy as:

A society in which political goals are defined in terms of their effect on the economy, which is believed to be a distinct system with its own logic that requires experts to manage it.?The Econocracy

An econocracy assumes that the purpose of an economy is to grow to produce more financial wealth because without money nothing worth having can be had.?All actions that require political support must now be defined in purely economic terms i.e. in terms of their contribution to GDP – the final arbiter and measure of success. Talk about the state or health of the economy far outweighs any discussion regarding the health of society, the environment or even its citizens. For example, in 2014 the OECD had to calculate the financial cost of mental health issues in the UK as totaling 4.5% of national GDP in order to gain attention. The plight of those suffering and the fact that so many were experiencing such misery was not taken into consideration to the same extent as its economic cost. Similarly, conservationists and biodiversity proponents have to put a financial figure on the economic value of any living species to justify its conservation.

Experts of whatever discipline within an econocracy are neither required nor trained to ask the question why? Theirs is to answer “how.“?It is not in their best interests to question?“the system” but to ensure it operates efficiently and effectively. Over the past 60 years commercial interests have insisted that our educational institutions prepare our young to enter a workforce that, until very recently, needed professionals, operational experts, doers and problem fixers to improve efficiency and competitiveness. That’s why the topic of sustainability has begun finally to capture the imagination of the mainstream – it can be incorporated so easily into the ethos of business (by cutting costs, gaining competitive edge, become more efficient) without needing to challenge any basic premises regarding purpose or outcomes. Crossing an “ontological threshold” (jargon for seeing reality differently) is needed for that and that’s a threshold too far for most.

In an econocracy, economics is the lingua franca and economists have extraordinary influence. But their language is unintelligible outside their discipline. The curricula at universities support indoctrination into one form of economics based on theoretical assumptions and equations that bear no resemblance to the real world. This doesn’t, however, prevent such experts from assuming a position of influence and entitlement that furthers their distance from the rest of society. It certainly explains why they can act so surprised when their interpretation of need differs from that of an electorate.

Every year 10,000 economic students graduate and go onto become regulators, civil servants, consultants, journalists and traditional economists. These people are society’s economic experts and we rely on them to manage the economy on our behalf. Currently they are being trained (not educated) to speak in a language no one else can understand and to slot in unquestioningly to a system in which they have considerable authority while citizens do not. They are imbued with a confidence that it is possible to have the knowledge and tools to understand, measure and manage the economy without input from the public……

……What all this means is that the people who were entrusted to run our economy are in almost no way to think about it critically. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it is now possible to go through an economics degree course without once having to venture an opinion.?Source:?The Econocracy

3.????Our experts, including scientists and futurists, don’t necessarily agree with each other but have found a way to keep us amused and distracted.?

While morality, religion and science once provided firm absolutes, each are now considered relative and open to interpretation. For centuries we could rely on science as a source of empirically proven “fact.” Now, non-experts are expected, required even, to take certain truths on faith – i.e., to throw their weight behind one expert or another. Experts used to be called upon simply to advise with facts not shape policy or legal judgments. But since our academic institutions, our experts and their consultancies have had to sell their services commercially while serving the econocracy, their integrity and impartiality has been severely compromised. Statistical analyses of multiple data points can now be manipulated to support many differing and sometimes opposite conclusions.?So now we have ‘facts’, ‘alternative facts,’ “truth” and “post truth” “whatever that means.

In short, we rely on experts whom we don’t understand enough to question and who have their own interpretation of the data according either to their “perceptual filters” or who is funding their endeavours.?Hannah Arendt, survivor of Auschwitz and famous political theorist had this to say (see:source ; clip extracted from TheBrowser.com)

The consequence - never have we as individuals or groups become more vulnerable to manipulation by those intent on wielding power. Never has power been more concentrated, more subtle, or more pervasively and instantaneously applied. We find ourselves caught between two dystopian visions whose creators were influenced by their own experience of dominating power.?In his novel?1984, George Orwell applied his experience of fascism and imagined a world of physical coercion, restriction of freedom of movement and expression, preceded by the widespread diffusion of propaganda and the burning of books. In?Brave New World?Aldous?Huxley projected a much more subtle, clever and insidious approach – the soma holiday.

"..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon..."

Sounds like “Experiential Virtual Reality” + some magic mushrooms to me….see the?latest distraction .

Social critic Neil Postman in the forward to his book?Amusing Ourselves to Death?did a far better job than me of comparing the two futures:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil?libertarians ?and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 2017, there’s no need to burn books (that’s messy, crude and obvious), today's autocrats simply order files to be deleted and confiscate computers without warning; titillate our appetite for endless distractions; and satisfy our latent curiosity with ever more immersive trips to ever more exotic places until virtual reality renders it unnecessary to move at all.

The Antidote to Extinction

The antidote need not be expensive, and requires no planning permission, nor investment. It is simply the willingness to ask the most important of questions?together?starting with: Why is humanity worth sustaining?

Our mainstream economists, as currently trained, can’t help us. They have left the why questions to philosophers. An econocracy places no value on philosophy. Fortunately, there is a huge and rapidly expanding cohort of deep questioners out there. One of whom is Daniel Wahl whose book?Designing Regenerative Cultures? inspired this post. He quotes his mentor David Orr who, in response to the question – why is humanity worth sustaining? states:

If our debate does not go further than the language of neoclassical economics, then we are done for!?Because you cannot make an economic argument for human survival, you have to make a spiritual argument for human survival. We are worth it, and we are worthy of it in that sense.

The adjective “conscious” implies an awakening.?After a deep, deep sleep the patient generally asks, Who am I? where am I? why am I here?

When that happens some poets and philosophers at your side could really help. So I’ve brought along Rilke for his admonition, T.S. Eliot to serve you with some starter questions and Christopher Fry to give you a sense of time and timing.?

What answers do you have to the question: why don’t we ask the question Why more often?

If you have some original thought provoking WHY? questions, please send and I'll post a collection in a month's time.

Author’s comments:?I’ve been working on Conscious Travel, mostly as a labour of love, because I agree 100% with Daniel Wahl’s observation that we would do well to follow Einstein’s advice and make sure we are getting the questions right before we rush off offering solutions that will only prolong business as usual or patch up the symptoms of a system that is based on erroneous assumptions. We will be destined to fail unless we learn to ask and live in the deeper questions.

If you have any question or thoughts of your own please share in the comments section or email me: [email protected]