Working Backwards Towards Better

Two months ago my second child was born. And once more I've found myself oscillating back and forth between joy and terror. Although neither feeling ever really went away (they never do), the daily onslaught of the god-awful, together with global crisis and conflict, deep uncertainty about the future and the agonisingly close call of almost losing a loved one, have certainly not made things easier. It's not easy for any of us.

Yet one question, or nebulous set of questions, keeps coming back to me over and over again...

Firstly - What have I done? What am I doing? What can I do? There's just so damn much going on.

But more importantly - How can I help my kids develop the resilience to not only face, but live in and engage with an increasingly complex and difficult world? How can I help them develop a realistic understanding of those difficulties and complexities, alongside a sense of both individual and collective agency?

Basically...How can I give them hope?

This is not just something parents ask themselves about their kids, but questions I'd wager we all ask ourselves, about...ourselves, and each other, as friends, family, colleagues and partners. What is hope? And where does, or where can, it come from?

Here on this platform (like most places in the public sphere) we are used to people couching hope in marketing for one thing or another - a technology, a breakthrough, a company, a project or product, an individual or a political party. But as wonderful as many of them are, any hope provided is fleeting, uncertain and superficial. These are things that can be corrupted and co-opted, misused and misdirected. They can veer of course in relatively short spells of time. And while many are genuinely positive, many others silo and prevent much needed action, by simply giving people 'stuff' to do.

Sometimes, in spite of the aspirational qualities a lot of these things exhibit, the sheer performance of it all, can make one feel worse, not better.

Belligerent Optimism

In recent years, and partially in response to all this, I have developed a bit of a habit of referring to myself as a 'belligerent optimist'. Something which often gets confused. A lot of people think that optimism these days is delusional, or a kind of wilful ignorance. To be fair, many do project optimism over the top of the plainly terrible. While others sometimes think I'm being literal about the belligerent part and am just grumpy all the time. Which...well...sometimes.

But I'd like to explain a little bit about where the term comes from.

When I say I'm a 'belligerent optimist', what I'm saying is that there's an ongoing battle, between optimism (or hope) and cynicism, which I just patently refuse to loose. It's not grounded in denial of all the very real and often overwhelmingly horrible things going on the in the world. It's grounded in defiance and no small degree of faith.

Yes, those horrible things exist. But we absolutely, positively, can not let the bastards get us down.

It's a belief, not that everything will be fine, but that enough people will be smart enough, will care enough and ultimately get pissed off and motivated enough to do enough about it, to make a difference, over time and at scale.

I'm not claiming it's the healthiest approach. It involves a little bit of conscious filtering and yes I guess the occasional dash of wilful delusion. But it's mine. And it does the job of keeping my head above water.

But that's not what I want for my kids. I want real hope.

And although we all acknowledge that it's important, I think that one thing we miss a lot of the time, is that hope is as much about history as it is about the future.

The Foundations

Real hope has foundations. It's based on systems and practices and effective arrangements of institutions, laws and values. It's based on norms and precedents established over time. Individual positive developments help, sure, but only in the context of a long term trend, with a goal in mind.

Merely clinging to an idea isn't hope. It's cope. And that's what a lot, dare I say most, of us are doing. Coping.

Hope is a vision of a better future, with follow through, and the learned agency of advancing both individually and collectively towards it.

To give our kids (and ourselves) that, the first thing I believe we need is a vision that is describable - in detail. We need to be able to articulate its component parts and how we might build them. What opportunities do they provide? How do they work? How are things better? How are we better?

So much of our effort, particularly in the political space, goes towards being reactive and dealing with things as they happen. And that's totally understandable. By it's very nature it's more urgent. But it's also fundamentally more divisive as well. It feeds into the frenzy. Yet, if you ask a thousand people what kind of society they want to live in, most of the answers will come back remarkably similar. The destination is always more unifying than the route. The what is less controversial than the how.?

By failing to describe what the future we are trying to build actually looks like, we are throwing away the opportunity to contextualise everything else we are doing. What may seem like a cheap attempt at gamesmanship or pandering without it, would suddenly make more sense as part of that bigger picture.

Yet the importance of the destination, doesn't undermine the importance of how we get there. It should however frame our approach. We've all herd the adage about starting with the destination in mind. But then very often people go back to the beginning and ask themselves what to do first.

I believe that's the wrong approach. I've been lucky enough to meet a bunch of fantastic strategic systems thinkers over the years and the one thing they all share in common, is the tendency to 'work backwards' from the goal.

That means, that once you know where you want to go, however grand and seemingly impossible, you ask what it requires and take one step backwards. Those goals don't need to be immediately achievable either, they just need to be practical steps backwards. Then you do the same. And again. And again. And again, until you arrive at the present.

Then you have what you need to do first. Then you have a plan and a roadmap, to often seemingly impossible goals - whether it's reversing climate change, reforming the United Nations or creating a post scarcity Star Trek esque utopia. Doesn't matter.?

The final thing I think is important relates to what I said earlier about history. Individual things aren't a reliable source of hope. An established succession of them starts to be. For a while there, it felt like things were getting better. That feeling may have been illusory and it certainly wasn't felt by everyone, but what absolutely seems to be the case is that hope has taken a nose dive in the last decade and that corelates strongly with the erosion of numerous long-ish standing trends - whether it's a smooth amicable transition of power or the rejection of fascist ideas in popular discourse.

Building Inevitably Better

To get it (hope) back and build it further, we need to rebuild a history of positive developments. This time, with a goal. This time, with a plan.

That's the world I want for my kids. And it's the thinking that has changed my approach to everything over the last few years. Trying to focus on what I know and love (mostly democracy stuff and space stuff). Trying to think backwards from how I want those things to be and how I want them to relate to each other. What sort of institutions need to exist. What rules and practices and precedents. What happens before that and before that all the way to what needs to happen now.

I know it doesn't seem hopeful right at the moment. I know it seems like everything is falling apart. And yes, this may be the 'belligerent optimist' in me saying so in spite of all the evidence to the contrary...but I genuinely reckon we can do it.

So now, my questions are different. And they're directed at you.

Where are we going?

What happens before that?

And before that?

What happens now?

And what can we do for our kids, to help them feel like a better more hopeful future is not just possible, but inevitable?