Alternative Editorial: What Is Freedom?
Freedom as connection: from Innovation Observer
Day one of Week 30 of The Shift and we are all on tenterhooks. With only two full days until the US Presidential election, the UK government has just announced a return to lockdown across the whole of England. Many of you reading will already know the result of the election and the response to Johnson’s new attempt to control the progress of the pandemic.
Unlike Will Hutton in this week’s Observer newspaper, we are avoiding predicting outcomes. Partly because it makes us a hostage to fortune. Recent history – Brexit, UK General Election (the sheer scale of Labour’s defeat) and Trump’s first victory four years ago – teaches us to be prepared for surprises. But more because, whatever the developments over the next few days, the real challenge to Western and indeed global society remains the same. Namely, how can people the world over come together to face the ongoing major crises of the environment, well-being (in which we include mental and physical health), inequality and division.
The politics of division
The last in particular stands in the way of us ever solving the first three. If you doubt that, consider how in both the UK and the US most recent elections, the losers were parties that offered the most generous benefits to the poorest people. If the ‘winners’ are rejecting that path to the future, what are they choosing instead? It’s a very simple question in a complex field of possible ideological responses, but an important one. Especially when so many of the people who voted for Boris Johnson were those who stand to lose the most.
We ask that question with all the caveats we have described before, most importantly the knowledge that voters are heavily manipulated in their voting choices. While this has always been the case – political propaganda is nothing new and always succeeds best with the most resources – the role of social media in controlling thinking has never been more visible. Given that we are not likely to see the end of manipulation by power elites any time soon, how can we become less vulnerable to outside interference with our minds?
Will Hutton’s article draws attention to important information that Asian societies have been clearly more successful in dealing with the epidemic than American and European equivalents. He equates our democratic culture directly with our failure to control the virus:
Is Covid-19 the virus that killed not just millions of people but also the supremacy of western economies, liberal values and convictions that democracy is the best form of government? As France and Belgium lead Europe back into national lockdowns and Britain is set to follow, no European country, whatever their record until now, is free from a surge in infections... However, autocracies and communitarian societies in Asia are faring much better; China and a host of Asian countries are managing to contain the virus and grow their economies. Taiwan has not seen a locally transmitted case for more than 60 days.
Hutton then goes on to make prescriptions for our improvement: we must be more like the Chinese. Not more compliant, necessarily—but more pro-social, less individualistic. The role of the state must be to offer more protection to the citizens as they face difficult times ahead. Who could argue with that? Well, at this moment in time, it could well be the majority of voters – and if not, then around half who appear to be voting for more individual freedom and less state care. If we think that all we need is 51% of the vote to change society, look again at what happened in the USA and what could happen after November 3rd.
How do we get out of this divide? Could it be that Hutton is not acknowledging or not rating the human need for autonomy? Or is it that the media and its patrons have weaponised that need – creating a false dichotomy between responsibility and freedom in order to trigger people’s emotions in times of turbulence? The news that Nigel Farage is in the course of rebranding UKIP as an anti-lock down party called Reform UK is political opportunism: without any means or context for people to become more autonomous, there is no net gain.
Does someone who cares for their neighbours lack autonomy? Is putting on a mask a sign of weakness? Or is knowing how to keep self and others safe a sign of self-control – the very capacity we need for building trust between us and the best conditions for individual freedom? How can we test that supposition when the public space is so polarised?
The Flatpack Democracy campaign for local-level collaboration and participation across the divides is the only real and practical offer on the table. When that is backed up by a Trust the People movement of community transformers that does the job of listening properly and drawing people into relationship with such a council, we have a new political system in the making. When that combination means not only a reconnection of people to power but also to the land, we can start the journey to recovery.
Looking away from this political battlefield – as we are committed to doing – there are weekly signs that people are finding new ways of coming together to solve the major problems party politics fails to all over the world. Almost all of them rely on a sense of collaboration and community, but without any sign of loss of freedom.
If anything, they signify an increase in what we see as interdependent qualities – autonomy, responsibility and agency. For more on this, see our many editorials on how citizen action networks (CANs) create a socio-economic-political space for people to flourish together.
Start with immersion - where people with urgent needs are coming together
For example, the entrepreneur, business advisor, founder of The Flourish Initiative and co-founder of Femme Q Karen Downes– featured before in our Elephant series here – has been visiting Eduard Muller’s project in Costa Rica (featured here). In brief, Regenerate Costa Rica is a complex, whole system project that links the change right on the ground - connecting indigenous wisdom with the science of soil renewal – all the way up to the national and international level.
Where 30 community members decide what happens next on their land in Costa Rica
At the top end, the whole of the tourism industry is being reformed in service to the changes needed for Costa Rica’s ability to face the environmental crisis. Both Karen and Eduard are core team with us on the Bounce Beyond project described here aiming to shift the globe towards the ‘next economies’.
Here are some excerpts from Karen’s daily diary which help us understand more directly the journey she took to understand reconnection. How a CAN not only answers the material and emotional needs of people by reconnecting them to themselves and the land. But also, how that connectedness gives them a whole new vision for the future of the globe.
I’m starting with a few lines of transition, where Karen registers the shift she herself has to make from living in the relative safety and comfort of SW London – a place of Northern hemisphere sophistication and privilege – to the rougher, less spoiled world of Nosara that is already feeling the strong impact of the loss of biodiversity and climate change.
‘Life is either a daring adventure or its nothing’ (Helen Keller). Arriving in Costa Rica I am out of all that is familiar to me, that which is routine and comfortable has gone: A daring adventure can simply be the willingness to step outside and go beyond the known, the habitual or the comfortable. COVID has asked us to step beyond the known, past the predictable and into something that we could not have imagined before. I feel like my environment is asking this of me.
I need greens for dinner and it’s fetching not shopping. Going along a wet, muddy lane to the man who has grown your supper: who tenderly picks the lettuce, Bok Choy and rocket, bags it all up. You say Gracias, the transaction is done for today.
Caught in a storm and soon a flood, she observes the easy way the people help each other out:
The GPS advises 2.5 hours if you take the gravel road or 3.5 by asphalt. No problem I thought until I reached the river crossing. A vegetable van has become stuck in the middle. (I) witnessed five attempts of generous drivers trying to help this man out in order to continue and maintain his business of supply..Each time the rope broke we all watched from the sidelines, cheering on the next committed volunteer.
When Karen eventually sees first-hand the community end of the Regenerate Costa Rica’s whole-system project, she is already wired to participate:
My adventures yesterday were so worth the endeavour to witness these projects. I have spent the day with kindred spirits who have dedicated their lives to rehabilitating, resurrecting and regenerating this country. These projects are enabling people whose lives have been decimated by COVID and are working to rebuild and reinvent a new way of taking care of themselves and their families.
Like all of us they are wanting to take their lives and the livelihood back into their own hands and to find a new way forward. Training is provided to each person, family or community that stands up and says ‘a new way forward is possible’. Beyond how they were living in the old system... in service to the profits of industry. They then take their commitment to transform the soil upon which they live and begin with a new zest for life: a new sense of pride and self-esteem.
Most impressive for me was my final stop where the landowner has transferred his property to 30 families for a single colón so they could come together, grow their own produce and more. A new set of agreements were established between the families: new ways of working and working practice. All created by their own community as opposed to an outsider telling them how it should be. A community empowered and thriving. Isn’t that what we all crave?
Maybe travelling to Costa Rica made it somehow easier for Karen to re-orientate herself to the changes that are possible and vital. Those who know her will agree that her values were always there – no deep change has occurred. However, what may have changed is her conviction in the possibility: until we really step into community ourselves, it’s harder to access.
So my advice back to Will Hutton is: don’t stay fixed on the opposing narratives coming out of China and the USA. If you want to experience human freedom at the very heart of social agency, maybe start with immersion where people with urgent needs are coming together. You might be surprised how much the ability to overcome separation is the very key to personal liberation.
