Alternative Editorial: Whole System Acting
Week 19 of the Covid lock-down – will it ever be over? One reason that we continue to count the weeks is because we sense the historic nature of this period.
We knew that, as highlighted by the IPPC - the 2020s were going to be hugely significant for the survival of the human race. But we hadn’t anticipated that the entire globe would have a period of collective – though not uniform – experience that invited us to focus on the problems we face together. Some of us don’t want that aspect of this moment to end.
On a personal level, the mainstream challenge (that we can accept or reject) has moved from recycling our plastic in the 2000s, then going vegan in 2010s, to wearing a mask today. Each stage brings the problem of our dying planet closer to home. Whether we buy into the whole analysis or not, these actions help us to experience our agency, at the heart of the systems that define our future.
While recycling started voluntarily, it has more recently become regulated to the point of serious fines for offending in some parts of the world. Veganism – highly eccentric, not so long ago – has grown massively as a popular trend. While its role in solving the climate crisis is still being debated, it weaves responsibility for protecting sentient beings into our everyday practices of life.
Popular with young people raised on internet pictures of adorable animals with distinct personalities, this may become the bigger rationale for veganism over time. The annual celebration Veganuary reported 400,000 people ‘giving it a go’ at the beginning of 2020 of which – with a sample of 6500 surveyed this week – 79% were sticking to it.
Wearing masks is a new frontier. Are we response-able enough to put up with the discomfort of covering our face, for the sake of the health of our community? The UK government ummed and aahed about the efficacy of this action – changing its mind frequently (ref), and thus allowing the debate to rage in social media. Yet the scientific evidence has been clear for a long time.
But check this table for the global premier league of mask wearers. While many of our UK mainstream news media mock President Trump for his recalcitrance, the UK remains in the relegation zone for awareness, well below the US. Given the power of our English-speaking media to influence others (British soft power), we would do better to look at the stories and messages we are using on ourselves.
This is not a simple moral message. After all, some of the countries doing better are stricter or more socially cohesive than ours. The role of religion in their public spheres – Buddhism, Islam, Christianity – is also a strong factor. If anything, the UK and European countries occupying the lower half of the mask-wearing table are those most culturally “post-authority”, interested in the freedom and independence of the individual.
In some ways, the argument for freedom hasn’t changed that much since it was being actively explored throughout the 20th Century, facing what was called ‘the communist threat’. This implied a direct trade-off between freedom and safety: according to the Cold War narrative, you couldn’t have both.
Yet how much of the freedom many opted for, in 1989 and after, now shows itself up as false? What’s on offer is not the risk-laden freedom to roam the world as pioneers, but more often the freedom to consume whatever we want, when we want. Understandably, most populations are still barely aware that their desires have been generated in them by super-skilled and psychologically-informed advertisers, in service to their paymasters.
Many of you reading this will think it’s ‘old hat’: we understood this decades ago, in the era of media studies! However, this period of lockdown is obliging us to refresh these critical methods and practices, which can effectively illuminate our false trade-offs.
In this podcast hosted by Terry Patten’s State of Emergence series, Monica Sharma – who has been working with the United Nations for x decades on transformative leadership – re-describes freedom as “moving into full connection with life’s possibilities”. What we often refer to here as response-ability.
Trump campaign now sells masks!
This describes both the internal journey of waking up to our own instrumentalisating by consumerism – and its parent, the growth economy – and also our ability to act upon those insights. Knowing and discussing is not enough. Our re-imagining and then co-creating of new methods, infrastructure and outcomes must manifest as response-ability – the ability to respond well and purposefully to our circumstances. Without that, our freedom is disconnected from our reality: an intention only. For some, that can feel more like being trapped than ever.
Over this almost five month period, The Daily Alternative has posted over 80 blogs that show an acceleration of response-ability for the multiple and interdependent crises of the environment, human agency and psychosocial health [ref, either from category or search result – where’d you get the number?] These don’t come much from those with traditional forms of power – government, business, elites. But mostly from those outside of the spotlight: rebellious scientists, civil society innovators, groups of citizens innovating in the face of scarcity. Often they are women who have always seen old problems with different eyes, now finding confidence in their ways of operating.
We’re not looking at a clear arena of possibility. Each week is a challenging mix of ever-deeper woe and excitement: new limits of human ignorance and ingenuity. Maybe the two are inextricably linked through our lens of innovation: the worse the mainstream media reports our predicament to be, the more determined we are to find a different perspective.
A clear example would be the reports of mass reverse migration in India from town to village (ref), wherein the villagers were always framed as hopeless and helpless. That week we reported on the many neighbourhood and village level innovations – tech, energy, governance - coming out of India (ref). (See also this week’s blog on India’s township-level “water revolution”).
This response is not intended to ‘put a brave face’ on everything, no matter how hard it gets. But it is telling a story about the Indian people’s power and agency in our news media that – for a variety of reasons – won’t be covered in the mainstream. If we only ever read about our powerlessness – personal, social, global – it will be too hard to build an alternative.
For most people viewing here, there is a still a considerable gap between reading good news stories on the DA and being able to feel positive about their own real-world situation. Hope itself sometimes has an ethereal quality. It’s not the same as the embodied energy of creativity when you yourself are directly engaged in making change happen.
To some extent, that’s the distinction between the reports we make in the Editorial, and those on our Daily Alternative blog. The Editorials are largely where we talk about what we are co-creating with others. And what you would be involved in if you became a co-creator.
This week – as every week, to the best of our ability – our networking stretched from the deeply personal to the communal to the global (I-We-World):
· Sharing and experimenting with new practices of consciousness and health with, amongst others Mindfulness entrepreneur Jamie Bristow or vegan ‘social cook’ Mia Jacobs.
· Plotting and planning with neighbourhood and parish governance innovators – Neighborocracy developers Nat Whitestone and Joseph Rathnam, Flatpackers Peter Macfadyen and Pam Barrett, Stephane Kolinksy and Penny Tarrant in Plymouth, Mike Riddell in Stoke and all the community transformers at Trust the People.
· Inviting Immy Kaur into the Elephant Room (ref) to share how whole community engagement is generating energy and solutions in Birmingham.
· Deep designing with next-economy transformers at the UK level with Ctrl Shift (ref) or globally with Bounce Beyond.
· Learning from outstanding exemplars like Eduard Muller working with the Costa Rica tourism industry. Or Meenakshi Gupta at Goonj – social entrepreneurs who “aim to build an equitable relationship of strength, sustenance and dignity between the cities and villages”.
· Add to that the ever-deepening conversation and building in our community of democracy builders and advisors, in the Future Democracy Hub.
Perhaps the most energetically exciting conversations we had this week were with digital entrepreneurs Lauren Nignon and Charles Blass, spraying system altering memes from CicoLab; Margaret Rose of the Future Law Institute and Carin Ism working directly on the architecture for effective global governance in the age of citizen participation (blog next week!). This is where technology begins to match our capacity for imagination and creativity to deliver new forms of collective power.
While this might seem like a hugely diverse and eclectic bunch of actors pulling in many different directions at once, there is a deep continuity between them; a sense of inter-dependence, in transit to a new system. While it’s early days for coherent, systemic co-creation, the vision for that is common to all of them. Each is developing - and sharing - the tools, methods, structures and cultures that will transform our everyday lives.
To become part of that movement does not require immense leadership capacity or skill: it’s much more of a simple choice of getting on board and bringing your own unique experience to the mix. As we move into week 20 of the lock-down, the role of each citizen, in determining outcomes for everyone, gets clearer. Each one of us has the possibility of agency – whichever way we choose to use it.