Alternative Editorial: Choices We Don't Have To Make
How often in the course of a day do you find yourself in this debate: whether it’s better to prioritise direct action, or to create the conditions for change? For example, bringing down a government, versus focusing on education?
This is not only a political dilemma: every one of us faces it in our personal lives. Should I be using my time to further my career, working all hours? Or should I be developing my internal skills, for mental or physical health? Some would say this is a competition between quantities and qualities of life – are we driven by accumulation and achievement or by the desire for ease or freedom? Are we pointy-headed – always going forward – or more rounded, constantly growing our capacities?
When you look at a tree do you see it growing upwards, reaching for the sky? Or do you perceive it as growing, outwards, spreading the rhizomatic networks of its roots and adding rings to the trunk each year? The truth is, as nature demonstrates, there is no choice. These two kinds of actions are interdependent; one simply won’t work without the other.
Although this might sound banal – we mostly understand that humans need nurturing in order to thrive – it’s surprising how often we act as if we have to choose one priority over another. If a tree kept growing upwards without a complimentary growing deeper and outwards, it would fall over. Similarly when we prioritise growth over social development, or achievement over maturity, we become increasingly fragile. Our ability to progress is undermined by our vulnerability to outside forces, preying on our strength and resilience.
At the same time, there is a false choice between whether we prioritise individual over collective goals – whether for growth or development. As we’ve examined regularly in our editorials, the internal development of individuals relates directly to the cultural enrichment of society. They are in a dynamic relationship—there’s maybe even direct correlation between them. We can observe this most easily when higher levels of education lead to a stronger economy. But also when there is more capacity for diversity in a system, which can lead to more creativity and innovation.
The tussling drives that make us human
But what exactly is internal development? After all, in our own wealthy society in the UK, education is a constant value and every child has a right to go to school. Why then are we still so incapable of extricating ourselves from the dangers of our badly-steered systems? Despite all the recent developments in emotional literacy (ref), we are still getting the wrong balance between teaching knowledge as facts and knowledge as wisdom. It’s a huge issue and one that Tomas Bjorkman, Jan Erikson and others are focussing on, through their launch of the Internal Development Goals, which they posit as the complement to the Sustainable Development Goals.
How does that address the crises we find ourselves in today? All over the world the Corona virus has taken control of not only the headlines, but also the culture. If party politics traditionally invited us to debate the economy - access to material needs of money, houses, services – this challenge is different. We find ourselves caught up in high-pitched arguments about power and freedom. Not in abstract, historically defined ways, but facing practical daily situations: who can speak, why vaccinate, how to organise?
Some will say politics was always about this and they would be right. What is class war if not about the right to make choices on your own terms? However, this new era of politicisation cannot find itself well reflected in parliamentary party divides. There are people on both sides of the Left-Right divide who reject the rise of people power – whether as a ‘woke’ agenda, climate activism or a demand for choice over vaccination. The Left / progressives often exacerbate polarisation by naming any strong emotional demand ‘the Right’ – conjuring up fear of fascism. The Right / conservatives’ weapon is to characterise care and social responsibility as oppressive and joyless.
Yet across the board these emotional needs for autonomy (the right to choose), status (the right to be seen and heard) and security (to feel safe) are common to every human being (see the input of the “human givens” into our work here). Should those of us who are constantly undermining the government [questioning the efficacy of a “broken” official politics?] be surprised if at some point more people want to take control of their own lives? Don’t all of us, reading in this space, have that drive to reinvent power? With some of us more driven by the need for achievement, others for meaning and purpose? These tussling emotional drives are what make us human.
Out of all these drives, the need for autonomy seems to be highly prevalent amongst the recently politicised. It’s different from the call for justice or fairness – a demand projected upon the institutional powers of government, banks, law courts. This demand is one we all experience internally as we grow up in family, school and friendship groups – the desire to be able to make your own mind up about things and take action accordingly.
Winning that battle in the early stages of life is a journey to maturity. With the right circumstances, we learn that ‘my freedom’ has to be seen in the light of what’s best for everyone, in the family, the classroom, the friendship group, the community. But even as we do that, we learn that the broader society is not so even handed. Some people have more freedom than others to move and act. In fact, our society is heavily weighted towards the freedom of elites.
As we say all the time here, we’ve been in an information and connectivity revolution for over 30 years. When more and more people wake up to the structures of power, discovering the many ways – cultural as well as material – their freedoms are predetermined by social-political design, these emotional needs demand new expression. What is social media if not the vehicle for people waking up to their own voice – seeing it in the public space, finding others who feel the same?
Some will believe fervently that everything wrong can be fixed by organising around their demands, as if they can create a tabula rasa and start again. Yet, as Anthea Lawson so keenly describes in her book The Entangled Activist, the penny slowly drops that we ourselves embody the very system we are trying to escape from.
Without factoring our own ‘personal revolution’ into our strategy for the future, we will find ourselves constantly frustrated. My need for freedom, for example, cannot simply be met by others: I have to find my own resources to ‘be free’ within a rapidly evolving reality.
For that reason, creating the personal and shared space for understanding our emotional needs and our response-ability is fundamental to any effective futuring. Self-sovereignty cannot be skipped on the journey to social cohesion.
At the same time, if travelling along this path, many will find themselves with unexpected bed-fellows. For example, take demands to become more local, more independent, more resilient – extending from designing new forms of participation through to growing our own food and energy. This extends across climate activism, community wealth developers, municipalism—but also to new groups arising across Europe around the right to choose to vaccinate. All imagine the new system Buckminster Fuller predicted will make the old one obsolete.
However, without the explicit desire to bring all kinds of people together – including those who don’t appear to care about the future - any one of these groups will have only limited traction. They will remain in the ‘us and them’ paradigm, competing for audiences, investing in each other’s failure: the framework that sabotages so many great human endeavours.
A whole-system approach can cope with the whole of us
The tragic death of six year old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, starved and tortured to death by his parents in Solihull may seem a very different set of issues to raise here. However for those involved in social work long term, the question of deep system change is ever present.
While the next few weeks will see a very familiar pattern on the front pages of our newspapers, blaming social workers for ‘ignoring’ the signs he was in danger, with an opportunist PM pledging to “find who failed him”, little will change. Look at the headlines around the death of Baby P, a tragedy now years ago.
The work that Indra Adnan and Pat Kane in Re-imagining Social Work (RISW) begun at that time, revealed the same problems of lack of autonomy for social workers. They were operating in a care system that was neoliberal, top-down and achievement-driven. Fatalistically, social workers often saw themselves as ‘ambulancemen for capitalism’, picking up human wreckage in the aftermath of deeper forces. They were damned if they did intervene; and they were damned if they didn’t.
RISW articulated a demand for more complex, self-organising, relational, community-driven support systems. It imagined reinstating every citizen’s agency within a supportive community as the goal of social work. Hilary Cottam’s book Radical Help is a later blue-print for such a developmental vision. Yet despite so much evidence, the approach is only slowly getting the attention it needs. Too slow, sadly, for Arthur.
Yet watching everyone across social media – including Premiership football clubs – express their sorrow, it becomes part of our shared story of ‘politics is broken: the recognition we need change in a big way. But let’s pause: do we now all turn our attention to social work, away from nurses or the homeless? Create another new priority?
Our own sense is there is no need to choose between them. When we apply the principle of autonomy, we invite each part of the system to play its part, evolve itself – yet all within the growing story of our common emotional needs. Thanks to the democratisation of knowledge, we know much more about the human condition, its frailties but also its intelligence. With this knowledge, we can design better.
In our role as systems convenors A/UK is committed to platform and amplify this emerging whole system capability, at seven points of emergence each week (see our front page).
We are never lost for choice.
