Alternative Editorial: Inverting Power
What do COP27 and I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here have in common?
To state the obvious, they are both news items currently making the headlines. It might also be obvious (to the most cynical of us) that both are lessons in futility. In Sharm el-Sheikh, national leaders gather to make demands on each other that they themselves are not prepared to rise to. In Springbrook National Park (not a jungle), no-longer-celebrities compete to be the bravest while staying well within the tv show’s health and safety guidelines.
But there is something else to ponder when observing the phenomenon of both of these repeating events. As we watch them, who are we being? In the case of the gathering in Egypt, possibly the most important meeting of leaders in the history of the world how much attention are we paying it as we go about our daily business? Have we decided that we are doomed if they don't get it right—while applying no urgency to our own scheduled habits?
As Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil throw their lives on the line, disrupting our ability to carry on as normal, do we curse them or pity them? The cognitive dissonance—between Prime Minister Sunak exhorting world leaders to stop the rising of carbon levels, while his own government imprisons young activists trying to help that cause—is palpable. But it’s somewhat mirrored by environmental activists sabotaging King Charles, one of the most effective spokespersons on behalf of the climate in recent years. Why can we not join up the dots even of our own critique?
Either way, what is the gap between our anger (whether against the state or non-state actors) and our passivity? Of course, there are many theories to explain our behaviour, but what is yours? Can you explain your own?
Meantime, while I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is generally an acceptable form of vicarious risk taking, the inclusion of Matt Hancock MP in this year's edition changed the discourse. To remind most of our readers: Hancock was the UK health secretary in the early stages of the COVID pandemic in the UK. He was fired from the job after breaking his own rules about fraternising with people outside your immediate family. In his case, Hancock was caught kissing his secret lover, recorded by hidden cameras in his office.
Maybe because his discovery was so farcical, Hancock thought he could use the programme to laugh it off in public: before the series is over, he might yet succeed. However, as it stands, his fellow jungle bunnies are having none of it. His performance to date tests all the boundaries of political and ministerial privilege. He’s taking a stage to present himself as courageous and honest, while abandoning his constituents at home and being paid half a million pounds in addition to his politician's wage. He is simply repeating the hypocrisy for which he was fired, with impunity. But his fellow participants are not playing ball.
In deep conversation on the cameras, Boy George was moved to tears recounting how his aunt went into hospital with COVID. He was unable to see her to comfort her at the same time as Hancock was breaking the rules, "because he fell in love".
On those terms, Hancock was trying to plead loss of physical responsibility for his actions. If we accept that, we’re in trouble. As the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barret documents, crimes of passion are generally confected motives, aiming to avoid responsibility. They’re only credible if we live in a world where we are surprised by involuntary emotions. Even so, Hancock persists in pleading for forgiveness: convinced somehow that he should challenge others to give him the benefit of the doubt. The inference is that if they don't, they lack compassion. But ex Radio One DJ Chris Moyles will not concede the point: he's too long in the tooth watching politicians faking their culpability.
Again, where do we stand as we watch these displays (even if you’re only hearing it for the first time in this editorial)? Where do we go in our minds when witnessing these stand offs? With both sides refusing to relent and a media channel getting rich on the impasse? Indeed, what are we doing with the hours given to us to respond to the crises? Too many are spent observing our combined and persistent powerlessness.
For many this leads to depression: we sense an approaching abyss, without having any tools or torches to light the way. Others have the capability of switching off and applying themselves to more constructive daily tasks, building a plausible future increment by increment. But the majority are caught between these two ways: wanting and willing to act, but lacking the context for agency. This refers partly to the lack of social infrastructure, that might engage us in meaningful action. But more importantly, it’s also about lacking the mind-set that gives rise to empowerment.
We are taught at school to see ourselves as recipients of learning. We are required to follow the rules and pass the tests the authorities set for us. From this, we find ourselves on a life-long journey of winning or losing at satisfying our betters, as evidence of our usefulness to society. When we succeed - due to inherited resources as much as learned skills - we are surrounded by others who put us on a pedestal, expecting us to deliver the results they are told they cannot.
Of course, we are deliberatly avoiding the more complex (and real) explanations for this phenomenon because it is also true when crudely put. This simple hierarchy of responsibility, with a rare elite at the top of a system of complex actions, robs the majority of us of accountability. We make no difference by tacit, if not explicit, agreement.
In the relative intimacy of a psychotherapists office - or Zoom screen! - we sometimes have the chance to tackle this helplessness dynamic. We are invited to notice how we project our own frustrations with life onto others: making them the cause of our inability to act rather than acknowledging that it is by social design. A story that we have been schooled in and now collude with.
A good interpersonal session might result in us ready to tackle this narrative: to test the possibility that we can take action ourselves and see changes happen. But this gap between perception and agency can also grow bigger. Sometimes, our desires are unreasonable: we want to achieve success overnight. But, through embodying them in 'the other' we make them into a cause we then fight for. "I'll never be successful, because she or he hates me" is a familiar cry. Again, this might have truth in it: but it is not the whole truth of why there is a lack of agency. If left unchallenged, we too often get trapped in that hate cycle ourselves.
Imagine if we were able to teach ourselves, from school onwards, to be intrinsic to the social change we crave? It would start at school with lessons designed to co-create intelligence. Chairs in circles around the teacher, each pupil encouraged to ask the questions they need answered, listening to others too, to become enmeshed with the learning on offer. In this way teachers also develop a new relationship to the information they are sharing; together they crowd source their mutual understanding of a topic. From early on we would understand our role in developing subjectivity alongside objectivity and get a sense of our collective intelligence too.
Or even earlier at home: imagine if parents saw childhood as a co-created learning space for the whole family and that they had the time to do so. That mothers and fathers expected to develop themselves acutely in the years of raising kids, through the growing ability of their children to ask ever more difficult questions? Particularly now, in the internet age, children would play an important role in training their parents for the future.
Instead of looking back poignantly at our kids' childhood and believing that we hardly knew what we were doing at the time, wouldn't we have a very different society if we committed to conscious mutual development? To help children grasp that their growing ability to engage with their parents and other authorities, learning to shape demands that serve everyone, is exactly what growing up is all about?
In his book on Community: Structure of Belonging, Peter Block describes this as an inversion of power, where all the people can come to see themselves as the creators of their own conditions for flourishing. Not simply with bravado, fighting on in the face of injustice. But dynamically, in a radically different relationship between cause and effect. To take on your citizenship - within the wider commuimty - becomes the cause; to shape outcomes is the effect that then sustains you. As Block puts it "the chicken becomes the egg's way of reproducing itself".
It's possible that all of us watching COP27 and I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, alongside our children and the wider community, are in fact, slowly articulating the real questions that matter. The ones that, when conjured with, would result in re-imagining the institutions of the future. "Why don't the people self-organise!?" could become “how do the people self-organise?” "Why do we give MPs free reign?", could become “how can we re-create society in our own, more accountable image?”
Without this evolution of power, as something we all own, there is unlikely to be a future in which we can flourish. 8 billion people are both the burden and the opportunity of this time.