Alternative Editorial: Rude Awakening
Maybe one day we’ll look back at this moment and recognise a turning point.
We’ll look at the UK leadership election taking place in the fifth largest economy in the world - third if you factor in per capita income – and remember the state we were in at the time. And how badly we were served by our institutions, their structure and culture, in their job to turn our ship around.
A planet so badly damaged by centuries of extraction, our poisoning of the soil and atmosphere, that we were set for no-turning-back from multi-species extinction within ten years. A democracy so badly designed that the people had no mechanisms for stopping the old guard from steering us towards the cliff edge, regardless of our anxieties.
A technology field dominated by psychologically gaming the emotional needs of vulnerable people for immeasurable profit. A media so poorly organised that singular old men could control the narrative, for the vast majority of those citizens who should hold the power in this world.
We would remember that the story it told was that the people are powerless; and that we believed them.
While democracy was a cherished ideal, we’d recall, it wasn’t working. The vast majority of people had no choice but to work long hours every day to put food on the table for their families. Even those with privilege had their minds fully occupied with playing a competitive game with friends and neighbours, to see who was making the most gain in status or profit. Very few paid attention to the shambles of our politics - the dereliction of duty paraded by those responsible for our safety, let alone our flourishing. On their watch, the viability of our planet was being destroyed.
Yes, we’d remember, pockets of insightful individuals worked tirelessly to reverse the actions of the majority. As the worst effects of colonisation, industrialisation and the growth economy wreaked havoc on global society and the planet, painfully slow but incremental changes have pushed back from the edges, showing the possibility of averting irreversible decline. Some of our most informed scientists had said “it’s not too late” to do enough to save ourselves.
But only if we stepped up radically and set our minds to making the impossible possible.
What we understood - those of us who were ready to invest in that possibility – were a few basic tenets. That to have any chance at all of collective survival would require great synchronicity, a never-before-experienced determination, and the tools, methods and practices of regeneration placed in the hands of every citizen. We would have to build on all the progress we’d made so far—then triple it. Everyone would have to be given part-time relief from their full-time jobs on the treadmill of the growth economy, in order to pay attention to a momentous shift in everyday behaviour and activity.
Social spaces would have to be facilitated for the coming together of previously aggravated groups, to help them build trust in each other for the work they would be doing together. We would be consciously forging a regenerative culture - inviting people to link their own health to that of the planet. Moving away from consuming as a means to satisfaction, towards getting involved in groups as the way to feel good about the future. None of this would have to start from scratch – there were already pockets of organising like this appearing everywhere. But those who were capable would have had to prioritise building the relational tissues connecting them all, so that even the smallest of contributions to the effort could have traction in a wider system.
We'll remember that we anticipated it would take a miracle. But in the end the shift would not be more substantial than what had recently experienced in the Covid lockdown. A different daily schedule, a new way of looking at the world and each other, a growing awareness of who is vulnerable and who is vital for ensuring their safety, and a pivoting of our economy towards survival. Covid told us that we already knew we could do it.
But when the self-organising skills of communities everywhere had a chance to kick-in – supported by the decades of preparation that skilled facilitators, space holders and conflict transformers in schools, businesses and civil society had accrued all across the country – it turned out to be a lot more compelling than lockdown. The artists had more walls and buildings to occupy, newly welcomed for their wild expression of worlds beyond our understanding—they had infinitely more vitality. The work that women used to do unpaid – relational, emotional, sustainable – became the most valued for its ability to incubate the growth of every individual: simply put, it felt much safer. If Covid’s lockdowns froze us in liminal spaces of un-knowing, they also pulled us all forward into a shared purpose and growing conviction in human potential.
Can you imagine looking back at that turning point?
But that wasn't our mind-set at the time. Yes, we would recall that after a period of global disorientation, when leader after leader was elected peddling impossible dreams, offering citizens a freedom no longer available – Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Morrison - there appeared a small window of possible change at the global level.
With Trump and Morrison demoted, Johnson ejected and Bolsonaro facing defeat from the resurgent Lula, we could have been forgiven for thinking there’s a trend away from their brand of political leadership. At a critical point in this most important of decades something new could be coming.
Instead we got this: an election to Prime Minister, in which only 160,000 people had a vote. Not a randomly selected 1.6k as for citizens assemblies (sortition), but the most die-hard conservatives in the country. When only 2% of the population are members of political parties anyway, this group are the most intensely committed supporters of the mainstream right-wing party in the UK. In a country almost equally divided between Remainers and Leavers, this group voted 75% Leave.
Of the two candidates they got to choose from, one was the most popular amongst the more balanced Parliamentary Conservative Party – Rishi Sunak – and the other Liz Truss, who refused to leave Boris Johnson’s side, even as he joked his way out of the building.
She quickly became the favourite to win. In a style deeply resonant of her departing leader Truss was already claiming that the past 20 years of Tory rule did not deliver on the economy (true that). And that she – who made her career in said administration - will reinvent it.
Having experienced record-breaking temperatures throughout Britain in the course of the week - in which gardens and building spontaneously caught fire - Liz Truss sensitively promised to create a 'bonfire of European rules'. Many of which were restrictions on use of fossil fuels and other green legislation. Despite the vertical drop in trade post-Brexit coupled with the highest level of inflation for 40 years, Liz claimed to be a reformed Remainer and ready to prove Britain is the greatest country in the world. Another politician who would say whatever she thought it would take to win - even if it was objectively absurd.
So what might have made this a turning point in our fortunes? instead of providing the assurance that the new Prime Minister would face the multiple crises head on, maybe this was the moment that the rest of the population saw the reality of our dysfunctional system. That, perfectly legally, 0.2% of the population was due to choose the person making the most important decisions in, arguably, the most crucial moment in our collective history. That if, indeed, the party chose Liz Truss, we the people have no agency whatsoever in protecting the future for our children.
Maybe this was the moment that something flipped in enough people - 3.5% of the population apparently is enough - to cause a new thought to arise and spread across the nation. Namely: we can't rely on those we appointed to represent us, to lead us to safer ground. That we ourselves have to switch on our own response-ability, turn to each other and find the way. And the minute that shift occurred, all of the hard work put in by the system transformers over the past decades, came into view for the first time.
Maybe we will be able to say, “after that, the rest is history”.. Enough people in enough towns and cities around the UK began to self-organise around the models set by early-stage community action networks. Transition Towns, Ecovillages, Fearless and Integral Cities, CAN networks of densely populated places building their own food and energy systems, generating their own currency and 4th sector economies. Using shared and co-owned technology to connect to similar CANs in South America, Europe, India, Nigeria and China.
Telling a new story of possibility driven by the sound of people waking up to their own agency. Re-shaping the public space in ways that even the politicians began to pay attention to and seek approval from.
The beginning of what, from the future, we now call the Regenaissance.