Alternative Editorial: On Another Planet
For the past two weeks in this editorial space, we have been emphasising our ambition to 'land' Planet A more solidly in the lives of the communities around us. Whether that be with you, our readers, or the wider networks and society we occupy. In brief, this means re-imagining our bio-psycho-socio-economic-political system: identifying in what ways this possible future is already here, in the fabric of our day to day lives.
We don’t want to be complacent about its unfolding - it is eminently fragile and febrile. But we want to direct our attention that way and invest our hopes in its flourishing. Not least, such a re-imagining should offer us a different focus for our energies and help us defend ourselves against despair.
Yet many people resist the Buckminster Fuller notion—where rather than fix the old system (incremental change, always subject to hegemonic power) we should build the new one that makes the old system obsolete. They fear this is wishful thinking, avoiding material determinations: the really dominant dynamics of power are still with the growth economy and inherited privilege. Bucky's day was before the digital age; it may have been too difficult to evidence what has been arising as a genuine alternative.
What we’re describing as Planet A is not simply an imagination space operating in a vacuum; a dream from which we awake as soon as we come out of our collective meditation or entrancement. We conduct this imagineering in a definite place, which we name the parallel polis. This is an emerging ecocivilisation, made up of self-conscious, cosmolocal community agency networks (CANs), appearing all over the globe at this time. This week we heard from another such group - Synergia Cooperative Institute who are launching a Co-operative Commonwealth with 22 countries from Jan to June this year.
These CANs offer effective, place-based infrastructure, in order to incubate the hugely diverse energies being released through the agency of the internet (facilitated by social media) and picked up on the ground (cosmolocalism). They manifest as intense, relational spaces within towns, cities, neighbourhoods and bioregions. In experimental mode, they generate the tissue of early-stage civic containers, capable of supporting the socially and emotionally vulnerable, while also birthing vibrant initiatives. As many of these new constitutes (temporary, fluid institutions) are stewarded by women, they bring wholism: excluding no one. Offering space to every kind of intelligence, form of agency and capacity to participate in each community.
In the process they meet difficulties. Trying to unlearn old ways of rigid, overly linear organising, while generating something more organic and responsive, is not easy. Those who depended upon hierarchical structures to create order, fear being overwhelmed by those who are comfortable with messiness. Having previously imagined clarity and simplicity in their top-down delivery of maps and priorities, they have to take time to process the complexity on the ground - and see its promise.
At the same time, if the aim is organic self-organising, there are rich resources to learn from: indigenous wisdom or feminine intelligence often moves to integration faster than anything we would recognise as “civic” today. In many ways, these skills and ways of being - unpaid, unrecognised, patronised – were driven underground and therefore avoided being co-opted by the system that destroyed the planet.
Today, these patterns of relationship can accelerate fractally through sharing, storytelling (and the technologies which amplify them): the more beautiful, disruptive and ambitious they are, the more attraction. People want to get on board and be part of something energetic: even more so when it offers them meaning, purpose and access to solutions.
Can any of that promise help us today? Can it challenge climate breakdown, inequality, mental health problems? Can it help the NHS? Yes to all of those challenges. But we should place them on a continuum of efficacy, related directly to each of our own engagement. In other words - it depends on you.
We assert that the parallel polis offers a constant space for pre-figurative action. All these experiments see themselves as actively generating new tools, methods and learning for a regenerative future. Even so, our project is not without goals. Working with all those described by the parallel polis, we anticipate we should have laid the foundations of a thriving planet by 2030.
Let’s test this against an urgent requirement, called for daily in our media and political platforms: the re-designing of the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service).
Unless this design aligns with the perspective and systemic practice of Planet A, it cannot be part of the solution in 2030. But there are three dimensions of transformational change that might make it so:
1) Systemic. The problems the NHS experiences are endemic to the system it sits within:
· Money for the NHS is a political football in a capitalist society that is failing the planet
· Decision making is overly top down and politically motivated - lacking intelligence from the heart of the NHS, its patients and personnel
· The NHS is still seen as a corporation with manageable productivity. It should instead be seen as a living organism, whose outcomes depend upon the humans implicated - both patients and professionals
How can this be sidestepped? None of the political parties are likely to solve the problem within this system. They need partnership at every level with communities of practice operating within a different ethos and using alternative forms of agency. For example, the relational care systems described in Hilary Cottam's Radical Help. Planet A brings those fragmented initiatives into relationship with each other, so they become coherent with communities, generating a feeling of protection that currently eludes us. (In our 2002-2004 project with social work authorities in Scotland, these relationships were beautifully concretised as friendly, creative hubs for social well-being). This is not at all about “privatisation”, but about the realisation of care systems that already exist, developed through the co-ownership of the CANs.
Planet A describes a system of governance that grants the parallel polis autonomy, in a healthy partnership with the state. In that sense, the NHS will take vibrant form in neighbourhoods everywhere
2) Agentic. We need an NHS that anticipates the wider collapsing socio-economic-political system. In other words, what new understanding of health, ageing, psychology and well-being should drive a more effective system? Core to this would be a subtle grasp of the context within which a human can flourish from birth to death in the present and future ecosystem.
This involves the creation of new narratives of health and well-being, driven by the core human desire for better, more connected lives, already evidenced across the internet.
3) Dignified. We need an NHS that understands the evolving human and their developing agency. There should be a constant dialogue between community care providers and patients, generating their own health programmes within a wider system of evolving care systems nationally. This does not add up to the 'independent' health care proposed in the 2000s, where vulnerable people were left on their own and carers clocked in for 10-minute visits, determined on a case-by-case budget. It's more like designing for time, space and listening so that both patient and professional are participating in the solutions.
Nice ideas, you might say: no doubt these are being discussed every day. in a meet-up near you - including in party political gatherings. At the same time, the likelihood is that any genuine creativity is being trammelled by a lack of belief - a call for 'realism' within the current structures. The obligation to fit within the Overton window of acceptable reason is guarded by policymakers or philanthropists. How does our ordinary wisdom get meaningful traction, in the face of print-out promises from politicians that improvements will take shape in the distant future?
A parallel polis operates with a different kind of will - one that arises from a different way of being in the world. One that not only desires a planetary consciousness, but one that has already committed to that - experienced it. This is what Vaclav Benda and Vaclav Havel, who invented the term parallel polis, were wholly committed to: a life outside and beyond the communist system they were subject to when they wrote Charter 77.
In this scenario, those consciously standing on Planet A are constantly prefiguring the future - not just theoretically with their minds, but in an embodied way, with their daily activities. Their feedback loops are within the new reality they are creating. For those of us still 'trying' to get there, this is hard to imagine as a human capacity. It's more familiar as a story about artificial intelligence: defined by the observable data input, not by the many hidden limitations of our historic trauma. (Having said that, the deeper likelihood is that - as Timnit Gebru and Mo Gawdat both describe - the data going into AI cannot avoid being structured by historic trauma and biases, of colonialism, racism and sexism).
In many ways, this contested space is the frontier of human exploration today and there are several different explorers on the terrain. Some are spiritual, others are quantum physicists. Inhabiting our avatars (see our blog this week), we're donning our existential space suits and getting out there. Join us.