Alternative Editorial: Four Perspectives On One Reality
As we go to press, there are a number of headlines competing for front page in the mainstream media. Israel is under attack by the military wing of the Palestinian organisation Hamas. Scientists are in shock reporting the rises in temperature in the UK and the world during September. Two men are jailed for plotting to kill a significant woman: one, the late Queen Elizabeth, two, chat show host, Holly Willoughby. Keir Starmer is claiming a 'seismic' victory in a by-election in Scotland.
While they are not superficially related, it is not that difficult to join the dots. In a world that was designed by Europatriarchal elites (at the expense of the vast majority of men, as well as the rest of the world), we are daily dealing with the consequences of disconnected thinking and acting. Iain McGilchrist would describe this as 'left-brain' thinking - an overemphasis on a way of being in the world that requires you to constantly intervene or act upon a problem. To fix it, rather than nurture its ability to heal itself.
In Israel we have the misery of war: both sides using violence as a way to resolve conflict. Across the planet, we have climate catastrophe as the consequence of extraction: using Nature rather than nurturing it. Daily, there are violent threats to women as a consequence of toxic (throttled) masculinity, taking out its frustrations with life on the physically weaker sex.
Finally, we toil under a party-political system that generates constantly misleading headlines as a way to keep the voters in thrall (and a media using the polarisation as a business model). With only a 34.3% turnout at the recent Rutherglen by-election in Scotland, it is a moment of turbulence for the incumbent SNP. But as the obvious party of UK government in 2024, Labour could still blow it.
While we could pick any one of those entry points and trace it back to such clear origins, we appreciated Roger Hallam's nine-point tweet on X (formerly known as Twitter - another symptom of the same system). Roger draws on the same world of symptoms and identifies similar causes.
1/9 My interview with @bbcnickrobinson at the BBC. “If warming reaches or exceeds 2°C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans.”
2/9 Like other interviews I have done with members of the political class, this one again shows their psychotic inability to see that the real world trumps the political world.
3/9 The contemporary British Establishment is a cult that believes in two extreme worldviews: Vulgar utilitarianism: the complete inability to see the value in doing anything because it is good in itself. ....
/9 Everything is a function of the question “does it work?” – which practically results in a chronic short-termism, and the notion that ends always justify the means (e.g., it’s okay to lie if it will take you into “power”).
5/9 Absolute post-modernism: a complete inability to see that some things are objectively real, such as the laws of physics. Everything is seen as a “point of view” and a “belief,” apart from the belief that everything is subjective which is insisted upon with rigid dogmatism.
6/9 The reason the political class is taking us to civilisational collapse is because it cannot think straight – it has lost its moral compass, and it has lost any analytical intelligence. It exists in its own closed world.
7/9 Worst of all, it cannot feel emotion – the entry point for a change in one’s worldview. When did you see a political or media figure cry about the betrayal of our youth, our country, our world?
8/9 The political class is DEATH itself – there can be no compromise with it. It is never going to save us in the time we have left.
9/9 We can only save ourselves through a political revolution which puts ordinary people in power through assemblies – not because “it will work,” but because it is the right thing to do.
While we won't argue with any of Roger's points, we do have some to add. After decades of observing this pattern of behaviour and six years of looking for news outside the party-political bubble, The Alternative Global has come up with, well, a genuine alternative that speaks to each of these outcomes.
As articulated through the World Human Forum covered in the last editorial it starts with a shift from left brain thinking to whole brain thinking. The quickest way is to shift the locus of attention to where the women work(historically, traditionally and currently) in radically diverse communities.
From there, it’s necessary to notice and amplify the connected behaviours, architectures and values generated and share the learning assiduously. Build a communications system to begin to cohere activity and a media network arising directly from that to tell the new story. Connect all of this to power by constituting a parallel polis and finding the poeticians willing to be Trojan Horses in the Mother of Parliaments. It's all in our four incubators, already in process throughout the world.
The real challenge is to be able to do all these things at once. They are not four projects that are somehow connected but four entry points to the same reality, or four aspects of one system. Those familiar with integral theory will know them as the four quadrants, but the vast majority who don't will be equally familiar.
When we talk about a self that is active in daily life, we are pointing at the developing work of citizens in the CAN of CANs incubator. That same person is also constantly developing their understanding and capacity for the future: developing new education and practices to help them grow. That is the territory of the Future Being incubator. Same single person, two arenas of thought and action.
That individual is, at the same time, conscious of the wider community they are taking part in, aware that it affects their behaviour and thinking. On the one hand this points at the culture we are participating in - captured by the storytelling of the media we read. Here is the work of News from Planet A. On the other hand, our agency is held in the structures available to us - which we are what we are addressing in the New Political System incubator. Every one of us is enmeshed in all four aspects of our reality: personal being and acting, collective culture and structure.
At the same time, each of us has a very unique history of power: individually through our upbringing and collectively through our location, gender and age and the environment we find ourselves in. Where Roger Hallam enters into the picture is very specific to Roger (a farmer whose harvest was crippled by climate change). But his story resonates with activists everywhere who feel that seizing the day in protest against power is the prime activity.
At the same time, his final tweet in the sequence above suggests he has moved on from acting upon the old power system directly—instead, moving towards creating the conditions for communities to develop their own agency, so they can build their own future. This is also closer to the position his previous co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Gail Bradbrook, has recently been developing and promoting.
Our proposition is to go straight to the fractal - the pattern of relationships - which holds the resonance of all the four-quadrant possibilities in a clear set of actions. Building a new political system, in a place small enough to act as a container for the new relationships arising, would do that job.
Join our incubators or donate and watch this space.