Last week we explained why The Alternative Global is shifting its focus to hosting four incubators (access them here), why we chose those four and, crucially, why none of them will make a real impact without the other three.

Like four vital organs within a body, their ability to function is interdependent. And to some extent, the body that contains them all represents a reality - or, more modestly - a social imaginary. A set of imagined ideas, practices, orientations, sensibilities that binds a society together. What we are always hoping to achieve through our activities is to identify a new way of being, feeling and acting in the world that presents a genuine, even irresistible alternative to the reality we are upholding today. One that helps us experience our developing agency - individually and collectively - as a means to regenerate the planet.

As we go into more detail about how to run these incubators, the task of holding many forms of agency - physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual - at once gets more challenging. The people who will be co-creating the incubators have very different strengths, skills and desires. More than that, they have diverse orientations and experiences. Because of their different journeys through life, they also have individual takes on what is needed at this time.

Mutiple forms of agency

Going back to Ken Wilber's Theory of Everything, some of this can be explained by the conditions we are living in and our history of power. In response to crises, some will want to build hierarchical structures and strong institutions to gain control over uncertainty. Others, often those with less vulnerability, favour more fluid, risky strategies. Some are motivated by fairness, others by the possibility of winning over others.

Even if we attempted to identify a 'best way to be', we will always be operating in a world of diverse forms and choices. Hence, our capacity for being with difference becomes core to our new reality arising. That doesn't mean an embrace of chaos, but it does mean an advanced infrastructure capable of complexity. Again, much like a body.

We keep coming back to the body metaphor because it easily captures the difference between something that is alive and constantly evolving, and something that is not. Heavyweight institutions, bureaucracies, overly centralised organisations - all require a more machine-like response to orders from the top in order to keep running smoothly. Liveliness is discouraged, obedience to targets and behaviours rewarded. Growth is lionised but too often - like cancer cells - at the expense of the environment in which they grow.

Humans on the other hand, in our private lives at least, endeavour to build relationships, friendship groups, families, communities that support our needs - things beyond simple survival. We've talked a lot about emotional needs before - belonging, meaning and purpose, status, conection. But there are also spiritual needs – “spiritual” meaning, in this context, our desire to go beyond the present circumstances, becoming more than we can be right now. Having people around you who share your desires for an unfolding future makes it possible to take action in your day-to-day life. As if you are living into the desired future together.

Public life heists the truths of our private lives

While this sounds obvious and mundane, it's not a logic that has been attended to in our public space, which thrives on division. Division itself depends upon massive heists of the truths we nurture in our private lives. For example, in the UK, that we can be represented by the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in the most important decisions of our lives, that the two are opposites—and that we must choose. While websites abound for helping people to make that choice, it's often reported that people are surprised by their own misunderstanding of their political allegiances. In the UK, the first past the post system makes it ever more difficult to be subtle in our decision making.

Over-simplifying the issues makes politics itself vulnerable to manipulation. When one party is emotionally articulate - often with an intent to trigger rather than inform - they will take advantage over a party that judges deliberate emotional activation immoral. See here for an example of how easy it is to win the vote of a 'hardworking person' simply by recognising their emotional needs. Even when the politician doing so has no concrete commitment to helping that person thrive, except by encouraging his own ingenuity - it's the emotional connection that delivers the vote.

In this era of waking up to injustice, yet rarely having any new solutions, attempts to disaggregate (or separate out) the big problems are helpful, by opening up a more complex political sensibility. See here, for example, the Conciliators Guild (based on the Human Givens model of psychosocial therapy and their Table of Political Elements, which hopes to encourage a re-building of the political sphere.

Another might be the Consilience Project, in which Daniel Schmachtenberger illuminates the meta-crisis and calls for a 'third attractor' to help reintegrate the public sphere. Neither of these offer 'solutions' but they dissolve the binaries and introduce a greater capacity for engaging in future development.

Complexity is inherent in community ilfe

A more feminine approach might be to see the complexity described as inherent in our communities - mostly held in the private space of our thoughts, relationships and constant reimagining of a better world. One that we are all naturally capable of, given time and space to be self-sovereign and better related to each other. A complexity that has been the fieldwork of women's unpaid labour through time immemorial - raising children, offering community care, mediating conflict at international level.

It's a view that might suggest that simply shifting to more feminine ways of working, would be a good starting point. As the United Nations did when it began to prioritise women as the recipients of aid to the global south.

Yet that shift seems to be the hardest thing to do in a party-political culture, where women themselves are obliged to take on the dominant, rigid, binary structures and cultures in order to get selected, let alone elected. When globally lauded First Ministers Nicola Sturgeon and Jacinda Ardern resigned within weeks of each other, both cited the political discourse - within parties, through the media - as undermining our ability to discuss the real issues. And that their work as individuals, hoping to represent that challenge from the top, inevitably leads to burn out.

A new political system with the capacity to meet the multiple crises effectively, needs a new architecture of participation for complex citizens and their realities. To be able to transcend the existing political culture, this new architecture must design for a level of autonomy outside of the current party politics - to help people to come together in the face of such divisive forces.

One that distributes the responsibility for outcomes away from single or small groups of politicians (known as kitchen cabinets) or other forms of singularly leading from the front. We have been proposing a parallel polis capable of hearing and holding the collective dreams of the people as they come together.

A new political discourse

Bringing that into being will itself generate a new political discourse - one that arises directly from those people stepping up to that challenge. Willing to bring their whole selves into the conversation about the future. Not simply submitting to an ideology, taught from the front of a classroom. But to the truths they are waking up to every day, in this era of facing the crises our behaviour has caused until now. To be “waking up” needs safe spaces at ground level: enough room and time to think about what needs unlearning and what now needs doing, given our rich resources as humans with technology.

The architecture should be as living and breathing as the autonomic system each of us has that quietly keeps our organs interconnected and working to a steady beat. Adjusting itself to cope with temporary anomalies in the body, always prioritising full functionality (without us having to control each moment).

Could artificial intelligence play this “autonomic” role for us more widely, in the near future? Such an autonomic system would surely have noticed that our current way of living is actively destroying our ability to survive, long before we were conscious of the dangers of extinction. In the same way our body uses pain to cause changes in lifestyle, such a socio-political-economic autonomic structure would have given rise new global lifestyles capable of saving the planet.

As we have seen, simply saying so is not enough. Listening to Greta Thunberg in conversation with Amol Rajan on the BBC, it's clear that she is feeling and hearing something he cannot grasp. As he tries to decipher her call for a better response to the crisis she often bursts into giggles at the inadequacy of his questions.

Even so their mutual respect is evident: between them they hold open the space of possibility from which something new might emerge. They invite the listeners into their conversation to help them make sense of what to do next. How different this is to our regular political debates (Question Time anyone?) that shut down possibility through the mutual shaming of all voices, leaving us all bereft.

Possibility reveals action

For that reason, each of our incubators - launching on April 3rd - will host at least two interrelated arenas regularly. One that holds the emotional and spiritual conversation that can give voice to feeling as well as learning on the path. That can acknowledge the past in the present, but also tune into the possible future arising. This might take shape as a facilitated check in with co-creators from all parts of the world, to hear about their lives: their struggles and breakthroughs. We'll share music and art to help us express what's difficult to describe.

The second arena will be for the active building of the infrastructure for that future, appearing in real time. Designers will work with engineers and builders of all kinds, bringing together the tools and practices already available to piece together an autonomic system for the new body politic. One we can all step into as the old one continues on its path to collapse.

Even though it will be no more than a small fractal model to start with, once built, it can release its DNA into the wider system and help birth similar systems, wherever it is invited to do so

Alternative Editorial: First Change the Conversation