The Hames Report

My Pact with the Devil

For us billionaires it was always about playing and winning. Winning is the main game. And money - that goes without saying. While winning is our passion, money is our addiction. An adrenalin hit. We are good at winning, which is very fortunate for you. Although most of us inherited our wealth, you profited from how we used our capital to stimulate growth. Naturally our drive and acumen worked in your favour too. Let’s face it - you had an easy ride on the back of our generosity.

We discovered way back in the dark ages how we could win and keep on winning. The idea was astonishing in its simplicity. Those of us born into wealth very quickly worked out that the best way to control you, the earning classes, was to keep you happy. By producing all the material needs you could possibly want, and promising you even more, we lulled you into a false sense of bliss. I don’t wish to be rude, but the rest was a walk in the park.

By convincing you that you were free to live your dreams, most of you felt no need to object to those things my lot craved – like power and affluence. You overlooked our misdeeds - including tax avoidance practices we felt compelled to use now and again, and dodgy investments in media, weapons trading, drugs and gambling. Some very smart marketing campaigns even convinced you that we shared the same goals and were all in this for the same things. With hindsight that was a masterstroke.

It was how we got you toiling so assiduously while demanding more and more stuff you didn’t actually need or want. Increasing productivity became your goal, and capitalism the means of achieving it, simply because we told you this would fulfill your every desire. After that you were so distracted - busy looking to wherever we pointed - that nobody thought to challenge the illusion.

It didn’t occur to you that we were spinning a yarn to get us what we wanted. We knew trickle-down economics could not possibly work. But that was irrelevant as long as you believed us, and were able to wait patiently for your situation to improve, which you did. Similarly, the sum total of human activities cannot be compressed into a single measure. Think about how ridiculous that is. Yet you embraced the totally implausible notion of GDP being a suitable gauge of both wealth and wellbeing. You were easily hoodwinked.

It was not always that simple of course. Especially when smart-arse radicals like Karl Marx and Mao Zedong advocated more socialist views, pacifists like Gandhi opted for peaceful civil disobedience, and reformists like Mikhail Gorbachev threw a spanner in the works. It became even more difficult when some of you noticed our methods were crooked, our products made you sick, and that the economic arrangements we had so carefully devised and ingrained within your psyche, actively prevented you from becoming as wealthy as us.

But we managed it. We played upon your naivety, ignored or snuffed out your pathetic protests, surfed the zeitgeist with the help of our media baron friends, and kept repeating the false mantras of capitalism, like endless growth, for example, over and over again until anyone who deviated from the official narrative was regarded as a fool or a heretic.

In the end we won. Our system was adopted en masse, the world over. Even in the most unlikely of countries like China. The ruse was to make our takeover look like a seemingly benevolent and beneficial model of statism, while rejecting and stoking fear in people’s minds about alternatives. Any alternatives!

It is true that a few of you, led by activist Naomi Klein, academics such as Shoshana Zuboff, and progressive philanthropists like Tom Steyer, have been keen to point out flaws in democracy, together with capitalism’s more predatory nature. Cries for reform were something we have had to refute on an ongoing basis. Capitalism tricks people into slavery by lauding comfort, security, safety and the illusion of freedom, followers of Klein liked to claim. They were correct of course. Thankfully you failed to act on such assertions. The revolution was in your hands after all. But why would you incite rebellion when we kept telling you the economy was booming and almost everyone was deceived into believing us?

Over decades of testing, developing and refining the economic model, we had learned one very important fact. Societies are mostly comprised of compliant, idle, yet decent individuals like you, who are unmoved by political deceit and corporate fraud. As long as you are safe and secure in your immoderate comfort you do not care about government policy - or much else come to think of it. Indeed, you far prefer the certitude of psychological shackles over the stress that comes from real autonomy.

Once we had worked that out a variety of dubious tactics helped advance our cause. By adopting the manipulative advertising of Edward Bernays we persuaded you to buy stuff you did not want. By persuading you to trust us, and to turn a blind eye to the anomalies inherent within representative politics, we were able to bend democracy to service our needs rather than yours. By acquiring the support of influential economists, buying a few self-serving politicians, backing the state with our wealth and declaring that state sovereign (by forcing people to consent to its law and order, no matter how perverse, unjust, or violent that law and order might be) we were able to grow our considerable wealth and power, unconstrained by those of you who might have had the gumption to bring us down.

That was how we won. And over the past decade we have begun to wallow in the luxuries true wealth affords. Tax as an optional extra. Trust funds, think-tanks, family offices and PR advisers that further our own interests. Private extravagances, and a lifestyle a majority of people like you cannot begin to imagine. We are the mega-wealthy. The one per cent. And we own the world.

Do not be tempted to tell us we have it all figured out though, or that we have all bases covered. On the contrary, we failed to notice one vital factor that could soon be our undoing: the unforeseen consequences of our growing affluence.

In spite of our private jets, ocean-going yachts, and lifestyles that eclipse yours many times, we did not pay attention to the inferences of a world in which the gap between the cream of society, of which I am a part, and the vast majority of citizens like you, was widening into a chasm. Deceived by our own propaganda, but blind to your true circumstances, only now are a few of us beginning to fathom out how economic inequality could threaten everything we have created.

As you can imagine all of this came as something of a surprise - so quarantined had we become from the reality of a shared existence. Working tirelessly on feathering our own nests often meant letting our relationships with family dwindle. We missed out on a lot of fun you take for granted. We hurt just like you. We are racked with self-doubt just like you. Our kids still get sick. We don’t have any real friends and we suffer anxiety and feel sad - just like you.

The biggest shock derives from the fact that having more money, faster cars and bigger homes, has not made us happier than you. So please do not tell me we had it all worked out. Only now are we starting to appreciate that no amount of money can prevent us from becoming old and dying. Worse still, the world we built is facing unprecedented challenges on so many levels. If I sound fearful it is because I am.

Until recently we deliberately tried to maintain the very delicate balance between production, consumption and wealth creation. We have been resisting any kind of adaptation to new realities, pumping trillions of dollars into maintaining the status quo instead. This has kept the major banks and large corporations afloat. It also bailed out high-net-worth individuals like me. Sadly, these self-serving tactics have done nothing to help you, or to change your fragile situation. Within the context of the current pandemic the economy will continue to contract leaving many more of you high and dry.

In the past I would not have given this a further thought. But now it is not tenable. The world of finance has become disconnected from reality to such an extent that we are all part of a worldwide financial casino. For now, I am on the winning side. But tomorrow could well see me lose everything that brought me pleasure. The financial instruments I have used to increase my wealth are perfect for those wanting to bring on a financial end-of-the-world scenario. And that is exactly what they seem to be doing.

Of course, I can hang on longer than you will be able to. I have my own bunker and can hole-up until the dust settles if the 5 billion or more poor people on the planet should ever decide to bring my dream run to an end through revolution.

But what then? I confess I had not thought that far ahead – I employed others to do that for me, but they only asked me about cash flow, the balance sheet, investments. If I manage to cling on and survive, with my considerable wealth all but gone, and the financial world I used to inhabit consigned to history, what then? If others see how I helped hasten the destruction of our civilisation with my self-serving attitudes and noxious products, in what stead will I be held with a reputation in tatters?

The future of wealthy people like me is by no means assured. Like power, material wealth can be fleeting. If you are able to survive the coming crises of geopolitical upheaval, socio-economic disruption, and a heating climate, people like you might even be in a better position than me. You are the makers - the true creators. There can be no viable future without ordinary men and women like you. I, on the other hand? I am one of the takers. My fortune was built on stealing the future from your children while extracting your goodwill, labour, and gullibility. That makes me expendable in tomorrow’s world. I am sorry I did not understand that before today.

How can you ever forgive me? More pertinently, after everything I have done, and consciously not done, how can you believe this confession now? Will you leave me behind, or take me with you as you fashion a world without such inequities? It is possible that only my children and their successors will know the answer to that question.

The Great Unravelling

In case you hadn’t noticed, although I am not at all sure how you could miss it, many of our most life-critical systems are rapidly unravelling. The current pandemic has exposed some very deep fault lines in our civilisational model. Some of these are cracking wide open to reveal the abuse of power and the accumulation of wealth on a scale previously unthinkable. Both threaten our very existence.

Political systems are in crisis. Globalism has stalled. Work has dried up. Conflicts and state-imposed sanctions are being prosecuted with greater enthusiasm under a media smokescreen of public safety and healthcare. Meanwhile the production of goods and services has slowed to the extent that the entire world is in recession. At the same time, inspired by nature showing us a gentler, brighter side to our existence in terms of what might be possible, our ability to break through the cognitive threshold in which we have been trapped for so long is picking up pace.

Some individuals, who wield enormous power and influence, are insisting that we return to what was as soon as we can. But even their minions are having doubts. Those whose task it was to lull us into an obedient slumber, so as to manipulate a contrived need for more and more stuff, have themselves been distracted. Having taken their eyes off the ball they are now frightened we might simply refuse to do as we are told in future.

This failure has meant that we no longer need to waste emotional energy on the hope that life will eventually return to normal. The probability is it will not. That is good news. It means what we habitually ascribed to be "normal" behaviour was as irrational and self-destructive as any sentient species could have contrived. It also means that life is clumsily and casually edging towards a new-found wisdom, where health and well-being are at least on par with material wealth.

This is the inestimable gift left by the pandemic in memory of its many victims. But, like the virus itself, this gift is useless without the physical life-force of informed action to cling to. Ranging from fresh models and mindsets, to more sophisticated moral codes designed from alternative ontological perspectives, and including peaceful civil disobedience if and when that is needed, we must not wait for others to undertake the work each one of us is being called to do. This is our destiny. This is the moment we have been waiting for.

The history of human evolution has taught us one fundamental thing about life: it is abundantly vibrant and hard to keep in check. It will not, indeed it cannot, be confined. Sooner or later it will break free. Rejecting all manner of repression and censorship it proliferates, expanding into new territories and crashing, awkwardly at first, through barriers that would otherwise contain it.

And so when we look at the struggle universities are facing today - declining student numbers and staff redundancies, the provision for anyone, anywhere, to study anything online, mounting debts for courses where credentials trump content, and intensifying vocational irrelevance given workplace automation - it is not time to get back to normal but an opportunity to challenge the very notion of what a university education is for.

When we witness police officers blatantly and unashamedly abusing their power, when we are given no reason for killings in custody, when police are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and tear gas in order to keep order, and when racism is ingrained within the policing fraternity and culture, it is not time to get back to normal but an opportunity to find better ways of protecting the public.

When economists continue to insist that there are no better alternatives to market capitalism, with its array of increasingly prejudiced features of growth, debt, and the unimpeded accrual of personal wealth within the framework of unbridled competition, it is not time to return to normal but an opportunity to reinvent economics to work within planetary boundaries, utilize natural laws, and create prosperity for everyone rather than an ever-shrinking minority.

When both corporate and social media resort to blatant bias accompanied by histrionic frenzy, constant attempts to misinform, opinion bubbles substituting for the truth, trivial fictions and the celebration of celebrities behaving badly, it is not time to return to normal but an opportunity to recast the role of information in a complex pluriversal world.

When we hesitate to return to the daily grind, with its overcrowded public transport and seemingly endless traffic jams, knowing that all we are doing is undertaking pointless work, for slave wages, to pay for a home that remains empty most of the day, while spending the remainder of our income on things we don't really need, to impress people we haven't met, the time has come to take stock of our life's purpose and move towards what really matters.

And when nation states fall back on their sovereign powers to suppress human rights, destroy smaller nations branded as “enemies” through the imposition of tariffs, sanctions, and state-endorsed assassinations, refuse to act in cooperation with others to curb carbon emissions, and continue to patch up the present rather than to confront the future, it is not time to get back to normal but an opportunity to reinvent the concept of the nation state in a borderless world.

Right now our civilisation is on the brink of a physical, psychological and moral collapse – an punctuation point of momentous significance. For this point happens also to be a crossroads where only the path ahead leads to a world in which human enterprise can flourish, generating a society of healthy abundance, in a world that works for everyone.

Which path we choose has yet to be determined. The path ahead will be an adventure, full of hurdles and unforeseen problems. That is in our nature. If we baulk at that prospect, considering it too risky, if we dawdle, recoiling at the thought of so much uncertainty, or if we prefer the comfort of retracing a familiar track, our lives will return to some level of what used to be considered normal. To some extent.

Taking those few retrograde steps will at least guarantee certainty. The certainty of more pollution, of continuing global heating, loss of species, and of an uninhabitable planet. More to the point, each one of us will have to deal with our personal shame, the knowledge that our generation is leaving an insurmountable problem to our children, burdening them with the dilemma of how to construct a future from the remnants of a world we stole from under them, while they were watching.

What is Education For?

I have skulked around the sidelines of the education industry all my life. Occasionally I have ventured into its alluring orbit only to beat a hasty retreat as I apprehended, again and again, how unaffected by its own product [that is learning] educational officialdom can be.

Educational establishments in many countries actually resist acquiring information of any kind that could imply the need for structural change of the institution itself. By that I mean information that challenges how and why things are done, explicitly using that knowledge to effect internal transformation, in alignment with alternative external conditions, is as a general rule considered unwarranted, and subsequently either avoided or ignored.

Conservatism of this kind is not always a bad thing. Pedagogical continuity, for example, can help preserve exotic languages, wisdom traditions and ecological knowledge that might otherwise be discarded.

But the question of what education is for changes from one era to another. Is it to facilitate the development of a moral compass to guide an individual through life, or to generate a society capable of doing new things, rather than just repeating what other generations have done? Is it to show us how to love beauty? To impart the power of critical thinking? Or is education simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to the next, as the English poet G. K. Chesterton would have us believe? There is no correct answer.

Most people would probably respond yes to all of these - and more - depending on the social context. Initially, schooling was aimed at imparting basic literacies, such as reading and writing. Later it evolved into a means for the developing of minds within an explicit moral framework. Very soon it became a critical factor for participating in the community - a medium for inducting young people into civic society. More recently it developed two quite discrete functions - one vocational, focused on equipping students with the practical skills needed to pursue a trade, the other dedicated to a career in the professions.

The question concerning what education is for remains particularly pertinent in a world beset by wicked problems, quite a few of them existential in nature. Can we get closer to an answer by studying it from within the emergent context of the human condition? What should education be for in a post-COVID-19 world?

A feature of the current pandemic is the way apparently impregnable institutions – banks, universities, airports, the USA – have been shaken to their core. This disease, particularly the universal panic it has caused, signifies not just a mere blip, from which we can return to normal, but a portent of a new fragility, especially in terms of globalised infrastructures and supply chains, and our total reliance on digital networks.

It is worth noting that previous pandemics have exposed fault lines in society, which then ushered in substantial socio-economic changes. It was only after the Black Death that the ruling elite realised the world would be a much safer place if everyone could read and write. Likewise the novel concept of a welfare safety net for under-privileged citizens was introduced following the Spanish Flu of 1918. It is highly probable that a post-COVID-19 world will lead to equally transformative changes. These will inevitably impact education.

So in a post-COVID-19 world what is education for? What role should education play in creating a healthier, adaptive, and empathic society? And is that a different role to that which it played in the past?

Most of my children were homeschooled, for no other reason than we were constantly on the move and it seemed like the most effective way to achieve some kind of continuity in the face of such a peripetetic existence. At various times I have been a tutor, a lecturer, the Dean of School, and a professor – working with pedagogical approaches from the radical to the mainstream. I have also advised various institutions, within the context of the future, in terms of curriculum design, branding, governance and organisational development. So to suggest that I am reasonably au fait with major issues confronting education would be an understatement.

To those outside of the industry it might appear to be an easy way to earn a living, given the lengthy vacations and relatively small number of hours actually spent with, or in front of, students. That is an illusion. Teaching is one of the most demanding professions there is. Yet we place muted value on the contribution education plays in shaping the future of our society.  

Because of that, together with the tsunami of exponential change that is sweeping away centuries of defunct praxis today, we stand to miss the opportunity of stepping into new epistemologies, or of approaching human evolution from alternative design ontologies. Both are essential today as we stare the possibility of extinction in the face.

That might be considered a melodramatic statement. But at no time during my various stints in the education industry has anyone asked me to seriously consider what education is for. In fact there is much confusion and heated disagreement regarding that deceptively simple contextual problem.

In order to comprehend the profound nature of this matter, and its importance to us in 2020, it is instructive to examine the issues from within the dynamic of an expanded now. I should also make it clear that I am setting aside, purely for pragmatic reasons, significant learning traditions that have germinated in other cultures, and at other times, by focusing my attention purely on modern Western practices.

Even from within this narrow frame of reference it is clear that the fundamental rationale for learning shifts, sometimes considerably, according to the prevailing societal narrative. In turn, the educational product responds by reinforcing explicit tenets relative to that society’s perceived needs and stage of development. This mutual benefit is vital for any deep understanding of the role learning can play in creating an abundant future for the next generation.

There are three interconnected social ecosystems that warrant our scrutiny – work and the workplace, higher education, and schooling. The ontological thread connecting these is a window onto underlying assumptions regarding the purpose of education.

Possibly since the genesis of the industrial revolution, and at least since the early years of the 20^th century, the espoused purpose of education has been most commonly expressed as the way individuals can acquire sufficient knowledge and skills to compete with others in getting a job. Work in our modern society, after all, is both the motive and the means whereby individuals are able to trade their labour for money - which can then be used to purchase goods and services in what I refer to as the never-ending cycle of desire and consumption. But for this system to function, we must believe (i) that hard work is good for us, in a moral sense, as well as for our mental health and wellbeing, and trust that (ii) there will always be an endless supply of work for us to do.

These hypotheses have been central in directing the attention of educators on preparing students for the world of work - even resulting in the specific structural, pedagogical, and curricula delineations that separate specialist technical training and university education today.

As the push for economic growth developed, and science, engineering and technology became more and more vital to producing the goods and services needed in a globalised world, a further fracturing occurred. Institutions in the higher education sector began to dedicate their resources to teaching and scholarship, vocational training, or advanced research - with relationships and funding tied to those choices. Less utilitarian programs, in the arts, classics and humanities for example, became inconsequential in the public mind.

Schools and schooling, meanwhile, became the one-size-fits-all device for attenuating any sign of imagination and individual creativity, while reinforcing the established order, so as to certify an abundant supply of disciplined, compliant individuals, into the trades and armed forces, or fields like the law and medicine which demanded further study.

This explains why we are facing an existential dilemma in education today. Particularly relevant is the fact that our two central hypotheses are no longer valid. Work, especially when so much of it is unnecessary, pointless, or can be done by a machine, is no longer the motivating force it once was. For most individuals, identity and purpose are tied up with the love of family and friends, and being free to enjoy activities other than work. So, once again, we are left with the same question: what is education for now?

With the advent of machine intelligence, drones, virtual and augmented reality, and autonomous vehicles, we are witnessing a massive exodus of routine tasks from humans to machines. A more forensic inquiry of underlying patterns reveals a future in which full automation and robots dominate the traditional workplace. Even white collar professions will not be immune as the work available for humans shifts from the mechanical and the routine to roles requiring care, creativity, critical thinking and compassion.

At this stage it is impossible to know precisely how many jobs will be lost to AI or new jobs created as a result. An educated guess is that possibly 60 percent of today’s office and factory work will be done by machines over the coming decade, leaving many of us with the dual problem of what to do with our time, and how to earn money. This is going to be a massive headache for governments as we grapple with levels of unemployment, and a subsequent lack of social cohesion, that are unprecedented in the modern era.

These problems are bound to disrupt a higher education sector already struggling to retain relevance. Today many academics have become little more than itinerant workers and their students customers facing years of indebtedness. Lower entry requirements, pay cuts for teachers or job losses, and high fees for an education that disappears like candy floss before you swallow it, is leaving many institutions fighting to survive.

Nor is the current pandemic doing them any favours. With courses increasingly online, and students working remotely from home, even Cambridge University, the ultimate in physical branding with its ancient colleges and manicured lawns, is having to pivot to a different reality. Content has become irrelevant. Credentials are all that matters.

If so much upheaval is dislocating established norms in both the workplace and higher education, the role of schools and the nature of schooling must inevitably respond.

The days of teachers passing on information to students who sit passively in classrooms has long gone. The most informed schools have already embraced pedagogical shifts. From discipline-based subjects taught in 45 minute compartments, to phenomenon-based exploration of topics that actually matter to the next generation – topics such as climate change, food security, and cooperative ventures, for example – the learning landscape is utterly different today from what it was just a decade ago. The need for basic skills has shifted too. Who needs to be able to write, or speak another language, when almost every interface is voice-activated and translation is instantly available?

While I have few doubts that more traditional schools will continue to exist for the time being, their importance will diminish along with their physical infrastructure. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us rare opportunities to experience life differently. We have tried home-schooling and are appreciating the benefits that expanded parental relationship can bring. We have avoided the daily commute to the office, and see no reason to return to a daily commute to school.

If schools are to have any relevance in this future they will need to adapt quickly. Children will still need to learn skills, but these will mostly be to do with life-long learning, curiosity, creativity, designing and making. They will also need to get along with each other and solve wicked problems together in a world that seems to be charging headlong into a variety of crises.

In this environment we could see a complete reconceptualisation of schools together with the elimination of schooling. Virtual classrooms will become commonplace. Corporations, charities, industries, and community enterprises will offer on-the-job mentoring. It is even possible, when kids see the most successful entrepreneurs either did not attend university or dropped out before completing their degree, that a university education will become immaterial, or a more leisurely activity to be undertaken later in life.

It could extend much further of course. Given the disruptions that are occurring in the world today, with billions of people around the world awakening to alternatives previously considered unlikely or impossible, we seem to be on the edge of a paradigm change. As new socio-economic theories embed, work will become an option rather than a necessity. Institutions of learning could respond by becoming the hybrid societal connective tissue.

The wealthy have the money, relationships, networks and influence to take advantage of the numerous internships, private tutoring, online courses, concierge services, and travel experiences, already for sale but not yet marketed within the context of learning. The best education they could give their children is not by way of a traditional school – and at some stage they will wake up to this opportunity.

The flaws in our society exposed by the current pandemic also suggest that the education industry may well realise a new role – the emotional, cognitive and collective development of society as a whole. If that is the case, we will probably see the education system turn away from a focus on individual career trajectories, returning to the creative shaping of cultures and communities more relevant for a new reality. When that happens it will not be a shock.

The wild card could well be the voices of the unheeded and the dispossessed joining us in fresh dialogues of possibility. When we find value from freely offering a free education to the under-privileged, bringing them together in multicultural meshworks, facilitating their exploration of real-world problems from entirely new perspectives, and turning their discoveries into action, we will have found what education is really for. A wiser evolution of the human family and its reimagined presence on this Earth.