The Hames Report

In Free Fall....

Our civilization feels like its in free fall. Much of what we have previously taken for granted now appears to be broken as old operating strategies refuse to work any more. Just as humanity is waking up to the limits imposed by nature on what it can and can not do, so an impasse has been reached in our ability to deal with critical issues in a collective manner - that is as a species.

Over the coming decade we will face a cascade of massively disruptive crises that will feed on each other economically and ecologically. Many of these are going to disable institutional power players, opening up new space for alternative socio-economic, governance, and technological models to embed. As that happens, collaboration on an unprecedented scale will be needed to transition the human family into a world-system that is at once more viable, resilient and nurturing.

In that respect it is useful to examine two probable scenarios. The first presupposes enlightened and effective leadership from at least a fraction of today's political and business elite. This is problematic for three reasons. Those responsible for generating the problems we face are unlikely to be part of the solution. The new leadership will require a level of consciousness and altruism sufficient to rise above perceived self-interest and ego. Much will depend on the trust 'we the people' have in those leaders. If today's dynamics are anything to go by that, in itself, will be a real hurdle.

The second focuses attention on local resilience but accomplished in ways where the resulting innovation flows are accessible universally – for example through open source design, commons, and peer-to-peer communities. Again this is problematic. By and large the general public is insufficiently motivated, informed and proficient in taking responsibility for anything assumed to be the function of government. Federal governments do not easily relinquish power. And in any case grassroots organizations tend to be far better dealing with local issues and are not geared up to cooperate on a global scale, at least without additional resources and layers of governance.

Clearly elements of both scenarios are critical to success. Both must be framed within different logics of possibility and desirability.

I find it fascinating that all the hype in the business-government axis of the dominant world-system right now - from the online World Economic Forum, to the new Biden administration in the US, and even unusually explicit statements from Presidents Putin and Xi, for example, is all about societal transitions, great resets, transformations, a zeitgeist shift to stakeholder capitalism, new normals, and green, green, green!

Frankly it is a little too hard to take these New Year's resolutions as anything more than a new wave of money-making gambits. Just as previous initiatives - B Corps, conscious capitalism, the triple bottom line and various other "social impact" agendas - at the end of the day little more than catchphrases, but so readily taken up by the corporate crowd, anything that makes business sense, tunes into the public mood, and balances purpose and profit, is a gotcha deal. I can believe some of the heartfelt declarations. But good intentions only get us so far. It is actions that we now await with bated breath. We must see what structural changes actually eventuate, and how rapidly these gain traction. And we must pray this is not just another cynical exercise of rearranging the deckchairs once again - because that, dear reader, is all we have seen so far.

My cynicism can be traced to five factors that appear to be impeding civilizational renewal in terms of a substantive societal metamorphosis. They have nothing to do with technology, infrastructure or investment capital, and very little to do with politics. In fact all five of these factors are relatively intangible. What they do have in common is an affiliation with the cultural and psychological spaces within which we typically respond to shifting and uncertain conditions.

Very simply stated these factors are (i) the separation of ideas and social relations and sense of exceptionalism that results from the false premise of detachment; (ii) treating other people and species as objects to be manipulated; (iii) obsolete mindsets; (iv) the obtrusiveness of competitive conduct within and across all human activities; and (v) the fragmentation of endeavours. Let us examine each of these in turn.

As the umbilical bond human beings have with each other expands and extends, both through travel and unbounded online platforms, we have become more attuned to comprehending Homo sapiens as a global “community of mind” - as an experiential phenomenon on at least one level. Global communications networks, along with our capacity to observe events and natural disasters as they happen, have allowed us to feel members of a cohesive human family. We feel the pain of others in distress.

At the same time, the world has splintered into diverse factions. Starting originally with nations, then followed by myriad communities, groups and tribes - right down to the sovereign individual - this pluriversal mix of distinct, often opposing, values, customs, myths, languages and activities, lacks any shared worldview conveying a desirable common future.

Shards of information depicting who we are, what matters to us, and what qualities we emphasize, in terms of what we believe it means to be human, slam into each other to reveal a schizophrenic state, in which coming to terms with the remorse we suffer from wreaking so much misery on our fellow beings becomes almost unbearable. The only way we have been able to shield ourselves from, or avoid, such emotional distress, is through the pretense of separation - an artificially-imposed detachment from others and from other species that is not simply unhealthy but a delusion.

Coupled to this is the toolkit we have derived to fathom out all manner of ills, and to which we turn when it comes to making sense of tangible events and issues - or our world-system. Here, critical issues facing humankind are becoming decoupled from each other in our forensic analysis of them. We no longer discern the entanglement. Topics are separate in our minds. In first seeking that which separates one idea from another we fail to discern and appreciate the crucial connecting tissues.

When it comes to issues like climate change, the production of clean energy, or state-sponsored terrorism, for example, we continue to apply linear thinking (usually with greater enthusiasm than before, and even in the knowledge that our solutions are not working and cannot possibly work) yet stop striving to design a different world where such symptoms (of a system in stress) could not endure. There are a few fundamental reasons for this.

Myopia is very significant in this regard. We tend to become blind to the obvious – the things that really matter. The warning signs of a system in distress are there to be seen, but only by those possessing sufficient bandwidth or acuity to perceive them as such. We are more commonly deceived and distracted by the many thousands of iterations of a few seminal messages - smudging clarity and meaning into inconsequence. This “consensus illusion” often deceives us into believing we are operating with additional information when, in fact, we are becoming indoctrinated with much less. If that were not alarming enough, many vital signs are not appearing on our radar screens because they are either imperceptible to us culturally or are showing up only at the intersection of our understandings.

With few exceptions we are no longer in the habit of seeking evidence in the shadows. We have a habit of following the spotlight, wherever it points. This is why it is so easy for unscrupulous politicians to distract us by responding only to questions they want to answer. Even if we were looking in the right places we lack the tools to bring into sharp focus what we might see there. In other words the territory has changed but our maps and reasoning have not kept pace. We have all become so busy interpreting what is going on from our own, deeply embedded, meaning structures that we have become oblivious to viable alternatives.

Most people find it almost impossible to grasp the more complex nature of change. Consequently modern society, along with elected representatives, is out of its depth - deficient in the capacity to make sense of what is going on at anything more than a very superficial level. Worse still, as hype around our most critical issues escalates, our ability to confront matters is overwhelmed by a belief that such a thing cannot possibly be happening to us. It is simply too much to bear.

The result is that collective cognition shuts down, or diverts to less existential matters like sporting events, celebrity gossip and other diversions. This is becoming known as apocalypse fatigue. People suffering from this condition feel helpless to do anything about the issues confronting them. They would much rather ignore any threat to their own existence by acting as if it isn’t true, shrug their shoulders in despair, and turn away from reality simply because it is too dreadful to contemplate. Ultimately there is only one question that really matters. Whatever happens over the next few decades the wealthy will survive. The three billion or so people who are not so fortunate will be wiped out. Do we really care? If so, what should we be doing about it.

The Occidental mind, unlike Sinic, Indic, Ubuntu or even Islamic mindsets, is a rational device. It responds best to deductive logic, which it values over all other methods of knowing. Accordingly, those of us raised in the West have been conditioned into building and dissecting structures one piece at a time. We have been taught to analyze and measure critical dimensions before applying problem-solving techniques to re-engineer these parts. Using this logic results in solutions ranging from the brilliant to the commonplace.

Method, though, remains consistent - dependent upon ranking and resources. So one or more parts of a structure - those perceived to be the weakest links - are improved, while other parts are ignored. When we see a deterioration in different parts of the structure we switch our attention to those elements and ignore the parts we were working on. While we in the West have become very adept at this kind of structural reductionism we have neglected to develop similar expertise in the design of viable and enduring systems. Our greatest weakness, however, is in applying deductive logic to every challenge facing us. By excluding alternative ways of knowing, including indigenous wisdom, we are requiring all other cultures to engage through the lens and morphology of the Occidental mind should they wish to participate in their own survival.

Overload is yet another problem. We are assailed by all kinds of information every hour of our waking lives. It has been known for some time that too much information causes a condition known as sensory overload. This produces disorientation and a lack of responsiveness, as well as lowering our ability to make accurate predictions. Not only does this make it much more difficult for us to comprehend and communicate the complex patterns we discern in systems, constructing effective, enduring solutions, is even more problematic when we are exhausted by the very information that might have the solution embedded within it.

We have developed a highly refined sense of shifting the blame. It is not my problem is a conditioned reflex acquired through our instruction-based, rather than inquiry-based, educational methods. As we are herded into careers, social memes, and classes, we develop a highly refined sense of what is in our purview. We seek public sector solutions to our wantonly excessive consumption. We rely upon government intervention when our sick and aging need care. We look to the police for community relations. We look to the clergy for morality. Regardless of evidence showing a lack of cognitive alignment within our collective transmuted accountability, the notion of someone else should remains our dominant modus operandi. 

Then, when these systems fail, we animate them with our personal projections of an accountability that they never accepted in our opening premise. By focusing on the role of leaders and obsessing on artefacts of hierarchical structure we have lost our moorings on citizenship and personal responsibility within community. In reality we are the problems we project on others. But then we, too, are the capacity to solve the same.

In spite of the highly controlled machinery of denial, misinformation and propaganda a growing minority genuinely comprehend the seriousness of our predicament. A few are even trying to do something about it. But having a partial sense of circumstances beyond our control has also encouraged society’s communicators to go to town in ways that exploit our growing sense of angst and that are detrimental to longer-term planetary solutions.

Some have leapt on discrete issues to push their own frenzied (often negative, cynical and commercial) self-interest. As a consequence most memes expressing the evolving human condition are conveyed via a strange mix of edgy fear coupled to competitive dogma - rather than from any sense of hope, inspiration and abundance. It must be said that some recent strategies by celebrity politicians and well-meaning activists have also unintentionally contributed to an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that has humanity in a vice-like grip.

Most of the seeds responsible for today’s rampant damage across so many sectors of society were sown during the industrial revolution. Those seeds stemmed from a type of thinking that was uniquely Occidental in its embrace of growth and innovation. This was ultimately responsible for the triumph of Western neoliberal economies of course. It has only been over the past few decades that it culminated in the hugely exploitative mechanisms of production we are experiencing today – variants of the capitalist ethos that have become driven by greed and are designed to promote the acquisition of wealth above any other goal.

Developing states, including China, Singapore and Dubai, have started to emulate this model, or a hybrid lookalike. Today, because of the exponential demand for food, water, energy and goods from the almost eight billion people who live on this planet, a perfect storm of economic and social flaws inherent within the original design is about to break. In spite of this, all relevant societal memes are still predicated on the erroneous notion that Occidental worldviews and values hold the key to civilizational renewal. This is hubris and narcissism at its most evil.

Western views of progress already border on the irrelevant in almost all non-Western traditions. Future solutions to the civilizational problem must of necessity integrate and transcend all current worldviews if they are to be effective. That means giving an appropriate voice to those cultures, along with credence to alternative economic and social modes of development.

The political inertia we see does not spring from apathy or any lack of a desire to change. Again the problem can be found in our thinking. In this case the notion of competition (and the prevalence of competitive behaviour) traps us in circumstances where it is expected that we fight others in order to safeguard our own parochial interests. Thus the lack of any real political leadership is first and foremost the result of us succumbing to an obsolete economic paradigm with its associated suite of constraints concerned with preserving the national interest.

The fact is we are beholden to mechanisms, from the nation state to the G20 and even the United Nations, that effectively hinder collaboration on a planetary scale.

Conventional wisdom maintains that we are fundamentally competitive social beings. Most biological evidence points to the contrary. But this is part of the paradigm we must shatter in order for the communal needs and interests we all share to shine through.

If the lack of a unified vision or platform for change is a serious issue then the splintering of any strategic focus and alignment are huge contributing factors to a demoralizing diffusion and dilution of energy. Currently there are myriad discrete and well-meaning initiatives, strategies, campaigns, movements and media all vying for our attention and funding across a range of theatres. Such diversity is overwhelming and a distraction in its own right. There is also far too much talk and not nearly enough inspired leadership for action attached to these ventures.

The key will be to find strategic acupuncture points that liberate new energy flows, concentrating and embedding entrepreneurial passion and relevant innovations within the evolving world-system. A critical element in this regard will be investment capital for renewal. The injection of capital and resources from business and high net worth individuals is still channelled overwhelmingly into old ‘sunset’ industries and interests – including the servicing of war and conflict which is a highly profitable business.

Two things must change. First entirely new business models must be invented from within alternative ontological frames. These must challenge prevalent assumptions governing investment, value and profitable exchange, ultimately making it more attractive to invest in things like renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, mutual enterprises, charitable agencies and alternative governance mechanisms.

Secondly, however inconceivable or idealistic it might seem, we must wean ourselves off military combat. Peace is a prerequisite for societal renewal. We cannot create peace by practising warfare.

So there is our dilemma. For the first time in history we are faced not with a simple problem requiring a simple solution, but with a fiercely diabolical condition – a world-system so immensely and dynamically complex that even the most sophisticated and advanced reductionist thinking, coupled to rational data, and a host of incredible technological breakthroughs, are still totally inadequate to correct the unintended consequences of our original defective design.

Yet we insist on using old tools and thinking to combat this enemy. It is not the planet that is at risk but our civilization.

Nothing is What it Seems

Nothing is what it seems, which is why I routinely interrogate my every thought and belief. To be capable of seeing the truth we must first shed all of the accrued garbage within our minds. And in my case, there is much to discard, as will no doubt be evident from what follows...

The narratives upon which we rely to make sense of the world are fast crumbling. It is almost impossible to determine the current status and trajectory of the human story. Now more than ever, we are aware that our civilisation is in trouble, and on a number of fronts. But it is difficult to comprehend what is actually going on. There are three main reasons for this:

1. An incumbent elite, individuals of affluence and influence who own the media, content curation and data analysis firms, smokestack legacy corporations, a few politicians and, in some cases, the judiciary - are manipulating how we make sense of everything that is happening in our world to their own advantage.
2. A combination of surveillance and curated content is used to manipulate instincts and social behaviour. This smudges perceptions, blinding us to the realities of our situation to such an extent that it is impossible to get a reliable bearing on just where we are.
3. Everything we took to be constant is in a state of flux and uncertainty. One outcome is that we, the general public, serfs in the grand scheme of wealth creation and socio-political game-playing, have not yet realised that our trust in this powerful elite is ill-advised and unwarranted - that we are being callously gamed.

If we did fathom out what was going on at a deeply metaphysical level, the ensuing outrage would be sufficient to fuel rebellion. I can imagine people all around the world rising up in defiance of authority, using the sheer strength of numbers to overthrow the established order in fury at such a grievous deception.

We take no action because we are confused - still trusting those with power or wealth to act in our favour and on our behalf. Instead, we remain cocooned in a comatose state of indigence and naïve lethargy.

To be fair most wealthy individuals, along with those in positions of power, probably believe they are helping to build a better society and might be confused by any criticism levelled at them. More often than not they are convinced their wealth gives them the right to influence elected officials and government policy, that the fortune they acquire is thoroughly deserved, and that it will eventually trickle down to the rest of us in the form of jobs, increased economic activity, greater inclusiveness, and philanthropic largesse. This “trickle-down” theory originally started as a joke by humorist Will Rogers. Today it expresses a naïve faith in the virtue of those wielding economic power and in the workings of the prevailing economic system, although it has never been confirmed by the evidence.

Not having yet caught up with these facts it should come as no surprise that the more affluent members of society continue to agitate for tax cuts to assist economic growth – even though in practice these policies perpetuate inequality and intensify the inherently oppressive nature of economic stratification. 

The apparatus of oppression in ostensibly democratic societies includes the weaponization of fear, threats of unemployment and privation, unprovoked discrimination, the need to comply with officialdom, pointless work, and differing forms of propaganda - much of it xenophobic in tone. While these instruments have been commonly used to repress freedom of thought and insurgency, mostly covertly, the brazen use of strong-arm policing tactics is becoming the preferred approach as a more sentient public reacts to authoritarian abuse by state actors.  

Naturally this automatically exposes the intentions of those in authority to continue their exploitation, larceny, coercion, cheating and deception, all the while engaging in disastrous environmental destruction, the stockpiling of armaments, and waging endless wars for no valid reason other than to preserve and expand their power.

How can we allow this to endure when it threatens individual health and wellbeing as well as the survival of the human family? Is it because we lack the will or capability to confront power? Or is it because we have been so utterly misled that we no longer see any valid alternative? I suspect it is a combination of both factors.

The former makes sense in terms of the monotony and drudgery we are willing to accept in return for money, without which even the basic necessities of life, such as housing, warmth, food, health, learning, information, and even respect, are unobtainable. The latter amplifies this dilemma by ensuring that the mainstream narrative is based on scarcity and competition.

Maintaining the illusion of austerity and struggle is vital – as is allegiance to the status quo. This is feasible by managing the information used to sustain the narrative. In contemporary society the control of such propaganda is most commonly exercised through the ownership of mass media, funding research projects and think-tanks, advocating censorship, or purchasing the loyalty of shady politicians.

The results are undeniably impressive yet - ominous. For example, we are told that we live in a free society where anything is possible for those who work hard. We are assured that life is getting better for most people around the world and that Western aid is responsible for that. We are taught to be loyal and to view other cultures with suspicion. We are cautioned that those who do not share our values are a threat to our way of life. And we are then cajoled into embracing conflict as the most natural reaction to that threat. From the cradle to the grave we are persuaded to believe wealth matters far more than health and wellbeing, and that striving for greater affluence is the most virtuous of goals. Furthermore, we are constantly reminded that compliance with these beliefs is an accurate metric of normalcy.

These are all deceptions of one kind or another. But is there any escape from this noise and all the organized racket that dominates our waking hours? How can we find the mental space and peace of mind to evaluate the endless string of stories we tell ourselves, and each other, about what is happening in the world more dispassionately – searching for empirical evidence rather than the self-opinionated articles of faith from Google graduates? How can we ensure that the lies are impossible to suppress?

Perhaps this is already happening. Certainly, the dominant narrative is breaking down in ways that are startlingly unexpected - yet exhilarating. Old ways of understanding what is going on are not working, which is why we are confused. Trust in the most venerable of our institutions is in a nosedive, often with good reason. Confidence in the mass media, too, is at rock-bottom. Meanwhile we are fast reaching the limits at which we can cope intellectually and emotionally with the changes we ourselves have initiated and are also feeling helpless to control the tools we are unleashing.

Few can deny this is an opportune moment for a fundamental re-envisioning of society and a rebalancing of the world order. The case for a thorough forensic examination of our shared worldview - the civilisational model upon which all human activity is predicated - and the subsequent crafting of a new narrative that makes better sense of the human condition, is compelling. For the first time, armed with hindsight, and using the extraordinary technologies we have fashioned, we have an opportunity to construct a new society from first principles.

Whatever the future holds for our species, the COVID-19 experience and the year 2020 will be permanently etched into our consciousness. The wildly impulsive responses we have taken to this plague which, for some countries, has resulted in the suspension of all economic activity; the anxiety, fear, bewilderment, and emotional turmoil generated from social distancing and lockdown restrictions; mixed responses to the epidemiological and medical science; and the proliferation of conspiracy theories and increasing numbers of individuals who refuse to comply with laws aimed at halting the spread of the disease, is seeing to that.

Hidden within the news of increasing infections, deaths, and morbidity rates, however, new possibilities are surfacing. An outbreak of compassion and collaboration between nations and across time-zones, occasioned by our interconnectedness, is proliferating. Within the stillness offered by the disease is an hiatus sufficient for us to take stock of our purpose and direction, giving us a chance to reflect deeply on what matters, and to decide if we want to go back to a grasping, iniquitous, everyone-for-themselves culture, within which even the survival of other species depend on the whimsical decisions of imaginary constructs - such as the nation state, Google, Facebook, and the World Bank - or invent something entirely distinctive.

Our collective future must surely result from a process of cooperative design. A future that is more desirable and sustainable than anything we have experienced thus far can be generated by a combination of new tools and practices driven by a totally new mindset guided, too, by a comprehensive appreciation of history and of our limitations.

For that process to lead anywhere other than back to detrimental economic conditions and toxic habits, we will need to reprogram the socio-genetic code that strands us on an island where we are complicit in seeing and interpreting the world, and our role in it, as comprising:

• the biosphere as an infinite cache of physical reserves available for extraction to the highest bidders
• people as little more than objects to be instructed, traded, coerced and exploited within the system of industrial production.
• a cutthroat quest for scarce material assets in which there will inevitably be winners and losers

If we are able to take such a giant leap of consciousness, and that is by no means guaranteed, we might then be open to repairing the harm we have inflicted upon each other from a range of tenets we still take for granted and that are so destructive. Such as, for example:

• the accrual of material artifacts and financial wealth is the pinnacle of human ambition
• the sub-optimal design of our most life-critical systems is legitimate and unavoidable
• that in-built obsolescence and other ways to swindle customers is justified in order for a business to remain profitable
• that some human beings are inherently inferior and less deserving than others
• that people must labour to earn a living even when such work is pointless, and when machines are capable of taking on tedious routine tasks
• that personal data is not a human right and can therefore be legitimately owned and sold by a company irrespective of an individual’s wishes
• that government budget surpluses are a sign of good economic management
• that competition is the natural order while empathy, cooperation and tolerance are signs of frailty deserving of exclusion and derision
• that the power wielded by nation states as autonomous sovereign entities gives them the permission to do exactly as they please regardless of any negative environmental and human impacts

A new society is possible based upon precepts that are viable, aligned to changing realities, and are wise, engaging, culturally respectful and morally responsible. It only requires us to jettison what is no longer working for humanity as a whole, and to re-imagine new ways of being in balance with nature’s laws.

For example, we could become less focused on individual rights and more concerned with appreciating, respecting and preserving the human family as a whole. Less obsessed with rebooting the economy than reevaluating and renewing our morals. Less about reverting to business-as-usual stereotypes than reinventing obsolete commercial principles. Less about harvesting profits from scarcity than spreading and sharing the abundance we see all around us. Less about nationalistic protectionism and more about enlightened globalisation and mutual support.

These shifts represent a more informed balance between the state, representing collective enterprise, and the citizen accepting individual responsibility but balanced by a civic duty to hold the state and our most venerated institutions to account.

There are signs that such shifts could already be occurring - that our collective consciousness is going up by degrees and that we are awakening to the reality previously hidden in full view. For example, spontaneous collaboration can be observed in the many ways we are adapting to new lockdown protocols.

Although the fabric of international commerce is founded upon competitive rivalries, with new products protected by patent law, the urgency and unfamiliarity underpinning the current pandemic, together with the degree to which we are all connected these days, is resulting in cooperation between scientists and nations, and rapid, real-time, collaboration across time-zones, which is unprecedented. Within 90 days of the coronavirus outbreak, an extraordinary 250 therapies were in various stages of development. In a month or so, we are likely to have over 40 or more different cures and vaccines that are already in clinical trials. Companies are reinventing themselves, offering new services, and anticipating volatility in the demand for their products. Some countries are sending medical supplies and staff to assist life-saving efforts.

Clearly, we cannot expect this new ethos to continue, nor to become anywhere close to being business-as-usual, if we are constantly looking over our shoulders and wanting the world to be the same as it used to be. Nostalgia for the past is deceptively alluring. But a liar nonetheless. And while we must provide for ourselves and our families, we also need to work for the greater good if we are to stay in balance with nature.

In the case of a coronavirus vaccine, the next step in our dance towards a regenerative and cooperative consciousness might be to circumvent Big Pharma companies profiting from the research altogether, ensuring treatments are made available to everyone as commons-owned assets. That modest act would signal our intention not to keep serving the vested interests of an industrial age mindset and habits.

We can do the same with education. By shifting away from the 180-year old production-line philosophy, with its emphasis on outmoded standards and pedagogy, and by reinventing learning from the point of view and pace of the individual student and their context, we can avoid returning to the physical familiarity and comforts of the school campus. Much the same can be claimed for other critical systems, including public health, work design, urban planning and public transportation, construction, logistics, journalism, governance, energy generation and distribution, automotive, real estate and agriculture.

We know that societal systems like these cannot change from within given the gravitational pull of the existing paradigm. Although the practical impacts from implementation are always disconcerting, and can continue to reverberate for years, the only considered input needed is a shift of mindset – from one of scarcity to abundance and from rivalry to cooperation. Indeed, this is inevitably the crux of the issue when any kind of transformative change is proposed.

It is why paradigmatic change relies on novelty rather than the tweaking of the current system. It is why disruptive innovation evolves from the edge rather than the current centre of gravity. And it is why it is always easier to create a new model that makes the old one obsolete than to exert effort trying to expunge the existing paradigm. So, let us start by reframing possibility in a shift from the scarcity mindset to one of abundance.

Scarcity and rivalry are ingrained within contemporary praxis. They both start with constraints, while abundance and cooperation offer new opportunities. Scarcity and rivalry encourage zero-sum thinking, whereas abundance is about plenitude and sufficiency. Scarcity and rivalry market secrecy and unethical behaviour as competitive advantage, whereas cooperation and abundance champion partnerships for the greater good. Licenses and patents are examples of scarcity thinking. Open source, commons, and peer-to-peer approaches are abundance in action.

A word of caution if I may. There will always be companies that disrupt the competition as well as entire industries, but that do not live up to any higher moral aim. AirBNB, Uber, and Netflix are cases of how disruptive innovation can result from the clever exploitation and leverage of abundance. None of them, I hope, would claim to make the world a better place for greater numbers of people. Why? Because their underlying values and calculations are still dominated by aggressive competition with the singular aim of market growth and profitability.

There are many lessons to be learned from the disruptions we are experiencing from COVID-19 of course. Live a simpler life. Do not take from the earth what you do not need. Shift from a competitive to a collaborative lifestyle. Work from home when you can. Understand that front-end schooling is not a substitute for life-long learning. Trust only what you can validate. Grow and buy goods locally. Save energy wherever possible. Reduce, reuse, and recycle whatever you can to avoid waste. Democratize the economy. Engage with others around what really matters.

There are many others of course that make going back to what used to be business-as-usual a travesty to anybody other than those vested interests that were happy to feed off our naivety.

While the way ahead is uncertain, reverse gear is not an option. Whichever path we choose we are bound to encounter transitional problems. And, as always, in order for our sense of moral community to expand and endure, the more difficult challenge will be to ensure the lessons of the past are not forgotten, and that new behaviours are sustained and cherished.

With climate change, a continuing loss of biodiversity, new pandemics, economic upheavals, geo-political tensions, mass migrations, and the rise of neo-fascist regimes, we have mounting emergencies to deal with, in addition to the substantial changes required to tame tribalism, predatory practices, prejudice, injustice and discrimination.

This will cost money. Lots of money. In order for our reserves to exceed the current rate of consumption, instead of the other way around, we will need to reimagine the fundamentals of our economies so that all life is ascribed inherent value, and measures like Gross Domestic Product [GDP] are seen for what they are – relics of another era. We have witnesses how some nations can be flush with funds, while descending into disrepair and despair because that money is earned by destroying everything that is genuinely meaningful - from jobs to trust, relationships, health and wellbeing, happiness, personal savings, and freedom.

Only when we can imagine a different kind of economics will we be inclined to allocate the estimated $20-30 trillion that will be needed to combat the perfect storm of existential crises facing us today. Only when we have a different kind of politics will we be able to heal rifts across artificially-created social divides. Only when we develop metrics that focus on well-being, wholeness, mutuality, reciprocity, kindness and reconciliation, in contrast to things that are broken, fragmented or disintegrating, will we be able to truly understand the measure of our success as a species.  And only when we can envisage a different social order will we be free to comprehend the human condition, reconcile our differences peacefully, communicate openly, and generate a more inclusive and expansive understanding of human purpose.

In the end we will only be able to reassemble the brittle husk of our humanity by facing our most dire threats together. Using surveillance, the force or arms, or decrees from those in provisional authority will not hack it. Ultimately, we will adopt cooperation and abundance as the basic elements in a new narrative for the alternative is to perish as a civilised society.

Litanies

1. Memories

Old age brings certain gifts, as long as we are open to receiving them. For me, one of these gifts is sudden and unexpected recollections from a past fast-receding from temporal view. Now and again, yet increasingly with each passing week, shards of memories long forgotten break surface with astounding precision. I am able to watch my past self with wrapt fascination. The pattern is always the same. A sound, scent, or some other sensation triggers a hiatus in what I happen to be doing. Nebulous mists clear to reveal vaguely familiar shapes before intimate details mob me and stop me in my tracks.

I had such an experience yesterday while watching a new movie. Greyhound tells the story of an inexperienced World War II US Navy captain, played by Tom Hanks, who must protect an Allied convoy of supply ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean while being stalked by Nazi U-boat wolfpacks. Towards the end of the movie Tom Hanks sinks to his knees, giving thanks to his God that he and his crew survived the ordeal. Instantly I realised what I was viewing was a mirror of a long-buried childhood experience.

Having embraced Buddhism at the age of 13, casting aside the doctrine in which I had been raised, I had also inadvertently purged most memories relating to that time. Only now I remembered...

Each evening as a child my mother taught me to pray on my knees to her Christian God. A kindly soul by all accounts, but one who stubbornly refused to make himself known to me. Nonetheless from the age of eight, whether at home or in the school dormitory, I knelt and prayed. My petition was simple, and it was the same each evening. God, look after mummy. Make me a good boy. And if you see my daddy please tell him that I love him. Amen.

At that stage, you see, all I knew was that my father had suddenly vanished from my life. As my solitary idol, he left a vacuum that could never be filled. I would not discover the truth of what happened to him for another 37 years - after I received a letter. A hand-written note, barely legible in an unschooled scrawl. A note from a stranger. My father. In the note an awkwardly expressed affection, along with an intimation he would like to see me.

The note arrived too late. I would not see my father again. There was no grieving at the news of his death. I had been through that torment decades before. There was no pain left. But the instant I realised how I used to pray so dutifully every day was shockingly poignant.

How did that daily ritual affect me? What good did my prayers do? Did they bring relief and comfort to my sorrow? Or did they simply prolong ingrained uncertainties? What bearing did the routine have on my state of mind and emotional development? Was it to blame for how I feel today about the covert menace of religious righteousness?

2. Righteous

I do not know. I cannot answer these questions. But there is another point to all of this. As a Buddhist, I try to live by tenets resonating from the spiritual praxis acquired throughout my life – particularly through grief. For me, this means tolerating those whose attitudes do not accord with mine – even when they detest me and everything I value. Humility. Doing what I can to be a worthy ancestor. Showing compassion for those who struggle. Mindful reflection preceding action. And a deep love for the sacredness of life. Not bad values to live by, and undoubtedly shared with many others.

Most importantly though, these tenets have taught me not to impose my beliefs on others. My credo is as simple as that childhood prayer. In spite of our heritage, acquired status, and superfluous titles, nobody enters this world any more or less inferior than anyone else. We are all born into conditions over which we have no control and very little influence. The only significant disparities between a monarch and a pauper are the inheritance of wealth, the delusions arising from that accident of birth, and deference shown by minions who hope to profit from their fawning behaviour.

What we are able to accomplish during our brief time here differs only inconsequentially. Expecting nothing in return for an act of kindness, offered in a spirit of generosity by a poor person towards a stranger, or from a child to an elder, is worth far more than a truckload of philanthropic dollars distributed by billionaires who want to feel good, look good and, if possible, get a tax break.

Eventually, we are all condemned to an end-game over which there can be no appeal. I have no right to judge others when I cannot read their story, feel their suffering, appreciate their circumstances, or truly put myself in their shoes. To do so is old-style hubris.

3. Hubris

Yet business schools still happily churn out old-style managers who are constantly told to apply such hubris – based upon a plethora of conflicting excuses for why others should heed their wisdom and in the warped belief that their status bestows upon them the right to motivate others - or to inflict penalties when those they aim to inspire are insufficiently enthused.

Likewise, organisations managed by armies of freshly-minted MBAs still incorrectly assume that controlling people is as easy as applying statistical methods and software development routines to improve processes and manage projects. This is the industrial-military method applied uncritically. Indeed, even the most recent management fads are bound up with these mechanistic derivatives.

The imposition of pointless, mind-numbing, often humiliating work today is the result of such hubris, together with the continued fragmentation of knowledge that occurs when we continue to compartmentalize organisations for reasons of efficiency and control.

Up to 30 percent of all work can be sorted into categories where it is impossible to find adequate explanations for its existence. In fact, many jobs seem to be designed purely to keep us busy doing something. Anything!

And while technology has advanced to the extent that many jobs are superfluous, and a 15-hour working week is certainly feasible and has been proven beneficial in any number of experiments, the puritanical work ethos that demands we labour for 40 hours or more seems to be ingrained. The result is a plague of pointless drudgery in an ocean of unrelenting tedium.

4. Tedium

It is hardly surprising that such drudgery would lead to high levels of staff disengagement. The managerial feudalism that persists in so many corporations puts people off work and generates mental health problems. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of all employees find their work engaging. Meaningless work, inadequate resources, a chronic misuse of talent, and a lack of trust in management are the major causes of this disenchantment.

But if we examine the 20 percent who are actively disengaged, one major factor stares us in the face: it is the obstacles self-motivated and creative individuals face when taking the initiative, experimenting, or attempting to dispense with age-old protocols they know to be hindering productivity.

Irrespective of the industry, market, location, or size of the company hubris, together with the delusions of control or power arising from such vanity, invariably stand in the way of exceptional performance. Traditionally managed organisations will have none of this of course. Boards and senior executives operating within the mainstream corporate power structures get far too much pay, preening attention, and other incentives to contemplate changing their command and control mindsets.

Believe it or not, even when agile, adaptive, or navigational approaches are regularly used by the most shrewd and forward-looking enterprises, an unhealthy preoccupation with targets, critical success factors, performance indicators, and appraisals, as well as a host of other teeming distractions, can deter collaboration, hijack the learning metabolism, and compromise the productivity potential of the entire enterprise.

It is not difficult to eliminate tedium from any enterprise – assuming a flat structure where talented, self-motivated individuals can take risks, collaborate, and experiment. Indeed, many entrepreneurial startups are able to rapidly scale-up using liquid structures where the dynamic flows of information and activities, lightning-fast decisions, peripatetic teams, and fractal leadership, interact transparently.

Working for companies like Valve, Zappos, Tik Tok, Atlassian, Canva, Legal Monkeys, or Aurecon, for example, is intrinsically inspiring. In these open environments, purpose and passion drive effort while management simply morphs into collaboration. Work becomes a fearless, fluid adventure, where no one is there to tell you what to do or to reprimand you when you make a mistake. Of course, you might not think it sensible to inflict this kind of open structure in companies demanding the precise coordination of complex activities, such as an international airline, for example. But to impose management orthodoxies in organisations like those above would be an act of sheer folly.

5. Folly

The British physicist Steven Hawking asserted that greed and stupidity would be the downfall of humanity. Although I am hesitant to contradict such a proposition, I venture to suggest that love and compassion are the two things that might yet save us. Nevertheless, even that small step will require us to see things differently, accept new ways of relating to each other and nature, and develop a new moral consciousness.

Actually, the more haunting question for me is whether or not we Sapiens are wise enough to survive our own undeniable ingenuity and ability to endure. This was the question that provoked the founding of the Centre for the Future. It is a question that continues to preoccupy me.

Examples of extreme stupidity are all around us of course, but none more so than in the indefensible ways we choose to relate to each other and to nature.

Individuals can be very smart – such defines the spirit of entrepreneurship. And most entrepreneurs consult widely in order to scale their ideas collaboratively. But when even the most intelligent people get together in board rooms and parliaments, any collective wisdom we might have assumed can vanish in a confusion of ego, dogma, risk aversion, and a tendency to rebrand what is known rather than venturing into new realms of inquiry.

Part of our collective stupidity today derives from an innate self-confidence. Today this is boosted by our unprecedented capability, via social media, to connect with and to hear what everyone else is thinking. This coupling can lead us into situations where it is easy to assume our opinions are equally valid to others - even when it is not based on verifiable evidence. For example, you might establish your views about climate change on scientific data from a panel of experts, whereas I have simply adopted the opinion of a celebrity I happened to see on television who gave me the impression he knew what he was talking about.

When emotionally amplified, this coupling of confidence with connectivity can also give rise to situations in which we are either offended or outraged. That too is a problem because both emotions open us up to easy manipulation and there are always unscrupulous people ready to take advantage of that.

Certainly, it is the case that stupid, outraged, or easily offended individuals are far more convinced of the accuracy of their views than smarter people who tend to sustain doubts and uncertainties. Moreover, because of our predilection for educating by fragmenting knowledge to fit highly specialized work structures, rather than the other way around, we have created conditions that amply demonstrate the hazards inherent in allowing this to continue.

Take science, for example, which is one of the best ways we have of understanding the world in which we live. Science is inevitably provisional, as is truth. Yet stupid people seek certainty in science. Once having found their truth, they then latch onto it with unwavering passion.

This penchant many of us have developed for trusting our instincts over objective data partially explains why incumbent plutocrats find the conception of a world where conflict, wars, and other forms of violence exist, utterly acceptable. In their world, it is legitimate to bully the weak, rob the poor, threaten those with whom they disagree, and assassinate those whom they fear.

As for ordinary citizens like us, we have meekly tolerated this state of affairs. It endures because of our apathy. We stand idly by, paying no attention to constant warnings that the breakdown of our climate and the unravelling of so many natural ecosystems must be treated as a global emergency. We continue to elect corrupt and uncaring officials who stigmatize and stereotype the homeless and the poor as parasites and workers as lesser mortals. And all the time we put up with this, cocooning ourselves in a zone of delusion where our ultimate purpose is to own more and more stuff we do not really want.

In effect, we are all contributing to a world in which the gradual emaciation of any moral or spiritual imperative is becoming normalized.

6. Normal

Normalcy is in the news – as is talk of the “new” normal – whatever that might mean in what is already looming as a decade of disruption. Most public attention at the moment is focused on the current pandemic and speculation concerning a “post-pandemic” world. Given the likelihood of further, potentially highly virulent outbreaks, from known and new viruses, I would have thought it highly imprudent to frame the short-term future in terms of a post-anything world!

Although the universal public response to COVID-19, rather than the virus itself, has led to the most fundamental socio-economic crisis experienced by our generation, it is still unclear as to what extent we will be able to carry on with life as usual - least of all what we should take with us, and leave behind, from that period prior to the outbreak when so many of our life-critical systems were already beginning to stutter and fail.

What the coronavirus is doing in such spectacular fashion is to reveal the deep fault-lines and systemic fragility existing in the world we have carefully crafted. It is as though nature has given us this virus as a dress rehearsal for what we might expect going forward – the chance to bring a regenerative consciousness to bear on human activities.

Human brains possess a great deal of plasticity, so there is little doubt we can adapt to new circumstances once the fog has cleared, as long as conditions on the planet remain conducive to life. But too many of the current batch of politicians and industry leaders, eager to see a return to business-as-usual, remain trapped in the mental coordinates of a world that no longer exists. They yearn to return to the comfort of a familiar past, over which they assumed they had control.

The truth is becoming clearer each day that passes. The longer the current crisis persists, and much depends in that regard on how soon we acquire herd immunity or an effective vaccine can be invented, the greater the likelihood we will underestimate the damage being done to the social fabric of society and, as a consequence, the degree to which massive change will be required. Then again, if it is bad for more affluent societies, the potential collapse of all economic activity will be catastrophic for the least-developed, most vulnerable nations.

Critical questions, too, concern the nature of the emerging world order. Will we see the unravelling of financial and trade globalisation? Will national interests dominate? How will the international community treat an increasingly formidable yet intrinsically problematic China and a deeply divided US at the point of civil conflict? Will economic integration be a fading dream as the relatively free movement of people across national borders ceases?

And what about business? Will retail malls, the daily commute into the city office, the law firm, the schoolyard, and the university campus fade into the memory? If so will innovation be unleashed in sufficient amounts to replace these institutions and generate the dramatic improvements in productivity where it is actually needed? I must admit this speculation of massive change and its consequences is making me feel nostalgic for the world we might be leaving behind...

7. Nostalgia

Nothing is permanent of course. As we have seen, even science is ephemeral. Nostalgia is also a seductive liar. Attachment to the material world and old habits such as those briefly mentioned above are ultimately of little consequence. In the end, though, the manner in which we are able to deal with our various attachments shapes and defines us.

These days my attachment to material objects is declining in alignment with my pursuit of a more peaceful, less hectic, existence. Of course, that quest has been accelerated by the current pandemic. Even in this remote part of Thailand, it is impossible to escape the aura of fear that has us in its grasp. Here though I am surrounded by my art and music. To lose these would be a great sacrifice. My MacBook, too, has become the repository of ideas, feelings, and projects stretching back over two decades. I would not want to lose it. But if I did I would cope.

In terms of affiliation, the affection I feel for humanity and for this planet our home, grows stronger and more resolute each day, while a committed detachment from the deeds of greedy, powerful, individuals, and the ways in which they have designed systems for their own benefit, at least gives me the courage to do the work I do.

I think back on those memories of my childhood with growing affection. Even those that are cocooned in sadness and grief, like the loss of my father.

What I have found exceedingly difficult to deal with is my attachment to these memories along with some highly personal artifacts from the past. Many years ago, an entire collection of my music, which had been recorded over a period of seven years, and which had been left in trust with one of my children, disappeared. There were no copies. After the initial anger had subsided, and I managed to work through the grief and sense of personal loss, I felt as though a part of me had been rubbed out, leaving only a fading, blurred daguerreotype.

More recently I discovered several hand-written letters dating back half a century, were missing from an antique Chinese chest in which I keep original scores and other assorted memorabilia. There was a pen and ink letter from the poet Ted Hughes, for example, responding to my setting of his poems Eros and King of Carrion, from this book Hawk in the Rain, which had received its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival. And another very brief note from my teacher Nadia Boulanger to my mother, assuring her of my talent.

Such bits and pieces are irreplaceable. The sense of loss inevitably cuts deep, even when they remain intact in the memory and are assuaged through the lens of Buddhist practice.

Buddhism teaches us not to become too attached to things. Indeed, one of the four noble truths in Buddhist scriptures asserts desire and attachment to be the sources of so much dissatisfaction and suffering. I must confess that I still find this a difficult precept to live by and a dilemma I have constantly wrestled with. Most material possessions I found easy enough to discard. I never owned property until I was 70 years old, for example, though my fondness for books, contemporary art, and music scores provides me with the greatest joy imaginable. Old age certainly brings gifts in its wake. As long as we are still open to receiving them.

 

The Swimmer, The Fisherman, and the Deep-Sea Diver

Knowledge is the condition of understanding something which is personally meaningful, and potentially useful in some capacity. As such it is deeply subjective. What may count as knowledge for one sentient being may not have the same meaning for another. In other words, objective truth for you may not be the empirical truth for me.

Existing at differing levels of cognition and aptitude, knowledge ranges from autonomic information acquired both prior to and following birth, data absorbed on a second-by-second basis, mostly utilitarian in nature, that allows us to think and take action in real-time, information we discover through practice, intentionally and otherwise, and sudden insights or epiphanies that hold the deepest ontological meaning for us personally.

Although our society institutionalized learning in terms of front-end loading experiences as the basis for cognitive development, via models of compulsory schooling, for example, acquiring knowledge is a quest to which there is no end.

Most people feel uncomfortable using this definition of knowledge and not just because it signifies there can be no universal truth. The lack of certainty can be disturbing, especially when individual perspectives and practical experiences clash, thereby creating cognitive dissonance, or when bias enters the equation – which is actually most of the time.

Knowledge, along with knowing or not knowing, have been the source of most challenges facing the human species through the ages. We access knowledge in making decisions all day, every day - decisions that deeply impact our lives, and the lives of those around us.

Once we resolve more fundamental problems, like survival for example, and deal with the many trivial matters that occupy us, like how to spend our leisure time, whether to follow a religion or not, or when to embark on that new exercise regime, we are confronted by any number of more profound knowledge issues on numerous fronts - from figuring out who our real friends are, to what can be done to make the world a better place.

Today we live in a world of profound disruption, A world in transition between industrial models and practices and new, as yet unused, futures. Four learning-related hurdles stand in the way of assuring a positive metamorphosis and outcomes:

1. Habituation, satisfaction with the status quo, ennui concerning most forward views, and our linearly compressed experience of progress and time, have conspired to generate a crisis of imagination. It is not that we have lost our innate capability for transformative change, it is simply that we do not have the energy any longer, least of all the impulse to step into new ontological frameworks as the basis for change. It has all become too tiresome. And we have now come to deem it unnecessary.
2. Only now are we beginning to comprehend the complexity of a world in which we, as a single species or family, comprise myriad cultures, beliefs and truths. There is a need to act together, from a shared sense of unity and legitimacy. Unified action cannot derive just from an accrual of individual experiences. Rather, it must evolve in terms of our collective knowledge of the human condition, in its context, taking note of the need to embrace culturally distinctive viewpoints when interpreting or translating the emergent civilisational narrative. We are not set up, nor sufficiently organized, to achieve such unanimity. The urge to compete is a hindrance. It just gets in the way.
3. As we constantly fail to address the planetary crises impacting all 7.7 billion of us, it is becoming clear that the intellectual processes we use to enquire, reason, discuss decide, and act are insufficient for our needs - particularly given the complexity we have knowingly created. In some ways our capability to think and act expediently, and in harmony, has been surpassed by the digital intelligence we have invented. We might have reached the edge of our ability to solve wicked problems. If so, it is possible we are all in a cognitive gridlock from which we can only be released by using machine intelligence in conjunction with new methods for the renewal of our most ingrained belief systems. Resistance to this idea is common. Nobody likes to be told their thinking can be improved.
4. Our civilisation is comprised of a richly diverse milieu of cultures, values, and tribal mindsets. There are as many different epistemologies in this pluriverse as there are individuals. While such variety should be a cause for celebration, the ensuing lack of tolerance has resulted in conflict and war. The sad truth is that opportunities for each individual to express what it means to be human in their own inimitable way, conflicts with the desire held by those in authority to enforce universally-applicable societal standards, practices, laws and norms. Equally, while some form of global governance is essential in dealing efficiently with pandemics or climate change, for example, ordinary citizens object to the loss of state sovereignty this implies, which they mostly associate with feelings of patriotism and excessive national allegiance.

So, we are left with apathy, competition, a rebuttal of alternative thinking, and ingrained prejudice. If the future of the human project depends on the application of fresh insights and wisdom, this is hardly a great place from which to start.

Facing up to this evidence the question now becomes: How can we break free from those prisons of invention we have unknowingly assembled in order that ignorance and bigotry can be set aside?

Totalitarian-imposed governance might be one way. But even the many far right-wing-leaning autocrats in power today are repulsed by that proposition. They are not about to give away their hard-won authority without a fight. A reformed UN? Doubtful. Toothless tigers are one thing. But states are not yet ready to hand over sovereignty to a powerful global government with veto powers. A social grassroots revolution is equally unlikely. So where does that leave us? Hmm...

What if we are not looking in the most relevant spot? Sometimes it is not the façade that requires restructuring but fundamental practices. Morphological analysis of the rituals and procedures in an entity like the Australian parliament, for example, points to the need for a broadening and deepening of knowledge within the organisation - not another round of new, expensive, exterior changes that are unlikely to improve its overall effectiveness.

If, instead of ideologically-shallow parliamentary debate, we concocted a more nuanced discourse that allows for subtle shades of grey to emerge, how might that reframe public policy?

If instead of artefacts from the past staring down at company directors sitting in their leather chairs, board meetings were held in immersive visualisation environments, to what extent would the ability to simulate alternate strategic patterns aid ethical corporate governance?

And instead of an army of bureaucrats attempting to negotiate reductions in emissions at annual COP extravaganzas, why not commission one hundred of the world’s brightest to put their heads together - 50 men and 50 women across all generations and nationalities. By using an online stage like run-the-world, governments would be able to vote instantly on actionable policies instead of aiming at zero-net emissions by 2050.

Would that lead to more effective outcomes? The answer to all three of these questions is a resounding yes! We have ample proof. 

So instead of modifying existing international bodies or instituting new ones to assume existing roles and expand present-day operations in impotent entities like the UN or the WHO, perhaps we should firstly try to upgrade their cognitive capacity by supplying them with a range of new conversational methods and decision tools. There are many models from which to choose - including appreciative inquiry, integral theory, and causal layered analysis, for example.

One “soft” solution that warrants further investigation in this context is the new approach to structuring and processing cognition developed by Marvin Oka and myself for use by the Centre for the Future and its members.

I have always found it helpful to imagine the total expanse of human knowledge – past, present and possible – as an ocean in which different life forms co-exist, currents and tides generate motion and fluidity, and numerous external factors, such as the sun, moon and weather events, determine every granular detail - from salinity and heat, to erosion and hydrothermal vents.

Using the ocean as a metaphor we can examine the differing knowledge states that exist, or must be acquired, depending on your degree of interaction with the ocean. A swimmer will be conscious of the need for surface information, vital for staying safe and close to the shore. Tidal and other data will be used by fishermen using driftnets to steer them to the best locations. Deep sea divers, on the other hand, need a more complete picture of the ocean using sonar devices to map its topology, ecosystem dynamics, and the geology of the sea floor.

These three parties ask different questions of the ocean because they are motivated by a need for different information from which they can then make decisions. The same is true of any category of person requiring specific knowledge. Prior to any interrogation of data, and in order for any inquiry to be viable, we must know what kind of knowledge is called for, where we can find relevant information, how it can be verified, and what we can do if it is not available. That is where learning comes in.

In 1984 David Kolb described the experience of learning – an instinctive cycle we use in the course of an average day to make decisions, as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience. Kolb identified four discrete stages: sensing a concrete experience; making sense of that experience by reflective observation; designing an appropriate response; and actively experimenting with those responses.

In 2010 Richard Bawden developed this basic model in his benchmark study of learning as a social system. Bawden’s seminal insight was that learning was a social function and was therefore intimately related to communities of practice and, consequently, of prime importance to those working in fields ranging from city development and agriculture, to education and public policy.

I found Bawden’s model inspiring and instantly set about integrating his model into my own parallel inquiries. The result was a conversational process I named Odyssey from its exploratory nature. Odyssey is a process predicated on the need to link experiential and conceptual states in order to improve and amplify possibilities in terms of design.

By tracing a recursive and iterative path between exterior and interior realities, invalid and misleading observations, in addition to obsolete assumptions, values and beliefs, can be exposed and transcended, new wisdom given legitimacy, and resilient systems designed around the intention to consciously evolve on the basis of whatever novel design criteria seem most appropriate.

On a more obvious level, Odyssey merges experiential learning about the external world of behaviours and systems (a cycle, as we have seen, comprising sensing, making sense, designing and enacting) with transformativelearning about the internal worlds of beliefs and cultures (a cycle of deconstruction, deep reflection, renewal and legitimation). This latter process would be more familiar to those working in community development or undergoing therapeutic counselling.

At this stage we began to talk about various ways of bringing data to life. We began to take Odyssey into immersive decision theatre environments where digital technology, together with high resolution imaging and augmented reality, allowed us to visualize complexity, play with dynamic patterns, and simulate foreseen and unforeseen consequences in alternative design fictions.

Although each discourse we curated at this stage was by far the most sophisticated I had personally encountered, we began to challenge the lack of other dimensions, particularly vis-à-vis time which was needed if we were going to step into new epistemes of inquiry.

At that stage we added a second infinity loop. Epiphany is the flow of macro-history from the present, via the present moment - which we refer to as the here and now - and out into potential futures. Epiphany delays (or interrupts) any impulse for action without adequate reflection. It achieves this through an exploration of past, present and possible issues and influences, from a variety of levels. As new narratives, literacies and practices evolve from this process the ideas themselves begin to express a paradigm shift to cultural renewal and conscious evolution.

Because the conversational space was already getting a little overcrowded at this stage, we imagined the two infinity loops intersecting at 180 degrees: Odyssey cycling from right to left in front of us, constantly ebbing between concrete and conceptual worlds, and an expanded “now” of consciousness – Epiphany - accelerating from the deep past, through our present point of alertness, and reducing speed as it flows in front of us into future decades and centuries. The importance of this added time dimension cannot be exaggerated: it had the dual function of speeding up our learning metabolism, from the inclusion of large-scale trends from the past, while simultaneously slowing it down in order to reflect on possible future patterns.

By now, we realised the power of the model was potentially unlike anything we had ever encountered in facilitated dialogue. It was creating an almost infinite conversational space in which we could forensically interrogate countless human activities, events, structures and decisions.

But there was still a missing piece to the puzzle - particularly in terms of morphological relations within and between various information domains. While it was always easy enough to talk about surface phenomena, especially those more easily observed, a lack of imagination and experience in using alternative contextual frameworks made it difficult for learners to transcend their own ingrained ontologies and epistemological preferences.

This missing morphological analysis we depict as an iceberg - which is why I started this essay in terms of oceans of knowledge. The iceberg is the central fulcrum on which both Odyssey and Epiphany loops are finely balanced. Try to imagine the entire conceptual structure floating in an ocean of possibility.

These two interwoven strands, poised on the morphological iceberg, bobbing around in an ocean of actual and potential knowledge, define four basic conversational domains. Topics within these domains can be examined from differing altitudes and through a variety of lenses. The most common of these are the interior-exterior and the individual-collective filters, derived from Ken Wilber’s integral theory, which I have written about extensively in describing the cycle of desire and consumption in which we are trapped.

Observable events appear in the tip of the iceberg. Our awareness of surface activity is often a distraction because we can only react to its presence. Yet most news items and policy formulation are attracted to this veneer. Everything happening below the surface is treated as a lower risk, when in fact, the deeper one dives, the greater meaning can be found. In the knowledge ocean, the fisherman will see patterns that he must anticipate and the tidal dynamics that can lead to an improved understanding of where to find the fish. But only the deep-sea diver, cocooned within a mini-submarine exoskeleton, can truly grasp the secret subterranean crevices and mysterious life-forms that occupy the deep.

This symbol of the iceberg, with the bulk of the structure hidden under the water, points to levels of knowledge and related understandings that will be needed if we are to find adequate solutions to certain problems – depending on their closeness to the surface of our awareness. It also indicates the kind of action we might take given the kind of inquiry we are able to conduct. And it implies the degree to which we can alter and shape more fundamental aspects of the human condition, if we have a mind to.

By their very nature, global-scale socio-economic and political transitions demand the ability to create new knowledge, then use that knowledge to turn conversations that matter into actions that make a difference. Discourse that is radically honest, courageous, expansive and out-of-the-box. Discourse that take you in surprising directions and that opens up entirely novel possibilities.

Sadly, strategic discourse of this kind is mostly missing in organisational and public life at a time when it is most needed. Organisations from local and state governments to the UN and WHO are trapped in a cognitive gridlock. Unable to break through this threshold they continue to use politically-correct, time-honoured practices, including routines that make matters far worse. This is why these organisations, founded in less chaotic times, albeit with good intentions, have reached the limits of their capacity to solve humanity’s most existential problems.

This method, which we call the Wayfinding experience, is by no means the only solution that has been developed to help reframe cognitive, discursive and design activity. Nor is it recommended for investigating complicated phenomena. It is tricky to curate and taken out of context can be confusing. In practice a little knowledge can so easily overshadow the flow of free dialogue that is essential for effective strategic design.

On the other hand, it is engaging and reveals complex structures with ease. The strength of the curatorial approach, unlike conventional facilitation, means that participants remain unaware of the varied processes informing the experience in which they are immersed. To them it is simply a richer than normal conversation that is challenging and enlightening. An alchemical experience that resonates in the memory only because it allowed them to be at once a swimmer, a fisherman and a deep-sea diver in an unexplored, previously unfathomable, knowledge ocean.

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.

 

The Deadliest Pathogen

When the Centre for the Future was established a little over five years ago, we released a 100-year agenda. Mindful Uprising projected a philosophy of 2^nd and 3^rd order global change. In doing so it pointed to a range of wicked problems facing humanity, and the need to pursue a fundamental shift in human consciousness if we were to resolve these problems in ways that avoided further unforeseen consequences. Designing our way out of trouble, by nurturing a regenerative biosphere fit for our children and their successors to inhabit, and in which they could flourish, was the prime aim.

I always imagined this kind of radical overhaul to our most deep-seated tenets and modes of operating would be unacceptable to the patriarchal elites in developed nations, particularly in the West. Their foundation role, together with a linear concept of progress, blinds them to any alternative. And for all their espoused openness to reform, commonly wrapped in a guarded justification for the status quo, and accompanied by a lethargy which conveniently betrays and delays the need for any considered reform of the world order, our mission was always going to be too intimidating for their congenital lack of imagination and ideological intransigence.

Like army generals who are obsessed with victory, thus sending more and more troops to their death, today’s wealthy power elites assume there is no gain, yet much pain, from a change in direction. Their convictions are both palpable and unsophisticated. Money is the sole driving force while innovation is the means to achieve greater wealth. Biological pandemic or climate change, it matters not – we will overcome. In the end victory over nature will be ours. After all that is what progress means!

This is mass delusion. If we believe they must soon awake from their wealth-induced torpor and find the courage to admit they were wrong, we wait for a miracle. Yet only by admitting their culpability for the predatory nature of capitalism and its toxic effects, and accepting the clemency from society that must follow, can we all be emancipated to take collective action for setting the human project on a very different path.

For those reasons the community to which the Centre for the Future appeals was always going to be a mix of youthful activism, women of vision, and the impoverished - the five billion or so individuals on all continents who are increasingly impatient with those in power and have no desire to inherit the sterile techno-surveillance nightmare which comparatively small numbers of wealthy old white men and their sycophants have been crafting on their behalf.

From its inception we had conceived the mission of Centre for the Future as reimagining the human presence on Earth. By identifying our most life-critical structures, within and across six theatres of human activity, we would discover those that were failing and in most urgent need of renewal. Or so we thought.

Looking more deeply, we noticed something else. A subcutaneous connective tissue acting as the prime agent in a complex web of global commerce and socio-political motivation. A viral-like corrupting influence that has undergone various mutations over the past 200 years and is now a pandemic infecting the entire population.

Needing a label for this destructive pathogen we decided to call it the cycle of desire and consumption – or CoD-c-2015.

CoD-c-2015 relies on continuous, expansive, economic growth to survive. Embedded within its morphology, traces of avarice, envy, and vanity (qualities latent in most humans) alongside prolonged indoctrination and emotional manipulation, give it the power to code and decode, regulate and express itself in ways most of us find habit-forming. These properties enable it to rapidly mutate, adapt, and retain its deadliest qualities in dissimilar conditions. As yet there is no known treatment or effective vaccine. Herd immunity? There can be none. Indeed it offers only herd susceptibility.

Having dramatically increased its infection rates and morbidity over the past 75 years, we can now see that CoD-c-2015 has been incubated by power structures implicit within our own civilization, particularly the ethos of separation (from each other, nature, and other species), the obligation to compete within a paradigm of assumed scarcity, our fidelity to synthetic rather than natural substances, the coercion to generate personal wealth, and linear notions of progress.

This should not come as a surprise given the human population has increased from 2 billion to 7.7 billion people in that time and that an entire industry has been invented to sell the dubious benefits of material possessions. CoD-c-2015 now impacts every individual as soon as they are old enough to have money to spend – often before that as many parents will no doubt attest.

The sheer intensity of our craving for more and more stuff puts untold stress on the productive capacity of systems like healthcare, education, governance, policing, food security or energy, for example, none of which were designed to cater for such large numbers and unbounded variety. We know that these levels of demand and production also cause immense damage to natural ecosystems, although we are still trying to pretend that cannot be the case.

Like any drug that is addictive, its manufacturers invariably seem to advocate larger doses as the cure. Thus advertising and marketing professionals assure us that if we keep medicating on relentless waves of must-have novelties – gadgets, snack foods, accessories and upgrades, we stay in tune with fashion and therefore must at some stage find the happiness we seek.

Except the morbidity rate seems to indicate the opposite. Our society is sick on a plethora of acquisitiveness, while as individuals we are becoming progressively more lonely, anxious, obese, diabetic, depressed and suicidal. To make matters worse, as the cures fail, we start blaming others for the mess we are in. And at that point the cycle deepens and intensifies.

If we step back to view and reframe the problem through a telescopic lens – for this, as you will now appreciate, is not a biological concern, but a question relating to the very morphology of how our societies, cultures, political practices, and economies are intended to work – we start to see a more expansive, predatory, picture unfold.

Like the collective impact of industrial activities on Earth’s climate, CoD-c-2015 has become an evolutionary force in its own right. As yet we are reluctant to classify current mutations of CoD-c-2015 as the enemy, even though the evolutionary pressure it exerts entices us into a deeply distressing and prolonged end-game. Upon reflection, almost every wicked problem facing the human family – including environmental pollution and waste, climate heating, corruption, sickness, and war, can be traced back to one or more features of this unrelenting disease.

Those few people who have identified the damage being done by the CoD-c-2015 pandemic and are trying to do something about it face an uphill battle. This is, after all, a very smart virus that spreads by insinuating itself into the most vulnerable parts of human psychology.

Scrambling for acceptable solutions in what is ultimately a life and death situation, they must:

• Accrue compelling evidence to illustrate that this pandemic, in its most unconstrained forms, is an inducement to societal extinction
• Find ways to slow and eventually halt the industrial production of superfluous goods
• Demand that governments pivot from continuous economic growth (as measured by GDP) to inclusive growth focused on human wellbeing and equity
• Continue to supply the essential needs of the population from appropriately-scaled, locally-sourced, sustainable means of production
• Avoid the trap of psychological withdrawal by calling a halt to manipulative advertising
• Restore physical and mental health, in ways that relieve us of our cravings over time, by finding substitutes for material wealth and meaningless work, as well as the media froth that instills a desire for more stuff and preserves the current paradigm.

Finding solutions for a single addict is difficult enough. Working with a population of billions is unparalleled. Even so, it is an essential part of repurposing the human presence on Earth. And we already have knowledge, processes and tools we can apply to combat this addiction. We must pollute less, eliminate waste by reducing demand, produce only what is essential, utilize renewable forms of energy for production, and create more value from our purchases through recycling. These simple stratagems can help cure us of this condition besides healing the damage we have done to the planet.

I do not for one moment imagine this transition will be easy for anyone. It demands different beliefs and mindsets, alternative modes of interaction, and the acquisition of frugal habits. But I also have no doubt that we must do this. By mobilizing women, youth, and the power of the billions of underprivileged in this world we will prevail.

2020 - The Imprint

As I was driving from my village into the city this morning, a trip of around 85 kilometres, I tuned in to a Facebook Live recording featuring my friend Dr. David Martin from M.CAM in Virginia. David is too dapper for words and devilishly astute. A performer. But under the dazzling surface there is an intelligence that should never be taken lightly.

I share many (though not all) of David’s concerns regarding the various experimental socio-economic agendas being rolled out around the world in the wake of the present pandemic. David is very focused on the US situation of course which, as a citizen and resident, is as it should be. We are global in our perceptions and perspectives, however, and the totalitarian undertones of some government policies, to which we have both been alluding in our very different ways, seem to be growing an undeniable momentum.

Although his preferred style can lean towards the instructional, on this occasion I was struck more by the intensity of inquiry David was using into the conditions we have countenanced in dealing with COVID-19. If we continue to allow the politics of fear, the repetition of dogma, and the erosion of liberty to drive isolation and compliance, he argued, we will submit to an authoritarian trait in our society, and be deprived of the individual sovereignty we take for granted today. If we permit beliefs and opinions to substitute for evidence we run the risk of being controlled by the ignorance of others and penalised each time we state the truth.

As each question underscored uncertainties being marketed as reality, and as validated facts tumbled over each other in their struggle to illustrate untold truths, I began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. This, I am sure, was David’s intention.

The case for a pause, in order to reflect on the deeper news, pushed all of my alarm buttons, in addition to letting loose personal convictions going back years. There is something going on in our society that is deeply disturbing and goes far beyond conspiracy. We need to wake up to what is actually happening, without being distracted by ridiculous conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact.

Silent undercurrents point to a disorienting psychology of addiction and self-destruction (at once calculated yet also involuntary) which is at the heart of the human condition. It seems to me we are complicit actors in a tragedy whose end-game could well be extinction. Unless, that is, we come to our senses and rewrite the final act.

Whether you agree with my assertions, or simply regard them as uncritical detours, the main points are sufficiently valid to be given due consideration. Likewise, whether you concur with his contentions or not, one feature always stands out in David’s recital: a compelling finale.

So, as the broadcast was nearing its close, and I was about to switch to some music as a much-needed counterpoint, I waited. I am glad that I did. David made a fairly obvious, yet pertinent point. Irrespective of the path we choose after the dust settles and life returns to a degree of normalcy, we will always refer to 2020 as a pivotal point in our development. Rather like 9/11, this event and date will be imprinted on human consciousness for generations to come. His closing statement was particularly poignant: The future we will have is the future we will make. Let’s make it together.

Issued with such a challenge what would you choose to take with you into the future? What would you leave behind altogether? What would you target for reform? What systems would you identify for reinvention? And what new design criteria would you advocate using?  In other words, if it was up to you, how would you go about redesigning the human presence on Earth?

Part of the problem in answering questions like these is that the data to which we habitually turn, particularly those uncovered by Google searches, seem to comfortable contradict any suggestion that we are living in bad times. Philanthropist Bill Gates, philosopher Stephen Pinker, and Dr. Hans Rosling who cofounded Medecins sans Frontiers, all endorse the notion that life is better today than it was even a decade ago, and far better than we think it is. We are better educated and more literate, they claim. We are also wealthier, healthier, happier, live longer and enjoy greater freedoms. But is that really so?

With a little more diligence and care, avoiding Google as the first port of call, evidence can be surfaced illustrating a narrative distinctly incompatible with the former.

Driven by our reliance on chemical-based synthetic technologies, alternative factors assume greater clarity. To feed a burgeoning population we adopt intense industrial farming methods. This destroys soils and pollutes oceans, as well as wiping out insects and other species that happen to be a critical part of the food chain. So more processed food is manufactured. But that leads to obesity and diabetes. In our commercially-minded efforts to control these, and other diseases, we submit to constant medication, which causes other problems including mental health issues. And so on....

Is it possible that the progress Bill Gates and his ilk sense a delusion? Are we really blind to the consequences of an unwavering faith in new technologies? Is our wizardry in this field actually creating a toxic, degenerative society? Could the combination of untreated sewage, garbage, fertilizers, pesticides, industrial chemicals, plastics and carbon emissions, be generating an uninhabitable world?

Apart from the fact that statistics can always be found to accommodate almost any proposal, however outrageous, three factors concern me when we are exposed to such overly-positive news. First, almost every individual claiming we are better off today was either born or lives in more affluent nations where, by and large, all their needs are met. Second, comparative data being used are snapshots carefully selected on the assumption that human progress traces a linear path. Third, they do not take into account the complexity of evolutionary dynamics and alternative socio-economic and psychological assumptions about human advancement. More critically, none of these factors get to the core issue – the survival of Homo sapiens by design.

We might be more literate, and better educated, but has it led to increased levels of empathy, tolerance, new ways of appreciating and understanding the world, an ability to step into new epistemologies, or to reinvent our world from alternative frameworks? In an age when our key problems are now so complicated that they can only be resolved by applying higher levels of cognitive processing within alternative design ontologies I would suggest our educational systems, however advanced, are still not up to the task.

We might be wealthier too. But if that is the case why are around 22 percent of young people aged 18 and under in the world’s wealthiest nation considered to be living in relative poverty? How can eight white men rationalise the fact that they own as much as the poorest 3.8 billion?

And if we are happier and have more hope than in the past, why is it that so many people are lonely, isolated, anxious and depressed? Why is domestic violence increasing? Suicide rates climbing? Why has narcissism become the most reported psychological condition presenting to psychologists? And why do so many young people resort to hate crimes, cyber bullying and substance abuse?

There is a canker eating away at the soul of society and nobody wants to venture there. This is possibly due to a combination of factors: the absence of a collective purpose and narrative for humanity within which personal meaning can be shaped; a distinct lack of intrinsic motivation; the erosion of trust in what were previously our most esteemed institutions and professions; increased levels of hatred and blame for our perceived ills; and the feeling of being trapped in an unending cycle of desire and consumption, from which there is no escape.

Is the silent, unseen truth, too frightening to confront? If not why we are trying to ignore it and hope that it goes away? It is far too big and too complicated for any single government, trade bloc or corporation to tackle. It is not an issue the World Economic Forum or its ilk will ponder. When it is mentioned the wealthy turn their eyes away. Advertising executives and economists express their surprise or contempt for any suggestion growth should be tempered. Why, this would only take us back to the dark ages, they protest.

Yet this is not an existential crisis. Simply put... If the economy to which we are wedded needs people to buy things they do not need, or even want, and to do more of that each year than the year before, simply in order to keep the whole structure from collapsing, do we not need a different, more benign, kind of economy?

The toxicity of the current system, though immensely damaging, is not going to usher in the end of the human race tomorrow. It might eventually lead to a society in which a few wealthy individuals lord it over the rest of humanity of course. Right now it is a slight tremor arising from neoliberal theories of production within the context of economic growth. But that tremor has made the entire system harmful. And it is becoming more intense by the day.

Almost all of the strategies designed to accelerate growth while lowering the costs of production - including planned obsolescence, off-shoring, energy from fossil fuels, global supply chains, just-in-time inventories, the pervasive use of synthetic materials like plastics, and industrial farming practices, for example - have joined with rapid urbanisation and over-population to create a highly fragile and vulnerable global ecosystem. 

So here is the crunch. Almost every civilisational challenge we see in the world today - ranging from our obsession with innovation and novelty, the need to be employed in order to earn a living, homelessness, the subsequent stress on our most-life-critical systems, the use of politics as an agent of business, and corporate corruption, to the culture of intolerance that so easily results in wars and conflicts, and the maladaptive coping practices we adopt to deal with our own individual psychoses, can be related back to a cycle of desire and consumption driven by a mixture of avarice and over-production.

Sooner or later we will need to address this dual problem. If the developed nations can rein in their desire to manufacture more and more stuff they do not really need, thus slowing the rate of consumption, in addition to recycling and using closed system manufacturing, for example, the tangible benefits will not be hard to sell to those of us pleading for sanity. We have seen a glimpse of what these benefits might look like in the current great pause occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lower and slower rates of production, curbing fertility through the use of education, constraining the desire for goods and services that are trendy yet unnecessary, will result in our lives being filled with an abundance of activities other than work. Nature can be given time to heal. Out of the hubris of our age a new society can take shape.

How wonderful to imagine this was the point at which we drew a line in the sand and pledged a new beginning. How amazing for our children to be able to stand in 2050 and look back at 2020, imprinted as it will be on their consciousness, pointing to the generative and empathic society we chose to create back then and the many benefits that have flowed since...

Fewer conflicts and wars. The dismantling of nuclear weapons. The elimination of poverty. A world of greater equality and justice, where anyone can choose the extent to which they work or play without penalty. A world in which alllife is sacred and the dominant desire is to help one another, especially those less fortunate, rather than to horde individual wealth. A slower-paced world in which successive generations can be assured of happiness without the fear it might all collapse like a house of cards.

What will that take? Sentience. We need to wake up. That is all.

About Time

A Gift for my Grandson Bassam - to be read on his 16th Birthday

It’s complicated. Such is the social media shorthand for conveying certain factors in a relationship are far from perfect without having to go into tricky explanations. It’s personal is another – code for mind your own bloody business.

This brief article is complicated and personal. Harrowing to write for these reasons, it ranges over two matters that are core to my own journey and close to my heart. I rarely mention either - even with close friends and family. Yet they constantly haunt my more reflective moments. Both are about the long now of time experienced over an individual lifetime, and over generations...

I have always found intimate relationships crucial, particularly in terms of mutual support during tough times, yet extremely difficult to sustain. Seldom do I envy couples who have been together for decades, though there are some notable exceptions. My niece Deb Cameron and her husband Rog, for example, have been married for 36 years. That is not especially long in the grand scheme of things. Even so, it has given them a heartfelt sense of empathy and tolerance, each for the other, within a framework of enduring love, that is increasingly uncommon.

Obviously people in prolonged relationships share a treasure chest of experiences -  photographs, letters, music, and artifacts marking a journey that is unique to them. They watch with awe and fascination as their children are born, grow up, and have their own offspring. They navigate life’s glitches and surprises as best they can. Each year they venture on holiday together, sometimes to new and exotic locations, but often to old hangouts to which they return again and again. This happens to be the Maldives in the case of Deb and Rog. And when old age eventually creeps up on them, they accept any physical shortcomings with a gracious nonchalance.

Sometimes I feel a sense of longing - not for the rite of passage itself, not for the variety of emotional interactions, nor the many ups and downs that punctuate each lifespan, and not for the disruptions that threaten to tear at the fabric of each marriage at some stage. What I miss is the uninterrupted relational continuity and empathy that comes through a life partnership.

My mother, now deceased, was the sole witness to the first forty years of my life as a drama stretching over two acts, though my oldest friend Peter had far more than just a minor role from the end of the first act to this day. In a marriage lasting 23 years, my first wife was the co-author in the second of those acts, while my subsequent partnership with Elizabeth resulted in the writing of a third act. Both acts ended in misfortune. But out of the heartbreak the fourth, and presumably, the final act, was conjured.  

In terms of the continuous flow of life’s experience then, my mother, together with my friend Peter, then Valerie, Elizabeth, and now Suna, my wife of 16 years, had only parts of the panorama in which I was the lead actor. Although the curtain has yet to descend on the final act, none of the actors had or have complete knowledge of how the plot actually unfolded from one moment to the next.

They had glimpses of the action of course. But Valerie never heard me perform my final organ recital at Notre Dame when I was 22 years old. My mother did not meet her last three grandchildren. Peter did not see the world premiere of my fiendishly difficult solo percussion work Quete in Sydney just a few years ago. Elizabeth has not met my youngest son. Suna has little comprehension of the scope of my career. The only witness to the complete drama was me. Everything else is open to interpretation. Even my own memories, of course, are flawed.

As it is with couples, so it is with the human species. If we were able to take that living panorama of a single life, any life, and project it back in time we would reveal lost information. If we had the power to do this collectively we would eventually unlock wisdom. Of course with the rate of today’s technological development, we might be able to do just that by the year 2045 – the year of the projected singularity. Just picture having the whole of one’s life, including the numerous details, decisions, dalliances, and distractions available in the Cloud. Imagine being able to pause and hit the replay button!

But technology does not particularly motivate me. What intrigues me, even more than the wildest tech dreams, is the prospect of rewilding the world, partially with extinct species that, taken out of the food chain centuries ago, precipitated many of the biospheric problems we now face. And of learning from the deep past too. For example, how wonderful it would be if we could access the vast treasure of

indigenous knowledge from ages past – learning from those who have been watching and caring for humanity and its evolution for many hundreds of years and whose decisions were intended to stand for generations.

Just today my friend Dr. Deon Van Wyk, telling me about the work he is doing with indigenous healers to bring their voice into the climate change debate, made it clear that the current pandemic disrupting our world is no surprise to aboriginal elders who have been watching us closely for 200,000 years. Bushmen of the Kalahari have known, since colonial times, that Western society has far more power than it can handle. The Huni Kuin of the Amazon refer to Western civilization as their younger brother, replete with hubristic impulses, in their ceremonies.

So how might we consider expressions of time differently? How can we step into different epistemologies by noticing more about both our granular and flow experiences with time? The expanded now of human awareness, stretching back in time and forward into the future, should be the canvas for any discussions about human progress and where to from here. But that will require humility. And I am not at all sure that we have the maturity we need in order to retrieve such an elusive quality.

When people ask me about what we need post-COVID-19 my response is always the same. I say I have no idea what an ideal society might look like, but it must work for everyone rather than just a few. We will need leadership, but not of the kind we have subjected society to today. We will need governance, but not of the kind that is corruptible and that enables just a few people to become more affluent than the rest. We will need empathy, to eradicate the erroneous idea that we are somehow separate from each other and from nature. And we will need a leap of consciousness so that we can solve our problems in ways that endure for generations to come.

The Victor, The Victim, & The Voyager

Shutdown & Aftershocks

Today we find ourselves in the grip of an experience whose enormity and impact we cannot as yet fully comprehend. A tsunami of dread has engulfed the world. Multiple shockwaves reverberate through global society, casting a beam of light on the ingrained fault lines of our civilization. Stunned and traumatized, all that we know and thought permanent is shutting down. Truth has become transient. Claims and counterclaims only adding to a growing sense of insecurity.

Even in wartime, cinemas, pubs, department stores, and sporting arenas remained open. Life continued much as before. Not today. Cities are deserted – once-vibrant streets have become deserted caverns. Most enterprises have put up the shutters. Some will never recover. Large corporations are having to radically restructure their operations. As of today, April 27th, 2020, around 3,010,484 have been infected with COVID-19 and 207,205 people have died. The oil price plunged into negative territory for the first time. Gatherings of more than two people are banned in many countries, with almost 60 percent of the global population under house arrest in epidemiologically-mandated lockdowns.

From air travel to concerts and sporting events, the beating heart of civilization has come to an abrupt halt. Personal independence has been suspended as fear, that sentiment overriding all others, takes hold. For the first time in the modern era, nature is showing us how reliant we are on each other. The fragile brittleness of our society, particularly found in the connective tissues between structures we thought strong and independent, have been ruthlessly exposed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Eerie, still, emptied of normality, even our most familiar comforting gestures – the shaking of hands, sharing a meal, and embracing loved ones - have soured into a cradle of deep anxieties. Patterns not previously evident have coagulated into a blood knot of entangled online relationships.

What we are witnessing has become much more than a medical emergency. Details regarding how the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged from the “wet” markets in Wuhan, why the local Municipal Council initially denied its existence, Donald Trump's suggestion that we should drink disinfectant, curfew violations, and the frenzied anti-Chinese propaganda coming out of the US in response, are all distractions in terms of the deeper news.

Zoonotic infections are commonplace, which is why a pandemic of this nature was always on the cards. They are a direct result of the harsh way we treat other species. But the true cause does not begin, nor does it end, there. The essence of this particular drama is rooted in a decades-old ideological crisis in which matters of power, knowledge, and a disdain for the truth, have wreaked havoc and endangered millions of people, as well as the planet itself.

This crisis cannot be detached from others besetting us: our willful destruction of life, the potential for nuclear war, the breakdown of natural ecosystems with its associated loss of biodiversity, food and water insecurity, chemical pollution of the Earth system, the advent of powerful unregulated technologies, a distracted public under the spell of a corrupt political class, the threat posed to the world by US aggression, the normalization of brutality... These emergencies, some barely acknowledged, are signs of a social pathology in which vast inequalities in wealth, income, and power are proliferating out of control. It simply took the magnitude of the present pandemic to expose their severity.

Nor can these crises be so easily divorced from our indoctrination into an insatiable desire for material goods that dominates our waking hours – replacing intrinsic motivation with a ravenous appetite for a stream of external indulgences, gadgets, and encounters. Nor indeed from the strategic opportunity such emergencies provide - a smokescreen, under cover of which massive scams enable the rich to become even wealthier as vast sums of money are transferred from ordinary working people to billionaires, banks, and corporations.

But that is bot the only epiphany. For in this moment, so eloquently described by the poet W. B. Yeats, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. This coronavirus outbreak is not purely a nuisance.

A Veil Lifted

In many ways, it is a poignant gift, for it allows us time to remove the blindfold of hubris. And if we can do that we then have a chance to reflect deeply on what matters at a human scale. In subsequent weeks and months, we will see that this is not an interlude but a different kind of encounter altogether. We have already entered what could amount to a bifurcation point in human evolution. The pandemic is directing our attention to a fecund moment in the space between the end of one era and the beginning of the next, where the possibility for a radical overhaul of society has become compelling.

On one hand, the pandemic has lifted a veil on our society to reveal the dysfunctionality and barbarity of our favoured economic system - with all its mean-spirited abuse, exclusion, austerity, and exploitation. On the other, we must now face up to an indisputable reality: humanity is a single organism - an integral part of the biosphere, not separate from it. As the elders from diverse societies have long avowed: We belong to the Earth. The Earth does not belong to us.

Of course, we have never truly believed that. The past few centuries, in particular, have been marked by unbridled selfishness, greed, and the doctrine of separation - from each other as well as from nature. During that time the social pact between individuals and the state, along with every other conception of social cohesion, has been relentlessly battered.

This dogma of separation, silent and invisible, only fully reveals itself in what we have come to refer to as the human condition. That expression hides a multitude of sins. It allows us to accept a number of erroneous assumptions with such certitude including, most pertinently, a belief that we are helpless in the light of certain inherent, pre-ordained factors. I cannot do much about that, we assert. It is human nature. Except, of course, it is nothing of the kind. It is our excuse for looking the other way and doing nothing.

One element of this dogma is the theory we made up as a way of explaining economics. It is a fiction. An illusion. Yet we allow it to intrude upon everything we think and do. It casually ranks citizens as customers, whose democratic right to choose freely is best utilized in the banal acts of buying and selling. In its reified form it has become a universal narrative that rewards merit and punishes any form of perceived weakness or inefficiency. This fiction has a name. We call it neoliberalism. And it is killing us.

Neoliberalism's obsession with commercial, rather than egalitarian values, its intolerance with matters of ethics and justice, and its spiteful credo of radical competitiveness, have combined to undermine critical thought and challenge the supremacy of well-informed analysis. 

Thus, our current predicament is the culmination of an incipient condition we have nurtured. We brought it on ourselves. It is part of an era defined by collective apathy and a flight from any sense of moral duty. An era notable for its contempt of tenderness, love, and respect. An age of intolerance, the elevation of opinion over evidence, (as well as emotion over reason), the decline of civic culture, and an obsession with wealth and self-interest.

We cannot permit the doctrine of neoliberal capitalism, which speaks only in the warped dialect of commerce, rents, profits, and private wealth, to wage war on public perceptions any longer. We cannot permit inequity to be recast as a virtue. Nor can we tolerate the market remaining a template for structuring social relations. If we do that we are simply allowing isolation, loneliness, deprivation, and economic misery to persist.

Irrespective of whether we attempt to take sanctuary in used futures or embrace the bequest of COVID-19 to recast the human project on Earth, we must remain alert to the immediate and long-term consequences. Some of these are beneficial enough. They give us a brief glimpse of a world that vanished long ago. The Himalayas can be seen from India once again. Fish are swimming in the clear waters of the Venetian canals. The smog has lifted over Tokyo and Los Angeles. Families are taking daily walks together. And in city parks a deep silence has settled, allowing us to hear the sound of birdcalls and insects. As fractured supply chains are remodeled, and international travel takes a protracted dive, the current confusion will quite possibly morph into new forms of globalism where alternative kinds of transnational coordination and cooperation will evolve.

Zombie Rules

Other outcomes are not so favourable. As flustered customers rush local supermarkets in an effort to stockpile essentials, and investors search in vain for safe havens, massive fortunes are being made from the suffering of others. Meanwhile, governments toil around the clock to restore community confidence. In an era where the power of the state was being eroded and devolved to private companies, the inherent contradictions and arbitrary nature of so many public sector edicts and policies can be seen with far greater transparency. That, and the many lies that have been told, are unlikely to generate the kind of trust lawmakers so desperately need in order to retain their legitimacy with the electorate.

In the space of weeks, the social contract between the state and its citizens has morphed into a raft of emergency measures. The most myopic and urgent of these signal a profound loss of individual freedom that is untenable in the long-term. With political factionalism growing ever more intense, and public proclamations constantly in the spotlight, governments of all kinds are more inclined to impose constraining orders rather than liberating policies.

As we have seen in a number of countries, a crisis of this nature creates ideal circumstances for restricting civil liberties, free speech, and human rights, while intensifying the likelihood of emerging authoritarianism. This is not surprising. Authoritarian edicts, resulting in part from a perceived need for tighter control over events, are easier to enact in times of distress and are often erroneously assumed to be more aligned with the statutory task of governing the state. Obviously, this is especially the case within compliant societies. Nevertheless, the fear of death contained within a pandemic can generate chaos. And it is in the management of such chaos that petty tyrants, thriving on fear, often emerge.

Even in some democracies, under the guise of manufacturing normality, political opportunism is rife. Plutocratic power structures, intent on taking advantage of community vulnerability, are already rolling out their repressive agendas. Backroom deals are being concluded under cover of the pandemic. Wars and blockades prosecuted by major powers are being executed with even greater ruthlessness. Commercial companies are getting ready to take advantage of less wealthy competitors, while wily politicians will be looking to strip-mine more public assets for the benefit of private interests.

Yet out of this fog emerges the prospects for a much-needed recalibration of the social order. The erosion of trust in the public sector, along with our insane faith in zombie capitalism, are ironically both reaching their zenith at a time when it is believed only the state, in collaboration with other sectors of society, is equipped to manage and overcome a crisis on such a scale as COVID-19, and to deal with the aftershocks of unemployment, mental health issues, family violence, and social decline. But this, too, creates a liability not usually acknowledged.

Black & White

The greatest trap we face right now is the impulsive habit of applying a Cartesian theatre to complexity made palpable. We urgently need to transcend the market-state power duopoly and the many false binary choices between a free market economy and state intervention. An entirely new social dynamic is needed in which partner-states, markets, and commons-based economic activities, act in harmony and in service to society as a whole.

For this new non-predatory, regenerative, commons-enabled economy to have any meaning at all, it needs both a material and metaphysical world for its existence. And that world can only be built collectively with everyone’s involvement.

We must never forget that the current pandemic, together with most other diseases assailing our civilization, is a direct result of the world we have deliberately constructed and wantonly allowed to corrode the social order. For example, the definitive law of “supply and demand” has now warped to such an extent that the economic theory can only be fully appreciated by viewing this relationship through a more inclusive lens...

A growing population drives the demand for more and more stuff. Economic growth is now critical. As wealth is accumulated, discretionary spending focuses on novelty and luxuries. Marketers use the craving for originality and extravagance to shape addictive conditions in which corporations can only compete effectively by constantly upgrading their products. But now the escalating productive capacity needed can only be met with more energy and more resources. The new demands embolden our incursions into previously inaccessible parts of the world. The result is an intricate web of supply chains covering the globe, intensifying industrial exploitation of the land, and financial avarice on a massive scale. Meanwhile all the assurances of fulfillment and happiness seem further and further out of reach.

A World to Exploit

Ironically, the global financial system, conceited and lacking accountability, was the first such edifice to cave in - its failure revealing a vulnerability we all took for granted but chose to ignore: the continuous circulation of money in the world, powering innovation and enterprise, relies on the health and vitality of people. As well, markets overwhelmingly depend on trust. Trust is the currency used to create the future. And trust rests on the health of the system – of individuals and society.

Ignoring those simple truths allowed us to abandon healthcare – arguably the most vital of all life-critical institutions. The privatisation of healthcare, the austerity accompanying budgetary constraints, and the subsequent commercialisation of medical research, combined to turn what might have been a serious health problem into a global emergency. That single act of myopic negligence has resulted in a catastrophic upheaval; dislocated the lives of so many citizens, disrupted jobs, culled small businesses, upset social relationships, destroyed families, and brought socio-economic instability in its wake.

Were we too busy pursuing profits, exploiting land and labor whenever and wherever we had a chance, and conducting wars, to see clearly what was happening, or likely to happen? Could we not have foreseen these consequences?

Perhaps those who accumulate wealth through exploitation, or slave labour, individuals and corporations in the business community who still pursue the demented ruthlessness of neoliberal economics, and governments who, lacking any moral compass, ingenuity, or foresight, are content to fall back, time and time again, on patching up the present, will finally grasp one irrefutable fact. In order to exploit the world, there needs to be a world to exploit.

To express the present predicament as a choice between sacrificing those most at risk (by virtue of their age, country of residence, financial situation, or pre-existing medical condition) and assuring the economic prosperity of the next generation, is inherently flawed. In a truly empathic society, neither of these would be a viable option. But that is precisely what we were initially offered in the interstices of conflicting assumptions underpinning how this outbreak should be handled. We are better than that. The time has come to think in ways that transcend such forced polarities, in order to create a world where these kinds of extreme choices are unacceptable.

Built by and managed by the state until recently, health, education, energy, food, water, public transport (as well as a free press able to hold government and corporate leaders to account) provide the essential infrastructure for a well-functioning society. Without them, there can be no viable economy. There can be no assurances for a better future. Even the security of the state is predicated on the health of its citizens.

When operating smoothly, these systems make trust in today stress-free and calls for a better future less urgent. Right now, they are almost totally dysfunctional. Yet still, we cannot bring ourselves to face one crucial fact: in order to be of any use in the future, these systems must be reinvented in alignment with the dynamics that are now transforming our world.

The Breath of (r)Evolution

The relationships between all of these structures are immensely fragile – mainly because we have allowed a theoretical construct called the market to determine matters of human well-being. The result is abundantly clear. The predatory facets of capitalism successive Western governments have permitted over recent times – intruding into state concerns, benefitting the rich, but creating harsh inequalities - cannot endure without inciting social unrest and the further deterioration of our most life-affirming structures - including the civilizing role played by artists, musicians, writers, scientists and philosophers.

The COVID-19 pandemic is going to cause unfathomable economic harm. But all of that will pale in comparison to the social damage arising from a sick economy: increased mental health issues, domestic violence, substance abuse, loneliness, suicide, deep cultural malaise, and cybercrime. We must also consider that this pandemic is just a dress rehearsal for what we can expect in the future, with more grievous viruses becoming likely, and when climate change makes some parts of the world almost uninhabitable.

The greatest lesson we can learn from this pandemic is not necessarily the simplest to grasp: We have allowed ourselves to become serfs, bonded to neoliberalist ideals in a quasi-feudal theatre of such vast proportions that we remain deaf, dumb and blind to the consequences.

We will not find any answers to our problems by returning to business-as-usual because those conditions were directly responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves today. More of the same will merely compound our ills, create greater tumult, and might even precipitate a bloody international uprising. So, what can be done?

The age in which we need only be concerned with fulfilling our own desires must come to an end. It is an imperative that the neoliberal sham be called out. The sheer magnitude of the present crisis also allows us to pause and reflect. In this interlude we can begin to reimagine the kind of society and the future world we want to create together.

As the pandemic recedes, commentators are suggesting we will have to choose between a world that attends to human needs or one in which an intensely competitive ethos remains the dominating organizing principle. I am frightened by the latter possibility though, once again, these are clearly bogus alternatives arising from a flawed logic.

Although we often speak of capitalism and democracy in the same breath, they are not the same thing. They do not even share similar goals. Democracy, and even much-maligned non-democratic systems in countries like China, exercise government for the health, wealth, and well-being of all citizens. By comparison, the end-game of capitalism benefits few. By manufacturing massive inequality and financial suffering for a growing majority, it institutes a brutal machinery of ruin in which humanity is one step closer to the edge of extinction.

Can we avoid backsliding into a society where egalitarian tenets are routinely undermined, either by being linked to the more rapacious forms of industrial capitalism in which we find ourselves, or being branded as some form of socialist nightmare? It is certainly feasible. But it will entail moving beyond a few cosmetic reforms to a more elemental restructuring of our civilization. And it will demand the kind of collective imagination that is in short supply.

We still have an opportunity to envisage a world in which the future does not just imitate the present, or yearn for a nostalgic return to an earlier era. This must surely be a society that brings the struggles for justice, emancipation, and social equality into the foreground of our design criteria. A world in which war ends because it makes no sense - other than the profits reaped by the arms industry. A world that imagines and acts on the utopian promise of an equitable, just, diverse, and compassionate civilization. A world in which we inherently grasp how interconnected we are. A world in which all life is held to be sacred.

The Victor, the Victim, and the Voyager

Looking back, this pandemic is a one in a hundred-year event. But looking forward it will be the first of many similar outbreaks we can expect from the escalating transmission of animal pathogens to humans. It is an event of such immensity that we will struggle to grasp the wider implications for months or years to come. Its scale, morbidity, and speed of infection, along with the rate at which so much we took for granted has been swept away, are all astonishing.

But this is what happens when an ancient world of deadly plagues suddenly erupts into a modern world of robotics, international nomads, machine intelligence, and digital media.

The alternatives facing us are many and diverse. We should not expect everyone to follow the same path. But three options, in particular, are latent with possibility. Will we celebrate our victory prematurely by blundering back into yesterday's world and recycling a misused future? Be forever content to play the role of the injured party and assume we can manage whatever is in store? Or will we cast aside the fear of failure, voyaging into new territories of the mind like the adventurers of old discovered new lands?

Today we teeter on the edge of indecision. Some of us are itching to end the inconvenience and all the fuss in order to get back to work. We want to re-establish old habits and routines as quickly as possible so that we can enjoy the material prosperity we have been promised for so long. But experts are now whispering that it might be both impractical and unwise to reinstate that world. Where does that leave us?

Some of us have grasped that we have been unknowingly trapped in a prison of our own invention and that there is so much more to life than we could have imagined just days and weeks ago. But where do we go from there? Is a universal basic income more likely now? Will employers bow to the desire to work from home? Will economic growth remain in the vanguard of human activity? If so, where are the new structures allowing us to opt-out of the rat race to pursue local production, together with less hectic, more reciprocal lifestyles?

A few of us want to throw caution to the wind and find entirely new ways to work and play in a world of abundant resources, social equity, and universal justice. Yet we are branded heretics, naïve dreamers, and unpatriotic revolutionaries. Who will listen to our voices now?

I invite you to play with these themes. For it is only when we reflect deeply on the meaning we hope to find in our personal lives, only when we can find supreme satisfaction in our social and functional interactions, and only when we fully comprehend all the opportunities available to us, that we can truly claim to be living, sensate, human beings in love with life itself.

The Victor: You attempt to recapture the world of yesterday, in terms of what you assumed to be your right - indeed your destiny - in the belief that you have overcome the worst nature can throw at you. You remain convinced that humans are exceptional and superior to other forms of life. The problems facing humanity can be resolved using the tools we have already invented. An unquenchable desire to return to normalcy, and to business-as-usual, will drive your quest.

The Victim: You accept that further disruptions and calamities of all kinds are likely to become more intense and far more frequent over the coming decades. Each time you will justify your surprise and lack of preparation as an inevitable consequence of being human. We could not have seen that coming. Besides, there is nothing we can do about it. That crie-de-coeur will ring constantly in your ears as you resign yourself to playing a bit part in a production of tragic proportions, directed by those with supreme wealth.

The Voyager: You consciously set out to build on, and nurture, what you have learned about yourself and others during these past few weeks. You have glimpsed a future in which the absolute joy of living outweighs the sacrifices you made for monetary reward. You intend to live in humility, within the limits set by the planet, allowing a shared regenerative awareness and a renewed purpose to guide you into pursuing very different goals than in the past. You will become an inspiration to others. But that, let me caution you, is never the easiest option.

Elements in each of these stories have some appeal. I can imagine one scenario being the context for the other two. But which do you find the most convincing? If we are forced into hitting the reset button on our civilization, which story offers you hope and the expectation of fulfillment that your children express every day through their words and play? If it is for them, which path will you choose?

The Wisdom of Generations

Did you know that at the equator, the Earth spins at a fixed rate of around 1,000 miles an hour? Probably not. The reason you cannot feel it turning is that, along with everything else on the surface of the planet, including the oceans, the forests and the cities, we are all spinning at the same constant speed.

Movement and synchrony are signs of vitality and of progress. Clues that we are alive. They are one of life’s constants - even if we do not notice them. To remain static is to be moribund. Or dead! Although we are not usually all that sensitive to the pace of change, and certain events, like the nine months gestation period it takes to grow a baby, do not vary much, it is remarkable how human knowledge and expertise have been accelerating exponentially since the dawn of history. Let me give you an example from my own life.

I stopped writing music in 1984 – a year before my 40^th birthday. Although this was an intensely poignant decision at the time, since I had been composing music almost daily since the age of five, there were a number of valid reasons for discontinuing. For one thing I felt the urge to experiment with words rather than sounds. I had become jaded by the solitary nature of composition, and the competititve nature of the profession was sapping my love for the art of music-making and performance. But mostly it was because my music, dubbed by critics as part of thenew complexity - a surefire way to kill off any interest on the part of concert-going audiences incidentally - was played by fewer and fewer musicians. Meanwhile the number of people who were inclined to attend concerts of “cerebral art” was shrinking. I had to face facts. Being a composer of modern classical music had become an indulgence I could no longer afford. What is the point of relating this story?

The last piece I wrote was a 24 minute music-theatre work called Quete - for percussion. It had been commissioned by a brilliant student of mine at the Victorian College of the Arts. Peter Neville, a member of Elision Ensemble, lauded internationally for its virtuosic flair and courageous programs, was one of the most talented young musicians in Australia at the time. Regrettably, the piece made so many demands on the performer, and required such dexterity, that it was pronounced unplayable.

Quete remained unheard for the next 32 years. Then, in February 2016, Kaylie Dunstan, a final year student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, decided to include the work in her graduation recital.  She played this incredibly complex piece from memory, to a highly appreciative audience, with a precision and sense of maturity that was breathtaking.

The same story in terms of skills development can be seen in sport. Jackie Charlton, who played in the soccer team that won the World Cup in 1966, recently acknowledged that the current England team would most likely demolish his old team with their superior use of data, intensive training techniques, spontaneous inventiveness, individual skills and levels of fitness. I imagine that the same principle would apply to most fields of endeavour where performance expertise, physical endurance, mental toughness and agility are on display.

A related issue is the time it takes for entire societies to adjust to new technologies and to adapt to changing conditions. In our modern world the interval between conceptual design, commercialisation, and market uptake is extremely compressed. In 1995 hardly anyone knew about the Internet. Barely a decade later it had become so ubiquitous that we could not imagine life without it. At the beginning of 2007, nobody had even seen a touch-screen smart phone with a camera. Steve Jobs unveiled the first ever iPhone in January of that year. By 2017 over 66 per cent of the population owned a smartphone with its music streaming and photographic capabilities considered the most important components.

Each of these trends represents a radical shift in the ways we are able to live, play, work, entertain and engage with each other. But there is a deeper, more profound pattern here that links to my initial ideas about new skills acquisition and development. For underlying each shift is the astonishing rate at which knowledge is discovered and applied. The just-in-time industry vogue of the 1970’s has given way to a real-time actuality in diverse fields. The ultimate leap forward in this regard is the noosphere of regenerative consciousness, which is already informing the reinvention of failing systems including energy, agriculture, education, social wellbeing, human relations, and so much more.

This is exceptionally good news for humanity. It is symbolic of our flexibility in the face of circumstances that threaten to disrupt every organisation and institution on the planet. Of course there are tricky pathological disorders still to be overcome – like our inexplicable readiness to espouse scientism as the only means by which society can establish norms and epistemological values. But at least we can now have renewed confidence in our potential to address those worse case scenarios that have so many of us throwing up our hands in horror and declaring the end of life as we know it.

Obviously the difference between being able to deploy knowledge rapidly, aided by the digital development of both human and machine acumen and skills, and wisdom (that is accepting the need for substantial change in the first place) raises further issues. But even then the situation is possibly more optimistic than not.

The youthquake of activism and civil disobedience spreading around the world is a sign that young people everywhere are refusing to become heirs to the avaricious world we have been so busy making on their behalf. They see through our hypocrisy and have no intention of being bullied into compliance by unelected oligarchs. They are making their voices heard and I doubt they will want to compromise.

If we can avoid gender-biased coding and diverse ethical traps, artificial intelligence will be used to make the world work for everyone. New modes of organising, such as peer-to-peer models and revitalised cooperatives, will erode the more predatory aspects of capitalism. Experiments with how power is exercised will eventually offer more engaging forms of democratised governance.

But the greatest hope for human durability and prosperity is a barely-visible tipping point: the speed at which we will agree to cooperate to redesign human presence on Earth.

The darkest hours are just before the dawn. And dark forces of destruction are stalking civilisation today. I believe these will be transitory and that a new dawn is on the horizon. We must be thankful in that regard for the various crises afflicting us – from our addiction to materialism, pressure from 7.7 billion people causing the failure of our most life-critical systems, the culture of fear that incites us to blame others for our predicament, and the anxiety and distress that perpetuates the illusion buying more and more stuff will bring happiness, when we already know that is not the case. For while these burning platforms are certainly dangerous, and pose a very real risk, the determination to resolve them is becoming a tsunami.

The regenerative impulse lies deep within the human soul. Although the future is a fairly meaningless concept for most people, the decisions we take tomorrow will be critical. For it is then we will realise the need to let go of those parts of our nature that are destructive and bring us only pain.

Instead we will find ways to inhale the joy of what it actually means to be a sentient human being. The most powerful emotion we can harness is unconditional love for life. That, and the realisation we are not separate from each other, nor from the planet in which we all live, will free the most profound renewal of the human species in our history.

It will not be forced. Nor can it be engineered to any great extent. Ironically that fact alone is sufficient to alarm those among us who try to control every outcome.

This transformation will be born of its own accord, in its own way, in its own time. How can I be so sure? Because there is simply no other way if we are to avoid extinction or living in an environment that is toxic to health and well-being. Only as a unified family, rather than separate competing tribes, will we rediscover the wisdom of generations, and use this to transcend history and our own prior accomplishments.