The Hames Report

The Heretic's Curse

In 1517 Martin Luther, a professor of theology in the German town of Wittenberg, caused a stir by publishing his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences.

In a tract comprising 95 theses Luther strongly disputed the Catholic view on indulgences: that wealth might be utilised to quarantine the faithful from God's punishment. Within two months this heresy had spread across Europe – helping to trigger the Reformation.

Although Luther certainly did not intend it to be so - given that he passionately believed it was his opponents who had fallen into heresy - the word heretic rapidly became a term of moral approval and integrity.

Not all disagreements are heresies of course. Heresies are philosophical disputes about our collective objective reality. As a consequence, they must seem to threaten mainstream beliefs, not simply individual values or practises. For this reason, the act of heresy relies on the existence of a canon of universally accepted ideas, the logic of which can be disputed.

For me the collective morality I contest is the set of beliefs and source models informing our civilisation’s prevailing worldview, and resulting world-system, which seem to trap us in circumstances that are increasingly toxic to human life and public-spirited enterprise. It is this shared reality, which creates the set of effects I refer to as the human condition, that I condemn. My definition of the human condition should not be confused with the efforts of others to explain the essential nature of our predicament - such as the purely biological view espoused by the Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, for example.

Given the complex phenomena of our existence, tackling the range of entangled forces triggered by our species, coupled with the technologies we have invented, that have had such a colossal impact on the natural world, it is surely naïve to claim that the source of all our problems is the tragic conflict between good and evil. I do not doubt for one moment that the emotional relief that could come from transcending such extreme dualities, must be at least part of any solution. But if we are to genuinely free ourselves from the burden arising from the battle between instincts and knowledge, as expressed by Griffith, then clearly the renewal of the dominant worldview, springing from models of abundance and empathy rather than scarcity and competition, and aligned to a far more sophisticated appreciation of our interdependent nature, both to each other and to nature, will be vital, as will a substantial redesign of the many life-critical systems upon which we rely for our subsistence.

So, while I agree with Griffith that humans need to coevolve more consciously, I refute the proposition that a single behavioural solution, even if it does resolve the paradox of good versus evil, can shift the pervasive world-system to a more equitable and viable basis. If it is unreasonable to suppose any one factor can be responsible for the set of circumstances we have created during our time on this planet, it is also unreasonable to suppose that any single solution will be found to resolve or “heal” such a phenomenon.

Although we yearn for simplicity, adapting to shifting circumstances is more likely to entail (i) a fusion of new ontological conceptions, mindsets, interpretations and impulses, and (ii) a more comprehensive grasp of dynamic contextual patterns and our role in their making.

Part of the trap we are in, and once again I can empathise with Griffith on this point, is that it is safer and certainly far more comforting to accept the status quo - to stay in the warmth and security of Plato’s metaphorical cave. Resignation with how things are, to the extent that we see little reason to search for more virtuous and improved alternatives, is a denial of our capacity for continuous advancement - to reach for the stars. It is true that humans are plagued by denial of many kinds. We deny the predatory nature of capitalism, deny suggestions that charitable aid sustains inequality, deny the thought that schooling sucks the creativity out of children, and deny that militant feminism was not damaging to many ordinary men. Autocratic governments routinely deny they trample over human rights. Addicts deny heroin is harmful. And so on…

But here is where I really depart company from Griffith. For the human condition cannot be eliminated, nor can it be transcended - although it can develop in ways that appear to be healing. It is what it is, morphing in step with shifting external conditions as well as our collective resolve to change or not.

Moreover, improving one or more aspects of the human condition cannot just be a matter of individuals moving from a shared psychosis to a more integral (or emotionally mature) state. Improvement on a planetary scale requires shared collective insights, leading to wiser, more inclusive, implementation of second-order structural change. Cooperation of that kind requires a mutual morality. And that is where good intentions begin to unravel.

If we continue to deny that the strategies we commonly use to construct our world-system, such as rivalry, partition, objectification, status and economic stratification, are a problem, any form of mutual morality will continue to be missing from our worldview narratives, and consequently out of our reach behaviourally speaking.

This is why the denial which most concerns me is that which rationalises any absurd claim to have created the best of all possible worlds, to be climbing a peak of human progress, and to be set on a course that will ultimately benefit all humanity. I realise this is the story of the optimist and that optimism is in short supply these days. But to deny there could be more virtuous, healthier, benign, reliable, and beneficial possibilities for the human race in the future, is sheer blindness. To emerge from this blindness means being open to the radical renewal of the source of all these problems. The Western civilisational worldview.

Unconditional commitment in the form of a global covenant by incumbent leaders and their successors to act in unity on this matter is needed. All partisan and national interests must be put aside if the greater good is to prevail. They will need help from sage process facilitators and expert curators of discourse. They will need to use smart algorithms to cut through and digest vast volumes of knowledge. They will need potent visualisation tools to grasp the complexity of patterns that are constantly shifting, as well as to identify the most benign intervention points. Finally, they will need to find the courage and strength of mind to deconstruct their most intransigent beliefs so as to surface alternative models and philosophies. Trying to design a new worldview, from within the constraints of the current world-system, is doomed to fail.

In this instance, I believe leaders should work on three themes. All three of these themes will be deemed heretical by many, including those who deny there is a problem, but also those who deliberately set out to profit from the way they have rigged the current system. Ruling oligarchies - including corrupt politicians; arms dealers; crime syndicates; the large investment banks; media barons; companies that monopolise and control life-critical systems such as water, healthcare, and the food chain; and even institutions that tread a more orthodox and cautious path in order to sustain the status quo.

Growing numbers of the human family are desperately seeking a more benign, inclusive, universally equitable, and ethically defensible worldview. This worldview must be crafted in ways that are compelling and optimistic, but express new wisdom.

The stories we tell ourselves today, and the beliefs embedded in those stories, have been responsible for most of the problems we are trying to fix. At the same time, they illuminate why many of our existing beliefs are unsustainable. But to tell new stories, interlaced with new beliefs, requires a profound understanding of why and how the source models we chose to trust have actually deflected our original intentions. Without new insights we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, continuously recycling the old episteme in a deluded conviction we are inventing a new paradigm.

There are really only five metamodels that need our attention. They all happen to fit into an occidental ontology, unmistakably demonstrating the ascendancy of Western thought and customs during the past few hundred years. Teleological mythology – particularly the cult of the individual – is the most dominant of these. Meanwhile scientific realism, moral dualism, Cartesian logic, and economic theories obsessed with ownership, growth, and debt, continually reify the supremacy of Western cosmology in this context.

In view of their intended and unintended consequences all five should be reconsidered. I am not implying that we overlook the immense value that has accrued to many individuals from the widespread use of these models, especially in the old Occidental empires. But in terms of their inexorable elitism, influence, and reach, their innate tenets are increasingly troublesome to a majority of humanity. More inclusive alternatives must be found if we expect to create a world that works for everyone.

For example, as we reject neoliberal political and economic orthodoxies and move into a fundamental repositioning of international monetary systems, undertakings geared solely to benefit individual financial gain, or facilitate continuous economic growth, may become ethically intolerable – particularly in a future where the even-handed sharing of resources becomes commonplace.

The prospect that the human workforce will decline dramatically, through the deployment of artificially super-intelligent machines and 3D printing, means we are sure to experiment with concepts such as a guaranteed minimum income for every citizen. In addition, we will probably re-evaluate how pre-industrial organisational forms, like mutual societies, guilds and cooperatives, can better facilitate more equitable forms of community engagement and exchange.

The opportunity offered by commons-based initiatives and blockchain technologies, even cryptocurrencies backed by gold or other precious metals, will in due course lead to the unshackling of excessive state control. As local and parochial activities take on much more administrative relevance I envisage the need for some form of panarchical governance to fill the void created by the retreat of state bureaucracies.

Underpinning all of this will be an epiphany that objectification of all kinds must give way to a new humanitarian pluralism. The dominant narrative will also shift - from competition in a world of scarcity to cooperation in a world of abundance. The hoped-for resurgence of matristic lore (and law) along with empathy and compassion will go a long way to heal the numerous rifts and damage that have occurred from thinking in dualistic opposites. Humanity will come together through changes of this nature.  

I dare say this new world will be unrecognisable from that in which we live today. Not from the technical gadgets and marvels that will certainly continue to alter how we make things, communicate, and transact business. Not from the new urban spaces featuring vertical gardens, hydrogen vehicles, and social meeting places. Not from the sensors embedded within and connecting every object. Not even from the new cityscapes displacing roads, offices and factories.

Indeed, the most fundamental change will not be any of the familiar physical infrastructure we see around us each day. On the contrary, for all the technocratic hype surrounding an imminent fourth industrial revolution, this uprising will be one of mindful consciousness, and thus invisible to the naked eye. From any conventional viewpoint, today this mindful uprising will feature the most improbable of transformations. The emotional conversion of our species that creates an ambient global state of connection and compassion. A new, and certainly far less enervating, human condition where fear and anger have turned to mutual respect, anxiety and conflict have dissipated, and where people from all walks of life and cultures know that everything is now possible.

I realise that this heresy threatens today’s collective trust. But this trust has already eroded to the point of collapse. Governments can no longer fulfil the promises made prior to their election. Some do not even try. Corporations cannot separate service to their customers from the rights of shareholders. Social media convey lies and half-truths. Once-venerable institutions are now part of a society that has been rigged to benefit the establishment.

And so heresy this must remain. For the moral values we once identified as being worthy of our advocacy and support, and to which we remain blindly loyal, are no longer that. They are mostly toxic in their impact. And yet they remain an inconvenient taboo - off-limits to any rational, intelligent conversation, that would challenge their legitimacy.

I am not an accidental heretic although I do not claim sole authorship of this creed. My heresy is to threaten what I regard as an illegitimate status quo and a wayward elite and to talk about this deliberately and openly. Like Luther I cannot recant and, like him, I grasp that the moral and intellectual questions around which these heresies coalesce are not fathomable in the normal sense.

As far as I am aware there is no scientific evidence or analytical knowledge that will finally settle arguments about the nature of human consciousness. And when questions such as these have no final answers they can only be decided by contests of political force, if they are to be decided at all. And yet in spite of this I am comforted in my belief that eventually these ideas will become mainstream - propelled by the momentum of virtue and common sense. There can be no compromise as that will seem indistinguishable from treachery. In effect, the betrayal of the human experiment on the cusp of an evolutionary breakthrough. 

All A Poet Can Do Today Is Warn

How we perceive our reality, and what we do to live with or change that reality, is governed almost entirely by a set of assumptions, and self-reinforcing metamodels that, while constantly evolving, are mostly taken for granted and, as a consequence, go unchallenged. Their dynamic interaction shapes our most fundamental experience of the world. Our worldview.

The unique paradigmatic nature of the contemporary Occidental worldview is a combination of four powerful metamodels:

1. Western cosmological concepts – including beliefs about how the world started, how it works, in what direction it is headed, and its eventual fate. The ontological construction of this worldview derives from an historical synthesis between scientific and Judeo-Christian religious traditions, based particularly on their hierarchical, class-based, characteristics.
2. Cartesian logic – a method of reasoning derived from Rene Descartes which applies ontological duality to two finite substances, such as mind (spirit or soul) and matter. This invariably leads to a discourse around two moral opposites, such as the conflict between good and evil, or right and wrong, for example.
3. Scientific realism - a view emerging from the tradition of empiricist philosophy of science where the universe described by science, including invisible forces and relationships, is regarded as real regardless of how it might be interpreted.
4. Cultural conventions based on the moral worth of the individual, that then give rise to the rights of the individual – as enshrined in democracy [the right to be informed and to have one’s voice heard] and in capitalism [the right to own and sell property] for example.

Although the prevailing Western worldview is a shared phenomenon, and increasingly so, it is not shared equally by everyone. Indeed the major alternate paradigmatic tradition, which evolves from Eastern thought, is distinctive in ways that are deceptively subtle.

The Occidental view of the universe is that of a clockwork mechanism with boundaries fixed in time and space. The Oriental stance, on the other hand, posits a universe that is cyclically created and destroyed, while social customs emphasise community rather than the individual.

On the surface, one might be excused for thinking that the Yin-Yang philosophy merely reflects the dualism noted above. In fact this is totally misleading. Duality can be found in many belief systems. Sinic beliefs are associated with oneness and the Tao. They might be more accurately understood as seemingly contrary forces that are actually balanced and complementary, interconnected yet interdependent, informing each other as they interrelate in any number of ways.

If we seek an even earlier and more unified worldview we must go back to the origin of indigenous societies where all life was sacred. Invariably experienced as an integral whole, the only meaningful boundary was between our existence here on Earth and the spirits of the ancestors - embodied within the topology and objects of the landscape and in the heavens. But this is a distraction in terms of my main point…

What I am suggesting is that the Western worldview has now evolved to a position of authority that is unprecedented in modern times. Most of the global population subscribes to this worldview. The adherence of Singapore and Dubai to the Western model is reflected in their respective skylines. The rules of globalism impact everything from trade and investment to wars and organised crime. Even China has opened up its society to some of the most central Occidental tenets – like private ownership, for example – in order to thrive in a global market system.

So let us assert for the time being that the Western worldview has emerged triumphant – that it has successfully neutralised or integrated potential challenges to its supremacy from alternative belief systems, and that a majority of the world is comfortable with the result. The next question we must surely ask is: How do we go about translating and interpreting that prevailing worldview into some form of relevance for us if we were born and socialised into a non-Western culture? The answer to that simple question is quite profound and points to fundamental differences between worldview and mindset – the socio-cultural filter that is constantly called upon to do the actual interpetation.

Over the course of a lifetime, each individual on the planet accumulates a mix of understandings, principles and attitudes that shape their unique mindset. Just as we all have distinctive biometrics, so it is unlikely any of us will have identical reactions to an event or particular set of circumstances.

But while our individual mindset does indeed set us apart from some others, it also unites us with those of a like mind. Common values and practises can be identified across specific groups. We then assign labels, like community and nation, to these clusters, distinguishing them from nations and communities that possess dissimilar characteristics. People in these social clusters tend to think and act alike to some degree and to that end there a degree of coherence manifests. But such groupings are essentially matters of political convenience – imagined social constructs that are not valid in any material sense. Yet we place such store in imagining that we are Australian citizens, or Canadian, or English, and that somehow we are fundamentally different because of it. Nationality becomes part of our identity – a neccesity in this bureaucratic age for international travel. United behind a flag, patriotism swiftly follows – and then, quite possibly, rabid fundamentalism. And yet it is all illusory. The only real unity we have is being part of a single species. One human family. Sapiens.

And so here we have the ultimate paradox characterising the human condition. For that mindset, that filter, that window onto the world, is actually a subservient agent; it is only able to interpret the worldview, performing its task of filtering out particular beliefs and behaviours while leaving others alone, in ways determined by that worldview. The power of the worldview is therefore absolute.

This is one of the most critical problems facing humanity. For while it allows us to destroy cultures and indigenous wisdom, contrive conflicts, and impose universal rules in a quest for homogeneity, it resists any attempt to transform it. So why should we want to reform a worldview that has brought so much affluence and wellbeing in its wake? Why don’t we hasten the inevitable by accelerating the shift towards a universal cultural uniformity?

The truth is that we cannot afford to allow that to happen at a time when the Western worldview is a demonstrable failure, unable to remain viable or fit for purpose in a dynamically complex global context vastly different from even a decade years ago. Democracy is in a shambles. The neoliberal theory of unlimited growth has led to economic stratification that is now patently inequitable and unsustainable. The environment we have neglected by industrial farming and fishing is dying. Propaganda and misinformation in social media are leading to social dislocation, depression and alienation. The crumbling US empire still believes and behaves as though it is the leader of the free world. Fear and apprehension stalk the planet. And the only promises we seem prepared to make to the next generation entail submitting to a form of joyless technological limbo, destroying each other with nuclear weapons, or preparing for civilisational collapse from the climate breakdown.

Meanwhile, as I have pointed out on several occasions, our incumbent leaders seem to have reached a collective cognitive threshold beyond which it is impossible to think or act, where the possibility of a new dawn for humanity, a different worldview, and a different narrative with shades of hope, have shrivelled into a dithering futility. The look of utter shock and disbelief on the face of Edward John Smith, Captain of the Titanic, as that unsinkable vessel slipped into the icy waters of the north atlantic ocean, come to mind.

Our best hope is to interrupt this folly, turning to wise reflection fuelled by intelligent optimism. For we are blessed with the exceptional gifts of ingenuity and invention should we choose to use them. Our best selves must be applied to a conscious renewal of the prevailing worldview before it enters a death spiral. If the source models I have identified are no longer effective, and do not work in the interests of the human family as a whole, then they should be replaced.

If we do not act, the collapse of our civilisation will be inevitable and it will occur without a guiding hand. The signs are already intensifying. Western cosmological thought continues to amplify class and hierarchy at a time when mutual networks and new commons are best suited to contemporary conditions. Dualistic thinking is a blunt instrument in an age of intensifying complexity. Scientific realism is but one epistemology among many – just ask indigenous people. And capitalism has become toxic - wedging open the lesions between affluent societies and everyone else.

So surely the UN is doing something about this? There must be a clutch of influential think-tanks and international NGOs working on this problem right now. Wise philanthropists must surely be turning their attention to second-order structural change? If they are I have not heard about it.

Apart from a few exceptions most so-called leaders are blindly optimistic concerning futures they cannot even begin to imagine. Besides, they are too busy patching up the present to notice the truth of our predicament. Naturally the UN is continuing to do what it has always done in a setting that would be hostile to tackling such massive contradictions in the stories we have been telling ourselves for decades. They, too, focus on the present expecting that the future will trace a linear rather than an exponential path. Their behaviour seems to indicate an unfounded trust in just-in-time achievements or prayers for deliverance to some unseen god.

All around me colleagues plead for the restoration of positive thinking, for hope, for putting the narratives of scarcity, competition, rampant economic growth, and dystopian collapse to one side. I wish that I could do that. Believe me it does nothing for my soul to be writing in this manner. But I remains convinced that the single most vital task facing all of us is the renewal of an obsolescent worldview.

In the words of the British war poet Wilfred Owen: All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets much be truthful.

The Real Problem

Ten years ago, when I wrote my third book, The Five Literacies of Global Leadership, I saw my primary task as helping to shift our thinking about leaders and leading away from the customary notion of individuals with inspiring visions using their status and authority to forge change, to a far more egalitarian notion of people engaging in a rich experience of mindful collaboration, where diverse contributions are all essential and equally valid.

I linked this explanation of leadership to the theory of social identity – in contrast to more widely accepted theories, such as charismatic and contingency theories, that dominated most academic and developmental descriptions of leadership at the time.

The thought of a crowd doing the bidding of a single leader who possesses some kind of magical aura or unique knowledge, always seemed absurd to me. It still does. Instead we perceived leadership as contextual – set within the burgeoning complexity, exhilarating energy, and daunting issues of a new globalism – but also more inclusive, personal, and consequently engaging.

Little did I realise that our preferred definition of leadership would be even more relevant and necessary today than it was back then. And, though still beyond the boundaries of the establishment, there is no doubt such collaborative approaches to leadership no longer belong at the fringe.

Leadership is the moral impulse to engage in a collaborative experience for improving one or more aspects of what it means to be human.

My personal volition in this context has been to explore deeply the various ways we can and should upgrade our thinking – particularly adopting a prudent balance between facts and beliefs – in order to arrive at new insights and undertake such vital improvements.

My inquiry has been an intellectual journey. This is the reason I have written extensively, helped develop new dialogical methods, designed alternative models, and mentored some of the most amazing people on the planet. It is the rationale for speaking to diverse audiences around the world at every juncture. And it is the motive for working with some of the most innovative thinkers of our time to establish Centre for the Future.

The mission of Centre for the Future is to make the world work for everyone. Our agenda for second-order change – a mindful uprising – has been planned as a transgenerational Earth-scale project to be deployed over 100 years. Yes, that is insanely audacious. But…

The rationale for the work undertaken by Centre for the Future is clear. Sapiens appear to have reached an impassable cognitive threshold. Unable to think ourselves out of today’s problems we increasingly pass these on to the generations that will come after us. Unsure how to create or transcend alternative conditions, we resort to patching up the present by surrendering to what seemed to work in the past.

At the same time, because of increasing complexity in our society and the overwhelming amounts of data available for us to access, we are finding wisdom harder to come by.

Meanwhile the fears and apprehension generated by leaders who are at a loss as to what they should do, particularly in the political sphere, is creating an ethos where beliefs and opinions are an acceptable substitute for facts and knowledge.

The putative challenges of our time - ranging from nuclear proliferation and terrorism to endemic poverty and the effects of climate breakdown - are being treated discretely, with a caution verging on paralysis, little sense of urgency, yet a reckless misunderstanding of the complexity underlying their relationships. These challenges are only the visible signs of a far deeper malaise - one that could threaten civilisation as we know it.

Whether we are talking about the rapid disintegration of the Gupta, Maya, Han, Khmer or Roman empires, there are a number of factors that seem to appear each time a civilisation is headed for disaster. In each case the adaptive capacity of the society is reduced. There is no valid reason we should regard our own civilisation any differently. When increasing complexity generates conditions in which the society finds it almost impossible to think of viable alternatives to the status quo and, as a consequence, defers action indefinitely, we face the possibility of societal collapse.  

These days, every day, I see evidence indicating our incapability of thinking our way out of the grave emergencies facing us. Incumbent leaders, progressively out of their depth and slow to act, are generating gridlock. Meanwhile new technologies have become a raison- d’etre, a panacea, rather than an aid to conscious coevolution. As fear, inertia and apathy embed as the real enemy, we must turn to adaptiveness. Not just physical adjustment, but cognitive renewal - the facility to design and adapt to alternative mental models, different epistemes, and unfamiliar practices.

I believe our aim has to be a transformation of the prevailing worldview and the design of a genuinely regenerative culture where the exceptional nature of the human species does not equate to putting ourselves at the centre of everything but, rather, seeing ourselves as a sacred part of Earth’s ecology.

Starting with the reframing of human purpose, cooperative interactions arising from abundance, empathy and inclusion, will need to be designed into every aspect of our lives – from the exercise of power, business and the economy, to governance, learning, production, and community advancement. Ultimately our primary task at Centre for the Future is to turn a vicious monoculture, driven by the prevailing mindsets of scarcity and competition, into virtuous cycles that benefit all the human family.

Power Shifts

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear - Antonio Gramsci

Scary Stuff

Recent events can seem scary, vapid, or just plain bewildering - particularly for those of us who skate on the ice-thin surface of reductionist indifference. Ultimately it comes down to personal preferences. We can tune in to the mainstream discourse - humdrum but uncomplicated - or be equally deceived by what is on offer from alternative sources. Legitimate or otherwise, official or not, in the final analysis most information is a filtered impression of partial truths.

After commercial factors are taken into account, the bias of most corporate media is political, casually shaped by history and habits. Editorial commentaries are crafted around an implicit doctrine. Explicit headlines accompanying carefully framed images, brashly declare everything you need to know about the latest scandal, bomb scare, or celebrities behaving badly. It is not crucial that we think too hard. In fact it is best we do not. The whole thing is packaged to keep us captivated, comforted, and amused.

Social media can be marginally more seditious in that all manner of conflicting reports, opinions and hot air are circulating. This, too, is to be expected, given that social networks like Facebook or Twitter are shaped by congruent communities engaged in a manic reification of each other’s opinions, often in a style the authors hope will ensure their content goes viral.

While the corporate media runs the risk of boring us with mind-numbing predictability, social media keeps us aroused with a mixture of rant, froth and an occasional yelp of anguish.

There are always important pointers should we care to probe more deeply. Seeking the veracity of a statement by verifying its source, triangulating data, or figuring out embedded codes within diverse belief systems, is not for the faint of heart. But it can be well worth the effort if, by doing so, we are able to comprehend what is going on in our collective ecology of mind and use that to anticipate future events.

As a foresight practitioner I try not to make too many predictions. I am more concerned with making sense of the present. But rarely does an event occur out of the blue. There is always a context shaping incidents. Indeed the backstory is often more informative than eddies on the surface of our awareness. In the context of our geopolitical world-system the past few months have been particularly turbulent. Yet enlightening as new patterns develop that complicate long-established international relationships.

A sociopath, racist and adjudged liar has been elected President of a divided America, with a friendly nudge from Russian hackers. Although it is far too premature to observe an accelerated unravelling of the world order, and the web of sensitive international relations that maintains the illusion of stability, it is highly likely that the appointment of Donald Trump, and the gang of billionaires and bullies he is now appointing to his cabinet, will drastically alter US foreign policy. It could also mark a further decline in the degrading of US political hegemony.

America’s partial withdrawal from the world stage will create ambiguity. Retreat may not be such a bad thing in the medium term. A wilting of an overly-intrusive US culture could be welcome in many parts of the world. But no one is about to fill the potential financial and military void that would inevitably follow.

Russia has its own economic problems. Chinese investments in Asia, Africa and Latin America are boosting the PRC’s influence in some countries - giving China an exceptional opportunity to expand its network of regional trade ties. But the Politburo is preoccupied with events at home. In order to maintain their grip on power the elite’s first priority must be to ensure that the country continues to modernise. A leadership transition scheduled for the latter half of 2017 may add to the potential nervousness.

In Europe the situation is not much different. Ultra right-wing fundamentalists like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Siv Jensen, Heinz-Christian Strache and Francois Fillon have nationalistic designs on wresting power away from Brussels - this in stark contrast to Iceland’s voters who are rallying around a radical, technology-focused, left-wing party that champions political transparency. The austerity measures imposed on Greece have become an intergenerational catastrophe - destroying pensions, dismantling essential services, and putting infrastructure projects on hold. A reconstructed fascism hints at future hurdles in the Netherlands, Austria, Turkey and possibly elsewhere. Italy is in chaos once again and should France decide to leave the EU, disintegration of the European experiment is virtually assured. Meanwhile the moral outrage shown by a largely disregarded blue-collar workforce in Britain, has sent shudders across Europe, spawning apprehension in Westminster and far beyond.

Across Asia the situation is relatively stable - but that is no reason for complacency. Pakistan and India seem determined to continue their niggling skirmishes over Kashmir. North Korea’s erratic leadership could spark a conflict with the South at any time. Citizens in the Philippines are only just starting to comprehend what life will really be like under an autocratic thug like Rodrigo Duterte. Thailand, having lost its revered God-King, awaits an uncertain future and the likelihood of further political instability, while Japan is still struggling to adequately address a lengthy malaise caused by decreasing worker productivity, and an ageing population.

Most territories in the Middle East remain prey to the West’s protracted desire for oil, coupled with an arrogant assumption that some form of democratic order must be imposed in order to guarantee their supply. Israel is forever distracted by issues of sovereignty and its paranoid relations with Palestine. Saudi Arabia and Qatar remain the most prolific sponsors of Islamist terrorism. While, for the time being, practically the entire continent of Africa is regarded as superfluous - a bit player on the world stage.

Patterns & Consequences

Some of the patterns arising from these evolving geopolitical conditions are worrying. They point to undercurrents in our society that should concern us all. Unfortunately many of those who should take notice are blind to the consequences and not at all interested in exploring the underlying causes. They airbrush them out of their version of the “big” picture.

From the perspective of a single individual, organisation or state there is probably not too much to get excited about. People still have jobs to go to. Investors can still trade and create wealth. Governments will always have the occasional diplomatic spat over resources and territories. Poverty, inequity and injustice still exist. But that’s life. Statistically speaking the trends are all positive. From the viewpoint of the human family, however, there are problems. And a significant number of these can be traced to basic flaws in the source operating model – the civilisational worldview - that manifests as our present day world-system.

I have spoken about the problem of unregulated competition in this regard many times. Another key tenet, nested securely in the bosom of this deep-rooted belief system, is the notion of sovereignty. We generally translate this to mean that any physical or intellectual asset, such as land, an invention, piece of code, capital, opera, or even seeds, for example, can be owned by one (or more) individuals, to the exclusion of others. Owners control access to, and use of, these assets through constitutions, patents, copyright, and various other forms of legal protection. Nestle’s recent claim that it should be able to own the rights to the world’s drinking water is an example of how this principle can so easily lead to outrageous, if logically consistent, assertions.

The origin of this interpretation of sovereignty can be traced back to the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. This is the theory that monarchs derive their authority from God rather than their subjects, from which it follows that rebellion is the worst of political crimes. This is the basis of L’ese Majeste laws in countries like Thailand, which make it illegal to defame, insult, or threaten the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent.

Acceptance of this as a secular principle applied universally has led to numerous contradictions and compromises. At the geopolitical level it has been the primary cause of schism and conflict for the past 500 years. Untold laws have been crafted by different parliaments around the world to justify and safeguard their singular interests - from trade agreements, defense, security and surveillance, to border protection and the issuing of national identity cards, for example.

In all likelihood we will eventually broaden this narrow concept of an individual’s entitlement to own assets, with an alternative scheme which construes sovereignty as our collective entitlement to share resources. But for the time being we are dealing with the knock-on effects of false propositions like competition, scarcity and sovereignty. And it is beginning to look ugly.

Under the Surface

Contempt by the privileged for the waves of national populism breaking on the shores of democracy is being countered by a flourish of anti-elitist discourse. Fake news and propaganda - coalescing from alternative versions of a myriad half-truths, misinformation and lies - is given as much credence as officially-endorsed interpretations of the facts in the mirror-maze that is social media. The absence of any real resolve from world leaders to enact laws that curb corruption, conflict, and pollution has become a festering wound. Even the self-satisfied nature of the Paris Climate talks has turned foetid as any hope for substantial progress recedes due to the lack of a binding enforcement mechanism.

Around the world lobbying and advocacy are both drifting to the conservative side of the political spectrum - fostering anti-establishment parties. These are becoming highly proficient at coordinating disgruntled citizens who, reliant on public services, are demanding adequate protection from global markets and discriminatory trade agreements. Globalisation as currently structured, and the lingering quest for unfettered growth, have brought the echo chamber of neoliberal economics into further disrepute.

Such disturbances mean little to the private sector. The large institutional and lending banks remain relatively untouched by political events. Technology giants, fashion houses and global brands still get away with exploiting our addiction to novelties and accessories, intended to incite envy but redolent of a widespread discontent. For it turns out we are unhappy consumers. Preoccupied with possessions, and the social image we hope they project, we are caught up in an exhausting real-life game of trivial pursuit. Corporations, indifferent to our predicament, continue on their merry way, stuffing money into the pockets of remote owners, while utilising the cult of compliant celebrity to market an array of bland products we do not actually need, and that will almost certainly add to our unhappiness once the spending spree subsides.

Probing below the surface at some of these correlations point to any number of challenging social questions. Is all of this a sign that we have consigned our species to an indigent, choleric future, for example? Is it the eerie calm before a tsunami of change sweeps away the deep-rooted corruption that erodes our most life-critical social, political, industrial and economic systems? Systems that are no longer working as originally intended, work for the benefit of a few or, no longer fit for purpose, are collapsing under the yoke of a global population exceeding seven billion people? Will populist fury continue to see the devolution of authority away from the nation state, and international enterprises like the UN and NATO, toward cities and local representatives? If so, how likely is this to stall the indispensable global cooperation needed to tackle climate adaptation and the  refugee emergency?

And if the pace of technological change continues to threaten the competence of governments to do anything more than patch up the present, will an ever-growing number of critical decisions with long-term implications be taken by corporations, hackers, interest groups and social networks? Or are these dynamics just the mess we will to navigate in order to transition from one kind of society to the next? One in which the false propositions that have congealed into a dispassionate and harsh world-system can be reinvented in order that the world works better for everyone?

Societal transitions have never been easy. Whether evolutionary or revolutionary, social or political, technological or philosophical, disruption to established patterns is an inevitable corollary of change. Our modern inclination to embellish and sanitise history, and to enshrine a limited repertoire of myths accentuating linear progress, within an equally limited capitalist credo, does not help. In fact we have seen how it can lead us astray and distort our intentions, bringing unwelcome delays to the realisation of vital ideas, and dumping complex problems on defective operational routines and methods.

When bemoaning recent horrors it is so easy to forget that present-day crises are neoteric expressions of a prolonged series of disturbances that have been tearing at the fabric of society for a good part of the past 250 years. This dynamic is civilisation’s curse. Some would say it is integral to the human condition. During this period international and civic turmoil, brutal colonialism, racism, and genocide have been the norm – as has been the regrettable tendency to frame every issue in the most basic of binary terms - yet another regrettable outcome derived from the use of sovereignty and competition as universally agreed organising principles.

A New Normality

So what of economics and its future? In a world increasingly defined by our inadequacies as much as by our ingenuity, public spending of the kind espoused by John Maynard Keynes is as inappropriate as Milton Friedman’s free market prescriptions. Essentially the globalisation of industrial capitalism, in which old forms of power were replaced by the promise of universal prosperity, has ensured that neither of these approaches, enacted in their purest sense, can ever be optimal. Establishment pledges of wealth and wellbeing, from both ideological extremes, have not been realised. Instead, massive disparities in power and wealth have led to anger, social exclusion, frustrated expectations, poverty and an alarming resurgence of nationalism.

Examining evidence accumulated over the past century from all around the world, noting particularly the inexplicable escalation of hubris, entitlement and defensiveness exhibited by the incumbent elite, including their increasingly unstable behaviour, an inability to think through the consequences of their decisions, habitual use of state brutality and a dumbed-down media to help achieve civic compliance, before placing all of that in the context of the history of sapiens on this planet, it is abundantly clear that our shared civilisational worldview is dystopian in the extreme.

The planetary emergencies facing us are similar to those faced by the crew of Apollo 13 - but on a much more massive scale. And this time the crew is not three astronauts - it is the entire human family inhabiting spaceship Earth. At this stage the causes of our predicament are probably inconsequential. So is the original mission. Systems needed to sustain life are failing. There is simply no time to blame others, nor can we stick rigidly to our original plans. The situation is perilous and it has escalated to a point where none of our rehearsed responses are effective. Now there is only one imperative. It is to jettison old assumptions and use our collective ingenuity to totally reconfigure how we can continue the journey and land safely. This is no longer just an engineering problem, for we are dealing with a multitude of intersecting beliefs, faiths and cultural conventions too.

What does this mean in practise? It means we need to confront the deficiencies of a derisory and toxic worldview. Outside of science fiction it means there is an absence of destiny narratives we can use to guide us. The adventures of the USS Enterprise are no longer sufficient to inspire us. It means an increasing number of our most life-critical systems and arrangements, including how we provision for the next generation and take better care of each other, are rapidly deteriorating, unable to cater for a population approaching 7.5 billion inhabitants. It means that our current socio-economic structures, political institutions, technological trajectories and methods of governance are all defective in some way. It means that what we do can no longer be measured by pre-established norms and indices. It means that many of the past assumptions, tenets and social codes, to which we still stubbornly cling, are not just incapable of helping us find a way out of the maze, but in many cases are making matters worse. It means we must purge our world-system of those constraints, irrespective of ideological slant, faith or moral justification, that originate in a worldview reinforcing partition, class, inequality, competition, individualism and conflict and that, as a consequence, benefits fewer and fewer people.

Cosmetic change is easy to espouse and enact. But that will not serve our purposes now. Reinvention is a more painful proposition, especially when it means starting with the global financial system.

Although it is clear that capitalism is in crisis, that it seems to reward the basest impulses rather than the finest, it is almost impossible to seriously contemplate the end of capitalism. Yet more and more people are talking about a post-capitalist society. What do they mean by that? Is it utopian to believe we are on the verge of a leap beyond capitalism? What signs could possibly indicate that the days of capitalism are numbered? And how would this supposed finale be marked?

German economist Wolfgang Streeck is absolutely clear:

Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.

Right from the dawn of printing, and the rise of the merchant classes in the 15^th century, capitalism was always an improbable, highly flawed, framework. Yet it has survived many crises throughout its long history and the market economy continues to spread across the world. At the same time, there are few within my own circle who do not entertain the idea that capitalism is in crisis – possibly one that could prove to be terminal.

Perhaps we should expect as much. After all it is only a few years ago that the global economy tanked, almost taking the entire international banking system down with it. From that day to this, the structural bedrock of the system has remained unscathed. A reassembled shadow banking system is even bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been diluted and delayed. The insatiable greed of the industry is still intact.

In the absence of alternative models, the conditions for further financial crises are mustering. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. Flushed with free money, the one per cent has become wealthier. Meanwhile, compensating strategies, from austerity on the one hand, to the pumping of massive investments into the markets on the other - are failing to fully resuscitate the unresponsive body.[1]

Downfall

The downfall of present-day capitalism is unlikely to be an impetuous revolution brought on by the proletariat, as forecast by Karl Marx, but a more bitter, potentially disorderly and prolonged affair. To some extent this collapse is being hastened by industrialists, explicitly the damage they have inflicted on the workforce needed to keep the system in balance.

The idea that capitalism might be modified in some way to ensure equality and social justice is utopian and tired. What remains eats away at the life force – at least until a viable metamorphosis can occur. But how can we claim that capitalism is dying? Where is the evidence? Like all great lies, there are several explanations. But the central truth is not hard to find.

Late-stage capitalism was a product of the industrial revolution. From the earliest years it was tied to (i) the consensual hallucination of democracy, (ii) the equally deluded notion of societal progress as a one-dimensional financial phenomenon, and (iii) the fossil fuel industry - unambiguously the capacity of coal, oil, and eventually gas, to provide the energy needed for the mass production of factory-based manufactures.

Capitalism was also the main ingredient in a wealth extraction architecture that benefitted only small numbers of people. In that sense the tension between the accumulation and concentration of wealth on the part of the capitalists, and the demand for the redistribution of wealth on the part of workers and their families, has always been an unresolved incongruity. Any number of predatory schemes were devised, and still persist, to protect the affluent - ranging from tax havens to dubious trade agreements and, more recently, austerity measures imposed on the poorest, most debt-ridden countries. The poor and disadvantaged remained so.

The basic formula of capitalism is simple and unseen: devices are used to continuously shift money from those who produce and buy goods to those who own the means of production. Although this served an initial purpose of growing markets and encouraging innovation, there are drawbacks to this formula – such as the constant need for compliant workers with cash to spend on purchasing the fruits of their labours. And yes, we now see that the need for continuous economic growth, driven by competitive behaviour, constructs a trap from which it is difficult to escape.

Ultimately, though, the system has become technically non-viable. It must inevitably collapse - unless it can find ways to transform each of the five following factors:

i. Scarcity

As previously explained, mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity. Indeed conventional business models use all manner of legal devices, such as copyright and trade marks, to ensure (i) that assets are owned, and (ii) that the availability of free information is suppressed.

The problem with this prescription is that while each manufactured object still has a production cost, the cost of reproduction is negligible and gradually falls towards zero. This trend towards zero marginal cost has meant there are far fewer profits to extract from industrial production.

Not only that, but the enormous amounts of information in circulation are corroding the ability of the market to accurately determine prices. Scarcity is destroying the price formation mechanism. That is because while markets are based on scarcity, information is not scarce. On the contrary it is abundant.

The orthodox defence against such events has been to form monopolies. Apple has famously done this with the music for puchase on iTunes. It is unlikely such monopolies can endure. By fabricating business models and valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, corporate monopolies are increasingly finding themselves at odds with one of the most basic of human needs. To share and use ideas freely.

Each wave of new technology brings diminishing returns. Logically then, the only way to prop up revenues is to find ways of keeping the technology scarce. This can be done by accelerating in-built obsolescence, for example, something the major brands and communications technology companies have been doing for decades, deploying deceitful marketing spin, or shifting wealth into the illusory world of speculative finance.

The latter is fraught with risk. Speculation leads to market crashes, financial collapse, and so-called structural readjustments. These trigger a spiral of debt, following which the most popular solution is applied austerity. This potentially catastrophic policy is not simply about months of spending cuts and deprivation. Austerity means salaries, social wages and living standards are all driven down, possibly for decades, until they correspond more closely with those of the middle classes in the emerging economies of China, India and Africa on the way up.

ii. Information

There are more unrelenting matters. As an economic resource, knowledge is displacing most forms of industrialised labour and processing. Innovation and creativity, the two most beneficial forms of knowledge in the world today, are now crucial factors for the valorisation of capital. Furthermore they are an unlimited resource. As such they are already giving rise to a new form of post-industrial capitalism years ago.

At first machines started doing the work previously undertaken by humans. Mechanisation replaced blue collar workers. Today smarter machines are increasingly doing tasks traditionally associated with management and the professions, thus eroding further the need for human labour. The next wave of artificially intelligent androids - presently stalled as our social infrastructure cannot abide the consequences - will hugely diminish the amount of both full-time and temporary work needed from human workers. Or at least that is the theory.

Because we have not invented any widely acceptable solutions to unemployment, nor indeed to the casualisation of the workforce, and human worth and dignity are still measured in terms of earning an income from paid work, two tracks become equally feasible. Firstly, we could simply design new or different tasks for humans to do. Current statistics actually illustrate that this has been our favoured course to date. Secondly, we could leave the majority of tasks to robots and enjoy more leisure time. In that case it is highly probable individual purchasing power would weaken, thus shrinking the market for many goods.

Clearly investigating alternative solutions, like a universal living wage for those without work, is therefore critical. Meanwhile various forms of knowledge commons foreshadow original, more equitable, forms of production and exchange. Because knowledge is neither scarce nor limited, abundance poses a real threat to traditional institutions and corporations. Once they have lost control over proprietary knowledge they will also lose both their competitive and comparative advantages.

Predictably, in defiance of its social nature and global access, died-in-the-wool industrialists and their attorneys persist in trying to exploit knowledge-based work through the one device they know best: privatisation. In time this too will fall. In a society where we can trade information and knowledge using substitute modes of value creation, including open source, peer production, and cooperative networks, for example, the production-commodity-money-consumption logic bolstering capitalism is increasingly obsolete. Indeed these ecosystems of free knowledge and thinking are a threat to all conventional power structures.

        iii. Virtue

If the previous two factors alone were insufficient, an end-game where the most affluent one per cent of the world’s population own 50 per cent of its total wealth is simply unsustainable. Apart from the obvious moral dilemma there is also a massive utilisation issue. By and large the one per cent hoarde their wealth. Most of it was derived from owning industrial and corporate assets. They guard this wealth aggressively and it remains mostly inaccessible to anyone other than a tiny coterie of insiders.

In the past this extractive wealth has been a potent force, and the most powerful in the land still have a substantial store of it to spend. But nowadays a new kind of wealth is being created. This wealth is increasingly, though not quite yet, beyond private appropriation. But by capturing the moral high ground it possesses an almost unstoppable momentum. The new wealth - generated by many and shared by many - is an open, participatory, peer-driven undertaking.

To some extent it is still about new skills and business models – crowdfunding versus venture capital, for example. But other performance criteria, such as personal empathy, a sense of design, aesthetics, anticipatory foresight, intuition, flexibility, creativity and entrepreneurship, have surpassed the roles that formal knowledge, craft qualifications and vocational skills used to have. In other words a new moral compass is being applied to business and its development.

        iv. Commons

New business models and skills are only half the story. Conventional wisdom has shifted away from how best to accumulate wealth, towards generating impact via disruptions to the established order. In other words the power that came originally from traditional wealth is slipping away from individual owners and established investment opportunities. It is now focused on growing various forms of knowledge commons and the potential these have for leveraging massive social change.

Obviously there are tensions between these two kinds of authority – and not just in terms of their unfolding dynamics. How people think and feel about the new social economies - their right to engage, participate and benefit, together with an unflinching belief in radical transparency and shared accountability - are likely to be some of the defining features of the post-capitalist era.

        v. Climate

A further impediment for contemporary capitalism, though infrequently considered as such, is the impact of climate change. Nature, as in the physical world of oceans and forests, has always been regarded as an extraneous factor in terms of neoliberal economics – unless or until it can be monetised. Economists have always regarded nature and its protection rather like religion or the arts – symbolic sideshows in comparison to the ‘real’ economy of manufactures, commerce and trade. Environmental destruction is still viewed in some quarters as an unfortunate, if inevitable, consequence of the need to produce more and more goods, so as to meet the growing demand from new customers in emerging economies. This craving accelerated exponentially during the latter part of the 20^th century by way of mass advertising and the rapid expansion of access to global markets.

The Capitalist’s Paradox

Now we face an inherent contradiction. As previously inferred, late-stage industrial capitalism relies upon three interconnected factors: (i) the availability of an ever-expanding variety of material goods at low cost; (ii) the continuation of our insatiable desire to purchase more and more goods – animated by repetitive marketing spin as well as strategies like in-built obsolescence; and as a consequence (iii) the energy needed to manufacture and distribute these goods to the far-flung corners of the globe.

The first of these factors can be assured by various means. Theoretically it does not appear to be an insuperable problem. The second factor is slightly more conditional. For example, if we become in the least bit fatigued by the continuous advertising spin used to sell bland and homogenised products, and seek more uplifting ways to achieve happiness instead, the desire to own or to share could become a considerable problem for retailers.

But the third is a killer. Global warming is an aggregate of the way we each choose to live our lives - multiplied by the sheer number of humans inhabiting planet Earth. While we often use the population explosion as the main excuse for the burden we put on the environment, including changes in climate, the issue of lifestyle is of fundamental importance. Allow me to reiterate – this time in terms of cause and effect:

• Continued domination of a socio-economic world-system, shaped by the structure and ethos of capitalism, is contingent upon increasing affluence - reflected in the ability to access and acquire more and more material belongings - remaining a foundation motive for ordinary people achieving the lifestyle they most envy and covet
• To fulfil this desire there must be continuous growth in the number and variety of products available for people to purchase - along with competition to keep prices as low as possible, and the availability of human labour to make them
• In order to meet this massive and constant demand for new goods the industrial combustion of fossil fuels is then needed to provide the energy for manufacturing and transportation.

Note the contradiction. The fuels that provide the power source required for capitalism to function optimally are also responsible for the global heating that is now an existential emergency. Without fossil fuels, capitalism in its current form is doomed. It becomes obsolete by its own inherent logic.

Environmental destruction is as much of an economic crisis as a social one. We ignore it at our peril. Air, water and soil contamination, toxic waste, the decline in fish stocks, the extinction of entire species, rising ocean levels, and abnormal heating associated with greenhouse gas emissions, are causing disquiet as the entire world comes to a shuddering recognition: in today’s circumstances economic growth and development, driven by competition for scarce resources, is incompatible with human survival.

The Age of Postcapitalism

Towards the end of the 20^th century, neoliberalism began to break with a 200-year tradition that had become entrenched within industrial capitalism: financial crises inevitably provoked technological innovations that benefitted everyone. Since the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan we have witnessed the containment of wages along with the smashing of the social power and resilience of the working class to help shape the political economy. The result is a predatory system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures on society.

Capitalism looks as forlorn a project today as did the millennial sects in the late 19^th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled media and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago. Millions of people are beginning to awaken to the fact they have been sold a fantasy at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is one of anger and a determination to change things for the better.

The main incongruity today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information, and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. In the final analysis everything comes down to the struggle between the network and the hierarchy, between the Cathedral and the Café, between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of liberated being. So, to return to our original thesis, and assuming capitalism can not endure in its current guise, what should we expect in a postcapitalist society? What will be possible that is currently constrained? What kind of new relationships can we expect? And how will this shape human nature? Will it evolve into a form of universal intercourse between all members of the human family that many of us desire?

Among the various unknowns, one thing is very clear: differing modes of production have always been structured around distinctive propositions. In the past these uniquely advantaged or marginalised certain groups. Feudalism, for example, was predicated on tradition and a sense of duty. It favoured priests, the military and the aristocracy. But those who were marginalised under this system, such as lawyers and scientists, became the architects of the next wave of social transformation. Industrial capitalism was predicated on markets. It is exceedingly unlikely that a postcapitalist society, in which abundance is a precondition, will simply emerge as a modified form of today’s philosophy. Indeed it is entirely feasible that those marginalised or betrayed by capitalism, including women entrerpreneurs, the unemployed, intellectuals, the urban poor and internet nerds, will help expedite the transition into a postcapitalist era.

Naturally we cannot fully grasp what this society will actually be like as many unpredictable factors could come into play. Nor can we imagine the kind of human beings the new society might produce once economics is no longer as central to life.

Whatever criticisms can be placed at the door of present-day capitalism, and there are many, it did succeed in weaving together significant elements of human creativity, innovation, aspiration and expressions of progress in nurturing and sustaining its own inherent logic of acquisitive growth.

It is also fair to say that, until now, we have not been able to attenuate its more destructive aspects, nor find an expedient way to live when deprived of its irresistible vitality and power.

As a consequence, capitalism is unlikely to be forced into retirement any time soon. But eventually, hastened by a series of external shocks - including climate change, energy depletion, migration, and an aging population, the constraints within its own logic, and the coevolution of a more connected humanity - it will be brought to its knees by a more dynamic, virtuous, mutually-beneficial system.

The seeds of that new system already exist, although one must look long and hard to identify them. Barely visible in the niches and hollows of the markets, entire spheres of economic life are beginning to move at a new pulse and to different rhythms.

The spread of collaborative production, social economies, parallel and cyber currencies, alternative producers, spontaneous action groups, open source software, local exchange initiatives, volunteer enterprises, cooperatives, and diverse knowledge commons are all proliferating. Driven by shared information and an impulse to engage, they do not respond to the rules of the market and pay no attention whatsoever to managerial hierarchies. Instead they are giving rise to new forms of ownership, new forms of lending, and new legal contracts.

To conventional economics such pursuits hardly qualify as economic activity. Government taxation agencies, indeed, are still inclined to refer to them as hobbies. But that is the point. They exist because they trade, albeit tentatively, in the currencies of postcapitalism: free time, free stuff, and networked activity. As such they inherently undermine the status quo.

Eventually a postcapitalist society must break into the mainstream from this genesis, reconstructing an economy founded upon higher motives, values and behaviours, and information as a social good - to be shared freely, and quarantined from being owned, exploited or priced.

When that time comes, those of us left will wonder how we ever put up with the old paradigm for so long. We will be amazed that it took us decades to grasp that what flows naturally, leads to empathy and cooperation rather than envy and hostility, and assures human sufficiency as well as the health of the planetary ecosystem, is the most vital part of what it means to be human. Some call it empathy. Others wisdom. Me? I call it love.

I have drawn on the work of many scholars in the writing of this piece. I am particularly indebted to Michel Bauwens, Joe Brewer, Charles Eisenstein, Douglas Rushkoff, Michael McAllum, Wolfgang Streeck, Michael Ignatieff, Francis Fukuyama, Jose Ramos, Robert Reich, Elinor Ostrom, Paul Mason, Diane Coyle, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Romer, Ian Bremmer and Nassim Nicholas Taleb for their noteworthy understanding of current conditions - insights I have shamelessly utilised in fashioning the arguments in my essay.

[1] This failure is international: The Bank of International Settlements - the central banks’ central bank - warned a few months ago that the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth.

Freedom & Other Profanities

And those who were seen dancing, were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music – Friedrich Nietzsche

Scientists recently suggested we are living in a sophisticated computer simulation created by an advanced form of intelligence. I am confused. For while I find the proposition fanciful the logic put forward to underpin this as a legitimate scientific hypothesis is very convincing, especially because the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws.

But instead of a simulation I am more inclined to describe it as a shared delusion - induced inadvertently perhaps, but methodically sustained once the privileged in society cottoned on to how well such a pervasive creed served their needs – particularly in maintaining the social order through various forms of control and compliance. And although I describe this delusion as a shared phenomenon, its presence can only ever be speculative. Indeed the only way we can test the existence of an ecology of mind is by conceding a set of coherent attitudes and behaviours, accumulated over centuries, that we then use to guide and inform our instinctive responses to the conscious experiences – variously interpreted as the nature of the human condition or how things are, or are meant, to be.

Steps to Material Fealty

Early indications of this state of mind first became evident when tribal warriors, leading their cohorts to victory in local skirmishes, began to achieve mythic status - often in folklore devised by the enemy to vindicate a defeat at the hands of “great generals”.

Although we live in a highly personality-driven society today, such veneration of individuals was unusual - a break with a tradition, stretching back thousands of years, where the framing meme had been the group. There is tacit acceptance among indigenous communities even today that family, and then the broader community viewed as an extension of family, is the fundamental organising social unit. This is not a romantic idealisation of aboriginal society, but rather a picture based on the latest evidence we have of how tribal groups cooperated with each other in order to survive.

Gradually supremacy passed from warriors to monarchs, emperors and princes. Affluent and all-powerful, many of these individuals assigned renowned painters, musicians, architects, sculptors and authors to portray their deeds, both real and imagined, in works that would captivate and instruct their audiences. Such narratives and artefacts consistently emphasised the presumed differences between deities and humans, or between masters and serfs, whilst elevating their patrons to absurd heights. Incidentally these same stories became the motivating impulse behind the hierarchically-configured “leader-follower” conventions some hundreds of years later.  

Meanwhile courtiers and prelates enshrined the “divine right” of rulers in pious evocations and dogma that served to reify the numinous nature of certain individuals over others. There was no logical basis for any difference between the medieval Lord of the Manor and serfs in the village of course. Both had blood coursing through their veins. Both would die from the same diseases. In certain respects, setting aside the prospect of ill-health, disease, and a short life expectancy, the lot of a serf was relatively comfortable and secure in its self-sufficiency. These were the days before the Acts of Enclosure deprived the right of ordinary men and women to farm common land after all. Meanwhile science had yet to catch up with a spiritual discourse based solely on superstition and myth.

But then, in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, another seismic shift occurred. This time unanticipated and socially disruptive, it deflected our attention towards machines and technology. As one invention gave rise to others, and inbuilt obsolescence created markets for inventiveness, the illusion of progress via technical wizardry gained the upper hand.

Actually the underlying collective mental state remained more or less intact. But now it was held more covertly at a subliminal level in society. Soon the original impulse became little more than a faded daguerreotype - adrift within a tortuous maze of increasing global trade and complex social transactions. But it refused to entirely vanish. Instead, acumen passed to a new emerging class.

In the early 19^th century merchants, industrialists and bureaucrats held sway – acquiring their wealth, opportunity and influence by virtue of the new technologies and forms of energy that enabled mass production and heralded the exodus of slave labour from the countryside to the new cities.

After the end of World War II that same power shifted once more. Today it includes heads of state, ultra-wealthy individuals, corporate chiefs, media barons, and the tsars charged with optimising the industrial-military complex for a never-ending war with enemies both authentic and contrived.

So what were previously localised phenomena have become pervasive today - global yet still nebulous and elusive - with links to an archetypal community of mind as tenuous as ever. This is most convenient for those in power. It means that managers and technocrats, aided and abetted by the corporate media, can continue to skate on the surface of society and patch up the present, using convictions they have extracted from the detritus of human progress. Our attention thus distracted, and the public’s penchant for bread and circuses assuaged, the elite are unhindered - left to shape events as they choose.

But the real power is not always held by those in the public eye. Often the celebrities we see and hear about are mere puppets – the public face of power. The puppet masters are often not to be found in the spotlight but lurking covertly in the shadows.

Throughout history the elite groups exercising power have been accompanied by cadres of aides who wield considerable authority and influence behind the scenes, seldom in the full glare of the public eye. William Shakespeare recognised this largely unseen presence, a very real force in its own right, as “the power behind the throne”. They are the true illuminati.

Hereafter I will refer to the credo of this potent shadow phenomenon as the worldview. The civilisational worldview to be precise. It remains a shared ideology - but only in the sense that its congealed impenetrability blocks out everything else. Rather like a black hole, whose strong gravitational pull ensures nothing can escape, the civilisational worldview leaves no possibility of a new narrative concerning the human family and the human condition, other than that held to be the self-evident truth by those who would have it so. Those in power and their counsellor-aides.

An additional complication is the fact that the worldview is still relatively unacknowledged and unknown. Gregory Bateson came close to defining this weltanschauung - in contrast to the more commonly understood mindset which is multiple, diverse, and individualistic; the result of environmental, social and educational conditioning. In other words, according to our cultural circumstances, all individuals possess a distinct mindset, whereas there is only a single worldview or weltanschauung.

In the past I have written a great deal on the factors distinguishing worldview and mindset. Unfortunately these terms are often used interchangeably. This distinction is not pedantic but a vital means of mulling over how contemporary society evolved and what should be done if the civilisational worldview is defective, or the manifesting world-system, as a consequence, is unable to meet current needs.

Essentially then my thesis goes something like this. The civilisational worldview is a deeply ingrained mental state – a tacit belief system expressing social norms that are common to most of us. Foreshadowed by warriors of old this worldview has been shared by humanity, with the likely exception of indigenous communities, virtually intact over centuries. In spite of this we are only ever momentarily aware of it - if at all. Acquiescence takes no effort.

Transcending artificial boundaries that compartmentalise knowledge of our environment by sorting them into distinct disciplines [such as geography, biology and history] the worldview is both subliminal and whole. It sustains itself autopoietically - its key tenets manifesting as pillars of a world-system which is the concrete reality of human existence - our relations, artefacts, transactions and interactions - as we perceive it to be.

In other words the worldview is an ideological code that covertly organizes, coordinates, and manipulates the way we expect relations and interactions to be conducted at a global level, leaving individuals to follow their personal inclinations as to how they live their lives, and particularly their relationships to each other, to the planet, and to other living species, via the world-system. In the meantime our mindset functions as an interface onto the world-system, helping us to interpret and translate the worldview in a unending dance of meaning-making. This gives us the illusion of being able to choose what actions we take at a purely practical level. But we never take the one step that could call the worldview into question. In that context choice itself is an illusion.

Although there have always been elements of this world-system we disparage, constantly complain about, challenge and tweak, the worldview itself remains uncontained. Inviolate. It is thus the unifying code of history. It is disturbing to think that it might remain that way in the future. Allow me to explain why I am alarmed by such a prospect.

The civilisational worldview code and its manifestation as a world-system assume five fundamental doctrines. For an effectively functioning society there needs to be:

1. A ruling power group, attended to by an underclass of compliant serfs, as well as courtiers and advisers who may or may not wield the “power behind the throne”
2. A dominant narrative, or inherent dogma, marketed as the solitary truth regarding how things must work. Over the past 70 years or more this narrative has emphasized economic growth while endorsing competition in the context of scarcity
3. All aspects of economic production controlled, and goods distributed, by the ruling elite or their proxies. Key economic features include a belief that nature can (should) be exploited as a human right and that conflict and warfare are legitimate factors in growing the economy
4. Wealth, influence and power of the ruling elite are protected by military and/or state mechanisms
5. Pervasive myths of a higher intelligence to which all others are subservient.

As previously stressed, this fundamental canon can be applied to almost any community or nation – past or present and irrespective of geography, ethnicity and ideology - with the exception of indigenous nations. This last point is especially important to understand. It becomes the rationale for why liberating the indigenous estate of all first nations globally is such a powerful idea.

We can analyze the impact of these principles on past situations and we can also examine how they are playing out in the world today. The latter is what really interests me. It is also terrifying.

The Descent of Civilisation

No political system in the world is working as originally intended – unless one includes the deliberately brutal, strong-arm, practices seen in authoritarian regimes like those that exist in Sudan and North Korea for example. Even the integrity in so-called democracies appears to be crumbling before our eyes as more and more citizens express their disenchantment with politicians behaving badly and in many cases unethically.

David Cameron’s embarrassing exit from politics after the Brexit vote in the UK turned sour was an act of pure cynicism irrespective of the spin he and his colleagues cared to put on it. Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female President, was thrown out of office for corruption. In an attempt to out-trump Donald Trump Malcolm Turnbull’s sanctimonious conservative party has recklessly trashed Australia’s reputation for tolerance in policies that are malicious and bigoted. In South Africa the Nelson Mandela Foundation is seeking the sacking of President Jacob Zuma having failed the test of leadership by looting state resources. President Duterte in the Philippines is simply an ignorant thug, while in a growing number of other countries we witness elected officials floundering in mayhem. The thought crosses our minds that all politicians are contemptible and should be ignored. But then we are given ringside seats to the circus that is the US model of democracy in action.

The 2016 Presidential election has descended into pure farce in a public display exposing ingrained graft and corruption among those who supposedly seek office to represent the will of the people. The situation becomes especially absurd when a majority of US citizens hold firmly to the illusion that their nation is still the leader of the free world. The fact that fewer nations aspire to US ideals, increasingly despised for its misdirected exceptionalism and acts of state-sponsored terror, is surely a reason to look for worthier models?

Of course it is not only politicians who display a thirst for power and are open to everything from sex scandals, money laundering and wiretapping to exploitation by industrial interests. But it is certainly a cause for concern when those who seek to govern also present as erratic, narcissistic sociopaths.

Not that its all bad news now that preening and posturing seem to have surpassed policy-making and planning as core business. In extracurricular activities France’s ex-President Nicholas Sarkozy was named the 68th best-dressed person in the world by Vanity Fair, alongside David Beckham and Brad Pitt. Canada’s pin-up PM Justin Trudeau lost his temper and resorted to belligerent behaviour on Parliament Hill. Thailand’s increasingly eccentric and superstitious dictator Prayut Chan-o-cha had four students arrested on charges of “eating sandwiches with political intent”. Meanwhile the clown-like antics displayed by Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi when he was in power still cause ripples of awkward embarrassment whenever he appears in public.

But that is about as good as it gets. When we need to look to Bolivia’s highly principled Evo Morales for humility, Russia’s Vladimir Putin for gravitas, and China’s Xi Jinping is held up to be the epitome of sobriety, there is something sadly amiss with the systems of governance we so readily tolerate in old empires without so much as a pause for reflection.

It is not simply the dubious temperament, ideological bluster, moral blindness and limited expertise of those elected to public office that is a concern however. It is also the bullying tactics - increasingly deployed by governments of every persuasion - to induce fear in the community. The need to uphold a semblance of social order is universally translated these days as the opportunity to hit back at critics on a scale ranging from sarcasm to pure intimidation.

Intimidation is no longer the sole preserve of petty tyrants. Indeed it has become the most commonly used and preferred strategy by ordinary politicians and their parties. Fear is used to stir up anger, cast doubt, and tarnish the integrity of those with differing opinions. It is used to threaten and cajole, to enforce compliance, to sustain war and maintain nuclear arsenals, to close borders, and even to exploit the elderly, the sick and the destitute.

The use of fear and intimidation by political leaders can be sufficient to provoke trauma in certain sections of society – especially when sustained over lengthy periods. The inculcation of national values will often be regarded as critical by governments using intimidation. This is manipulative by design - aimed at cultivating loyalty to accepted ideals and dogma while disavowing behaviour that could be regarded as unpatriotic.

In these situations citizens may even begin to identify with, and become deeply devoted to, governments that mistreat them, regard them as fools, take away their hard-won freedoms, and pay little heed to their emotional needs. Indeed citizens experiencing these conditions often develop a tendency to support government dogma to the detriment of their own emotional health and wellbeing. Citizens will also rationalise, to themselves and to others, their poor treatment as being necessary for the economy, or the security of the nation, and furiously defend their government’s actions when those actions are challenged by outsiders.

In contemporary Australia we can see these Stockholm syndrome-like symptoms playing out daily. The rise of fiercely patriotic groups who abuse each other verbally during street protests. The election of rightwing populist politicians who resort to racism and bigotry in order to engender fear and a dread of others. The rejection of an Amnesty International report that had the temerity to criticise the federal government for its abuse of asylum seekers. The gradual erosion of privacy and other human rights. The rifts that are opening up in what was once one of the world’s most tolerant multicultural societies...

Experiencing these symptoms puts more credulous citizens at risk of significant trauma. When combined with the alienation already being felt by many - the foreboding expressed by those living below the poverty line and the long-term unemployed, the despondency among people young and old who, in record numbers, are choosing to commit suicide or inject dangerous drugs, rather than face an uncertain future, and of course the existential threats to humanity from terrorism, nuclear armageddon, and climate change, topics that even the average six-year-old can talk about, one has to conclude that much of society is on a descent curve exacerbated by the attitudes and behaviours of those who market hate.

A fairly large silent majority continues to condone the more populist nonsense emanating from democracies in crisis - tolerating it more as light entertainment yet ignoring the crucial issue of how serious legislative work can be expected in such circumstances. The media, too, is often complicit in trivialising political debate and framing incessant leadership speculation in this manner. But many others (and it is a growing movement) are fed up, viewing this inane cabaret with frustrated bewilderment and looking for alternative solutions.

However, if dissatisfaction with systems of governance, as distinct from the scary ignorance of many elected parliamentarians, who seem out of their depth and incapable of bringing a sliver of wisdom or bipartisan empathy to the issues facing humanity, are indeed the causes of such detachment, action eventually becomes an imperative. The real question then becomes what to do.

Initially, frustrated individuals might seek solace in part-time activities, such as charitable work, volunteering for a social movement focused on social change, or lobbying for ecocide to become a corporate criminal activity, for example.

But if political performance around the world continues to decline, to the extent that the quality of life on this planet is significantly compromised, or that human rights are dismissed, only two alternatives become possible:

Either we can put up with a broken system, together with the ongoing charade of actors within these systems who continue to conduct themselves as though the entire framework is still secure, complete, and effective - while treating them with respectful disdain. Or we can rise up mindfully with others in activities targeted at reinventing governance in all its forms and manifestations. Reform movements such as MiVote and Democracy Earth spring immediately to mind, then the various Occupy movements of course, plus the myriad peer governance and commons-based entrepreneurial entities that will eventually displace current models in a future post-capitalist society.

Of course we might decide the best course of action is simply to seek sanctuary by throwing ourselves into activities that quarantine us from witnessing such depressing displays of folly by people like Jacob Zuma, Theresa May, Donald Trump or Rodrigo Duterte. But it is difficult to escape. The insidious nature of social media these days makes it impossible to ignore reality when it stares you in the face. Besides, turning our backs on the debilitating state of politics becomes even more tricky for parents with children and grandchildren who are heirs to the future we create in this moment and bequest to them.

In the meantime, in an unwavering effort to keep the populace quiescent, the elite react as we might expect from our preceding analysis of the civilisational worldview. They distract our attention by intoning predictable refrains to the press and to each other ad infinitum. There is no dearth of material for them to chat about. Politicians are fond of talking about the benefits of their policies relative to the opposition, how they are protecting us from evil, the need to balance the budget, jobs, jobs and more jobs, and matters that are of so little consequence or that could quite easily be left to responsible adults without legislation by Parliament. Company executives prefer to bore us with the obscene profits they are making, as well as how they are trying to remain relevant in a future they expect to be much like the past.

Finally the official media stretches credulity to the limit by diluting the news and bestowing it with a blanket of banal indoctrination. The result is often a kind of TV reality show. In this dumbing down process citizens are routinely denied the truth, while any sense of intellect is disparaged in celebrations of ignorance. Strategy of this kind is only apparent if we are really paying attention - for the aim is to shape a dominant narrative where we are blind to the underlying propaganda. In this dumbed-down debate an artificial dichotomy is established - a dual narrative that deliberately excludes alternatives. We can have left-wing or right-wing views, for example. We can have faith in a religion or be agnostic. We can equate Islam with terrorism or not. We can accept the reality of global warming or remain climate sceptics. Anyone with beliefs outside of these two main narrative streams runs the threat of being ignored or demonised.

Unsurprisingly all of this lulls us into a torpor where expectations are stultified and energy dissipates. We have become as the world-system intends – cogs in the capitalist machinery where the factories most vital for maintaining production and sustaining economic growth are the shopping malls and casinos.

Life in the Bubble

Now I realise this is perilous territory. A few readers will find all kinds of conspiracy theories embedded in my text. If that is the case then we are all complicit witnesses to some extent. It is possible that some of us are more awake to the reality of a meta-discourse while others, fearful of living in a deluded state (or even a digital simulation) prefer to take cover in the comfort of the civilisational bubble. Many may simply dismiss my proposition as socialist claptrap in spite of a genuine attempt to rise above such artificial distinctions, in order to face the hard, cold facts. Perhaps my hypothesis will simply affirm beliefs already held. But others may start to think more deeply about the civilisational model that gives rise to the conditions within the world-system we see today - for our present path is unfavourable in terms of our future prosperity, and even our survival.

We take so many things for granted – assumed and inherited axioms that have become detrimental to humanity. Yet these same axioms also prevent us imagining and inquiring into alternatives – even where the current world-system is not functioning as intended, is working as intended but to the disadvantage of the majority, or has become irrelevant given a range of new factors like technological innovation, the size of the global population, and the problems posed by climate refugees or nuclear accidents, for example.

If we really do see the need to reform the world-system in order that it generates different outcomes, we need to start by reinventing the tenets that comprise the worldview. We must start thinking the unthinkable.

Tackling elite power structures requires that we revisit governance. For example, we might decide that we want more egalitarian, feminine and distributed forms of government. It is clear that new forms of online democracy challenge many of the points at which current democratic structures fail: lobbying and infiltration by big business, corporate donations, the paucity in ideological conditioning, and politics as a life-time career, for example. But is that sufficient? Rather than attempting to institute democratic reform, perhaps we should be challenging the need for central governments of any kind. Conventional wisdom posits the need for every country to have a central government to enact legislation. We assume no society can be allowed, or would be able, to blunder along by itself. Political control is vital if the world is to continue to turn on its current axis and to avoid anarchy. That is just dogma – integral to the dominant power narrative of course, but by no means sacrosanct. Anything invented by humans can be reinvented. And if we are to alter the speed or nature of the turning world we may want to try other things. Things that make more sense given today’s contextual dynamics.

We put great faith in empirical evidence. Empirical evidence suggests the civilisational worldview orthodoxies might be misleading – particularly in terms of the effectiveness of current governance structures. For example, because of political deadlock, Spain has not really had an effective central government for the past 10 months. No new legislation has been passed. Yet it is expected to be one of the fastest-growing eurozone economies this year. And as a result the unemployment rate has just fallen from 20% to 18.9% in the past three months. If central governments are unnecessary, or could beneficially be redirected towards international collaboration rather than domestic meddling, might citizen juries be a more effective and engaging proposition for local governance? Again the empirical evidence in a variety of countries in West Africa, South Asia, Britain and Australia suggests a positive answer to this question.

Perhaps then we should apply these types of challenge to all five of the tenets comprising the civilisational worldview. For example, and again following empirical evidence, we could generate new narratives emphasising cooperation, self-sufficiency and abundance as more mutually beneficial than competition, dependency, and scarcity. We could introduce new laws that value biomimicry over the more toxic applications of chemical engineering and that forbid environmental damage of any kind. We could liberate the indigenous estate by actively engaging the wisdom of first nation elders. We could promote the design principles of permaculture so as to shift the balance between industry and nature. And we could redraft corporate law to favour peer production and commons-based businesses over proprietary shareholding entities. We might even reconceptualise the role of the military to guarantee peace rather than to wage war, and the priority for police to nurture the social maturity of communities rather than on focusing on law enforcement.

The current state of the world-system is ambiguous – a fragile pathology at best. For many of us, on many levels, life continues as it always has. We face the daily round of travelling to work, taking care of our families, doing the grocery shopping, and ferrying the kids to and from school. We relax when we are on holiday, enjoy the solitude when pottering around the garden, and look forward to the next trip overseas.

But life is not so predictable if you happen to be a member of the Standing Rock nation protesting the proposed North Dakota oil pipeline. Life is even more precarious if you happen to live in countries like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan that have been ravaged by war. If you are a genuine refugee you will still be turned away should you approach Australian shores by boat. And if you are a child in Ethiopia or Yemen there is not enough food to guarantee you will become a teenager.

Documented evidence from organisations like the Pentagon, the UN, World Wildlife Fund, Save the Children, and Amnesty International, all point to an unsustainable end-game in some form or other. Nearly half of the world's population live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty. Approximately 1 billion of these are children. According to UNICEF 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.

Yet more than $14 trillion was spent on international conflicts in 2015. This represents around 13% of global GDP - or roughly the combined value of the economies of the UK, France, Germany, Canada, Spain and Brazil combined.

Average life expectancy in most nations is higher – mostly because of good nutrition, hygiene, and medical breakthroughs. Suicide, however, is now a global phenomenon accounting for around 1.4% of all deaths. We are far more powerful today than ever before but seem unable incapable of translating that power and affluence into peace and happiness.

When all the evidence is synthesised there can be little doubt that the current worldview has led us down a rabbit hole from which escape will be problematic. Ironically, given our ingenuity and relative affluence, we are the first and only species on the planet capable of destroying ourselves. But instead of addressing that possibility we seem intent on hastening our demise - caught up in some kind of masochism or the arrogant belief that extinction only happens to less creative species.

Having read numerous reports on every issue from drought and famine to poverty, conflict, crime and drug abuse, education, climate, global affairs, trade, employment and technology I am left in no doubt that the global outlook is one of a number of symptoms indicating a continuing and serious collapse. There is a deterioration in the conditions and dynamics of all five of the tenets comprising the civilisational worldview. But movement is exponential and so not easily observed.

Power is misused by the elite in our society and there are no signs that this will change in the near future. Wealth is owned by fewer and fewer people. Governance is inadequate, having been unable to adjust to the complexity of a globalised world. The narratives we use to make meaning are controlled by corporate media and skewed to trap us within dualistic arguments that lead nowhere. There is no destiny story - which is why we are losing hope.

The overwhelming imperative for humankind is not the various emergencies that are now besetting up. The demographics of an aging population, global warming, food shortages, degradation of soils, the divisions in society between the affluent and the disadvantaged, drought, energy, debt, pollution, poverty, terrorism, and the spotlight put on borders by the refugee crisis, are merely symptoms of a far more pressing problem.

We should stop trying to escape our terrestrial home in order to populate other planets. We humans have become a scourge on the Earth and should do our very best to reverse the unsustainable anthropocene conditions we have created by halting our tendency to patch up the present in the hope that the future will take care of itself. It will not.

In that context a comprehensive reinvention of the worldview itself is the only universal endeavour that makes any sense. It must be redesigned from first principles as a post-civilisational and post-capitalist paradigm that has the destiny of the human family and its advancement as its prime purpose. If we do not undertake this reinvention, by professing it to be too hard, or unnecessary, we can expect a continuing deterioration of current trends to the extent that they will soon overwhelm our capacity to recover.

This work has already started. Many hundreds of thousands of small initiatives all around the world are edging towards a new kind of connected global community based on equality, abundance, empathy, transparency and cooperation. The various transitions moving us towards to a sustainable, self-sufficient, low-carbon economy, are offering us important lessons in how to live more gently with nature. Likewise the liberation of the new commons, peer-based methods of production and shared technologies, will transform the rules around ownership, trade and value. Very soon the various models experimenting with eradicating corruption in politics and restoring power to the people rather than as the prerogative of a privileged class, will disrupt and reconstruct the way we choose to govern and organise.

We can expect increasing opposition from those who perceive they have so much to lose. The empire will strike back. But sooner or later the current worldview will come crashing down. Gandhi’s dictum will come true and we will be able to say: First they ignored us. Then they laughed at us. Then they tried to stop us. Then we won.

About Time

It cannot have escaped even the least observant individuals how glaringly prevalent the virtual world has become - and how precipitately digital technologies let it become that way. Our society has become a veritable technopoly – within which culture has not been forfeited so much as warped, particularly our experience and interpretation of time and space.

Today the world has about 5.6 billion mobile phone users - or 80 per cent of the total population. I know this because they are all stalking me. It has become impossible for me to walk down a supermarket aisle, or cross the street, without having to weave my way through throngs of people all gazing and stabbing their fingers at these gizmos. From schoolkids and students, workers on building sites, taxi drivers and young mothers with toddlers to elderly men in suits, they are glued to a screen that allows them to thumb instant messages, organise a liaison, check the time or the weather, watch a favourite YouTube clip, share a photo on Facebook, play Angry Birds, or monitor Google maps to get them to a location they just passed - if only they would glance up at the street numbers for an instant!

Children, some barely out of nappies, seem to be the most afflicted by this uniquely contemporary disorder. My 5-year-old son looks for his iPad the moment he wakes up and would keep it by his side - if he could - until he falls asleep at night, or the battery needs charging. The ears of our teenage daughter seem to be permanently welded to two buds that terminate in a cellphone, which accompanies her everywhere. As far as I know she even takes this accessory to the shower with her. As her tête-à-têtes stop and start quite arbitrarily, without any sign as to their on-off status, we tend to resort to hand signals if we need to attract her attention. We are totally in the dark regarding the substance of her constant exchanges, or even the identity of the "friend" to whom she chats at 2am in the morning. The only clue as to the extent to which she is immersed in this alternative world arrives as a bill in our mailbox at the end of each month. Other than that her virtual presence remains a carefully guarded secret to which we are not privy. Or at least, being smart parents, that is the illusion we are at pains to preserve!

Seriously though, for many people the wired world has become more "real" than life itself - a hybrid world we happily inhabit from dawn until dusk. Each year we spend more and more of our waking hours online - scrolling, chatting and reacting to these flickering displays - irrespective of whether we are in a meeting, shopping, driving, or seated at the controls of a 380 Airbus!

There is a downside. Slowly but surely this consensual addiction is ambushing our minds within a anesthetizing "present" that is proving irresistible to many. Life in this technological cocoon is a synthesis of transitory sounds, images and text messages - many of them trifling, yet indiscernible from others of even less import. Our sensation of time deforms as a result. The past happened a moment ago. We need only wait a few seconds for the future. The only phenomenon that really matters, because that is what we absorb, is a mish-mash of micro-events encountered as the "here and now". And as these experiential clips tumble into each other in a mad scramble to change their status from what is to what was, any distinctive resonance quickly fades. Thus memory becomes nonchalantly divorced from authentic meaning.

This bizarre bifurcation of perceived space and time also permits at least two distinct personae to manifest: a corporeal one where our tangible presence is evident to those in close physical proximity to us - the other pure avatar, a version disconnected from ambient corporeality. We can be present in either state, or both concurrently.

In the former we are limited by the laws of physics. These laws deny us the capability to move from place to place using the kind of instant transportion devices beloved by generations of science fiction writers. But in our avatar state(s) we can be in multiple places at the same time. We can communicate instantly with anyone, wherever they are - effectively transcending our corporeal nature. This spatial ambiguity has become commonplace. I can convene a video-call with my team, who are physically scattered across Asia, from my yacht anchored off the Maldives. Yet by switching off the video I could be anywhere in the world. Who would know unless I divulged as much?

Additionally, the World Wide Web allows my avatar existence to be permanently present to those who are also online. I can be physically engaged in a Centre for the Future board meeting while my online presence, simultaneously, inconspicuously, allows me to translate a Mandarin phrase into English, change a flight reservation, transfer money between my bank accounts, purchase a book from Amazon, and text my PA to cancel a luncheon appointment.

There are more profound uses for this technology. Surgeons can use composite scans to turn their patients into three-dimensional avatars, for example. Critical manoeuvres in brain and spinal surgery, where there is no room for error, can then be conducted with unprecedented precision. Patients with previously inoperable tumours can be treated using this technique.

All of which is marvellous - at the level of instrumental and automated transactions. But in terms of meaningful communications, greater numbers of interactions seem to be facile, frivolous and condensed. And so I wonder about the provisional nature of it all - the negative impact on our ability to perceive and comprehend granular detail, to distinguish trivia from salient information, to respond adequately and at speed to looming physical dangers, or to imagine and plan for the long-term.

What is lost when everything is so ephemeral and in a constant state of flux? How does our neuropsychology react and adapt? Is memory detrimentally affected? Would we know if it was? What about behavioural traits? Is the capability to empathise, for example, reduced by abbreviated attention spans? And what impulses guide relations when everything else is so provisional?

As we read this sentence, we believe this moment - right now - is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is palpable. However much we may remember the past, or anticipate the future, we live in the present. Of course, the moment during which we read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. Consequently it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open (until it becomes present) and that the past is fixed (because it has gone). As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives depends on it.

Yet as obvious as this way of thinking is, it is not reflected empirically. Science does not tell us which events are occurring right now. Indeed physics deems the perception of time passing from one present moment to another an illusion - an artefact invented by our psychology. Moreover, if the present moment does not exist, then neither does the flow of time. If each moment is equally real, the future can be no more open than the past; the past no more true than the future. The notion that time is emergent from an enduring cosmological reality reflects a metaphysical predisposition that accords well with Eastern mystical traditions. The only valid alternative is a proposition that time is real - the only aspect of reality directly experienced which is fundamental and not emergent.

To become a little more granular.... We usually think of time as having three distinct elements - past, present and possible. This device allows us to sort things out in our minds more effectively. But it is only a construction. The past is an assortment of memories that are reassembled and interpreted differently each time we bring them to mind. Without a time machine we cannot actually experience past memories. We can only remember them through a simulation of the experience. There is no objective thing that can be called the past. It resists any form of measurement. Our only contact with it must of necessity occur in the present.

Similarly, the future is a mental construct we hold from the perspective of the present. We cannot experience future possibilities unless they manifest as the present. Until then they remain fantasies. We can project what possibilities may occur but there is no objective thing we can call the future. It cannot be measured and our only contact with it is by way of the present. An expanded now. Now there’s a thought…..

Disruptive Innovation: Delusion or Distraction?

Within the context of exonegous change, especially more recent experiences of radical technological advances, two entangled business ideas have arisen to capture our abiding attention. Often prematurely proclaimed as ideas that will change everything we search for products and schemes that satisfy the craving we have developed for innovation to be disruptive - at least if it is to live up to our expectations entailed in massive change.

The oft-heard mantra of disruptive innovation as a business model in its own right can be heard intoned time and time again. Emanating from the claustrophobic world of lecture theatres, business books and management conventions, and ending up in entrepreneurial endeavours, investment plays, offers from professional services firms, and the strategies of corporations and governments alike, we have become so convinced of their legitimacy that these two core ideas are often confused as causal agents of change, including any necessary practices for success, as well as the new conditions created by such change.

As a consequence they receive a mention in almost every government policy, electoral campaign, corporate plan, and organisational tactics. Indeed not to incorporate the idea of a disruptive model in the context of innovation is often considered both negligent and ignorant.

I wonder whether such easy acceptance of these ideas is a substitute for thinking. At what point does the quest for disruption actually become a distraction? And is the overt quest for disruption simply a delusion – a fate similar to that suffered by Don Quixote in his obsessive tilting at windmills?

The deliberate use of innovation as the key to shaking things up in an existing global market, where established trailblazers and alliances are eventually displaced by new value networks, is extremely rare and often accidental. Because innovation is an emergent property of the creative process, disruption is more often an outcome of entrepreneurial activity rather than its root cause. This is especially the case where disruption gives rise to significant social impacts that change brings in its wake.

After the event we can easily be drawn into making unfounded and extravagant claims – typically mistaking correlation as cause, and cause for effect. But, as most entrepreneurs will recount, living one’s life in the alchemist’s enthusiasm for invention usually means that an abiding concern with early viability while ensuring sufficient provisioning to be able to grow, mature and endure, overrides most other considerations. The last thing on one’s mind is the need to be disruptive.

Very few innovations are truly disruptive - even though they might be revolutionary. Indeed disruption is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. The development of the motor car, for example, was not disruptive to what was then essentially a horse-drawn vehicle market - at least until automobiles began to be mass-produced. Nor was that Henry Ford’s plan. But at a point when plummeting costs of production converged with the demand for much rapid forms of transportation disruption of the market was guaranteed. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 was disruptive as much as it was empowering. It contributed to far easier dissemination of information and gave ordinary men and women the license and autonomy to learn from written materials instead of having to rely upon the spoken word. Likewise the internet gave us the foundational possibility of connecting with anyone, at any time, for any reason.

Disruption, then, seems to occur as an emergent property of a system-in-transition; one that is being propelled into a new state by the deployment of a certain kind of discovery or invention. It has the capacity to shake up conventional markets, often in ways that are structurally and economically transformational. Huge social impacts typically result.

But I doubt disruption can be ordained, let alone accurately predicted. And, if that is the case, perhaps our obsession with disruption as a premeditated stratagem, is nothing other than an exercise in futility. Could it be a cruel and expensive delusion?

Possibly as it is currently conceptualised and deployed. But it does not necessarily have to be like that. For a far deeper contradiction should be concerning us – one that necessitates the embedding of disruptive innovation at its very core.

Markets are a human invention. They arose out of convenience and exist for one purpose: to facilitate exchange of one kind or another. At their core, markets and economies are really only concerned with money and materials. They do not offer up much of interest concerning human purpose, relationships, well-being or ephemeral desires.

So in terms of disruptive innovation what would happen if we were able to shift gears up a notch or two; away from the materialistic impulses of consumerism and competition that have eroded humanity’s innate qualities of empathy, gratitude and love, and replaced them with indifference, greed, selfishness and loathing? What might happen if we could take disruptive innovation and find ways to apply this to the renewal of a more universally beneficial worldview and world-system? What if we could arrive at a healthier balance between our individualistic material ambitions and a greater concern for the planet and each other? More pertinently, why would we even contemplate doing so?

Within the profoundly disturbing context of the human condition, the interminable and apparently irresolvable tension between instinct and intellect that serves only to intensify our sense of alienation, guilt, depression, anger and sorrow, a spark of hope still flickers. That hope is contained within the thought we may still be able to apply innovation to disrupt a worldview that has become so toxic to the human spirit. Four general observations using Ken Wilber's 4Q model:

1. In 1945, the year of my birth, there were less than two billion people on Earth. Since then the population has grown to almost seven and a half billion, putting an unparalleled burden on systems that were never intended to cope with such numbers. 

2. That stress is now palpable. It is leading to the imminent collapse of our most life-critical systems and a consequent decline in the ability of the planet to support the human family. Food and energy production, health, education, and governance, for example, are all at risk of sliding into a bleak decline from which it will be almost impossible to recover. The original aims of all these systems have been corrupted; they now spawn inequality, injustice, crime and poverty that seems unrelenting. We need to lift the veil of ignorance from our eyes in order to recognise that we are all culpable – the wealthy more than the poor. Humanity’s outrageous hubris harnessed to an intolerably competitive worldview, still prejudiced in favour of the wealthy and focused compulsively on economic growth, technological development, and serf labour, must be totally redesigned if we are to avoid the failure of the human experiment and the potential collapse of our civilisation.

3. The aforesaid is easier to theorise than to practise. Competitive behaviours are now so ingrained, social media so pervasive, that we effortlessly leap to blame anyone for our current state of affairs who does not immediately share our beliefs or cultural values. Organised crime is rampant. Corruption ingrained at all levels in society. Religious groups fear each other, basing their hatred on trivial differences and isolated incidents. Radical ideological proponents clash and do battle. And all the while our so-called leaders eschew amity in favour of conflict and resort to killing in favour of dialogue. If this is not insane I am unsure what is. Biologically speaking human beings are identical. We are all part of a single family. We are born with the same number of genes and a similar impulse to survive, achieve happiness, and create a secure and loving situation for our family and friends. A Palestinian family on the West Bank will have similar feelings and desires to the Jewish family a few kilometres away. Muslims in Pakistan and Iraq have almost identical hopes as Christians in Australia or France. A wealthy industrialist in the US is not too dissimilar to a peasant farmer in Cambodia. We all want the same things in life. Not that you would know that judging from our bullying and intimidating behaviours towards each other.

4. The most appalling outcome of this widespread culture of fear-driven blame is a generation of psychologically and neurotically anxious, despairing, alienated and depressed individuals who no longer have hope in a dystopian future at odds with their most sacred human instincts. In the end this is the most dreadful expression of the human condition and the world-system it has spawned. Yet it is still one we cannot face.

Applying innovative disruption to this state of affairs is potentially the most reliable, courageous course we can now take. Such a strategy is likely to be far more benign than the constant, unending, warfare we prosecute based upon primitive superstitions and the irrational fear of others. And yet it has the potential to heal our ills more effectively.

So many possible scenarios, initially encouraging, are now well past the point of no return. Some, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals unintentionally simplify, misrepresent and trivialise the extent of the problem. Others tried perhaps half-heartedly are depleted. We now need to try and apply disruptive innovation to humanity’s views of itself in order to deal with a pathology that, without dramatic treatment, will devour us.

At an absolute minimum the evolution of a new all-encompassing and inclusive worldview that better serves a majority of humanity will require four design system criteria. These are corrective schemas for each of the four experiential domains outlined above and each one has both a material and a psychological component.

1.i. Although we must find ways to cater for the needs of possibly 8-9 billion people by mid-century, the global population must decline in sheer numbers. Paradoxically this is actually a local problem. Essentially the birth rate needs to be tackled as a priority, but appropriately – and that means voluntarily. By educating people and empowering women - especially in fecund countries where there is a lack of even the most rudimentary elements of sex education and birth control – the population will drop.

1.ii. The other factor in this domain is the need to tackle our emotional addiction to spending money in order to strutt our stuff. Alleviating the stresses on manufacturing and distribution through local and peer-to-peer production, putting greater resources into the sharing economy, using communications and information technologies more effectively, embracing non-monetary exchange and valuing nature not as an economic resource but for what it gives us aesthetically and emotionally, will all help shift us away from the precipice of excessive consumerism.

2.i. If we can identify the systems that are failing us, a forensic interrogation of that system will quickly reveal why, what constraints in the system need to change, and how best we can do that. An acupunctural approach to whole systems design will lay bare a simple truth: in spite of what we have been taught to believe, massive change does not need to disrupt our society’s aspirations or well-being, even though it might well disrupt, and even destroy, the model that previously benefitted only a few.

2.ii. Some systems were intentionally designed to work the way they do. Neoliberal economics, for example, is calculated to benefit the wealthy while keeping the poor in their place. The core notion of trickle-down economics was proved to be fraudulent year ago. Likewise the industrial military complex is purposefully designed to keep war and conflict active and peace difficult to come by.

To create a new civilisational model it will be necessary to consign these and many other arrangements to history. I include among these, for example:

• the capturing of the food chain by multinational corporations that then hold farmers to ransom, sustain agrarian monocultures, and stifle innovation where it is most needed
• the marketing and sale of products from extractive industries that do not directly benefit local communities or that harm stakeholders
• toxic industries that endanger life and whose products poison the soil, water and air we need to sustain life on the planet
• political systems that are corrupt or that deny people a voice in how they live their lives and suppress the freedoms enjoyed by many others
• all devices that intentionally siphon wealth from those who make goods and provide services by virtue of the labour to those who accumulate and spend it
• all systems that knowingly perpetuate war and conflict while hindering peace.

3.i. Competition results from conditions where a resource is scarce. In markets the concept of competition can be positive. It results in lower prices and higher quality as the competing parties attempt to sell their goods. But pushing competitive behaviour recklessly into every crack and crevice of society generates a divided society with fierce envy, greed and frustration evident in one faction, as well as extreme fulfillment in the other.

There is little need for competition to reach into every corner of our lives in a world of abundance. If adequate provisions are available to us all the problems of poverty and injustice disappear. This is why some states are slowly moving to a basic living wage for their citizens as a substitute for a raft of costly government grants, benefits and wage supplements.

3.ii. The blame game is corrosive. It fuels enmity and erects barriers in the way of empathy and compassion. If we are truly one family, concerned with one another to the extent that the ethos of what it means to be human hangs on that single thread, then blaming each other for the ills of the world is blindly ignorant and offensive. In the end we are all culpable.

It is obvious that in order to counter such alienating attitudes we need to consciously inculcate a vital sense of appreciation and diversity in our communities. For it is only when we are able to stand side by side, as curators of each others’ destiny, inspired by the intention of improving one or more aspects of the human condition, that we will be able to loosen the shackles of the past to evolve a more empathic worldview.

4.i. Finally we have to deal with a legion of disillusioned and alienated individuals – young and old, men and women – who, for reasons we must presume, only sense the futility and sterility of a future to which they cannot relate, and in which they have no sense of authentic joy or belonging. Eradicating old systems that no longer benefit a majority of the human family is one thing. Engaging individuals in crafting a revitalised purpose is quite another. It requires us to put aside prejudices in order to deal with the uncomfortable realities of the world-system we have created and sustained for so long.

4.ii. Ultimately we must restore purpose and meaning in our interactions with each other and the planet. In a life bereft of meaning there is not much we can do but to wallow in self-pity and guilt – hesitant victims in a world-system we no longer want and have little inclination to comprehend.

For much of humanity the largest and most significant missing piece is that of story. We lack both personal and collective narratives that make sense, restore hope, and concede the inescapable truth of the human condition. Our destiny story, comprising life-affirming principles, hopes and desires we can and should hold dear, is absent. In its place is a vacuum – empty and cold – a uniform cry echoing into the void. This story is not to be found in the banal visions of our so-called leaders whose only concern, or so it seems, is to lull us into a belief that the financialisation of every aspect of our lives should be our highest goal - a pathetic psalm of birth, learning, work, jobs, retirement and demise.

So swallow the blue pill. Quickly. Slouch off into the darkness and security of Plato’s cave before you awaken to the terrible agony that is our reality. Or venture into the daylight. Seize the opportunity to disrupt the prevalent worldview, shaping a future world-system that benefits all of humanity and gives birth to a fresh concept of the divine in all of us. What a wonderful use for disruptive innovation!

Feeding Ourselves: Gratuitous Advice for Asia's Agricultural Research Institutes

Getting Real

As the world tilts on its dark side the prospect of our civilisation sliding into a quagmire of deep inequity and injustice is being felt - not just across the great cities of the developed world but in the most remote villages of the Global South.

Envy, greed, hatred, overindulgence to the point of futility, aided and abetted by a generation of morally bankrupt and incompetent leaders, have gained more than a toehold in our dealings with each other. Shadows of the human story now lengthen - growing more sinister by the day. I had never supposed it might end like this.

The flare-up of fanatical terrorism and the untold fear this is causing; the collapse of trust in political institutions; corruption; right-wing militancy; the self-serving, myopic agendas of most large corporations; the widening gulf between the wealthy and the destitute; a lack of adequate laws to protect the environment; and the tedious dictatorial defiance of people like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Prayut Chan-o-cha in Thailand have become, or threaten to become, festering sores on the face of humanity.

Moreover the mass movements of people seeking refuge as a result of these intertwined issues is evidence that artificially-contrived borders, once thought to be impervious to unsanctioned forms of migration, are actually highly porous and vulnerable to new, unforeseen pressures.

Fuelled by an unprincipled global finance industry, whose main game is now one of sustaining predatory capitalism, aligned with puppet masters on Wall Street, and those like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers who reign over the corporatisation of public life and who therefore find it in their best interests to feign outrage at anything pertaining to humanitarian idealism, the response of many state governments has been both extreme and naïve.

Apprehension and confusion in elitist ranks has brought about a schism between power exercised internationally and parochial politics. Inequality is metastatising. The resulting panic has seen increased public surveillance, heavy-handed policing, the metastasis of discrimination, and the methodical withdrawal of freedoms in exchange for questionable upgrades in personal and state security. This is leaving many ordinary people, mere witnesses to such shifts, anxious and perplexed – concerned for the environment, for the disadvantaged, and with what unknown shocks might lie ahead that future generations will need to take care of.

In this context many organisations and institutions are beginning to tremble. But the traditional not-for-profit sector finds itself increasingly isolated – caught between politics and power they are desperate for funds. They are also scrambling to find new meaning in order to maintain their niche in a society seemingly primed to jettison the dispossessed, and almost anyone else seeking sanctuary from the horrors of war, famine and repression, without so much as a backward glance.

In this context some NGOs have been compelled to define their distinctiveness in very parochial terms, often to the point of competing for limited resources with similar-constituted enterprises. Unhappily their ingrained convictions lead them into dilemmas from which they cannot escape. All too often they allow themselves to be guided by too modest an impulse. They then end up treating the more harrowing symptoms of a disease rather than using their resources more wisely to cure the disease itself. But there is a compelling logic even to that.

For example, it is a relatively straightforward decision for an organisation like WWF to put great store in its “adopt an endangered animal” campaigns. This is a proven and highly popular way of attracting donations. But while the organisation continues to spend its time and resources on that particular strategy it probably prevents them from finding an effective way of conserving the world’s biodiversity – which is their espoused mission – in collaboration with other like-minded organisations. In this instance the compassion and pragmatism exhibited by WWF executives acts against their long-term strategic success. But this apparent failure, in terms of the big picture, is also a necessity if they are to endure as an entity. This is why endurance has become a driver in and of itself.

Meanwhile more monolithic organisations, especially unwieldy off-shoots of the United Nations as well as issues-based and charity-driven organisations like World Vision and Greenpeace, for example, who find themselves caught in the clutches of international power plays, increasingly focus on polishing their entitlement attitudes and bureaucratic credentials.

The fact that all kinds of charitable and aid organisations, large and small, have been declining in relevance for at least the past two decades seems to matter little to those in charge – though it is abundantly clear to many of the staff I talk to on a regular basis, who despair that anything is likely to change soon, and that promises being made cannot possibly be kept.

A large part of these problems comes down to a failure of leadership – explicitly the failure of those thrust into positions of authority to recognise and appreciate the need for collaboration at scale if they are going to stand any chance at all of transforming those systems most indispensible to humanity. Sadly such widespread incompetence has also been accompanied by a profound lack of wisdom and of foresight. These disabilities go right to the heart of our lack of proficiency to address the global problematique we so enthusiastically manufactured in previous eras. It also raises a most fundamental question: Are we wise enough to survive our own success?

Illiterate Leaders

At its core is the issue of illiterate leadership - in this case the moral, psychological, cognitive and instrumental incapacity to engage in collaborative system design - set against the mutable cultural morphology of our innately nomadic tendencies. A related problem is the hugely complex nature of metasystemic design and the disparate controls, such as ownership and process variations, for example, embedded within each component of a system.

All human-made systems are impeccably designed to produce the results they get.[1] If we become dissatisfied with the outputs, for any reason, or they do not meet their expectations, then the only real option we have is to reconfigure those components (commonly referred to constraints) that cause the system to act in a dysfunctional manner.

It is a fact that none of the systems human beings have devised are inherently generative. Unlike natural ecosystems they lack the capacity to evolve in alignment with fluctuating conditions. This was never a problem until we irretrievably (albeit unconsciously) altered just one of those critical conditions - becoming so fecund that human numbers swelled to well over 7 billion – 5 billion of those in the past 70 years.

The correlation between population size and a system’s performance, you see, is not as trivial as you might think. For example, a welfare system designed as a safety net for one million citizens, subsidised by taxing the income of 80 per cent of those same citizens, will simply collapse if the population doubles without a subsequent increase in the numbers of tax payers, the amount of tax levied, or innovations that significantly lower the cost of health care and unemployment. This is simple mathematics. Yet it has hardly ever been taken into account as a vital element in whole-system planning and design, except in hindsight.

If present demographic trends continue our planet will be home to 8 billion people by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. So this is a statistic we can no longer afford to ignore.

We are now witnessing natural ecosystems that are critical for our survival - such as rivers, soil, the oceans and the biosphere – under extreme duress, while those we invented over the course of centuries – systems that were never intended to meet even the most rudimentary needs of such a vast population, are breaking down in front of our eyes.

Furthermore the systems we have invented, again unlike natural ecosystems are, for the most part, hugely wasteful and inefficient. One of these is the hugely intricate network of units assembled to investigate, grow, process, distribute, regulate, market, retail and consume food – a system which then has to deal with the loss and wastage, currently estimated as up to half of all food produced.

The modern industrial food chain is an immensely complex organism of interdependent (often conflicting) motives, exchange and distribution mechanisms, relationships and interactions. It touches every aspect of society - from economics, commerce, culture and politics, to science, technology and the environment. It is also wasteful and increasingly toxic to humans.

In order to improve the quality, integrity and security of the food chain we must first study the interdependencies within the entire system. Reducing loss and waste, for example, will surface other “indirect” factors that need modification or elimination altogether. For example, genetically engineered varieties of strawberry could be farmed to grow quickly all year round and with less likelihood of perishing within a few days of being picked. This innovation could eradicate the need for chemical additives that are currently used to preserve non-seasonal fruit and vegetables, in some cases for months, until they arrive on the supermarket shelves. On the other hand waste would be far less of an issue if fresh berries could be bought directly from the farm or from local farmers’ markets. In that case transport costs would be minimal and no preservatives would be needed to keep the fruit garden-fresh.

The issue of toxicity, not just to human health but also to the land, is much more apparent in the case of fast-food outlets. The most pervasive ingredient of a McDonald's meal, for example, is corn-derived carbon and corn starch. All the chicken and beef at McDonald's is produced from corn in the form of feedlots, while the soda also contains high-fructose corn syrup. Nutritionally speaking this monoculture on a plate is extremely unhealthy. It is also a fundamental absurdity.

Seventy per cent of the grain grown in the US, for example, goes to feed livestock. Most of this livestock is cattle, which are uniquely suited to eating grass, not corn. To help them tolerate corn, antibiotics are pumped into the cattle. And because the corn diet leads to pathogens, we must then irradiate their meat to make it safe for humans to eat. Feeding so much corn to cattle thus creates new and entirely preventable public health problems. It contributes to soil erosion, pollution, food poisoning - and obesity.

Corn also happens to be a greedy crop, which is probably why it is so heavily subsidised. It takes two litres of fossil fuel and 15,000 litres of water to produce 25 kilograms (or a bushel) of corn. Growing corn as an intensive monoculture requires more pesticide and more fertiliser than almost any other crop. As the soil degrades immense amounts of nitrogen fertiliser must be used to keep the land arable. Furthermore, when the run-off from the fertiliser leaches into ditches, streams and rivers, the nitrogen stimulates growth of phytoplankton and algae that starve the area of oxygen, to the extent that fish are unable to live in it. These polluted “dead zones” have not received much attention in the popular press compared to carbon in the atmosphere. But in terms of the sheer scale of human interference in one of the planet’s most critical natural cycles, the impact from nitrogen is possibly even more dramatic.

The task for studying these and related matters falls to the various agricultural research institutes around the world and global partnerships like CGIAR. These are relatively small players within a colossal system. As already pointed out many of these NGOs are under-funded and scrambling to retain their relevance in a world turned upside-down. By focusing particularly on their funding and investment patterns we may be able to discover some clues as to how we can approach the redesign of the global food system, including what strategies can be used to leverage constructive change.

Perfection in Mind

The food system as currently configured is regulated by a comparatively small number of positive feedback loops. These are intentionally designed to advantage big business, mostly in the form of financial incentives and earnings that can then be used to generate shareholder wealth. Thus this system has descended into an econocentric monoculture, reliant on fossil fuels for its continuation and fixated on the notion of scarcity. This should have been apparent from the examples outlined above regarding the intensive nature of growing corn for the fast-food market, and its unintended consequences.

It is possible to argue that the industrial food chain is highly efficient - but only from the point of view of profit maximisation for a relatively small cadre of corporations and their investors. This might be reasonable if it were not for the fact that the system is deliberately biased against other stakeholders - particularly those who are socially or economically vulnerable. Most other parties have become subordinate to the strategic intentions of big business and are held captive by these dynamics. This is not a predicament unique to food. It actually reflects a universal trend, starting immediately after the 2^nd World War, embracing the financialisation of every aspect of our lives.

Some of the largest and most powerful industrial agribusiness companies in the world, including Monsanto, Nestle and Cargill, for example, have taken advantage of this situation by controlling every aspect of the upstream value chain - from the farm to the supermarket. Other large players, such as farm machinery manufacturers John Deere and large retail food chains such as Tesco, Wal-Mart and Woolworths, hold sway over the downstream.

Alarmingly, the downstream landscape features increasingly dubious, often openly disreputable practices - marketing chemically saturated foods thought to be causing diabetes, malnutrition and obesity. Today more and more people are claiming with greater certitude that processed food presents a serious factor in terms of human morbidity.

The organisations to whom I have alluded also benefit in other more subtle ways. By maintaining the status quo they effectively quarantine the food system from badly needed reform. They shape government food policies to reflect their particular needs. They send small producers to the wall. And by prolonging energy-intensive industrial agriculture they create a scheme of production and distribution that is increasingly unsustainable.

Fortunately there are already encouraging signs this cannot go on for much longer. Developments in renewable energy, agroecology, and blockchain governance technologies, for example, indicate we may be entering a period where innovation increases and prices keep dropping, yet production continues to rise. Many economists find this hard to accept as this logic runs counter to orthodox economic theory. But, if true, it could mean that small-scale local production will get a serious boost and large corporations may find themselves needing to down-scale and localise activities to a far greater extent. This could precipitate a new shift in the relationship between governments and the private sector while redefining what we mean by the term globalisation.

The impulse of the large agribusiness companies to maintain the status quo as a pre-requisite for creating shareholder wealth differs significantly from the moral imperative of national and state governments to take care of their citizens. To my amazement the United Nations declaration that access to food and water is a human right is still not a view commonly shared by the private sector. Indeed there are often basic discrepancies between private and public sector enterprises aims when it comes to food.

While corporations take care of their investors, governments are more concerned with the public good. This remains the current theory at least. In practice the ties that link big business interests to government policy often end up in knots that are difficult to untangle. Thus while such inherent conflicts of interest might be casually acknowledged, the unintended effects flowing from such inconsistencies are routinely ignored – glossed over for fear of causing some slight offence that could inadvertently damage mutually beneficial (usually financial) relationships.

So we increasingly see slick marketing campaigns from major industrial suppliers projecting false impressions of unity, solidarity, and alignment with the public good. The resulting narratives are a fiction - but states do not call the lie, preferring silence or obfuscation. The reasons are obvious. Both parties hope to convince us they are intent on pursuing identical aims. While that may be true at a certain level, it is certainly far from clear that this is the case in every situation. Nor would such a close symbiotic relationship necessarily be in the best interests of the public.

Because of this willful deception, some governments - predominantly those who are financially impoverished and are also subject to ballooning public debt – see agribusiness companies pouring billions of dollars into research projects with explicitly grandiose outcomes, such as an ambition to feed the world, for example, which is actually about capturing a larger market for their goods, and then use that in justifying their reluctance to spend taxpayers’ money, duplicating what they perceive to be the same ends.

This is a dual deceit. A game that means most investment in agriculture today is channeled into a one-dimensional quest to produce more food or increase yields. Research in alternative agrarian technologies, agroecology, and poverty-reducing forms of agriculture receive only token funds from the agribusiness industry for one very simple reason: the results would potentially weaken the industry’s supremacy by constraining corporate profits and freeing communities from a yoke of serfdom. Nor is the agricultural research community likely to get adequate government funding while research goals mimic or pretend to be identical to those being pursued by the private sector.

In order to win the future agricultural investment game, the high level goals and outcomes of the non-aligned research community must be significantly different from those of the major corporate players and must be seen to produce different and better results. This would generate far greater viability for the food system but is a hazardous playground politically speaking.

Research organisations must be able to point to inherent differences between their clients’ needs and the self-serving goals of the agribusiness conglomerates - with whom they might still enjoy mutually-beneficial relationships – whose interest is focused solely on increasing profits. Unless reasoned justifications for why alternative investment strategies, including those avoided by the corporate world, are so crucial to humanity’s well-being are provided by the research community, nothing will radically change. No plea for additional funds based upon scientific rigour, nor emotional arguments however well-crafted, are likely to overcome the current deficit.

There is no single solution to eliminating hunger, poverty and malnutrition, nor of improving the productivity of agricultural systems. So much depends on context, resources and capabilities, a willingness to collaborate, and access to relevant innovations. But if non-governmental strategies are not sufficiently distinctive, the ability to compete against a deeply ingrained belief system that is now virtually impossible to dislodge will become futile. Fewer resources will come the way of research institutes as a consequence. In addition, if strategies are not leveragable and cannot work at scale, these NGOs will fall still further behind. This may be one of the most critical of present day and future dilemmas for the design of the food system.

Copycat strategies, whereby the goals of the large agribusiness corporations are mimicked and causes are apparently aligned, only serve to weaken the authority and distinctiveness of research entities in the long run. So these organisations should not try to feed the world by tweaking the current system. They should not directly pursue greater yields. And their quest should not be to produce more and more food. These are corporate strategies and they should be left to the large agribusiness players, if indeed that is the game they want to continue to play.

The mission of agricultural research bodies should be complementary to the extent that it assists grass roots growers to place less reliance on industrial methods - encouraging them to move into deploying low-cost, culturally-enhancing, commons-based, and ultimately poverty-reducing and organic agricultural innovations in the management of sustainable agro-ecosystems.

Mitigating the Risk

This strategic dilemma is laden with risk. The large agribusiness companies have their own research agendas. If their short-term goals, for that is invariably what they are, are not supported by the non-aligned research community, the latter may be cast as the enemy by an industry intent on refusing to play game in any way that would hasten genuine reform of the food system and lead to a subsequent loss of power and profits. That could well result in them protecting their intellectual property more vigorously and openly opposing the development of alternative, albeit viable, systems at every juncture – especially in terms of agroecology.

On the other hand if NGOs fail to impose their own unique role in the food system public sector funding may stall and dry up altogether. In this case the risk is that NGOs will be perceived to be irrelevant or, at best, superfluous fringe players, in comparison with the mainstream industry.

This situation is not all downside risk. In fact there are considerable advantages for research bodies in pursuing dissimilar strategies to the corporate agribusiness industry. For example:

• Traditional know-how and techniques, like permaculture, are frequently superior to industrialised farming practices and just need better marketing and propagation to be accepted by farming communities
• Most technologies are getting cheaper - especially those that enable collaboration, communication, and the sharing of information
• Much knowledge is free, as in the Global Innovation Commons - a massive repository of over two million inventions, held in Trust by Centre for the Future, that are out of patent and are available for anyone to use, anywhere, without restriction, at no cost.

The conventional funding mix is also changing in ways that could work well to the advantage of researchers. Corporations are becoming much more narrowly focused in their spending. The need to remain viable in highly competitive global markets, together with the fickle nature of customer loyalties, have become abiding distractions for them.

Meanwhile as public debt grows, and governments begin to take the pursuit of a low carbon economy and the provision of free public services such as health and education more seriously, liquidity will shrink. Taxes will shift from labour and consumption towards capital and wealth. Private equity firms, funds managers and venture philanthropists are ready to step into this void. Indeed many investors already see agriculture as a key component in their portfolios - especially as they expect agricultural earnings to outperform equities and bonds over the coming decade.

In that context it is important to appreciate a novel philosophy that is beginning to gain ground in the investment community. As the conscience of ultra high-net-worth individuals, persuaded by a few celebrity investors with an humanitarian ethos - shifts deeply ingrained attitudes about how wealth might be better used, philanthropy is being reinvented. Today’s impact investors aspire to leverage massive social change where revenue-generating portfolios are used to channel funds into more principled “not-for-profit” ventures that can scale-up once the source idea is proven to be effective.

Seen purely from this perspective, the time-honored arms-length competitive process regarding the giving of large grants is increasingly considered a blunt instrument. Outcomes are difficult to measure and appear to have little enduring impact. Besides this process is more suited to an old-fashioned scarcity mentality rather than the contemporary idea of provisioning within abundance. The use of small and micro investments to prototype new products, processes, and relationships, on the other hand, is gaining in popularity.

An acupuncture-like appreciation that small, well-targeted, donations can release entrepreneurial energy within a community, thus effecting system-wide transformation in ways that large grants often fail to do, is also becoming prevalent. This opens up new options for philanthropists and sponsors to directly engage with their beneficiaries while educating and freeing local groups to embrace new responsibilities, rather than passively accepting their plight as labourers in a system controlled and operated by a coalition of big business and government. Another trend that cannot be ignored is the cumulative amount of money being spent on dealing with systemic emergencies, whatever the cause. Global heating is making disasters such as floods and droughts more frequent and intense, land and water more scarce and difficult to access, and increased yields in agrarian productivity even harder to achieve. These effects increase the risk of hunger and the breakdown of food systems.

In this situation it is not hard to imagine a future where a significant proportion of all monies invested will focus on the resilience of our most life-critical needs, like food production, security and distribution, for example. This is a system already struggling to come to terms with a global population of over seven billion people at a time when the cost of food is rising and farmers are having to adapt agricultural techniques and apply disaster management strategies.

Three Wild Cards

1. Climate

When most of us think about climate change we imagine gradual increases in temperature and only marginal shifts in other climatic conditions, continuing indefinitely or even leveling off at some stage in the future.

Conventional wisdom has persuaded us that modern civilisation will either adapt to whatever weather conditions we face, and that the pace of climate change will not overwhelm the adaptive capacity of society, or that our concerted efforts, such as those embodied in the recently concluded Paris Protocol, will be sufficient to mitigate the most severe impacts. Optimists assert that the benefits from technological innovation will be able to outpace the negative effects of climate change. I believe this to be an unsophisticated point of view infused with, and propelled by, our innate hubris.

Climatically, the gradual change view of the future assumes that agriculture will continue to thrive and growing seasons will lengthen. Northern Europe, Russia, and North America will prosper agriculturally while southern Europe, Africa, and Central and South America will suffer from increased dryness, heat, water shortages, and reduced production. Overall, global food production under many typical climate scenarios increases.

This view of climate change may be a dangerous act of self-deception, as increasingly we face weather related disasters - more hurricanes, monsoons, floods, and heat waves and droughts - in every region around the world.

Past examples of abrupt climate change suggest it may be prudent to consider rapid climate change as entirely plausible, especially because some recent scientific findings and new records suggest that we could be on the cusp of such an event. This past October in Australia was the hottest recorded for any month since 1910. Nationally, maximum temperatures were 3.4 degrees celsius above average for the month and 2.7 degrees warmer than previous years. This is simply another factor that could expedite changes already noted in the way funds are allocated and investments are made.

2. Coal

One of the most powerful outcomes from the heightened awareness of our changing climate has been the recent shift away from fossil fuels by a diverse group of institutional investors. The shift away from is the fastest growing global divestment movement in history. This movement has already seen pension funds, universities, churches and local councils commit to pulling their investments, currently valued around USD 2.6 trillion, out of coal, oil and gas companies.

As this wave of institutional divestment accelerates, individual investors will begin to embrace the same thinking - and a global investor-driven push for a new low carbon economy will become a powerful driver of change. What is not yet ordained is where this money will be reinvested. At the moment the renewable energy industry is benefitting from early reinvestment patterns. But other options, compellingly communicated, could see huge inflows of capital to agriculture and agroecology research – especially as this would be viewed as a risk-reduction tactic by the markets.

3. Connectedness

The dire situation concerning food cannot be quarantined from emergencies in other life-critical systems. Investment in agricultural research and associated fields could benefit from an explicit association in the public’s mind with other well exposed issues. Foremost among these today are climate change, natural disasters, terrorism and the links between food, poverty and conflict.

Arundhati Roy and others argue that the World Bank and the IMF under the guise of philanthropy are complicit in the development of approaches that privilege the “free market” systems of just a few global conglomerates. Currently the World Bank is helping 130 countries take action on climate change. In 2014, it doubled those financial lendings targeting adaptation. The Bank-administered USD $7.2 billion Climate Investment Funds are now operating in 48 countries, leveraging an additional USD $43 billion in clean and ethical investments.

However, while the World Bank is intent on supporting action on the ground to finance the kind of projects that help the poor find their way out of poverty, greater care must be taken to ensure that such actions do not consolidate the non-viable systems that have caused problems in the first place.

Making the connection between grass roots farming, climate change, and alternative models of distributed capital, based upon fostering community rather than reinforcing vertical institutional power still further, could well lead to additional funds being made available from organisations like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. This is acutely the case if organic, chemical-free, local agriculture as a key strategy for shifting large numbers of people out of the poverty trap.

Future Pathways

So what should agricultural research organisations do differently that would help shift the entire global food chain towards greater viability - especially in terms of access, nutritional value and food security? How should their thinking change? How can they craft future pathways that continues to access available private sector and state funding for a set of unique strategic imperatives? In other words how can they adapt to an investment landscape that is changing quite dramatically?

In the end all strategy is temporary. Because the external world is so dynamically complex the most effective strategy today is frequently navigational – a flow of real-time responses to the ever-shifting fluctuations and nuances in the food system and its contextual dynamics. So where is the future of agricultural investment going to come from and how should it be used for the greatest impact? To that end I see a shift in strategic emphasis will be needed.

Most research bodies commonly espouse the importance of cooperation and innovation. I would urge putting greater emphasis on reinvention and, particularly the prototyping of alternative systems, processes and relationships that can spring without too much effort from a connected communal base and networks, keeping a close eye on Beddington’s Perfect Storm as an unwavering focus.

In terms of actual strategic content a number of options present themselves. These are relatively straightforward to envisage, yet require courage and determination to execute – particularly if the non-aligned research community concludes that a move away from what previously brought them success is warranted, or that they should now highlight the need for grass roots collaboration and innovation with even greater passion than before – as indicated in this paper.

Taking a longer view, the main game will be to forge a revitalised and unique strategic role for agricultural research entities that heals the more destructive effects of industrial agricultural practices that have mined the earth and plundered its natural resources in a manner seemingly blind to the aftermaths. One thing is absolutely certain from a purely strategic viewpoint: research organisations must stop espousing and duplicating the profit-focused corporate goals of the major industry players. Instead they must think for themselves. Finding appropriate alternative themes worthy of support in their own right, and projects that invite collaboration on their own terms, will be critical.

Their future mission should be to liberate a suite of systemically forceful, financially viable, culturally acceptable and socially engaging strategies that are internally consistent, focused on outcomes that local communities find compelling and inspiring, and that help neutralise or reverse the more toxic elements resulting from the worst excesses of industrial agriculture.

This needs to start with an appreciation that the term agriculture has lost almost all its original meaning. Large corporate farms are fundamentally different from those of smallholders, niche producers (organics), intensive farms and urban producers. Future investment and research therefore needs to be framed against this more complex matrix of understanding.

For example, starting from the bottom-up, focusing on innovation that occurs as a result of reinventing management and organisational systems, and always remembering that one size does not fit all, they might focus their efforts on co-creating the following with relevant stakeholders:

• Designing ways of supplying diverse, culturally-appropriate foods to different regions
• Legitimising food democracy by securing the ability of smallholder farmers to prosper while reducing dependence on imports
• Encouraging poverty-reducing forms of agriculture that suit local conditions
• Helping cities become self-sustaining by using disintegrated supply chains; innovative composting; alternative forms of al production such as agroponics, etc.
• Sharing knowledge freely in appreciation that different cultures have often pioneered solutions to present-day problems but that these are often forgotten or outlawed owing to the pressure from a highly litigious agribusiness lobby
• Advocating open source and commons-based innovations (rather than just scientific breakthroughs) that are low-cost or even free to implement – as exemplified by the Global Innovation Commons
• Finding strategies for sustaining soil and water resources and for connecting urban consumers with local organic food producers
• Strengthening cooperatives so as to sell to large buyers under dependable contracts
• Raising food security levels within areas that are currently vulnerable.

Needless to say these initiatives can only succeed if they are supported and openly complemented at national and regional levels, and accompanied by an international willingness to provide a coherent framework that integrates and aligns new strategic imperatives. This is best done by designing changes into the food system that create enduring value whatever external factors prevail.

National and regional bodies can help, for example, by introducing natural capital accounting into national accounts; doing more to encourage local resilience; persuading affluent nations to move away from export-driven agricultural policies - thereby making space for small producers in local markets; curbing the desire of wealthy countries to purchase large tracts of global farmland for industrial purposes; containing the demand for animal feed and agrofuels; and reducing food waste.

All these examples are worthy of consideration in the context of a revitalised grass roots response to the problems facing the food system. They also have the advantage of fitting more suitably into an agenda concentrating on entrepreneurial activities leading to greater social impacts, that are occupying the new generation of philanthropists and impact investors.

This article is an expanded, albeit redacted, version of strategic advice commissioned by APAARI and delivered in the form of a paper and presentation to their High Level Policy Dialogue in Bangkok in December 2015. Taking just one element in the global food system – namely changing investment patterns in agricultural research - it explores the various strands of design thinking and contextual relevance, much of it counterintuitive, required in any serious attempt to redesign a dynamically complex system regarding this theme. Given that the reinvention of humanity’s most life-critical systems is core to the mission of my new enterprise, I hope this brief article will evidence the wide-ranging and discursive analysis required of any such inquiry undertaken by Centre for the Future.

 

[1] I am using the term system to mean a set of interdependent components forming a complex, organic, and recognisable whole. Every system is defined by its spatial and temporal boundaries, contained within (and influenced by) its environment, described by its structure and purpose, and expressed in its functioning.

Hoodwinking Humanity

Several regular readers of The Hames Report have noted with some concern an absence of postings since August 2015. There are good reasons for this silence, not least the fact that I have been settling into my new role as founding CEO of Centre for the Future and transferring the family from Bangkok to Melbourne.

However I have not been inactive during this period. Quite the opposite in fact. I have been engaged in the most extensive and detailed research I have personally undertaken into any topic since writing my third [The Five Literacies of Global Leadership] and fifth [Heresies] books.

Over the past weeks I have tenaciously read and re-read the recently released Paris Protocol. At 32 pages this is the official document from the UN Framework on Climate Change (the 21^st of its kind) which is to be endorsed in April. A paper of that length might not sound like a particularly onerous task, but the Protocol’s convoluted prose is wearisome for anyone with an aversion to legal jargon – a category I fall into with considerable ease.

I prepared for this chore by bringing myself up to speed on the background to the agreement - reviewing official documentation stretching all the way back to the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol in December 1997 - in order to compare the promises made with the actual track record of the participating parties. Believe me this made for depressing reading.

And if that wasn’t disheartening enough I then invited even more melancholy into my life by talking to some of the world’s leading climate experts about the state of the science and how the reality is rapidly outpacing current knowledge. Humanity is moving into unknown territory.

In collusion with a number of friends, including those I regard as most eminently qualified to appraise the nature of the approach being taken by the international community in their efforts to tackle the issue of climate change, I then undertook a fairly rigorous examination of the UN framework. The idea was to uncover any false assumptions or flawed logics.

Without trying too hard we exposed several that, in normal circumstances, would immediately shut down a legal case. And yet in this context, remember, we are not talking about a murder, or even a massacre, but the much more serious premeditated crime of global ecocide.

As a consequence I now harbour numerous qualms about the UN process itself, especially the manner in which profound policy implications can be so easily watered down to comply with the parochial fads of self-serving coalitions and the bully-boy tactics of powerful individual states and their subservience to big business. I still remain highly sceptical regarding the solitary aim of reducing carbon emissions at the expense of other equally germane factors – akin to putting all our eggs into one basket. And I question the wisdom of leaving such decisions in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians. For me the relinquishing of such civic responsibility is like handing over the keys of the asylum to a bunch of inmates who are already high on a cocktail of adrenalin, self-delusion and the din of bureaucratic echolalia.

Listening to the rational narratives of scientific trailblazers, like James Hansen for example, leaves me in no doubt we are staring into an abyss of uncertainty.

Even so, or perhaps because of this, I feel the need to add my own commentary about COP21 and its aftermath, and to offer an evaluation about how effectively our elected world leaders are dealing with the existential planetary emergency that is occurring on their watch.

Off-the-record leaks leading up to and concluding with the formal announcement of the Paris communique were consistently euphoric in tone. The language used by the media expressed a real breakthrough in attitudes and the restoration of hope. Looking at these messages in the cold light of day they are an uncanny reminder of the heroic speech by Neville Chamberlain proclaiming “peace for our time” just one year before the outbreak of a world war that claimed over 60 million lives.

Admittedly there did seem to be cause for cautious optimism early on in the proceedings – at least in contrast with the debacles in almost every meeting from Qatar to Lima in addition to the utter failure to reach any kind of agreement in Copenhagen (COP15). But the Paris Protocol, too, falls far short in spite of the ebullient hype we have come to expect from these conferences. It doesn’t even begin to deal with what we actually need to do if we are to have any hope of adapting to the harsher realities of climate change.

So, in spite of assertions to the contrary, December 12^th 2015 is unlikely to go down in the chronicles of history as a great day for planet Earth. It is even less likely to be considered the day on which humanity’s self-serving ingenuity reached its peak. And it certainly did not mark a point at which we were able to express renewed optimism for a benificent future when the current civilisational model is being brought to its knees by so many life-threatening factors in a range of domains encompassing energy, health, food, politics, environment, economy, media, religion, terrorism, corruption, refugees, conflict, and nuclear war.

For the time being, it seems, a gang of neo-liberal economists and ideological technocrats reign supreme in the corridors of the United Nations and its member states. Once more the voice of science is cowed by what the corporate media erroneously call strong leadership. Of course it is nothing of the kind. In the face of public outrage it is common cowardice - a deception that further dispossess future generations of their rightful inheritance, motivated by nothing more than a combination of greed, arrogance and lethargy - coupled with an appalling lack of foresight.

Meanwhile the insidious erosion of what it means to be a sentient human being, forever intensifying, is allowed to fester. Almost unnoticed, our rabid addiction to ownership and material wealth; the archaic designs and hapless effects of our most life-critical systems; our growing lack of tolerance for, and empathy with, each other; the inexplicable alienation from society being felt by so many, young and old alike; the powerlessness of the underprivileged to escape the calculated callousness of the poverty trap; even our perverse state of ignorance concerning things that should matter to us and to our families, are all relegated to a trashcan of irrelevant trivia.

The truth is the future of the civilisational worldview, cherished and nurtured over many centuries, hangs in the balance. That will continue as long as the moral imperative of a reinvented world-system – essentially a new narrative based upon empathy, generosity and cooperation, and featuring reduced feuding, corruption and oppression; greater social equality and tolerance; advances in governance and production; a more even-handed distribution of wealth with an explicit focus on the sharing of resources; and a phased transition to clean energy - are delayed or avoided because of the self-serving avarice of a privileged group, who happen to possess both wealth and power and are protected by the state.

Nor do we now have the luxury of time. Scientists insist that a massive extinction of life forms essential to the viability of the human food chain, and consequently vital for our survival, is already underway. Human activities, such as the use of fossil fuels, widespread application of industrial agriculture, and overfishing of the oceans, are largely responsible for this huge loss of biodiversity. We have wilfully created the conditions for our own destruction. Yet ironically we do not treat each other with any greater respect than the species we allow to go extinct.

In these circumstances the only words that make any sense to me are those that have the potential to puncture human hubris. For actually the only question that matters now is whether we are smart enough to survive our own success.

The UN’s favoured (and therefore we must assume well-thought-out) method for tackling climate change is to bring around 190 parties and their delegations together in concentrated bursts every few years with the overriding intention of negotiating an agreement to limit the amount of atmospheric carbon we produce. This tactic is aimed at reducing the heating effects of climate change that are already impacting the lives of so many communities around the world. The oft-stated aim of the UN conferences is to keep temperatures below a certain limit considered dangerous to human health.

If you believe, like me and others far more experienced who moderate thematic gatherings and open space forums in their capacity as professional facilitators, that conducting sensitive discussions of this nature, in the full glare of the world’s media, with approximately 190 nation states espousing slightly different agendas, together with their delegations of possibly 25,000 officially accredited representatives, is impossible, you could stop right there. The task of achieving a universally agreed, legally binding agreement, that is effective and fair, is utterly impractical given such conditions.

But let us assume for a moment that it is feasible….

The two measures most commonly proposed, albeit still arbitrary, are a rise in temperature of no more than 2° celsius by 2100 and a commensurate reduction of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to less than 350 parts per million.

The Paris Protocol explicitly assumes we can keep the rise in global temperature below 2° celsius - boldly proposing that we should aim for 1.5° celsius in order to protect island states - the most vulnerable to a subsequent rise in sea levels.

This entire proposition is built on an absurd lie. Despite the unprecedented mobilisation being shown by some nation states, the truth is that atmospheric carbon dioxide is currently around 400 parts per million. The world is also much closer to the 2° celsius mark than many experts acknowledge with temperatures of between 2.7° celsius and 3° celsius likely by the turn of the century. Moreover continuing global carbon dioxide emissions from human activities at present rates will commit the planet to 2° celsius in less than five years from now!

The proposal to contain temperature increases to 1.5° celsius is fraudulent. This suggestion chooses to ignore the fact that we have already expended the vast majority of the carbon budget for remaining under 2° celsius. And in terms of a 1.5° celsius stabilisation we are already well overdrawn. Given these realities, far exceeding the “safe climate” thresholds set by scientists, the only way we can possibly meet such targets is to keep coal, oil and gas in the ground, starting right now. While some developed countries could achieve that aspiration very rapidly if they really wanted to, it is unreasonable to expect developing countries to meet the same targets at a similar speed.

Sections of the Paris Protocol also imply we can manage human affairs so as to avoid global warming. This too is an outright lie. There is no avoiding what we have already set in train. Reviewing greenhouse gas emissions every five years from 2020 will make no difference. The damage is already done. Halting the use of fossil fuels may certainly help to avoid the catastrophe of a climate totally out of control. But we still need to learn how to adapt to extreme weather patterns and events that are inimicable in comparison with the “goldilocks” conditions of the past few thousand years.

And so the Paris Agreement in and of itself is a shell of empty promises built on lies and distortions of the truth. COP21 will do little to avert dangerous levels of climate change without immediate action. The targets that have been set are inadequate. The financial implications have not been appropriately considered. While other important factors, like consumption - where huge amounts of airborne carbon resulting from the energy used to process and distribute food, and methane gas released from grazing livestock, are all but ignored.

Simply focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in such a complex system as the Earth’s climate is akin to filling in potholes on roads, without redesigning vehicles or changing driver behaviour, in the belief that this alone will bring down the road toll. It betrays our ignorance of complexity and a gross inability to imagine and craft planetary solutions that are culturally, socially, financially and ethically acceptable.

If it were feasible to revisit the latter part of the nineteenth century, armed with a willingness to incorporate ecological principles into the design of large-scale industrial systems, we might have been able to prevent the problems we are facing today. But even then, with the wisdom of hindsight and unlimited access to contemporary knowhow, technologies and funding, I doubt we would be any closer to banning fossil fuels or reimagining the absurdity of expecting unlimited economic growth. There are simply too many factors to be taken into account.

And yet my optimism persists. I am convinced that there are viable solutions available if only we can overcome the hubris of orthodox thinking posturing as innovation within a framework of rampant competitiveness.

Innovation is important. But the need for new forms of intergovernmental and cross-sectoral cooperation are key. As long as governments pander to the energy sector by keeping fossil fuels artificially cheap and profitable, it is inevitable that their use will continue to rise. So we need to eliminate subsidies that continue to prop up old smokestack industries and their toxic practices. Logic demands that a market failure of this nature can only be corrected by requiring the price of fossil fuels to account for their actual social costs. Investors like Hazel Henderson and reputable scientists like James Hansen have been saying this for decades.

So, for example, a far better way to deal with emissions than the fixation on “cap and trade” policies constantly proposed by unimaginative technocrats in tax agencies around the world, would be a universally applied and policed “fee and dividend” strategy – with all monies distributed back to the community on an equal per capita basis.  This can hardly be seen as a tax if governments don’t get a cent. A universally-agreed carbon price, with full revenue return and appropriate border adjustments, would internalise the social cost of carbon-based fuels, help eliminate inequity, rapidly realise greater emissions reductions, stimulate a zero-carbon economy, and engage global participation. An additional advantage would be that poorer nations would benefit because affluent countries emit more than their individual share of carbon dioxide.

Whatever we do the planet is sure to survive. This is not about saving the planet, it is about saving ourselves. There is now no doubt we are facing a civilisational emergency. And we do need to take immediate action. But current institutional arrangements, as exemplified by the Paris negotiations, are far too lethargic. The UN’s game of nation-state negotiations is trapped in a no-win torpor of its own invention, a gravitational-like force from which it cannot possibly escape.

World leaders and their acolytes who met in Paris are not thinking rationally. They do not approach the problem from higher levels of consciousness of what will work. They are out of their depth. They cannot admit to the futility of trying to reach an agreement with such large numbers of representatives without the inevitable oversimplification that must occur. They do not access the wisdom of systems designers or of experts in transformational dialogue. As a consequence their conversations are restricted to the prosaic - a string of worthless and fake promises. They are certainly not taking meaningful and immediate action to avert dangerous levels of climate change. Humanity is being hoodwinked.

This circus needs to end. The UN has proved they cannot handle this. It is highly likely that all eyes will now turn to China for leadership for their situation is already untenable. The population is choking on horrific levels of pollution and the rivers are poisoned. Fortunately, in this instance at least, China does not need to wait for everyone to agree.

We have reached the point of needing to deploy all forms of energy that do not entail the release of carbon. That includes nuclear energy, which is far safer to human health than coal, oil and gas in spite of the myths and fear-mongering being perpetuated by the fossil-fuel industry. At the same time we need to let go of the fantasies of large scale carbon capture and sequestration.

Further delays, already built in to the Paris Agreement, will simply consign the next generation to a world in which climate refugees number in the millions, food stocks and drinking water are in short supply, large tracts of land including many coastal cities are uninhabitable, and life as we know it has become almost unbearably grim. Is that what we really want? No?

Then why do we persist in allowing our so-called leaders to repeat the mistakes of the past, all the while believing they can achieve different results? That, as we all know, is a sign of insanity. Is humanity really that gullible? I think not. Which is why we so urgently need a mindful uprising of those with the capacity to think and act differently, in purposeful collaboration aimed at reinventing a worldview that is no longer viable for any but a small minority of people.

Sins Of The Father

Born into a small parochial community on the day Japanese forces officially surrendered to the Allies, thus marking the end of the 2^nd World War, David was an only child and unlike most other kids of his age. He lived in a world of his own – a world fertile in creative play and imaginings but detached to some extent from actuality. Certainly many people in the village thought the boy slightly strange – artistic, spoiled, timid, yet far too well-mannered and conceited for a mere farm labourer’s son. Are you bringing him up to be a pansy then, they would chide his mother? Followed by, What big teeth he's got. He's like a rabbit isn't he!

Although David was aware of everything that was going on around him he didn’t utter a comprehensible word until he was almost four years old. Painfully shy well into adulthood, unable to make friends easily and thus a prey for school bullies, he found it distressing to maintain eye contact with those around him, even for a few seconds. He would often stare at the ground when speaking. If on the odd occasion he did actually look someone squarely in the eye he would invariably blush while a faint smile would appear – often giving people the feeling he scorned what was being said. This nervous smirk would always appear when he was being scolded. It irritated his teachers no end. But what could he do? He knew it was happening. He could feel the rush of blood to his cheeks. But he simply couldn’t control it and there were no words that could adequately explain his anguish.

Most of us know people who find it difficult to blend in or to conform and David quickly became the butt of spiteful remarks and snide pranks. On the other hand he did nothing to dispel such attention. He refused to walk on sand or pebbles in bare feet and didn’t much like playing on the beach for that reason. He avoided getting wet if possible, visibly flinching when water splattered on his skin. All the physical activities other children embraced with such passion David found tedious. In later years he would rashly relate stories of his physical prowess to complete strangers – claiming credit in every sport from cross-country running to rugby. Such boasting was intended to be nothing other than a forlorn attempt to connect more deeply with those of his age who tended to measure their masculinity by such deeds. But it almost always failed to impress. They could sense his true nature. Unsurprisingly these elaborate stories got him into no end of trouble when the horrible truth was discovered.

Extremely sensitive David far preferred to sit alone, writing poetry, tending his flower garden, composing music, playing the piano or reading erudite journals like The Lancet - pretending he understood concepts of which he had not an inkling and imagining what it would be like when he became a doctor -  his one and only ambition.

Other factors marked his slow development. He obeyed orders grudgingly. This made life at school particularly difficult - especially for certain of his teachers who accused him of having a superiority complex. He relaxed by reading books, playing with his pet puppy Suki, or assembling his collection of tin soldiers, putting them neatly away as soon as they were out rather than playing with them as other children might. He was also fussy. For example he would always separate the food on his plate, polishing off the apple pie before turning his attention to the custard. He was obsessed by neatness, precision and rituals. Everything had to be in its place before David could rest.

One person was pivotal in David’s young life. His father. His father was his hero. Although his mother was always on hand to protect her cherished boy it was David’s father that mattered most. His dad was always the first person to pick him up when he fell; the first person at his side to wipe away the tears after he was tormented by the village louts; the first person David would go to for reassurance. David also cherished being held by his father - though that feeling changed to one of intense discomfort when anyone else came too close.

These emotions became much more pronounced after his father left his mother, without prior warning, to be with another woman. David was eight years old at the time. He never saw his father again. Suddenly his young life was torn apart. He didn’t speak a word or cry a tear for weeks. Meanwhile his mother doted after him, keeping him close to her whenever and for as long as she could. One result from this early trauma was the fact that David avoiding physical contact of any kind with women until he was in his late twenties.

In later years David learned to manage these social and emotional mannerisms. But not every trace of his bizarre behaviour disappeared. Even today he is still embarrassingly timid and finds it particularly arduous to start a conversation or walk into a room full of strangers. He still compulsively rolls paper receipts and keeps a small collection of these in his car for when he needs something to fiddle with. As a professional speaker he has learned to face up to many of his early fears and these days actually enjoys playing to an audience. On the other hand he still feels uncomfortable when he senses a lone figure staring at him on the street. Deep within his psyche he remains a child. But still a child unlike most others.

As you will already have guessed, if David was a youngster today he would have been diagnosed as autistic. The term Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) was originally applied to a range of symptoms just a year before David was born. Consequently nobody thought to suggest the boy was suffering from ASD. He was just a shy kid who didn’t seem to fit the mould of what was then considered ordinary. He was just different from other children of his age.  Since then however an assortment of symptoms have become the condition known as ASD. And that is a truth I am compelled to own - for I am the David in this story.

There comes a moment in everyone’s life when we begin to prepare for death. Not in any mawkish or morbid sense but in the realisation that life must be lived to the full and embraced with a passion because it is so very short. For me that point arrived the day my mother died. My father had passed away a few years prior to that and I had grieved silently. But on this day of my mother's passing I felt intensely alone. This was a weird feeling in itself because by that time I had eight wonderful children as well as a trio of grandchildren. 

But then something inexplicable and quite miraculous happened. Professionally I had begun to turn my attention to the legacy I wanted to leave behind. Feelings of fatherhood receded into a suite of distant memories as my life in Thailand with a woman half my age began to shape an altogether different destiny. The endless concessions and diversions that invariably arise from being a parent no longer interfered with my newly-discovered serenity. Until fate took a hand...

Nico, my ninth child, my third son and a miracle baby, was conceived. We had not planned for this. How could we? Having recovered from cervical cancer and then months later an ectopic pregnancy that ended with major surgery, Suna had been told not to expect any more children. She had a beautiful 12-year-old daughter from her first marriage and would have to be content with that. Ha! So much for medical science and certainty.

Experiencing fatherhood after a gap of seventeen years is profoundly dissimilar from before. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Filtered through many more perspectives, a degree of discretion that was previously missing and, hopefully, a trifle more maturity, I give myself permission to be calmer and more tolerant these days - even when things fail to transpire as I had envisaged.

I am also fortunate in being able to consciously choose to spend more time with Nico than I did with my other eight children. Of course I love all my kids unconditionally and remain incredibly proud of their various achievements. But I do regret the fact that I might have seemed like a total stranger to the younger ones in the first batch - possibly including times when they most needed me. Fortunately I am privileged to have children who care enough about me to treat me as a friend, who tell me what a kind father I am, who forgive me my faults without question, and who show affection towards me in spite of my conspicuous absence from their lives when they were growing up.

But if Nico’s arrival was an unexpected gift then fate was about to warp our joy in a way that reminded us not to take too much for granted. For just as I was taking pride in the fact that my youngest son had the most striking good looks, had started to walk at the age of ten months, kicked and threw a ball with ease, scaled the outside rim of the stairs with a sherpa’s sense of balance, swiped an iPad like a veteran techie, shared his toys with visiting kids, displayed the most gentle character imaginable, and generally expended more energy during the day than a gaggle of puppies, a dark shadow was about to fall across our unbounded love.

By the time he was two years old Nico had invented his own language. We didn’t think too much of this. After all he heard three languages around him much of the time. It would take awhile for him to sort out  and make sense of three languages we reasoned. Besides, he was a creative little boy.

We were slightly more bothered by a tendency to throw himself to the floor with such melodrama when he couldn’t get his own way or make himself understood. At first we assumed this was a phase he was going through. After all he seemed to understand everything we said to him and appeared quite normal in most other ways.

Then we began to notice other signs, of a more disquieting nature, indicating his emotional development was much slower than it should have been. Although he mostly appeared to be a happy little soul he would often walk around the house on tiptoes chattering to himself. Echolalia slowly crept into his invented language. He would ignore us if we gave him an instruction, as though he hadn’t heard. He seemed forever distracted and in a world of his own. His behaviour now began to attract comments from friends who also had children. So-called normal children. Children who could talk fluently - some of them bi-lingual. Clearly it was time to get some professional advice. Nico was almost 3 years old.

Nico’s pediatrician had consistently assured us that he was fine. Trust your instincts he would urge us. Nico is alert, smart, loving, healthy and physically adept. Give him time. It was true that he seemed perfectly ordinary if a little nervous in a hospital environment. And slow to speak of course. Don’t worry, I told Suna. I didn’t utter a word until I was four years old - but now you can’t stop me talking!

Such reassurances were comforting for a while. But soon additional questions and awkwardly expressed concerns from family members reignited previous misgivings. In truth we did not know what to do. To us Nico was simply a loving child who was developing slowly, particularly in terms of his speech. To others, we now know, he seemed an oddity – a withdrawn and hapless deviant possessing tics and barks reminiscent of a mad person.

Our anxiety reached a peak as we tried to find Nico a suitable environment, such as a kindergarten, where he could socialise while learning how to play with other kids. This search proved futile. A refrain repeated over and over and which we came to anticipate from every school we visited was that Nico was a child with special needs and that their school was not equipped to deal with such cases. We quickly grasped their meaning: a child with special needs is a euphemism for autism. As one door after another slammed shut in our faces we decided to do what we had been resisting for so long. We would have Nico tested by speech and behavioural therapists to rule out the possibility of it being ASD or Asperger's Syndrome.

Even that is easier said than done - at least in a country like Thailand where most psychological conditions are spoken of only in hushed tones. Finally we found a group of specialists we felt we could trust. Some baseline tests were done and we waited for the initial diagnosis. Of course nothing can ever prepare you for news you hope never to hear. The clinical statement was delivered as a matter of fact. Your son is autistic. No wavering. No possibility of an error. No doubt. The verdict was absolutely clear. Nico was on the spectrum. Therapy was recommended and it should start as soon as possible.

I was lost for words. I was vaguely aware that Suna was asking questions, choking back tears, and just trying to make sense of what we were being told. Even now I can not account for every single emotion I felt in those first few moments where I learned the "medical truth" about our son: stunned, angry, defiant, frustrated, self-pitying and sorrowful certainly. I began to lament the fact that Nico had been born. Unwittingly I had saddled Suna with a child who would be an impediment she would regret for the rest of her life…

But then an epiphany! One that I will always remember. Nico rushed out of the adjacent room, laughing excitedly and holding a model airplane for us all to see. Let’s go he shouted, heading for the door. It was as though I was looking in a mirror with a time delay of some 65 years. Suna and I glanced at each other and smiled. The heartache that so recently threatened to stifle any hope we had of a happy and fulfilling future for our son lifted in an instant. The real truth of our situation dawned upon us both. Here was our beautiful son imagining an airplane flying through the sky and deriving untold pleasure from sharing his joy with us. He was alive with electrical energy.

Only then did it dawn on me what a crazy neurotic state we had helped contrive. We were almost persuaded that a disparate set of symptoms which happen to occur in more than 15 per cent of the population should be considered unusual and required urgent medical treatment. Worse still was the realisation I almost allowed an inconsequential acronym - one that undeniably strikes fear in the hearts of so many parents, yet means different things to different people - to define and shape my expectations of a 3-year old boy I adore.

That is not to deny the fact that some children are extremely disabled by autism and benefit greatly from the help they get from behavioural therapists. Nor is it to deny that Nico may need some help with his speech. He will. And it’s also quite possible a course of behavioural therapy will help him overcome some of his more, shall we say theatrical, traits. But right now I celebrate the fact that Nico is more like me, particularly in his sensitivity towards others, his gentle and loving nature, than I or anyone else had fathomed. And I aver that is not a bad thing.

As a consequence, and taking into account the upbringing I had as a child, the wonder of learning, the fascination I developed for all living creatures and the sheer appreciation of “I” as an experiment for trying out new ideas, I no longer have any desire for Nico to be normal - whatever that is - nor that he should conform to other people’s conventions or stereotypes. My son is the mirror image of me at that age.

Over the course of the past 60 years particular traits such as excessive reserve, nervousness or introspection, coupled with out-of-the-ordinary or repetitive behavioural patterns, have been singled out as being unhealthy - anomalous and therefore in need of correction or treatment of some kind. But who decides what or who is normal? Why the professionals of course.

In today’s competitive business climate it has become commonplace for most industry bodies and peak associations to protect their niche, in accordance with their members’ interests, by broadening the scope of activities that fall within their jurisdiction. Professional bodies representing healthcare practitioners, clinical psychologists and behavioural therapists are not immune from this expansion in the scope of their pursuits. This is tantamount to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. As a direct consequence it is no surprise that we see healthcare professionals consorting with drug companies, insurers, investors and research scientists in an effort to classify increasing numbers of symptoms as abnormal disabilities. In the field of mental health it is widely acknowledged that individual traits, once viewed as features characterising individuality, are now routinely portrayed as psychological conditions to be remedied with cures from drugs or therapy or counselling - or whatever happens to be the latest fad.

In the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, autism is defined as a lifelong developmental disability that affects how individuals communicate with, and relate to, other people as well as how they make sense of the world around them”.In other words ASD has become a convenient treasure trove for the health care industry to exploit.

My son Nico is unique. I am proud of that and I hope he retains his charm and character throughout his life. In our eyes he is not a child with special needs but a very special child with an inimitable personality and incredible potential.

But if psychologists persist on burdening him, and those like him, with labels signifying little more than shyness, introversion, or a tendency to focus on repetitive play, I hope that he will have the courage to look them in the eye and tell them he actually wouldn’t mind being as smart as Albert Einstein, as gifted as Bob Dylan, as imaginative as Stanley Kubrick, as funny as Robin Williams, as wealthy as Bill Gates, or as kind and considerate as Yves Saint-Laurent – all of whom suffer or were diagnosed with ASD. Or, for that matter, that being like his dad was as a kid is just fine by him.