Recently the citizens of Brazil, the world's fourth largest democracy, flirted with a despot by electing Jair Bolsonaro as their President. He is the latest to join the ranks of an extreme right-wing political axis whose influence now girdles the globe.
A Reason to Fear
In a growing number of European countries, too, amidst a migrant crisis, economic inequality, increasing cynicism with Brussels, and a sense of lost national pride and identity, right-wing parties across a broad policy spectrum, have made electoral gains.
From Donald Trump in the US, to Victor Orban in Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Recep Tayyip Erdoğanin Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Sebastian Kurz in Austria, we are stalked by a new terror.
These leaders and their acolytes are openly fuelling a climate of aggression and hatred, their rhetoric inciting antisemitism, racism and homophobia. If you have been observing closely you will have noticed that these martinets declare the press the true enemy of the people, encourage white supremacists, do everything in their power to curtail social movements, increase public surveillance, criminalise legitimate activism, and imprison or force their political opponents into exile.
Just when a more empathic disposition, systemic appreciation, and truth-based strategies are so desperately needed, the world turns on its dark side once again, inciting a toxic culture of vilification and demonisation. What better mechanism is there to accelerate the decline of Western civilisation?
For this is not simply an ideological swing of the political pendulum towards neo-fascism, populism, or ultra-nationalism. This is a deliberate attempt to hijack the moral foundations of our society, to eliminate democratic government almost entirely, to elevate the ultra-wealthy, and to plunder even more of the resources needed for human life. And if that sounds insane then you are close to the truth.
We underestimate the extent of right-wing extremism washing across the world at our peril. But how on earth did it happen? What kind of monstrous fantasy did we unleash that now threatens to trample over everything we previously cherished? Why have we become so absorbed by technologies that saturate our cultures and amputate our humanity? What is so appealing about the neoliberal worldview that it now takes precedence over all others? How could we have allowed the rich and the powerful, individuals and nations, to impose their warped visions of the future on the rest of us with barely a whimper of protest? Why did we so easily succumb to an economic order and behavioural code that has clearly sown the seeds of its own destruction, yet appears to so many to be preordained and irresistible?
To answer these questions, we must revisit the recent past. But to truly understand our predicament, we must first come to terms with a new reality: that neoliberal extremism- pervasive across politics, community life, and work, as well as in all manner of social constructs, education and jurisprudence - reshapes everything and everyone in the prosaic image of homo economicus. It is just that this persona, once a mere caricature of economic theory, has become the new reality.
Past Perfect
It is a courageous person, or else a fool, who attempts to predict the future. In spite of historian Francis Fukuyama’s provocative thesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which helped spawn sundry quasi democracies in central Europe, signaled the end of history, the final decades of the 20thcentury were anything but routine.
During the second half of the 20thcentury, democracies had taken root in the most unlikely of circumstances – in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism; in India, which had the world’s greatest number of poverty-stricken citizens; and in South Africa which had been scarred by apartheid. The practice of decolonisation had conceived a host of new would-be democracies across Asia and Africa, while autocratic regimes were ousted in Greece, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. At the same time nations like Vietnam embraced capitalism and even China accepted the pre-eminence of the market economy, albeit reluctantly.
It is true that the end of the cold war, while thawing hostilities between the super powers, allowed blood-stained history to bubble up to the surface in places like Bosnia and Croatia, where it had been in abeyance for at least two generations. But to an impartial observer it must have appeared as though all the significant arguments about how society should be organised and led had been resolved in favour of the Western worldview and dominant world-system.
We now recognise that such judgments were far too premature. Democracy and capitalism, two of the great ideas to emerge from centuries of political and social development, twin ideological pillars that shared a common ascent and promised the world unparalleled prosperity and freedom, are even now descending into a free-for-all that might eventually destroy them both.
This is most evident in the US which depends on international mayhem, and on the unending warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence, for its continued clout and prosperity. At the same time hegemony is imploding – burdened by a muddle of parochial self-interest and an ingrained, deeply psychotic, craving to dominate and intimidate others. Elsewhere, repressive regimes persist in around 49 nations, a statistic that has not changed much over recent decades, while the gaze of the Chinese, unsurprisingly, is firmly set on the international role being vacated by the West.
A cynic might be forgiven for labelling this era of national self-determination as an era of international lawlessness, and for claiming that it is this that has crippled the legitimacy of the nation-state model. If that is true, the extent of our insecurity will finally be revealed as the relative power of the US empire declines still further, and it can no longer do anything to curb the chaos it helped create.
Pragmatism now demands that we pay attention to a complex range of problems threatening the complacency of anyone daring to believe we have already arrived at some kind of zenith in the evolution of a civilisedsociety. The potent interactions between democracy and capitalism, our demand for an endless supply of gadgets and new material goods, how competition plays out in everyday life, and the need to urgently address longer-term, deeper issues – such as economic inequities, the threat of nuclear warfare, and the broader impacts of climate change, for example, may well signal even greater disruption to society in the future than was the case during the latter part of the 20thcentury – at least if we are unable to escape past ontological instincts and telelogical deceits.
Human ingenuity is such that we might be able to design our way out of trouble. But that will be out of the question if we insist on using the same beliefs, based on the same principles, and resorting to the same methods, that have ensnared us in such paradoxical circumstances. I am reminded of the oft-quoted remark by Albert Einstein, that it is impossible to solve our most wicked problems by using the same thinking that caused those problems in the first place. This statement has become something of a cliché. But it is still relevant for three major reasons:
First, the groundbreaking thinking he implied was so vital still evades us. In other words, we still find it virtually impossible to leave the comforting cocoon of the prevalent paradigm. Even when we are convinced of our inventiveness, we tend to resort to hackneyed patterns disguised in modern garb. Instead of real innovation, which is elusive, we take consolation in the delusion we are being creative.
Second, the most challenging cognitive shift any individual can make is from the deeply ingrained cultural blueprint etched into our psyche since birth, to allow the legitimacy of ontological pluralism. Our congenital intolerance of difference, and dread of diversity, is why racism has become such a rampant force in our society, and why we assume our own societal group to be more developed and virtuous than others, who we then classify as less spiritual, moral, educated and civilised.
Third, when we really do manage to craft something new and meaningful, such as the concept of a society of nationsthat emerged after the first world war, we often fail to adhere to our true intentions. In this case we permitted the tenet of national autonomy to take precedence over the more ambitious goal of ensuring universal cooperation, peace and justice. Once the doctrine of state sovereignty took hold, permitting governments to inflict unutterable atrocities on those living within their own borders, with barely a reprimand from the international community, the moral integrity of the nation-state was in tatters and its eventual fate sealed.
Out of the aftermath of 20th-century colonial indiscretions, a plethora of nomadic allegiances, tribal militias, quasi states, religious and ethnic sub-states, and super-states now jostle for power. Meanwhile, what we might define as genuine nations, and the system of which they are a part, are unable to offer a credible purpose for citizens, or fulfil their promise of security, employment and wellbeing.
In most cases, apart from a spate of flag waving ceremonies and sporting events, citizenship has become more of a legal expediency than a legitimate allegiance. This is particularly poignant at a time when impotent state bureaucracies watch forlornly as both corporate and individual elites find novel ways to quarantine their wealth from national loyalties altogether.
Future Imperfect
Our most fundamental need is for a more conscious coevolution - with each other and the planet - informed by a set of more equitable and egalitarian values, so as to transcend the intellectual gridlock currently stalling human advancement and impeding the discovery of enduring solutions to the existential problems we face.
Indulge, if you will, for one moment, my personal desire to escape the gravitational pull of the past by tracing a pathway into a future our great-grandchildren are, at this stage, likely to inherit. Permit me to challenge current orthodoxy by imagining a future world qualitatively different from that inherent in simple extrapolations of the present, though keeping the underlying premise of the nation-state intact.
This is a future in which almost the entire population has deserted the countryside in favour of conjoined inland cities. A future where most food is plant-based, grown locally and, in the case of meat and seafood, fabricated from bio-printed animal tissue. A future where our entire productive capacity, media, and the military is owned by regional councils of self-appointed, wealthy individuals. A future where democratic government disappeared long ago. A future where the market value of labor is higher than ever (the customary links between income and work have finally been severed)but where meaningful, paid work, is available only to a few, highly creative, specialists. A future where the inclination to learn or to acquire alternative knowledge has either been suppressed by the ruling oligarchs or has wilted under the relentless ascendency of super-intelligent robots – although a fascinating, as yet underground, trend among rebellious young people is to opt for intellect-enhancing neural implants as a way of interfacing (and keeping up with) intelligent machines.
In spite of extensive state surveillance, the inexorable rise of religious militancy, and groups practising racial hatred, this is a relatively benign world - at least for those who comply with state laws, including the new protective trade barriers that safeguard old parochial interests and help shield one group from another. Or perhaps it is a world of slavery given the structural inequities in society.
Individual psychological data profiling has allowed each business to precisely meet the needs of its customers. Trust is no longer an issue since open source holochain applications have transformed all transactions between individuals and institutions. Meanwhile supply chain costs have plummeted to near zero as a consequence.
The global Peace and Order Commission manages all data previously controlled by individual states, so it is hard to confirm whether the desires of a majority of citizens are actually being heard, least of all implemented. Extreme poverty does not exist. Urban crime and homelessness, too, is a thing of the past, while drone-delivered drugs and anticipatory policing have become customary in defusing most criminal activity, often before it occurs.
Even disputes between states are settled representatively by gladiatorial wargames fought to the death in customised arenas rather than through devastating conflicts that proved so disruptive to civilian life and territory in the early part of the century.
Meanwhile, for a majority of the ten billion citizens on Earth, strolling in the all-weather megamalls, watching sport, gaming, screen interactions, and various other pointless pursuits, fill the days and hours not taken up by socialisation or sleep.
This is also a world where temporal organisations, unaffected by the antique faith of physical borders or locale, have surpassed the ability of most spatial institutions, including the state, to respond and adapt to markedly changing circumstances…
At this point I am wondering what impact such a scenario is having on you? Do you think it is far-fetched? Is this the kind of future you envisage, or are you shocked by how different it is from your own imaginings? Every topic I have included here has been validated – in the sense that each one is in process of being advanced today, in one form or another, or could result from their convergence. The entire scenario is therefore perfectly plausible.
In that regard, is this a picture of the kind of world you will be happy to pass on to your great-grandchildren? Do certain factors irritate and concern you? And what about individual freedoms such as privacy? Is sacrificing a few of the liberties we enjoy today too big a price to pay for a trade-off between communal security and personal liberty? This is the hidden logic running like a silver thread through the human story after all.
And if parts of it are unsettling what must occur in our thinking to protect us from any unwanted or undesirable effects – keeping in mind the extreme intricacy and uncertainty of the dynamics we are dealing with?
Reappraising Assumptions
Science and technology have added greatly to our material prosperity, reinforcing the spread of capitalism and, as a consequence, the impact of markets. Capitalism, in the meantime, has lavishly repaid the favour, literally trillions of dollars having been invested on technological infrastructure – much of this linked to the military.
Early digital technologies influenced the very nature of democracy, fostering its cause. It has long been accepted that the fax machine and television, for example, helped depose Soviet communism, bringing capitalistic beliefs, and images of freedom, to the attention of ordinary Russian citizens. But whereas the Internet once made the control of information by any entity seem unlikely, we are now at the mercy of formidable corporations, such as Google and Facebook, and their government partners. These intelligence-collecting agencies are not content with owning and selling personal data. They are too busy manipulating public opinion, spreading and reifying misinformation, exchanging information with governments and their surveillance authorities, and shaping entire belief systems. In so doing, they are naively (or perhaps actively) undermining democracy.
The next phase of technological development – especially the algorithmic kinds of direct democracy offered by engagement platforms such as MiVoteor DemocracyEarth, for example, will be even more challenging to state-based political authority.
Just as the first commercially-available computers were used as smart typewriters, so elected representatives will try to use the new technologies, such as blockchain, to adapt. But they will fail. The case for representative democracy no longer makes any sense whatsoever. Besides which, most of the means by which social identity and teleological meaning are shaped have already shifted to private enterprise.
Having already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from surveillance to cartography, Twitter and Facebook provide a concierge service to social reality and imagination. Participation in these social ecosystems provides a line of flight to a new form of citizenship - incompatible at every level with more orthodox offers. And, as demonstrated by the growth of crypto-currencies, new technologies are constantly emerging to replace the other fundamental tasks of the nation-state.
In this environment personal privacy has all but vanished. If you own a smart phone or have a Facebook account, your personal record reveals minute by minute where you are, where you live, where you have been and where you are going, what you are doing, who you work for, what you earn, who you talk to, how you feel about certain issues, what you are thinking, what you have purchased, and who you do, and do not, trust. We can confidently presume that companies like these, together with many others that pay for the information, know more about you than your own mother does.
And so, in spite of the national constraints I imposed on my previous scenario, and the routine scorn poured upon planetary governance as an impractical utopia, the idea that obsolete bureaucracies submit to perfect automated corporate systems, which then take over the administration of all life and resources, is a far more likely vision of our future than any pipedream of an early return to social democracy.
Our responses to this state of affairs have been various - driven either by ignorance or outrage. And possibly apathy – given that our sense of the possibleis unrefined.
As a result of all three factors, the affluent are hoarding their wealth with greater enthusiasm. Rival groups denounce their opponents as evilinstead of attempting to find common ground. Politicians professing mastery over national affairs feign any such proficiency as a matter of routine. Warmongers raise tensions in the name of their righteous power against barbarism and brutality, expediently disregarding their own culpability. Technocrats funded by rival military establishments race to develop intelligently superior machines, while ordinary citizens around the world disengage from the political process - citing disillusionment with politicians and their ideological recklessness, dishonesty, arrogance, detachment from reality, inability to enact the will of the majority, and fixation on re-election. This confusion is further muddied by the role and influence of big business, industry lobbyists, and other elites, who openly cajole, encourage, and bribe elected officials at every opportunity, with impunity.
In a number of cases, such as Thailand, for example, the void created by this lack of public trust in once-venerable institutions has been seized by dictators, happy to mark time by feathering their own nests and those of their elite sponsors.
Sometimes we have seen public uprisings, offering a flicker of hope, before slowly fading or being cruelly crushed. Civil conflict has ensued in some others.
Elsewhere various forms of populism are erupting. While there are certainly some superficial parallels between narcissistic braggarts such as Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the deeper news has much more to do with the same pressures that are crushing the life out of national political life everywhere we look. So, ever hopeful, we watch and patiently wait... But in vain.
For even when despots, authoritarian regimes, and corrupt political parties are finally driven out of office, their successors usually fail to create viable democratic alternatives. Why is this?
Why are solutions to such failings so hard to find? What is it about democracy that is so problematic? Is it less relevant today than it used to be? Or is it simply that our society has become so incredibly diverse that coherent policies are impossible to conceive and enact within conventional ideological frames? Is it because we have allowed periodic voting on personalities rather than policies to become a default substitute for real democracy? Is it the coupling of democracy with capitalism? Or is it that the craving for power from within political parties, often by psychopathic characters, once granted, consistently descends into partisan game-playing - and worse?
Perhaps it is none and all of these. Maybe it has more to do with the conflicting motives and ethics of the main actors, coupled with the uncontrollably entangled complexity of the dynamic issues facing us where, in spite of the best of intentions, there can never be a satisfactory policy solution implemented by a discrete state without it affecting others in a whole range of deliberate and unanticipated ways.
The seismic shifts we are witnessing in national politics are not confined to the West, of course, nor simply to democracies. Fatigue, despondency, the waning efficacy of old and established practices, the marginalisation of women, and public disenchantment and frustration, are the themes of politics everywhere.
Politics has become a farce. An opportunity for fraud on a grand scale. This is why the kind of brash, Mussolini-like pomposity, displayed by Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, as well as the likes of Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro, has become so prevalent, along with a renunciation of civil freedoms and, quite often, the rule of law.
The power of these despots, along with that of the state, is brittle. Which is why they provoke and put chauvinism to such potent use: an aversion to refugees, or the elation derived from futile military exploits broadcast on the nightly news, are not just a substitute for true leadership but ways of persuading us they are still in control and command the circumstances surrounding us.
Not that this is in any sense a solution to our predicament. Indeed, one might easily conclude that such crass behaviours actually hasten the moral decline of the state.
Nor are these convulsions simply the inevitable impacts of globalism. There is no doubt that the tremors rattling the foundations of the nation-state arise, at least in part, from such ostensibly irresistible forces. But they also come from the internal efforts of administrations to understand, cope and adapt to the new. Examining some of these internal factors - their correspondence and intersection with global tensions and trends – can be instructive.
When most Western constitutions were written, representative democracy was a necessity - if only to deal with the so-called tyranny of distance in a continent as vast as Australia, or the size of the population in countries like Britain and the US. Today, government polling through instant referenda, on any number of issues, is feasible – as demonstrated by regular plebiscites held in Switzerland, and the use of digital engagement platforms, like that pioneered by MiVote, which are gearing up, even now, to take the political world by storm.
More of an issue is the fact that much government policy, irrespective of ideology, increasingly bows to short-term populism, based upon the continuous ebb and flow of opinion polls, rather than on any exceptional insights, mindful intentions, or informed, longer-term goals. Populism becomes even more grievous when social issues - like racial inequality, women's rights, global warming, domestic violence, or kids being killed at school- are hijacked for partisan self-interest and used as a means for the establishment to delay their inevitable demise.
Everywhere, citizens have extraordinary capabilities to communicate and interact with each other. Digital platforms liberate new knowledge. But they also mould, intensify, and reify current needs and expectations. As a direct consequence we want and expect more - constantly raising standards and escalating our demands for improved choice, speed, convenience, self-determination, and control when accessing information or services provided by governments. Unfortunately, we are far more inclined to resist or deny alternative information than use it to modify and change our own behaviours.
How can we overcome such resistance in an age when adaptation is so vital to our survival as a species? Given that many citizen-centered, society-transforming tools now exist, and more are being developed all the time, how should we reconfigure our social institutions and political systems to take advantage of these? What can we do to shift our perspectives and habits - enshrined as they are in short-sighted attempts to constantly patch up the present - towards the longer-term? How can we escape the trap of extreme neoliberalism?
Is it practicable, for example, to shift from representative to participative modes of government in order to integrate informed opinion into more elegant resolutions? Is this even feasible, given the current levels of apathy and mistrust in our elected officials and the political process, discernible in every democracy today? And, if it is realistic, can digital platforms offering secure processes for deeper community engagement, powered by artificial intelligence embedded in smart-phone apps, for example, provide at least a partial or temporary way out of our predicament?
The Globalisation of Everything
Thomas Kuhn in his book,The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, reminded us that every age has its prevailing paradigm – a shared mental model about how things work best. From time to time discoveries are made that do not fit the established order. At first these are ignored. But as evidence continues to accumulate, more and more people become persuaded as to their relevance. Those with a vested interest in keeping the status quo resist with all the energy they can muster. They deny, deride or attempt to discredit the emerging wisdom. Gradually, however, a critical mass of people connects with the new beliefs. From that point it moves into ascendancy as the new paradigm within society.
Three of the more significant attributes of the paradigm guiding the origins and evolution of the Western worldviewover the past 300 years have been:
- the notion that humanity and its institutions are infinitely perfectible
- that scientific rationalism explains everything that we need to know
- that Cartesian dialogue provides a suitable language for decision-making.
Within this robust framework capitalism, along with its corresponding doctrine of competition, ownership, and infinite economic growth, bolstered by the cult of the individual, have held sway. This neoliberal epistemology has rarely, if ever, been seriously challengedin the West.
Paradoxically, amidst the greatest material and technical advances ever achieved, capitalism’s most staunch advocates are now being subjected to its most severe limitations. Although neither capitalism nor progress are intrinsically noxious, they appear to have become so in the context of the Western cultural tradition, chiefly when it comes to the ownership of assets, a desire for unlimited economic growth, our readiness to allow small groups of individuals to exploit and extract value from the rest of society, and unbridled consumer avarice.
As a consequence, the atmosphere, the earth, and the oceans are polluted; we casually tolerate a plethora of social injustices - as long as they do not impact us personally - and the gap between the poor and the wealthy has turned into a veritable chasm. All of this at a time when public trust in time-honoured institutions (including government, justice, and the law) continues to decline alarmingly.
Right now we are all caught up in the experience of discovering a new worldview- a post-capitalist window onto a world-systemthat may eventually lead to a basic re-appraisal of what we imply by terms such as progressand success,and what it truly means to be alive and human. The fact that this quest goes unnoticed by most of us can not detract from its magnitude. In this context, extreme neolibralismis the overwhelming distraction. In spite of this, hope is beginning to materialise in the dystopian cracks.
Suffice to say, where once, establishment and other vested interests served only to fuel ingrained biological behaviors, such as competition, aided at times by an elite industrial ideology, mutual self-interest is now beginning to generate cooperation, a revitalised involvement with, and concern for community, compassion for others, and the forging of a truly empathic,more advanced, society. This is an additional factor eating away at the legitimacy and relevance of the modern nation-state.
Already, the single most striking feature of the post-capitalist epoch has been the extent to which inchoate elements of a new paradigm have drawn together much of humanity into a single system. Most parts of the globe are now interconnected, we constantly traverse old borders, while data, the raw material of the innovation economy, invades physical space and is impervious to physical boundaries.
Likewise, the idea the world has become a single corporeal space, occupied by a single human family, applies to human impacts on the planetary ecosystem and in many of the precepts by which we organise and manage our communities, our communications, and our activities. Foremost among these are scientific method, the use of English as a lingua franca,the importance of individual liberty, and the free market.
The spread of industrialisation, too, together with the impact of information and real-time communication technologies, has created a global ecosystem of military, diplomatic, and commercial relations among the world’s states that is more potent than any single state.
It is true that globalisation has become a scapegoat for the venting of individual anxieties and paranoia - chiefly from those it has left in its wake, who are without jobs, adequate income, and any hope of a better life. Yet, even after it became absolutely clear that states would be obliged to discard many of their social commitments, in addition to applying harsh austerity measures in order to reinvent themselves as guardians of the economy, we pushed on with the task relentlessly.
Today, after so many decades in which economics and information have outgrown the authority and reach of national governments, it is hard to see how all of this can be wound back. Indeed, the distribution of global wealth and resources today is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.
And although xenophobic nationalism is in vogue, the ephemeral fascination with macho leadership, the cries for barbed wire and walls, the racism, and the allure of national restoration, are not remedies, but signs of what is slowly being exposed across the world stage:the nation-state archetype is in a relatively advanced stage of political atrophy and moral decay, from which it is unlikely to recover.
The great moral undertaking of the nation-state was breathtaking in its originality and scope, and a major chapter in the evolution of the Western psyche. Pledging the affiliation of spiritual and material wellbeing between individuals and the state, where the security and advancement of both were paramount and intertwined, it effectively become the basis for a resolute secular faith.
But such high ideals have their costs. It is a promise no longer possible to keep.Indeed, the withdrawal of this moral contract over the past few decades has had a shattering metaphysical impact on citizens in the West - one that has left entire communities fumbling around, looking for new ideas to believe in.
And so, it is timely to re-think and to move beyond the constraints of the nation-state, and to identify and eliminate any flaws that have become apparent - mostly manifesting as inequities, injustices and irrelevancies. This entails designing a world that works for everyone. Sadly, not everyone is inclined to be so altruistic.
If our desire is to revive a sense of political purpose in this era of global finance, data-driven algorithms, mass migration, ecological upheaval, and the threat of nuclear war, we will have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. By doing this we might also be able to complete the task of globalism, which is currently incomplete and precariously poised. For while global economic, trade, and technological systems are stunning, in order for globalisation to serve the entire human family better, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure. Very few people have even begun to think about this.
Naturally there are some who claim the idea of global governance unworkable. A utopian folly. But then many human accomplishments we take for granted today seemed far-fetched before they appeared – including the creation of the nation-state itself. The real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.
For some considerable time, we have watched the globalisation of two pivotal ideas concerning political organisation and legitimacy – namely, sovereignty and the nation-state. Ideology aside, the regulatory environment in almost all Western democracies has gradually rejected protectionist policies and public ownership, favouring deregulation, privatisation, collaboration, and a move towards self-responsibility, instead. What still remains in doubt is the future of welfarism and egalitarianism, two critical components of the industrial paradigm, and how they can be accommodated in any new global structure.
This quiescent arc, driven by information and digital technologies - rather than by capital or labour as in the past – has reconfigured the essential nature of the world-system, as well as its products, services, markets, social structures and processes.
The levels of complexity arising from this shift is unprecedented. It has drastically altered accepted patterns of human behavior and commercial habits. This, in turn, has created the need for more flexible organisational structures, not least in the political arena. As the Internet facilitated the efflorescence of a worldwide nervous system over human culture, new forms of business enterprise and governance were spawned. Now, in a world turned inside-out, speed, inventiveness, mutuality, and adaptiveness, have become the vital factors in almost every situation where sustainability, security and survival are the paramount considerations.
These developments herald the genesis of an eco-capitalist society formed around new kinds of peer-to-peer action, new measures of socio-economic advancement, and a harmonic balance between resource consumption and human habitation on the one hand, and the needs of the global ecosystem to sustain conditions for life on the other.
At the same time, the current trajectory of those themes depicted in our previous scenario, raise substantive issues relating to the nature of governance, the ethics of ownership and wealth creation, and the adequacy of the law – especially in dealing with the development of machine super-intelligence and autonomous weapons – while creating a modus operandi for human evolution that circumvents poverty, injustice, and an existence segregated from the best life on this planet has to offer.
As we transition from a society dominated by sovereign states to one liberating the sovereign individual - precipitating rites of passage that will, no doubt, be strange and stressful - we must prepare for a range of unanticipated seismic shifts.
Foremost of these will be in the world of global finance and capital flows. The new asset class of digital currencies, especially those acting as security tokens that can bypass centralised state banking systems, for example; the blockchain-enabled development of distributed ledgers that allowliterally millions of people around the world to authenticate and transact instantly, and without costly intermediaries; and thecommencement of a new gold standard and internal gold trading platform across Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which could bring an end to the US dollar’s domination of the world economy,all present challenges to established practices.
Clearly, the more commercial activities and affiliations refuse to be contained by traditional economic frameworks, the more the nation-state is at risk of becoming ineffectual. This trend is hardly new. In fact it started decades ago.
Since the early 1950s most Western democracies have been severely hampered by structural revenue deficiencies. Today’s failure of national political authority derives in large part from the loss of control over the flow of money. At the most basic level, money is being transferred out of national jurisdictions altogether.
The incapacity of states to halt possibly trillions of dollars taking flight substantially undermines national communities. They are a prime cause of national decline, but they are also a result. One of the reasons tax minimisation and evasion are such accepted fundamentals of 21stcentury commerce is because nation-states have lost their moral potency.
In an effort to manage within their means, successive governments attempted to cut costs - retrenching large numbers of staff, outsourcing crucial services, and privatising selected government business functions. Public finances were slashed for the benefit of the free market economy while the maintenance, and even the completion, of public infrastructure was greatly impeded. In the process, public jurisdiction over many aspects of our lives was relinquished through the gradual ceding of authority to private corporations.
Concurrently, private companies became increasingly reliant upon outsourcing, strategic alliances and acquisitions which, together with aggressive tax planning and money management - such as transfer pricing, for example – allowed them to compete in the global marketplace. In so doing they became political as well as economic entities. In many respects, multinational corporations are now society’s real powerbrokers.
It is important to comprehend that this is not simply the case of a more streamlined public service focusing on government policy while outsourcing non-essential activities - the message often conveyed to an ingenuous public. Rather, these practices symbolise a divergence of politics and economics similar to that which occurred when the Holy Roman Empire, unable to collect sufficient revenues to provide essential services, succumbed to a feudal system in which authority vested in the hands of private landowners. In essence, these factors signal a fundamental realignment of the relationships between business and government and a blurring of what were, previously, two separate sectors – the private and the public.
An unintended consequence of this realignment has left much public power in the hands of private companies, where public benefits are routinely forfeited for profit. Today, the devolution of public works to private enterprise is evident right across society – particularly in the domains of energy, hospital administration, transport, dissemination of government information, prisons, education, unemployment, housing, and the coordination of most other public amenities.
In addition, while governments still retain fiat over the minting of coins and paper currency, these kinds of value exchange have been increasingly overshadowed by alternative forms. Initially these were credit cards, debit cards, and electronic cash, offered, and controlled by, financial services firms and multinational corporations. Today conventional money is under threat from a breed of cryptocurrencies that are deliberately designed to exist outside the clutches of the state.
Retreat of the Nation-State
As private companies began to discharge authority under their own brand, rather than in the name of a law that surpasses corporate power, and individual citizens increasingly accepted responsibility for their own welfare, learning and security, so the power, competence, and legitimacy of the public sector was compromised still further. This, in turn, dramatically reduced the capacity and inclination of the state to resolve systemic issues within society - such as long-term unemployment, urban homelessness, the erosion of the revenue base, inequitable distribution of wealth and income, regional disparities, and community disintegration, for example.
In principle, of course, there is absolutely nothing to prevent private enterprise taking responsibility for ensuring freedom, justice, security, and opportunities for the pursuit of happiness. However, as even basic government functions came to be exercised by private parties, so a shift in sovereign power and legitimacy occurred.
Today, such issues, and band-aid solutions, continue to be symptomatic of the inability of sovereign states to manage effectively in a fundamentally altered, constantly shifting, economic and social global environment.
Within this context, too, any perceived deterioration in living standards - predicted by some as unavoidable given the intensifying pressures of the global marketplace on business, assuming a steady growth in population, and considering the negative impacts of global warming - merely contributes to a further weakening of public confidence in government.
In time, the legitimacy once held by the state may be undermined totally by its impotence in coping with mounting distress of large segments of the population; unless, of course, it can find new, sustainable solutions to the structural, systemic issues confronting society. National governments may not entirely disappear, but because they will not have the capacity needed to maintain public order, nor to prosecute breaches of the law by large, multinational corporations, it is likely that their influence will be drastically curtailed.
In the short term it is likely that government functions will continue to decrease in number and decline in significance. As power diffuses away from the nation-state to large commercial entities, peer communities, and global networks, many of the traditional functions of the state will devolve into the hands of semi-autonomous communities of interest. In the long term, more and more governance issues, (such as taxation, for example) are likely to be tackled locally, where people can see the tangible results of their contributions, and internationally, to control capital flows more effectively.
Even the services retained by the state after continued decentralisation, however, cannot remain quarantined for long from the profound impact of the new post-capitalist global economy.
New technologies make legacy systems a burden and infrastructure maintenance costly. Environmental degradation necessitates ever greater restorative measures, while shifting demographics and employment patterns require greater resources to be allocated to pensions, allowances, and aged care. As a result of these and similar shifts, politicians often believe they have little choice but to cut spending in areas where no powerful interest groups can prevent it. Traditionally this has been in cultural facilities, social security, and public works and services.
By the year 2025 almost all information about physical objects - including people, buildings, processes, organisations, in addition to many creative works - will be in cyberspace. This tectonic shift in technical capability is desirable and inevitable. It will provide the foundation for astonishing new ways to amuse, advise, socialise, medicate and educate.
Excluding the possibility of a new social contract, however, in which the customary nexus between work and income is broken, where voluntary work, or other forms of cultural expression, are encouraged once again, and where every single person receives a guaranteed minimum wage, the price to be paid will be high. For when technology shifts to such an extent, the crumbling of specific expertise, or what is known as knowledgemonopolies, invariably follows. Everyone goes back to zero.
Such was the case during the 20thcentury, for example, with assembly-line factory workers and clerks. Re-skilling programs, not infrequently on a monumental scale, were implemented across all production-based, blue-collar industries. Today it is hard to see similar strategies working. Consequently, we should certainly expect numbers to decline across the professions. Lawyers, surgeons, university lecturers, consultants, accountants, and managers will not be immune in situations where robots can undertake standardised tasks faster and with greater accuracy. Such a reality became personal recently. The task of subject research, which precedes any presentation I deliver, used to take me at least a week or two to complete. It can now be undertaken by a machine, more comprehensively and with less bias, in just a few seconds. Ironically, I suspect politicians will soon find themselves surplus to community’s requirements.
In the early part of this century, reasons for a shrinking public sector were crystal clear. Given the task-sharing capabilities of computers, work was sorted in ways that exploited the essential differences between humans and machines. While our propensity for perceptual processing, such as evaluation and interpretation of data, for example, is highly evolved, we found that data collection and symbolic problem solving was more precisely executed digitally. Today those distinctions are fast disappearing.
As a consequence, tasks that demand empathy, the establishment of trust, good humour, creative thinking, the delivery of bad news compassionately, as well as processes requiring discretion, acumen, and advanced perceptual understanding, will soon be entrusted to machines as a matter of routine. The numbers of public servants must inevitably continue to decrease as tasks such as these are devolved to be dealt with by computers in real-time.
Another concern must be the changing nature of the issues public servants deal with. As the dynamic interplay of digital technology, capitalism and democracy unleashes complex incongruities upon society, so the nature and resonance of strategic issues change. Bizarre social, cultural, political, commercial and even conceptual affinities are conceived within an economy nourished by innovation rather than capital. Now, strategic issues become more global, more systemic. Instead of discrete problems, national or state, requiring permanent solutions, business and governments alike face complex, emergent, dilemmas requiring a range of continuously evolving strategies.
One such dilemma still tormenting the minds of senior executives in tax agencies everywhere, for example, is the manner in which multinationals, through a fairly elaborate arrangement of cross-border trading between subsidiaries, are able to optimise their overall liability by systematic exploitation of the differences between national taxation systems. Since major corporations account for a large share of gross domestic product, chronic tax-revenue shortages are inevitable. Deficits like these severely limit the ability of the nation-state to pay for public services.
The complex nature of many contemporary issues is particularly easy to illustrate - as is the futility of conventional responses to policy - in situations where community anxiety intersects with pressure from the media. For example, because dealing in ice or heroin is a criminal offence, and addiction to either is currently considered to be a perilous social problem, the police are repeatedly admonished to allocate additional resources to fighting the problem. Targeting the amount of available heroin, the police attempt to curtail use of the drug by arresting known dealers. As dealers are taken out of circulation, so heroin supplies dry up. But this scarcity now begins to fuel price rises. This leads in turn to an increase in the amount of crime and prostitution perpetrated by those with a habit to support.
Clearly, in this particular example, effecting a rationalchange in part of the system inadvertently causes deterioration to the whole system. Arguably the most viable solution would be to decriminalise drug use and categorise it as a health problem. But that has its own ethical and health care implications and could cause other unforeseen effects.
Similarly, a range of unintended consequences can be detected in any number of government initiatives - from the funding of state emergency organisations to the privatisation of public utilities, and the provision of welfare services. In fact, it is a problem familiar to most proponents of systemic development. Lacking tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty; preferring prudent, reasoned thinking, over creative boldness; those responsible for public policy, however well-intended, consistently underestimate, or misconstrue, the systemic implications of their analysis.
True systemic acupuncture points are often to be found in measures which, on the surface at least, appear to be counterintuitive. Sometimes they can defy reasoned analysis. They are also invariably perceived to carry an element of risk and, in cases where the cost of these risks is considered to be unacceptably high, such leverage will frequently be eschewed in favour of more logical solutions - independent of whether those responses actually benefit the performance of the whole system.
Meanwhile, compounding the already complex nature of such issues today is the emergence of this globally networked innovationeconomy with its own code and its own opportunities, primarily the use of knowledge and information - rather than material resources, property or capital, as the primary source of wealth creation. Within this environment, everything is connected to everything else, value derives from the abundance and proliferation of distributed relationships, rather than their scarcity, wealth flows not from optimisation but from invention, and success, in any form, requires supreme agility and structural adaptiveness.
The main concern for Western governments in the innovation economy is how to retain social cohesion, while developing social capital, once successful control over the movement of economic capital is gone. Most individuals would probably agree that any civilised country should maintain and advance its capacity to make decisions that work for the common good rather than sectoral interests. But that is not to say the majority should necessarily govern – particularly when its demands are not in the best interests of all. Obviously, the situation is exacerbated when governments lose their ability to manage in the national interest, which is increasingly commonplace these days.
In spite of the fact that it is easy to miss completely, or otherwise fail to capitalise on opportunities today - particularly when one’s natural inclination (or deliberate focus) has always erred towards caution - most governments still plan their routine operational activities around the assessment and management of risk. In so doing, I suspect, the nation-state runs the greatest risk of all. Namely, that it fails to identify opportunities for cooperation at a global level, focusing, instead, on improving what has become irrelevant in an attempt to avert its own demise.
In the industrial age, the public sector was primarily concerned with political and economic risk. The imperatives have now changed. Risk is considered to be most severe in circumstances where complexity, in some form or other, is either a critical amplifier or is perceptible to the degree that the advent of unpredictable (or emergent) issues increases. As a consequence, the dimensions of concern have expanded to encompass social justice and cohesion, political influence, communal morality, economic resources, technological capacity, and environmental quality.
Risk can occur along any number of fault-lines where these parameters intersect. No longer can it be contained, furthermore, within the artificial confines of politics or economics – nor indeed within national borders. On the contrary, it spills over into any number of perplexing, dynamic and interdependent issues where critical relationships, and the drivers of coevolutionary change, are what really matters. Its context has become volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity and unpredictability. In other words, risk has become genuinely systemic.
Massive, interconnected and digitalised systems provide more and more functions that are essential to our daily lives – healthcare, transport, energy, communications, etc. Most services offered by companies in these spaces are now accessed via internet-based media platforms. This also encourages an exponential increase in the complexity of interactions. The volume of transactions between people and their devices worldwide is mind-boggling. The world’s current daily data output is around 2.5 quintillion bytes. And with each click, swipe, share and like, the world of commerce is using that data to make decisions about the future our children will inherit.
Naturally, the ever-increasing complexity of multiple linked systems creates the potential for large-scale disruptions to everyday life, where disasters such as unusual combinations of loads causing electrical power failures, or the accidental severance of telephone cables bringing down air traffic control systems, are less of a raritytoday than they were even five years ago.
The natural tendency of governments and institutions has been to tackle each known problem by formulating new rules, regulations and laws in an effort to deal with exceptions and to control abuses. Unfortunately, as can be seen in taxation legislation and laws relating to environmental degradation, such well-intentioned efforts merely proliferate, adding yet more complexity to our lives. Over time, and particularly with the discovery of new technological capabilities, most rules and regulations become imprecise or obsolete. This results in massively unpredictable and unstable systems in which catastrophes can be triggered at fairly low levels.
Arguably the greatest peril to society, perhaps even to the survival of our species, are the threats consumerism and overpopulation pose to the planet’s ecosphere, and the menace posed by unregulated machine super-intelligence. Bearing in mind that the catastrophe threshold is markedly lower today than in industrial times, detecting events before they hit this threshold is essential. This should be one of the roles for governments working collaboratively. Yet few are willing to undertake this responsibility.
Within the context of volatility and complexity embodying contemporary life, a more systemic approach to risk and its management has become vital. Indeed, without this, any accompanying assertions that what we are witnessing are discrete or unique events, and cannot reoccur, are simply hollow rhetoric. Given, though, that such assurances are increasingly commonplace, we must vigorously question whether our governments and legal societies are even equipped to ameliorate the incongruous, vague, ambiguous regulations now governing society that correlate in so many unanticipated ways.
Today, we are much more conscious of that fact that the global economy is not a machine needing to be continuously fine-tuned so as to achieve optimal efficiency. Rather, it resembles a living, learning, organism in a permanent state of continuous coevolution - entangled, interdependent, chaotic, ever expanding at its edges. And, like any ecosystem in which there is incessant disruption, as new species displace old, and as organisms and environments transform each other, the new economy is inevitably going to be characterised by constant perturbation – at least for the time being.
In this volatile economic environment, where notions of masshave already given way to molecularisation, where innovation and instant communication is routine and vital, and where the continued financing of the welfare state has become a burden, it is certain that the current paradigm of governance will be transformed. In a globally-interconnected world, traditional approaches to control through regulation simply do not work. Global alliances, as well as networked individuals, have made protectionist policies virtually impossible to administer.
If state governments are to remain viable, they must heed the music that is now playing. Two things will have to occur. Neither of these factors is assisted by the current fad for despotism or the role played globally by extreme neoliberalism:
First, the obsolete command and control model, forged in the industrial-age organisation and adopted with such enthusiasm by Western politicians, must yield to more flexible, adaptive, internetworked structures.
Second, the one-size-fits-all policies of the 20thcentury which, inexplicably yet consistently, promoted vast war technologies of imperial power over social and environmental issues, must be dismantled.
Obviously, efforts to deconstruct the massive operational outlays incurred by traditional bureaucracies should also continue.
In order to avoid even the most innocuous elements in the dystopian scenario with which I opened this essay, the future role of national governments, it seems to me, must be less linked to the interests of the commercial economy, the maintenance of a nanny state on which more and more people are dependent, and half-hearted interventions in global affairs that only serve to exacerbate differences, rather than a revitalisation of the social economy at every level. For only this is likely to restore civic life and enable far greater levels of community participation and involvement.
Rekindling Social Capital
Thanks to a plethora of technological discoveries made during 20thcentury, we are now in possession of some extremely perceptive theories about the nature and structure of reality. If we really want to understand the world in which we live, it must be through these new explanations, rather than through our preconceptions, received opinion, assertions, or even common sense. Our best hypotheses are not only truer, and therefore less distorted, than what we once thought to be true, they make far more sensethan common sense. However, accepting and applying these theories requires us to discard many popularly-held beliefs, sometimes accepting accounts and evidence so counterintuitive they can, at first, seem utterly absurd.
Although most of these theories appear to relate primarily to the ways of science, to the structure of the universe, to human destiny - indeed to the very construction of human consciousness - the domain of social activity, too, is intimately implicated in the emergence of entirely different types and patterns of work, learning, leisure, government and commerce.
Yet nowhere do these theories seem more incompatible with current practice, nowhere more disturbing to acknowledge, than in those very same areas of human activity. The reasons stare us emphatically in the face: by accepting the relevance of these new ideas, we are set on challenging many of the basic assumptions we have held about life and work – its means as well as its ends. And by accepting their sapient validity we invalidate many of the principles upon which institutions of government, business and learning are still predicated.
This is the real significance of the genesis of machine super-intelligence and its present and future relationship with humanity.
The fact that the discovery of this body of new scientific knowledge happens to coincide with a far greater global awareness of human limitations (the fragility of our environment, the paucity of our imagination, the egoistic nature of our deeds, the finite nature of our resources) coupled with a growing sense that unrestrained economic growth and development may not necessarily equate to progress or to transformation of the human condition, does not make it’s manifestation any less scary.
No simpler, nor finer, example of the profoundly unsettling nature of the new science exists than the theory concerning the basis of human interaction. From cradle to grave we are constantly reminded that humans are competitive. That it is in our nature. This assertion has given rise to a system for the organising of human affairs that is unequivocally adversarial. Learning institutions, governments, and corporate media, enthusiastically sustain this credo. Industry policy is based upon it. We swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Yet modern biology no longer supports this jaundiced view, concluding that humans have instincts to be both compassionate and cooperative, especially when survival is at stake.
The secret of this good side to human nature is that, compared with other animals, we are uniquely ill-equipped for self-sufficiency. Like ants and bees, we cannot live outside of a communal society. We need each other. Indeed, so dependent have we become on each other that few people today could feed, clothe and shelter themselves entirely through their own efforts. Many people regret this. They yearn to rediscover the virtues of a simpler age of self-sufficiency. But the truth is there never was such an age for us.
From time immemorial, human beings have been obsessed with exchange, pacts, contracts, bargains, fairness and reciprocity – concepts virtually unknown to other species. Nor does such a theory of cooperation necessarily disprove the prevailing paradigm in both economics and biology: that people act out of enlightened self-interest.
It does, however, raise profound questions regarding the ways we have designed and put to use our social, economic and political institutions. And it also screws up any selfish, conditioned responses we may have regarding the ultimate purpose behind work, enterprise, wealth creation, public service and government.
If we examine the relationships between this biological concept of human nature and other new theories drawn from social ecology, systems dynamics, and the science of self-organised criticality, a startling, yet unusually evocative, pattern of connectedness emerges; a strange attractor demanding an ecological,rather than an economic, approach to the organisation and management of human affairs - assuming that survival and advancement of the human condition is indeed the paramount game we all play.
Initially, especially given the power now exercised by multinational corporations compared to the nation-state, this ecologicalparadigm has had the most influence on business and trade. Most 20thcentury corporations readily conceded that any successful business model was good for up to about 40 years. After that period, companies that had tied themselves to that model invariably atrophied and died. Only corporations that adopted new business models, or that created new waves of development, continued to grow and prosper over the longer term. Today, the most enduring business models might last for ten years or even less.
The same proposition is true for societies, albeit with extended time-frames. This has potentially significant repercussions for the functioning of the modern nation-state. It means it would be foolish to divorce the purpose and functioning of private enterprise, public service and community development from the dynamic necessity for global society to change. It means we should be ready to jettison social strategies that continue to divide humanity, or that are unable to stabilise environmental degradation, or eradicate social injustice. And it explains why we need to find new models, capable of creating a culture of regeneration, within our society in order to overcome the highly toxic and unsustainable Western strategy of unfettered materialism and rampant economic growth – the strategy that, even today, motivates most government policy and business activity.
Naturally, some issues will always remain too complex to be dealt with by individual nations. But if we want to develop a new global society that avoids the pitfalls inherent in the imposed paternalism of the nation-state, that accepts responsibility for the care and well-being of the human family beyond history’s artificially-imposed boundaries, a society that is able to both protect and liberate sovereign individuals while nurturing genuine community, governments will need to create a new social contract, changing their focus to be considerably more concerned with:
- The achievement of social cohesion through new expressions of personal and collective responsibility
- Ensuring that every public policy, proposed action, project, or decision, is good for our children and their future, good for the biosphere, and good for each other
- Intelligent regulation to ensure that technological discoveries do not engulf an otherwise ethical, spiritual and civilised society
- Educating and inspiring the community to be more critically informed about what is going on and how events impact and shape their lives
- Ensuring the interests of the whole society while protecting individual rights and freedoms
- Making life possible (though not necessarily easier) for all citizens to be able to live their lives constructively, in harmony with others, by spreading more equitably the wealth created by society.
Without such a refocusing and recalibration we will most likely witness a worsening of the crises increasingly impacting the ability of the nation-state to avoid collapse.
In particular I believe there are three acupuncture points we should address as a matter of urgency: global financial regulation; experiments in flexible governance; and alternative concepts of citizenship.
Devoid of systems to track transnational money flows, and the capability to transfer a portion of these into the public purse, political infrastructures will likely decay still further, becoming more and more superfluous to actual material life. But this trend can also be used to find more effective ways of redistributing wealth: not charity or aid, but the methodical transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor, in efforts aimed at strengthening the security of the human family as a whole.
As new local, regional, and transnational political currents become more potent, the rigid monopoly on political life held by the nation-state will become more and more impractical. National governments have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the modern era, waging endless wars against each other while killing, oppressing, and otherwise failing their own populations. In persuading nations to submit to a superior tier of authority, experiments with flexible governance models will be needed until the right balance is found between autonomy and collegiality.
Citizenship is the most primitive kind of injustice in the world today. Functioning as an extreme form of inherited arbitrary privilege, it arouses little fidelity in those dislodged by wars, or those who inherit nothing.
Contemporary technologies offer models for rethinking citizenship. For example, if if citizenship were to be divorced from territory, its advantages could be more fairly distributed. Logically speaking, deregulating human movement would seem to be an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unfair to preserve the freedom to move capital around while banning people from following.
The rights and opportunities accruing to Australian citizenship, for instance, could be claimed far away, without anyone having to travel to Australia to prove so. We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth? What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq, Korea, or Afghanistan?
If we are to resist the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces; if we are to avoid volatility within the poorest countries and regions, followed by an exodus of migrants now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility; and if we are to confront the illegitimacy of an international order that has never aspired to any kind of community of nations governed by the rule of law, we will need to attend to these priorities.
As the digital economy turns the familiar world inside-out and upside-down, so the binary political ideologies of the past become increasingly irrelevant. Whereas, for example, education, employment, taxation and welfare policies have unswervingly excluded many citizens from full participation in their nation’s life, governments now must focus on increasing society’s sense of interdependence, confidence and trust if they are to retain any vestige of relevance. In that context, the nature of true governance and public service will need to be totally reconceptualised.
Ultimately, though, the nation-state may well self-destruct under the burden of its own irrelevance. For when the music changes, governments invariably fall.
This essay was provoked by the enthusiasm and dedication displayed by the Centre for the Future’s teams incubating both MiVote and Operation PeaceQuest, in addition to the many philosophers and commentators in recent times who have been concerned by the more toxic elements of the prevailing paradigm in our society. It has been inspired by those who seek new solutions to the problems brought upon humanity by humanity itself. Among these are a few thinkers whose ideas I find worth incorporating into my own thinking given their refreshing originality, ability to see the truth, and ability to convey the truth in ways that are audaciously compelling. These include Nora Bateson, Elza Maalouf, Said Dawlabani, Arturo Escobar, Rebecca Costa, Timothy Mortin,Nils Zimmerman, George Monbiot, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Michael McAllum, Joe Brewer, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Anand Giridharadas.
