Shrewd futurists scour
the past as well as investigating the
possible in their never-ending search
for clues and insights into the present.
In terms of the social order our forebears so diligently created, that which
manifests today, the past happens to
be the most enlightening of these three domains.
For many of us the reality
that is the ‘human condition’ emanates from a bizarre blend of primitive superstitions
and visionary ideas, reckless deeds and astonishing inventions – all nurtured
by a cultural complexity that is awe-inspiring and beyond understanding.
Those that are able to
embrace such expansive epistemological variety, yet can also acknowledge the ominous
shadows of an unintended dystopia in the storm clouds threatening almost
everything we take for granted are, as yet, relatively uncommon. But at a time
of universal disquiet these philosophers and scientists are the myth-makers,
people to whom we can confidently turn for coherence and hope.
Indeed we ignore their wisdom
at our peril, for they proclaim compelling possibilities combined with the
means for averting potential catastrophe in a new story for humanity. Their narrative
is inspiring simply because it is one of societal renewal – a metamorphosis from
the appalling detritus of denial and dysfunction that crashes in on us daily. Not
content merely to punctuate circumstances, these individual are the intentional leaders of a new ‘Gaian’ age.
Life, death and rebirth
(metamorphosis or resurrection) are entangled in myth as well as in the flesh. This
life cycle is at the core of living systems. It is how evolution, so
astonishing and intricate, is designed to work. It is the ultimate truth from
which there is no evident escape – even today when science is at the point of
creating life itself.
Alas such elementary laws
of nature are not easily accepted by a materially-focused, highly competitive, corporatized
world pushing the seductive power of more and more possessions and where competition
for scarce resources (driven by envy or greed, depending upon one’s circumstances)
pervades almost all human activity. Such distinctive traits pave the way to ruin
simply because they set us apart, divorcing us from each other and from the
natural world. We now know that is folly. The industrial paradigm to which we
have been in thrall for at least the past two centuries is broken – shattered
by its own unconstrained success.
Yet it is not because we
have become disconnected from nature, nor that we pursue our existing
industrial dogma in such an unrelenting manner, that a new actuality will be
born. Nor is it because our values have become warped by unsustainable
practices or that our stories currently express such overwhelming despair. While entrenched
ecological ignorance has undoubtedly accelerated the inequity, poverty,
injustice and environmental degradation we see all around us, an explosion of
industrial production (coupled with the legalization of publicly traded
companies) in the late nineteenth century, yielded the extraordinary wealth and
lavish lifestyles that many of us enjoy today.
And so the truth is far
more inconspicuous: our current culture of reckless profligacy must perish because
a new reality, a unique planetary culture, is wanting to be born. It is
inevitable. It will not be stopped. The pillars of our civilization are
tottering under the stresses of unconstrained consumption and are starting to
fall, just as others before them have fallen.
Most noticeably the
great engine of consumer-driven capitalism, in which the developed world has cocooned
itself for over 250 years, has lost its moral conviction as well as its balance.
Based on debt-laden monetocracies, over-stretched beyond its designated limits,
on the verge of looting assets that belong to us all (the air we breathe, our
identities and our individual DNA, for example) and, one suspects, intentionally
distorted to exclude certain ‘externalities’ in order to better serve the
interests of an increasingly wealthy group of corporations and individuals, the
globalised economy is unraveling. No longer can it properly function to provide
for the seven billion people inhabiting this planet. In effect the financial
system, as currently conceived, is flat-lining.
Of course this proposition
is an affront to the hero-leaders of yesteryear and deeply insulting to their
neo-liberal economic ways. After all they have staked their reputations and their
fortunes in sustaining vast industrial empires to keep this industrial machine
running. They need us to keep buying their goods, smoking their cigarettes,
eating their fast food, fueling our vehicles with their gas, heating our homes
with their electricity and killing each other with their weapons and their
drugs. What is more they pay governments and marketing firms obscene sums of
money to ensure that it stays that way.
In the context of
sustaining the current indust-reality
then, it comes as no surprise that the spin doctors and lawyers are out in
force, paid to pour scorn on any suggestion of reform or renewal and dismissing
every line of reasoning for whole-system change on a scale ranging from ‘meaningless’
to ‘irrational’.
For most industrial-age
leaders even the prospect of re-designing aspects of our society to make it
fairer and more sustainable is appalling for they are only able to detect a downside
to them personally. Why? Because their egos are bound up with the zero-sum games
they play every day, where there are only winners and losers, and where other
factors do not enter into their sense of what is right and wrong. Striding the
world’s stage in the glare of publicity and propaganda, they take huge risks
and relish the cut and thrust of competition. But let’s be quite clear: these people,
so constantly in the news and held up as paragons of business and corporate
management, practice leadership as an extreme sport and they are a dying breed.
Accepting even a modicum
of the need for eco-social renewal, particularly in eliminating the extreme
economic apartheid that divides the world’s rich and poor, could precipitate existential
trauma in many of our old-style leaders. For such a frame-changing idea flies
in the face of everything they know, identify with and value. Moreover it implies
deep-seated changes to everything they take for granted, including the
privatization of assets that should be owned by us all in trust for future
generations.
But while that might be
a terrifying idea for some, for most of us it contains the possibility for
treading more lightly on this Earth, renewing hope, and restoring wisdom in our
relationships with each other and with all living beings. So let’s bring it on!
If we cannot avoid the inevitable
collapse of our consumer culture’s life-critical systems we can at least learn
to avert potential disaster by embracing the opportunity to invent something far
better and durable.
For the most part genuine
transformation is not even on the agenda. Admittedly phrases such as transformational change and conscious leadership are on the lips of
many, assuming pride of place within the elite vocabulary of the bureaucracy
and in situations ranging from coaching and organization development to
political reform and even community engagement! But in most cases this is a
sham; we shy away from any deeper implications, desperately clinging on to what
we know even when that is clearly dysfunctional.
Likewise, terms like transition, resilience, reform, mitigation, adaptation and even revolution
are now bandied around the corridors of power as the most fashionable phrases
to be heard uttering. Unfortunately their meaning is still framed within an
overriding, unchallenged, almost condescending conviction that US-EU-centric
models, systems and institutions (particularly in terms of governance, business
and the economy) somehow represent the pinnacle of human achievement. Consequently
such words are used, more often than not, to bolster and restore functionality
to the existing system where assumptions and beliefs remain untouched. For
example many, otherwise well-meaning politicians, seem to believe that the
solution to poverty is to create even more consumers. But current patterns of
excessive human production and consumption are precisely the cause of so many
of today’s problems. There are too many of us consuming too much too
fast.
This kind of linear
‘cause-and-effect’ thinking traps us all in a perilous mindset; engendering an
inability to imagine that things can be anything other than what they are today, or were in ‘the good old days’. And so it is that our elected
officials, ensnared in a web of pathogenic symptoms indicating a complex
predicament they cannot fully comprehend, act without mindful intent, moral recalibration,
or even a more profound knowledge of the system they are so desperately trying
to safeguard.
All such efforts will
ultimately fail but, ironically, often after creating the illusion that things
are slowly beginning to return to normal. At the moment, however, it appears we
cannot stomach the thought of letting go of old assumptions and frameworks and
surrendering to what is happening. It is simply too scary. In any case we are so
paralyzed by the unspeakable vastness of the problems confronting us.
As history illustrates
over and over again, attempting to prop up old paradigms in this way, rather
than boldly encouraging their demise and relying on our ingenuity to create
better futures, delays the inevitable. It also perpetuates untenable practices,
thus creating even worse conditions and making the cost of rectifying them even
greater. In effect defensive behaviors of this nature simply prolong the crises
that lead to renewal. Such conservative hostility towards whole-system change is
precisely what we are witnessing from governments and large multinationals in ‘smokestack’
industries all over the world. Consider the following...
After successive waves
of economic, socio-political, cultural and technological globalization dating
back 600 years or so, humanity finds itself poised on the brink of planetary
integration. This dynamic condition (let us call it ‘globalism’) is a natural
consequence of our hyper-connected world and neo-nomadic jet-set existence and
it lets loose myriad new possibilities for eliminating many of the problems
that have beleaguered our civilization.
But globalism also shines
a clinical spotlight on distinct system failures that may be about to cascade out
of our control. Probably because of the media’s obsession with bad news as well
as a burgeoning public consciousness, leaders of every persuasion are focusing
on the distressing issue of climate change. But issues like global heating, the
loss of biodiversity, ocean acidity and the pollution of the oceans, for
example, are really only signs of a more alarming and deep-rooted collapse of
the natural environment. We can learn from this – if we have a mind to...
Ecologists have long
observed the critical role of ‘hub species’ in different environments. For
example, white-footed mice and their counterparts in
other terrestrial communities, are considered a ‘hub species’ because they are
central to a web of interactions with various predators, prey, competitors,
parasites, and pathogens. If a ‘hub species’ declines or becomes
extinct the entire ecosystem becomes more vulnerable to collapse.
We can extend the
analogy of ‘hub species’ to human society. Humanity has become dependent upon a
number of life-critical ‘hub’ systems - namely the economy, energy and the
environment. There is growing evidence that these particular systems will
collapse if we continue to ignore scientific data staring us in the face. As
currently configured they are not viable. Functionality has been sucked out of
them by excess consumption and an escalating global population.
Regrettably we are not
yet sufficiently astute to take seriously key linkages connecting these three systems.
Even less are we inclined to probe into their underlying deeper structure in
the search for clues as to their inherent flaws.
This failure to think holistically,
to consider the complex unfolding of numerous consequences (intended and
unintended) in an appreciation of emergence, is the reason we are overwhelmed.
Instead of looking at our society’s entire nervous system we have become preoccupied
with the warning signs within each autonomous system (such as a global credit
squeeze in the global economy, for example) rather than with identifying a set
of ‘acupuncture points’ that could release an entirely new energy for whole-system
renewal, resilience and prosperity.
Possibly the greatest
challenge to whole-system (or civilizational) renewal is the hard-wired nature
of specific beliefs and mindsets. In the developed world we have allowed ourselves
to be so conditioned by free-market thinking that existing levels of affluence
are often considered to be a minimum standard of what is acceptable. In the
developing world, too, citizens either aspire to a similar quality of life as
that enjoyed in the West (almost as a god-given right) or take hostile exception
to the fact that anyone should enjoy such lifestyles when so many do not even
have access to clean drinking water and healthy food. Whether right or wrong, such
ingrained beliefs only serve humanity’s propensity for greed and further embed anti-cooperative
behaviors.
As a new reality takes
hold, assisted by entire communities responding to a deeply felt collective
impulse for more meaningful relationships; smarter, less toxic practices; socio-political
regulations that liberate rather than encumber human aspirations and compassion;
wiser use of resources; and a desire to design with rather than against
nature, old style hero-leaders will need to decide whether to mount a last
stand (potentially bloody yet ultimately futile), watch helplessly as nostalgia
for the past evaporates around them, or learn to step into new epistemologies
to help others in creating the new.
Human genius, imagination
and indestructible spirit have already given birth to an amazing treasure trove
of knowledge, artifacts, merchandise, products, methodologies and institutions.
Right now these abundance is mostly only accessible to the privileged among us.
At a time when over two billion people around the world still subsist on less
than two dollars a day the time to share our wealth with those less fortunate
than ourselves is long overdue. Goals that fall short of this do us an
injustice. We are better than that.
The path towards a ‘Gaian’
paradigm, in which we rise above the inequities and injustices of the
industrial age, necessarily entails finding better ways to expand the means for
generating prosperity and sharing the value accrued from human imagination (in
its broadest sense) across all sectors of society; fairly, with compassion and
regardless of status, ethnicity, education, location, or other arbitrary divisions.
For that to happen we must find ways to transcend egos, for only then will we
be sufficiently open to see ethnocentric possibilities and awaken to the conscious
fulfillment of our true potential.
Human beings have
created so much to celebrate, to marvel at, and to hold onto as we forge a new
world out of our collective dreams and aspirations now that the age of
individual genius has past. I am confident that by simply re-framing our
thinking around questions like, "What kind of a world do we want?"
the ensuing conversations will help us shift towards a future that is far more
viable than that which currently threatens.
Indeed changing the
dominant conversation in society (by changing our thinking in quite fundamental
ways) has to be a major part of any solution. Which is why so many conventional
institutions, with their focus on restoring the current capitalist system, its
power relationships and intentions, in a more or less unchanged state, continue
to delay the inevitable.
If a crisis of
leadership was responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves today, it
is likely to be a leadership epiphany which allows us to reunite as a species and
to thrive and prosper once again.
Authoritative
leadership in a Gaian world, however, will be unlike the extreme sports
practiced by the famed hero-leaders of our immediate past. Leadership must become
a selfless act, a collaborative process for improving one or more aspects of
the human condition. Within the arc of leadership influence and accountability,
restoring systemic functionality and vitality will be paramount. That will
demand an ability to visualize, design and enact adaptive systems which, in
turn, will require us to see the world as a single, living organism within
which we are all intimately connected.
Wiser design, inspired
by nature’s own solutions will follow, making many of our traditional tools
redundant and our solutions primitive by comparison. Innovation will occur
across networks.
Collaborative enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship will
occur on a scale that is unimaginable today. And, all the time, we will be
averting potential disasters by growing the intelligence to navigate any
conditions in a world where, once again, we can proudly tell of a unified human
family and the extraordinary resolve of our species to survive, to thrive and to
prosper.
This article was commissioned by Kosmos journal in the US and will appear in the Autumn-Winter 2009 issue
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