"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves." Dresden James
Over the passage of time I have come to anticipate the end of each year with a serenity born of familiarity as much as for the solitude and change of pace it invariably brings.
As people all over the world return home for the holidays, hibernate or simply seek sanctuary in simple joys arising from reconnection and renewal, the frenzied clockwork of contemporary existence seems to slow down to such an extent that it allows scrutiny in some considerable detail - like counting the seconds. In that briefest of moments all exterior realities are suspended, albeit temporarily, and transcendent qualities perceived or possibly felt.
Perhaps this illusion of slow motion, of stillness, is the only real gift at this time of the year – a rare chance to pause, review in awe the debris we have left in our wake, reflect on the path we are intent on tracing and ponder our most probable destination should the path remain true.
Since a very early age it has been my practice to mark the end of each calendrical chapter by writing a short account of the past twelve months, attempting to make sense of events while mulling over key twists and turns in a journey I share with others as well as consider some ways I may be changing as a result of others' interactions with me.
Normally I sense only evolution. This year has been different. It has invited palpable psychological change. I am increasingly perturbed by foolishness. Stupidity goads me into anger far more easily these days. Greed and laziness too. And I am suitably offended when encountering self-righteousness in any guise. Perhaps all of this is partly a consequence of age. At 65 there is less time for subtlety or toleration of political correctness. Every word must cut through pretension; every deed must be meaningful. It was always in my genes but this year I have matured into a trouble maker par excellence!
Long ago I acquiesced to the label of futurist – an ironically short-sighted consent, for as successive years pass I feel less confident about what tomorrow holds and far less able to voice my apprehension without resorting either to vehement provocation or brooding silence – a state many find even more disconcerting given my innate penchant for debate and my delight in vocabulary.
It is also true that on some days I feel like an impudent adolescent, accused and imprisoned with prejudice in a padded cell from which there is little likelihood of escape, other than by appealing to those who chose to incarcerate me in this manner. On such occasions my blood boils and I am moved to scorn, delivered with an icy precision, capable of inflicting deep wounds. Yet each month I meet and fall in with hordes of like-minded souls who agree with my analysis of the global milieu and who feel a similar torment and stress. Yet few speak out - possibly for fear of being classified as an hysterical malcontent. No matter. I cannot help myself.
Even so the curse of knowledge is deleting positive memories of the future as fast as the water evaporates from puddles in summer. With each moment that passes I feel less able to comprehend the impulse of a species tacitly, tragically, intent on pursuing its own destruction, knowing that most people just get on with their lives, much as before, having little or no consciousness that would lead them to such a desolate conclusion. Each day it becomes harder to tolerate a situation where the most destructive of “inconvenient truths” are ignored, relegated to trivial pursuits, or ridiculed by an increasingly terrified gang of wealthy monarchs, politicians, autocrats, media barons, industrialists and senior executives who have, quite simply, lost the plot of what it means to lead.
Of course it is all too easy (and utterly wrong) to view everything through a lens clouded by despair and scarcity. On those rare occasions when pessimism crowds me in I am fortunate enough to be stirred by those around me who see only abundance, generosity of spirit and cooperation. They are my inspiration and my salvation.
This year has been crammed with significance on so many levels. The local impacts of global heating continued to gather pace. Meanwhile the previous failure of the United Nations’ climate negotiations in Copenhagen, which led to an even more spectacular collapse in Cancun, were air-brushed into “success” by armies of spin doctors. China’s yuan has become the most trusted global currency, helping to reinforce the continuing shift of moral and economic authority to Asia and the global South.
Web 2.0 journalist Julian Assange blew the whistle on an entire library of government chronicles, copping the petulant wrath of politicians and generals who dislike their sordid little secrets being aired in public. In Burma, comparable enemies of democracy graciously released Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest while in Thailand the year ended peacefully after the stirrings of a class revolution failed to muster the required momentum – at least for the time being…
As usual my personal life flaunted variegated shades throughout the year. Isaan New Life took off. The Constellation was born in a state of grace and love. A host of new ventures started at a pace that promises to be both exhilarating and exhausting. In 2010 I traversed the world several times, created a furor in the Thai Royal household by publishing a letter highlighting racism and injustice, resigned from Dhurakij Pundit University but accepted the Chair of Australia21, started work on my next book, Dancing with the Future, encountered enriching new friendships on all five continents and accompanied Suna to Japan and Europe where we witnessed the cherry blossom season in Kyoto, tried our hand at salmon fishing in Scotland, foraged for mushrooms in Stroud and enjoyed crusing the canals in Amsterdam. However the most incredible news was that I am to become a father once again. Our baby is due in June.
Inevitably I am drawn to speculating on what kind of a world our child will inhabit. Those who know me well understand that the more recent compulsion for my work springs from the dread of knowing I helped create a world that, in some respects, is hardly worth inheriting. In my quietest moments this is a huge burden. At least I want my children and grandchildren to know that I strived to instigate renewal; to help create a world that is intentionally different to the one manifesting today.
What might that effort look like and to what end? To many observers even the proposition of massive societal change might look, feel and smell like unwarranted insurgence and seditious in the extreme. But only, I suspect, because we have been conditioned to interpret radical ideas through the win-lose lens of scarcity and competition. Thus we instinctively respond to any inherent novelty in this regard as a threat to our quality of life or our standard of living - especially in the West. Or even as an unwarranted imposition on our hard-won freedoms and acquisitive tendencies.
Actually the imperative for whole societal change is more accurately described as intentional evolution, where such intentionality arises from a more sophisticated collective awareness of reality to that which currently prevails. Let me be clear: the imperative for whole-system change is not some kind of left-wing conspiracy aimed at shifting power from one group to another. Such a goal would be entirely inconsistent with our actual needs. On the contrary, intentional evolution transcends more primitive instincts by shifting attention to our mutual predicament, our shared humanity, rather than on individual fears of deficiency, deprivation or difference. In effect it builds on an integral knowledge base, harnessing the impetus to collaborate in the design of a society we would all gladly bestow on our children, and their children.
The most salient, indeed sacred, aim of evolutionary leadership in this context must be to seek paths that reach into the future by going beyond limits imposed by the “civilizational worldview” that pervades our existence and within which the human species is most certainly trapped.
It may help to define what I mean by the civilizational paradigm: that is the framework of unchallenged principles, beliefs and values that has given rise to our world-system – its institutions, structures and protocols. This belief system is not new. On the contrary it stretches back hundreds of years to a time in history when tribes and communities were just beginning to form.
In fact the civilizational worldview is not only enduring but immensely resilient. Over centuries it has been modified and shaped by differing cultural streams (most obviously Occidental, Indic and Sinic mindsets as well as more finely-grained hybrids of these) without seriously testing its underlying philosophy. Intriguingly the only cultural mindsets I have yet discovered that appear not to subscribe to the civilizational worldview are the various Aboriginal and pre-literate belief systems that honour a different social order and intent.
Outside of these pre-literate mindsets then, the civilizational ethos encompasses all political ideologies and class structures and is consequently one to which we all learned to submit, whether consciously or not. Its core is embodied in the following attributes:
- A hierarchical social order controlled by a privileged minority (an elite leadership for want of a better term) that remains largely unaccountable for its decisions and where serfdom (and even slavery) is used extensively to exercise power
- The pursuit of wealth through unlimited economic growth and expansion and the protection of this wealth (as well as the determination of how it is used) through a strictly measured allocation of resources sustained by an interwoven apparatus of political, legal and military elements
- An economic system, driven by notions of scarcity and competition, that vests title to the wealth produced by society in the elite
- The concentration of power and wealth in urban centres as well as widespread despoliation and plundering of the rural environment and wilderness
- A grand mythology and mythic narrative portraying society as originating from and continuing to be influenced by suprahuman powers with sectors of the elite as the official conduit of that influence
- A written language and accompanying symbolism that is absorbed and monopolised by the elite and its functionaries particularly in the reification of the civilizational illusion
- Education, labour and corrective systems designed to serve the aims of the elite while manufacturing and maintaining compliance with the designated social order
- A military establishment and industrial war machine utilised not only for external defence and aggression but also for internal control and repression.
I apologise for listing these attributes in a language evocative of repression, power and class struggle, but it really is the most apposite way to explain the essence of the civilizational ethos. And although as individuals we might find such an association confronting in the extreme, our collective memory and impulse resonates quite spontaneously with this paradigm precisely because most of us have known no other. Whether Chinese, European, Aztec, Zulu or Sikh, it has been the original, solitary, overarching worldview with which we have all complied. So far...
However we have made two fundamental errors in our abiding allegiance to it. Firstly, we have come to view progress within this single worldview as the zenith of human potential, one to which all people and societies should aspire. It is not. Secondly, we have assumed that the civilizational paradigm can solve all of the problems facing us today. Clearly it can not.
Now comes the appalling catch. Those readers who are paying attention will have realised that in order to transcend the civilizational worldview - to move beyond civilization to a world-system that is genuinely sustainable, less manipulative yet deeply liberating - we need to persuade the wealthy (that is you and me) in addition to our nominated elite (including monarchs, high wealth individuals, heads of state, corporate leaders, public intellectuals, and senior bureaucrats) to give up that which has brought such unprecedented affluence and power. As far as I can see the only way to pierce the bubble is by shedding our desire to accumulate more and more material wealth at any cost. But in order to achieve that our overwhelming narrative about who we are and what is important must morph from one that exalts competition and scarcity in every crack and crevice of public life to one that venerates cooperation and abundance without boundaries. Indeed abundance is the space in which evolutionary leadership must now manifest if our species is to advance beyond base materiality, futile conflict and rampant consumerism.
If you think such a situation is sheer fantasy, then take a look at what I am predicting will happen within the next quarter of a century; simply because it has to. As I look back on my life with such gratitude, and forward into the future with such hope, my deepest conviction is that we will witness a substantial shift in five conditions that serve to hold the civilizational worldview in place:
- Official diplomacy will be set aside so that the truth can be told openly, sincerely and without fear
- The wealthiest among us will cooperate to eliminate poverty and injustice
- Militarism and the industrial war machine that spawns terror and sustains conflict will start to unravel or be dismantled
- Communities will migrate to a steady-state (low growth) economy that jettisons reckless development and consumption in favour of replenishing the Earth’s natural resources
- The power currently vested in nation states will decline as human ingenuity opens up less exploitative and engaging forms of governance.
This is not an altogether idealistic wish list. Nor is it quite so mad as it looks. Indeed, as I have indicated consistently over the past decade or so, there are already signs that such a genesis is in train. Small, apparently insignificant tremors and recallibrations are evidence that more massive shifts are on the way. The commons movement is gaining an inexorable momentum, calling into question established notions of ownership and granting rights to the underprivileged. Open source and peer-to-peer mechanisms are unshackling ordinary men and women from under the yoke of large corporations. Networked communities are beginning to challenge allegiance to the nation state. Meanwhile people everywhere are beginning to tire of a dominant narrative and systems that isolate and alienate, that create fear and suspicion, and that propagate injustice and inequality.
Digital communications tools and social media are enabling alternative voices to be heard, free from the censorship and half-truths beloved of the establishment and state-controlled media. The recent hullabaloo surrounding Wikileaks, for example, is an indication that a majority of citizens are increasingly disdainful of officialdom, believing truth and integrity to be far more indispensable than complicit agreement with the elite's belief in their right to preserve clandestine reports and activities. In fact the leaked documents are shocking not because they reveal profound state secrets (lets face it there is more tittle-tattle than profundity here) but because they illustrate (a) that the government-military alliance is in effect a vast terrorist machine perpetrating mass murder in our name; (b) an alarming dearth of true leadership in the propaganda many elected representatives are prepared to invent simply to bolster their illusion of power; and (c) the fact that democracy itself has gone feral given that we now owe our allegiance to autocratic leaders who obtain our consent through massive duplicity.
Another case in point derives from the Cancun climate accord which seems to me to be indefensible in the way it fails to deal with climate justice. The text of the accord replaces binding mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with voluntary assurances that are utterly inadequate, at least if we are not to exceed a rise in global temperature of 2 degrees Celsius. Filled with bureaucratic ambiguities the accord allows numerous loopholes for polluters, opportunities for expanding traditional carbon markets and other mechanisms that reduce the obligation of developed countries to lead.
Ultimately international negotiations will need to bite the bullet or risk irrelevancy. Sadly, a convenient lie has become all that powerful nations are willing to offer, while they ignore scientists' exhortations to act radically now. Unbelievably Bolivia was the only nation in Cancun to refuse to sign the accord. Bolivia’s logic is clear: they are perturbed that yet another US-European managed, neo-colonial process, will result in the justification and continuation of a failed “development” model and the emergence of additional market-based mechanisms that aim not to solve the problem of global heating but rather to profit from it.
Who knows, perhaps they also grasp the fact that we are facing not just a serious environmental crisis but a global ecological collapse in the broadest sense. Whatever the motivation, this act of principle by one of the poorest nations on the planet appears to be reigniting the determination of others in a similar position not to comply with the traditional power elite.
Indeed support for Bolivia’s stand is forthcoming from diverse networks across Asia and the global South. Comprising men and women, rural communities and farmers, fisher folk, indigenous peoples, formal and informal workers, climate migrants, youth and urban poor (communities who are among the marginalized and most vulnerable due to climate change) the members of these networks comprehend that their lives and their futures are at stake.
All of which indicate a tentative breakdown in the key elements required to preserve the current worldview and a positive sign that we can evolve to a fresh worldview (beyond civilization) more just and benign than that some of us have enjoyed and are now chossing to reject. Ironically I view a breakdown in the established order as an essential pre-requisite for the future survival of our species. Call that revolution if you like, although I am no revolutionary. I am confident, however, that we can evolve in ways that are wise, socially liberating, and do not require us to go back to the dark ages.
But there is a tension within me for I, too, have been indoctrinated within the bubble of the civilizational paradigm. So although I believe the excessive habits of the rich (especially our astonishing levels of production and consumption) are totally unsustainable, I cannot bring myself to accept the oft-heard conspiracy theory suggesting deliberate, organised, attempts by the world’s elite to cling to power through any means. I need to believe in the good intentions of people, whether serfs or leaders, and in our capacity as a species for adaptation and, yes, transcendance.
On the other hand one huge question lingers in my mind. It relates to the speed at which we are prepared to change. Whether we like it or not, whether we "get" it or not, those factors defining the civilizational worldview which I articulated above are obsolete, utterly out of kilter with our needs and the limits imposed by physics. We have reached a point in the human story where, in order to survive and thrive, leaders must create the conditions for their own decline - in terms of wealth and power. This is metamorphosis and to suggest this will require a degree of altruism, audacity and wisdom that is unbearably rare is a huge understatement.
Whether the members of a system we have deliberately installed over many centuries are sufficiently enlightened to even comprehend this, or possess the collective capability to design what is in effect a new society, remains to be seen. It requires letting go of old knowledge and ways of knowing, unprecedented application of imagination and innovation, and an unwavering commitment to collaboration.
The clock is ticking. Uncertainties are plentiful. And, of course, many people see no need to change the habits of a lifetime. “Let future generations deal with the problem” is their catch-cry. I cannot live with that thought. Success will most likely depend on the patience of the world’s poor, the ability of young people everywhere to invest in the creation of a world-system far beyond today’s materialistic models, and a willingness from people of all creeds and persuasions to set aside pettiness, fear and superstition in order to combat economic, energy and environmental issues in ways that will provide us with the breathing space needed to design the next great worldview.
I am grateful to Keith Chandler and his study into mindsets and value systems for helping me to articulate the set of eight attributes depicting the civilizational worldview in this blog.
