The Outlier
Throughout my career I have frequently been accused of being a heretic or, possibly more politely, an outlier – a prophet of things to come but hardly pertinent to present imperatives. In the latter context I am supposedly too idealistic. A dreamer, romantic, perfectionist perhaps. But most definitely not a pragmatist. These allegations have been repeated so often and in varying circumstances I suppose they must contain an element of truth.
As I recall they started at secondary school when I insisted on studying both music and science, a bizarre request at the time though not so uncommon today. Actually I recall the expression actually used by my teachers at the time was troublemaker. But troublemaker is close enough to heretic for you to discern a pattern. At university I protested about the incompetence of some of my teachers – although the sit-down strike I organised on the grand staircase of The Royal College of Music just prior to a visit by Her Majesty Elizabeth the Queen Mother was, I confess, a little over the top. It also resulted in my immediate suspension which was not the aim. Notoriety seemed to follow me after that…
When I became a university lecturer, a tendency to take pot shots at the ludicrous rules and regulations that simply got in the way of teaching guaranteed an eventual falling out with the authorities. My entry into the consulting profession was, befittingly, via the path of continuous process improvement, or Total Quality Management. I was recently reminded that the question I most often posed to my peers at that time was How could you not notice the stupidity of this? Which, to allay any suspicion that I was unfairly targeting one individual, was rapidly followed by Are we having fun yet?
More recently the pretentiousness of some of my clients, especially those who should know better, irritated me to the extent that they became the deliberate object for my tacit heretical inclinations. A few political leaders, senior bureaucrats and CEOs have been particularly intent on sustaining the “Hames as Heretic” myth. This is unsurprising. Let’s face it, those that aren’t actually psychopathic can be so…. Oh you know! Out of their depth. Confused actually.
With the possible exception of romantic, none of the labels that stuck express my preferred way of occurring to people - especially with those who do have the authority, capital or influence to actually change things for the better. Yes, I am certainly an advocate of change but it is still surprising to me how even that innocuous tag can strike fear and trepidation where it is least expected, especially in the Board rooms of banks, large mining and chemical companies, industrial military complexes and, naturally enough, the cabinet offices of our elected government representatives.
Of course there are many like myself who agitate for better futures, improving the ways we interact and work with each other, correcting injustices, and treading more lightly on the Earth. But in my old age I am becoming far more conscious of the need to provide my fellow heretics (or troublemakers) with the means to neutralise negativity and even outright hostility. For the value of alternative (oft perceived as dissenting) opinion cannot be under-estimated. Nor must it be silenced.
But herein lies an uncomfortable paradox: foresight gives rise to insights but insights cannot be appreciated without the gift of foresight. What could possibly be the reason to change what one does if there is no change in external circumstances? Heretics do not simply want to improve things. Their passion for change arises from their perception regarding the underlying rationale for change. It is in the communicating of both the need for change and the nature of such changes that the difficulties arise. As Nietzsche famously observed: Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music….
So now I am going to get serious. There appear to be at least five reasons many people cannot "hear the music" to which most heretics dance. These reasons become barriers inhibiting the kinds of renewal (political, social and economic) many of us seek. They have nothing to do with technological invention, infrastructure or investment capital, and very little to do with politics. In fact all five of the factors I can identify are relatively intangible. What they do have in common is an affiliation to the cultural or psychological space within which we have typically responded to shifting ambiguous and uncertain conditions.
Very simply stated these factors are (i) the detachment of ideas from social relations; (ii) fears and apprehension engendered through an apparent lack of control as well as a distrust of other people’s motives; (iii) redundant mindsets; and (iv) the fragmentation of endeavours. Each of these barriers need to be resolved or accommodated in order for change to embed and, as a consequence, for us heretics to die with a smile on our faces. They are stated here purely as an indication of the depth of the problems we face as a species. Not heretics. Humans!
1. Detachment of Ideas & Social Relations
As the umbilical bond human beings have with each other intensifies we become more highly attuned to a global community of mind as an experiential phenomenon. Increasingly we feel an integral part of a cohesive human family. At the same time it can be deeply disturbing to have to acknowledge the harm we keep doing to each other.
When it comes to tangible events and issues, however, the opposite condition seems to prevail. Here, critical matters facing humankind are becoming decoupled from each other in our cognitive analysis of them. We no longer discern their inherent relatedness. On the contrary they most often occur to us as entirely separate issues. But in first seeking that which separates one idea from another we fail to discern and appreciate the key pattern that connects as Gregory Bateson so eloquently put it.
So when we tackle dynamically complex issues (like climate change, natural disasters, population growth or terrorism, for example) we continue to apply the same linear thinking, usually with even greater enthusiasm than before and in the knowledge that our solutions are not working and cannot possibly work, yet fail to go back to the drawing board in order to design a world-system where such undesirable symptoms would simply vanish.
There are some fundamental reasons for this, though I suspect most are by no means as indelibly etched into the human psyche as those alarmists who see the end of civilization looming in the rear view mirror, would have us believe:
Myopia: Because we operate within our own paradigmatic confines we can easily become blind to the obvious, including stuff that really matters. The signs of a world-system in trouble are evident, but only to those possessing sufficient bandwidth to perceive them as such. It is more common for us to be misled, distracted by the many thousands of iterations of just a few seminal messages that smudge clarity and mutate meaning into inconsequential nonsense. This consensual illusion has us believe we are operating with more information when, in fact, we are becoming indoctrinated with less information.
If that were not disturbing enough many warning signs are not appearing on our radar screens, either because they are imperceptible to us culturally, or are showing up only at the intersections of our knowledge. With few exceptions we are no longer in the habit of looking for truth at the edge. Instead our senses are glued to celebrity, scandal, disasters, sensational events conveyed in epigrammatic video clips and ephemeral tweets. Even if we were looking in the right places we lack the tools to bring into sharp focus what we might see there. In other words the territory has changed but our maps and reasoning have not kept pace. We have all become so busy interpreting what is going on from our own, deeply embedded, meaning structures that we have become blind to the obvious, the ordinary and the easily observed.
Despair: Most of us find the complex nature of change incomprehensible. Consequently most of us are out of our depth most of the time - deficient in the capacity to make sense of what is going on at anything more than a superficial level. Worse still, as hype around our most critical issues escalates, our ability to confront important matters is overwhelmed by a belief that such dreadful events can surely not be happening to us. It is simply too much to bear.
The result is that collective cognition shuts down - or diverts to less existential matters, like sporting events, entertainment, gossip and other comforting distractions. This is known as apocalypse fatigue. People suffering from this condition feel helpless to do anything about the issues confronting them. They would much rather ignore any threat to their own existence by acting as if it isn’t true, shrug their shoulders in despair, or turn away from reality simply because it is too dreadful to contemplate.
Ultimately there is only one question that really matters. Whatever happens over the next few decades the wealthy will survive. The four billion or so people who are not so fortunate will be wiped out. Do we really care? If so, what should we be doing about it?
Exclusion: The occidental mind is supremely rational, responding best to deductive logic which it values over alternative methods of knowing. Accordingly those of us in the West have been conditioned into building and dissecting structures one piece at a time. We have been taught to analyse and measure critical dimensions before applying problem-solving techniques to re-engineer those parts under stress.
Using this logic results in solutions ranging from the brilliant to the commonplace. Method, on the other hand, remains consistent - dependent upon ranking and available resources. So one or more parts of a structure (those perceived to be the weakest links) are improved while other parts are ignored. When we see deterioration in different parts of the structure we switch our attention to those elements and ignore the parts we were working on.
While we in the West have become very adept at this kind of structural reductionism we have neglected to develop similar expertise in the design of resilient and enduring systems. Our greatest weakness is in applying deductive logic to every challenge facing humanity. By excluding alternative ways of knowing, including indigenous wisdom, we are requiring all other cultures to engage through the ideology of the occidental mind should they wish to participate in their own survival.
Overload: We are assailed by all kinds of information every hour of our waking lives. It has been known for some time that too much information causes a condition known as sensory overload. This produces disorientation and a lack of responsiveness as well as lowering our ability to make accurate predictions.
Not only does sensory overload make it more difficult for us to express and comprehend complex systems, constructing effective long-term solutions becomes even more problematic when we are exhausted by the very information that might have the solution embedded within it.
Displacement: We have developed an uncommon ability to shift or assign blame. It’s someone else’s problem is a conditioned reflex most commonly acquired through our instruction-based, rather than inquiry-based, educational methods. As we are routed into careers, social memes, and classes, we develop a highly refined sense of what is in our purview. We seek public sector solutions to our wantonly excessive consumption. We rely upon government intervention when our sick and aging need care. We look to the police for community relations. We look to the clergy for morality. Regardless of evidence showing a lack of cognitive alignment within our collective transmuted accountability someone else should remains our dominant modus operandi.
And then, when these systems fail, we animate them with our projections of an accountability that they never accepted in our opening premise. By focusing on the role of leaders and obsessing on artefacts of hierarchical structure we have lost our moorings on citizenship and personal responsibility within community. In reality we are the problems we project on others. But then we, too, are the capacity to solve the same.
2. Fears & Apprehension
In spite of a highly controlled machinery of denial, misinformation and propaganda pervading modern society a growing minority of people vaguely comprehend the seriousness of our predicament. A few are even trying to do something about it as can be seen by recent civic protest and social unrest. But having a partial sense of a situation beyond our control has also encouraged society’s communicators to go to town in ways that exploit our growing sense of angst and that are detrimental to longer-term planetary solutions.
For example, some journalists have leapt on discrete issues to push their own frenzied (often negative, cynical and commercial) self-interests. As a consequence most memes dealing with the contemporary human condition are conveyed via a strange mix of edgy fear coupled to competitive dogma rather than from a sense of hope, inspiration and abundance. It must be said that some recent strategies by celebrity politicians and well-meaning activists have also unintentionally contributed to an overwhelming feeling of helplessness that has much of humanity in a vice-like grip.
3. Redundant mindsets
Most of the seeds responsible for today’s rampant damage across so many sectors of society were sown during the industrial revolution. Those seeds (which economic historian Niall Ferguson identifies as the Protestant work ethic, democracy, medicine, consumerism, competition and the scientific method) all exhibited a way of thinking that was uniquely occidental in their approach to economic growth, innovation and development. According to Ferguson they were ultimately responsible for the success of Western economies. Unfortunately these same “killer apps” have recently culminated in blatantly exploitative mechanisms of production – variants of the capitalist ethos that have become driven by greed and are designed to promote the acquisition of wealth above any other goal. I have no doubt this development will turn out to be the Achilles heel of capitalism.
Unfortunately many developing states, including China , have started to emulate this model, or hybrids of it. But because of the exponential demand for food, water, energy and goods from the seven billion people who inhabit this planet, a perfect storm of economic and social flaws inherent in the original design is about to break. In spite of this, all relevant societal memes are predicated on the notion that the rational occidental mindset, values and beliefs (including that of competitive conduct) hold the key to societal renewal.
From a Western perspective this is hubristic narcissism at its worst. Western views of progress (often embedded in technological positivism) already border on the irrelevant in most non-Western traditions. Future solutions to the civilizational problem must of necessity "integrate and transcend" current mindsets if they are to be effective. That means giving an appropriate voice to those cultures, along with giving credence to alternative economic and social modes of development, and elevating the importance of universal cooperation.
The political inertia we see all around us does not spring from apathy or any lack of a desire to change but the prevalence of competitive behaviour and the lack of collaboration. Competition traps us in circumstances where it is expected that we fight others in order to safeguard our own narrow, parochial interests. Thus the lack of any real political leadership is first and foremost the result of us succumbing to an obsolete economic paradigm with its associated suite of constraints concerned with preserving the national interest.
The fact is we are beholden to mechanisms, from the nation state to the G20 and even the United Nations, that effectively hinder collaboration on a planetary scale. Conventional wisdom maintains that we are fundamentally competitive social beings. Most biological evidence points to the contrary. But this is part of the paradigm we must shatter in order for the communal needs and interests we all share to shine through.
5. The fragmentation of endeavours
If the lack of a unified vision or platform for change is a serious issue then the splintering of any common strategic focus and alignment are huge contributing factors to a demoralizing diffusion and dilution of energy. Currently there are myriad discrete and well-meaning initiatives, strategies, campaigns, movements and media all vying for our attention and funding across a range of theatres. Such diversity is overwhelming and a distraction in its own right. There is also far too much talk and not nearly enough inspired leadership for action attached to these ventures.
The key will be to find strategic acupuncture points that liberate new energy flows that concentrate and embed entrepreneurial passion and innovations within the world-system. A critical element in this regard will be investment capital for renewal. The injection of capital and resources from business and high net worth individuals is still channeled overwhelmingly into old ‘sunset’ industries and interests, including the servicing of war and conflict which is the world’s most highly profitable business. Two things must change:
- Firstly new business models must be invented to challenge prevalent assumptions governing investment, value and profitable exchange, ultimately making it more attractive to invest in things like renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, charitable agencies and alternative governance systems
- Secondly, however inconceivable or idealistic it might seem, we must wean ourselves off military combat. Peace is a prerequisite for societal renewal. We cannot create peace by practising warfare.
The Heretic’s Dilemma
So here is our poison chalice. For the first time in recent history we are faced not with a simple problem requiring a simple solution, but with a fiercely diabolical human condition – a world-system so immensely and dynamically complex that even the most sophisticated reductionist thought, coupled to rational evidence and the most incredible breakthroughs in technology, are totally insufficient to correct the unintended consequences of our defective design.
Heretics are often at the forefront of envisaging what can and should be done (in terms of systemic renewal) yet insist on using old tools and old thinking to communicate both what we perceive to be the predicament in addition to the potential solutions to that predicament. The alternatives, neither of which I can possibly recommend, are either to rein-in one's ambitions for change in compliance with a status quo that resists all attempts at renewal, or continue to use technological positivism and the unambiguous myths of human progress to make extravagant claims regarding the "inevitable fusion of man and machine" that, ultimately, create even greater anxiety in a system already burdened with uncertainty.
Of necessity we must devote far greater effort into designing entirely new approaches to communicating these matters or continue to suffer the consequences of being pushed aside as an irrelevance. The first task will be to address the cultural and psychological barriers that allow so many of us to cast aside both fierce logic and unbounded intuition in favour of blind habit. Little attention is being paid to that task at the moment....
Final thoughts
Come to think of it, who would actually choose to be a heretic? If I could go back to my school days, with the wisdom that comes from hindsight, perhaps I would choose to study music or science. But then again, I might just miss all the provocation and the notoriety. So.....
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They are not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you cannot do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. - Apple Computers
