Musings on the nation state

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Nearly all of us hold a special place in our hearts for the land where we were born and raised. That is a normal, human, positive connection to the Earth and our place on it, which can inspire us to cherish and steward our heritage.  But when we turn that sense of place into ‘patriotism’ it acquires toxic overtones of superiority, privilege and exclusiveness that deny our common humanity.

The “nation state” as a concept evolved in Europe during the 16th and 17th century. It was a response to the disintegration of Catholic Christendom following the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism – instead of identifying as Catholic Christians, people were asked to define themselves by the political region in which they lived.

In England, the concept of nationality was cemented into the culture during the reign of Elizabeth I. Instead of owing allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, as God’s intermediary, people owed allegiance to the monarch, the “Defender of the Faith.” Protestant England, standing firm against the power of Catholic Europe – and particularly the power of Spain – was the ‘sceptred isle’, to be defended with the heart of a lion, and Elizabeth could have had no better propagandist for this vision than William Shakespeare. The subtle messages of his plays has spread throughout the English-speaking world.  

It was a story that came to the fore during two World Wars, particularly WW2 when Churchill mined these tropes to consolidate support for British resistance to Nazi expansionism. It is worth noting, however, that for most ordinary Brits, Britain and the Allies were fighting against an aggressive vision of white (Aryan) supremacy which happened to arise in Germany.

It is a vision that could equally well have gained power in Britain.  Images of a special place and a special people, blessed by a Protestant god, spawn the idea of a superior people who have the right to dominate and exploit others. Hence, Elizabeth’s reign ushers in the blossoming of the British Empire, together with the myth that it was ‘better’ than other Empires, carrying democracy, bureaucracy, the Protestant religion and the Protestant work ethic on its shoulders.

This mythical Britain has reached all around the world, and underpins the culture of former Imperial colonies, notably in America and Australia. Substitute the ‘sceptred isle’ for the ‘land of the free’ and the story is just the same.

It is time to part company with that story, and all the Imperialist notions that go with it. The exploitational Imperial model the European nations created majors on trade and continuous economic growth, and it has brought us to the brink of environmental disaster. We have just the one world to live in, and we have only our common humanity to guide us in how we survive the environmental crisis. So let us truly love our land, and work with others who love their land, to keep it rich and bountiful for generations to come.

Freedom, self-determination and belonging

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Freedom is a philosophical concept that politicians and lay-people like myself would do well to tread warily around. Wild animals are not “free”, they are wild. They concern themselves with the basics of living – feeding, sleeping and reproducing.

When it comes down to it, most people would like the freedom to concern themselves mainly with these things, too. They certainly do not flourish in a society that denies them time to eat, time to rest and time to nurture relationships.

We must stop conflating freedom with privilege; privilege does not respect the freedoms of others. 

I believe what we generally mean when we talk about “freedom” is actually self-determination; agency over our own lives. The wealthy have an enormously privileged position in the world, and wealth gives you the security to explore your individual potential. To dream, to experiment, to create. To take risks, and act irresponsibly. 

But the security that allows individuals to do these things comes ultimately from belonging to a stable society, based on trust. Unstable societies breed insecurity, fear and hate. Destroy the trust, de-stabilise society, and you lose your freedom. All your wealth goes on security and defence against the hostile forces surrounding you. The un-governed engine runs out of control until it tears itself to pieces.

Self-determination, or ‘agency’, is recognised as a fundamental requisite for human wellbeing, but so too is a sense of belonging. We are not isolated individuals. We are social animals, who depend on each other. The security that gives individuals freedom of self-determination comes not from amassing wealth, but from nurturing a caring, compassionate society that respects the worth of each individual human being purely because they are a human being – not because of what they contribute to the economy.

Compassion is not a soft, optional extra; it is an essential survival trait. Unfortunately, it’s one the wealthiest sector of British society – the ones with a natural path into positions of power and authority – systemically undermine in their children by severing family links at an early age and placing their offspring in the care of educational institutions frequently modelled on militaristic lines. They are taught to base their sense of self-worth in an arrogant self-belief that they spend their lives striving to live up to. It makes them terrified of facing the truth. Of being found out. They have to live the lie. 

This concept of self-determination and belonging applies not only to our identity as individuals, but also to our collective identity; our nationality.

Both Brexit and Scottish Independence are arguments about the right to national self-determination; but while the SNP have embraced the global concept of Wellbeing as a unifying message to shape the Scottish identity, the Brexiteers have clung to worn-out, Imperialistic notions of national identity. Deluded by the myth of the ‘self-made man’ and the dangerous concept of national exceptionalism (the same myth that underpinned the Third Reich) they have gone down the road of isolationism. There is no future in isolationism; it is fed purely by a desperate desire to ringfence the status quo. The system that has got us into this mess in the first place.

The future of political decision-making needs to be localised, humanised, and optimised for survival on planet Earth. But the systemic social and environmental threats to our civilisation are global. We tackle them together, equitably, or we won’t tackle them at all. Survival is not compulsory.

Shaihen Heritage: The Executive Summary

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I was challenged the other day to summarise the insights, in terms of re-shaping economics, that I gained from writing the Shaihen Heritage series. That’s quite an ask – but I gave it a go. The books are my own personal journey of learning and discovery, so I don’t claim any of what I have to say is new. But this is it.

The core insight I discovered is that the only reality is life and death and the natural cycles and systems that arise from mortality. Everything else – the concept of a ‘Fair Land’, or any other vision of how human beings interact with each other and the rest of life on Earth, arises from human imagination. It’s a story. It’s only reality derives from the fact that a sufficient number of people believe the same story that it has agency in human society. It is “true” because we behave as if it is “true”.

So “capitalism” is a story, and “communism” is a story. The whole body of economic theory is a collection of stories.

If economics were a science, the stories would be continually challenged by rival theories. We would be looking at what happens when those stories are enacted, and how closely aligned the lived experience is to the theory. We would be continually adjusting the theory in the light of new information. But once we drew battle lines between the rival camps of “left-wing politics” and “right-wing politics” that was never going to happen. Each side claimed ownership of the ‘truth’ and saw theories which disproved their own tenets as enemies to be shot down, suppressed or denied.

That’s not science. That’s religion. The ‘continual growth’ theory of capitalist economics and the rampant, nihilistic consumerism it drives has the same hold on human imagination as any other heirarchical religion which sets up groups of humans as interpreters of God’s will. It cannot be challenged. Criticism is blasphemy. Dissent is a punishable crime. If the lived experience does not fit the theory, those in power (which, in a democracy, can simply be the majority of ordinary people) would rather deny the lived experience than adjust the theory.

The first thing we need to do therefore is to make economics a science, rooted in reality. We need to define its aim – which I suggest is to create a system that enables human beings to survive, and live peaceably alongside each other (since we have the capability to destroy ourselves and the planet if we don’t live peaceably alongside each other.) The economic system we create to achieve that needs to continually be taking soundings against reality to adjust the theory so that it functions as a chaotically adaptive system able to work within the constraints of the chaotic adaptive system we call “life”. Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Model” captures this far more learnedly than I can.

However, to lose the stranglehold of consumer capitalism and make the human behaviour change necessary for the survival of life on Earth, we need to be telling ourselves different stories. We need to go back to the root of reality, and re-discover our spiritual connection to warp and weft of life and death.

The story I subscribe to is that every human being is a sovereign individual. But we can only realise our potential as sovereign individuals by acknowledging that we are part of the chaotic adaptive system of life on Earth. That is what should govern our actions. When our actions negatively impact others and the natural world around us, they negatively impact on us too. We feel it in our bodies. It creates anguish in our large brains, to which different personality types respond in various ways – arrogant and aggressive denial, helpless despair and cynicism, or a courageous resolve to remain true to reality and re-write the stories we’re telling ourselves.

Humans are social animals – we cannot function as individuals without connecting to each other and to the culture shaped by our ancestors. But sovereignty cannot belong both to an individual and a nation. Thinking of ourselves as British or American, French or Russian, black or white, male or female, is helpful for building a sense of community, for understanding our past and how we belong together, but it is not helpful when it becomes exclusive and arrogant, when it starts telling a story that my group is superior to your group, or, worse, that my group has a right to steal the future from every other group. Culture and community should be about celebrating our humanity, not about oppression and dominion.

That’s about as good a summary as I can come up with.

Why We Argue Over Politics

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…when we fundamentally agree with each other. 

All through the arguments over leaving the EU, there was an underlying mantra that Brexit represented the will of the British people, democratically expressed through a referendum.

Which was true.

No matter how much we might quibble over the goalposts, the numbers, or the quality of information provided to the electorate, Leave won an overall majority. That victory was further enforced at the last General Election, when the Conservatives were voted into power with a commanding majority on a promise to “get Brexit done”.

This is democracy in action, isn’t it? 

Well, no. It isn’t, actually. It’s a demonstration that the political system we are ruled by is not democracy. It is democratised capitalism. People are only ever asked how they want their capitalism, hard or soft. 

If we genuinely had a democratic political system designed to reflect the will of the people, we would not need referendums. Those in power would have a constant feed of information telling them what people thought. If European legislation was causing friction and discontent, that would have been investigated and dealt with in negotiation with our European partners. If immigration was causing disquiet and social tension, a truly democratic government would have intervened way before it descended into racist slanging matches. It would have investigated the root causes of the disquiet and social tension, and worked with communities to resolve them. Similarly with any abuse of the benefits system, real or perceived. It would have restored harmony where there was discord, and allowed everyone to get on with their lives.

I believe this is fundamentally what the majority want – the freedom to get on with our lives and not have to concern ourselves with politics. We want a just and fair society where we can be rewarded for our own efforts, and criminals feel the weight of the law. We want a robust public safety net which catches us when age, illness or misfortune knocks our independence for six. We want good infrastructure that means we can communicate effectively, trade competitively, and live in peace with other nations. We want to feel proud of our towns, our landscape, and ourselves. We want the bounty of nature respected and protected from human greed and ignorance. 

That is what democratic government should deliver. That is the will of the people. But what we have is a political system based on a power struggle between the owners of the capital and the people who have to work to acquire it. It’s a bargain forced on capital by its need for labour, and it only ever gives people what they can wrest from its grudging hands. In return, capital demands its pound of flesh, as it always has done. You work at the hours capital demands at the jobs capital demands, for the pay the market determines.

As automation increasingly reduces capital’s need for labour, so the bargaining power of the working population decreases. Public services are seen as unnecessary expenses. The demands of working people fall on deaf ears, and people without capital begin to be seen as expendable. This is not to say that the people running the system hold such views, let alone the people voting for them, but they simply don’t understand what the machine they are cranking the handle of is designed to do.

For those who have capital, however modest an amount, the machine has delivered comfort and prosperity – which they perceive to have been achieved through their own efforts – and they can see nothing wrong with it. For those without capital however, the outlook is bleak. Their bargaining power is reduced to the power of persuasion. Their access to basic human rights relies on the charitable instincts of those in power. There is no compulsion on capital to take any notice of them. The system attaches no value to them.

We are experiencing the kind of government this produces. When COVID-19 hit us Britain, like America, traded the lives of its citizens to preserve the interests of capital. Individuals and small businesses are being left to cope with the catastrophic economic consequences of the pandemic alone, while public money largely goes to the big owners of capital. We are seeing billions of pounds wasted on inept, if not downright corrupt, public procurements. We have seen health workers left unprotected, and care workers and those they look after abandoned to die. Key workers who stepped up to the challenge of a pandemic, often at considerable personal risk, are rewarded with empty words and a pay freeze.

Boris Johnson’s bumbling incompetence in handling both the coronavirus pandemic and Britain’s exit from the European Union, and the on-going tragedy of a mentally unstable US President systematically destroying a country that vaunted itself as the “leader of the free world” are both sad products of the system of democratised capitalism.

It doesn’t work.

It’s destroying the conditions for life on earth.

We need something better. We do not need strong government. We need good government. And all the time politicians simply have to periodically ask an ill-informed electorate for their opinion, we’re not going to get one.

Whether you are a business entrepreneur or unemployed, a farmer or a technologist, an executive manager or a homemaker, schoolchild or pensioner, this is our country and we need a government that works for us. All of us. We won’t get that until we have a truly democratic system that puts people in charge and capital in the servants quarters.

Telling the story

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So, Leaving on the Tide is with the publisher (New Generation Publishing) and Hills of Gold will be following shortly once I’ve summoned up the courage to part with the manuscript.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my guinea-pig readers, Helen, Dan and Annette, and to my wonderful editor, fellow author Karen Tucker. Not to mention Andy for putting up with me throughout the process and keeping me well-fed and watered (or rather, tea-ed).

It’s ten years since I published my last book, Spirit of Shehaios in 2010. The world and I have changed quite a lot in that decade, and this time round I have had the experience to be able to stand back just a little and observe the writing process. I thought maybe it is worth sharing some of those observations.

The key thing I figured out is that I have to tell the story to myself first. That’s the reason I write. I do not want to re-hash someone else’s story, follow someone else’s formula. I am on a journey of discovery. I want to know what happens next – but when I turn the page it’s blank. So I’ve got to figure it out from the clues already laid in the pages with writing on.

I once saw the late, great Terry Pratchett give a talk at Winchester Writers Conference, in which he compared starting a new novel to standing on one side of a cloud-filled valley. Your travelling companions – your key characters – are standing beside you, but you don’t necessarily know them all that well. You have no shared experiences. They tell you their back-story as you travel on together through the plot. And you don’t really know where that plot is going to go. You can just about make out the end-point of the journey in the hills opposite you, but you have to go down into the clouds and bumble about a bit before you can emerge on the other side.

Quite often, I find I’m climbing up the valley on the opposite side heading for the final destination, only to find I’ve lost one of my characters in the mist. Or left them stranded at the start of the story. I have to go back and retrieve them.

When Grant and I used to do hill-walking with the Scouts, the rule was always that one of the more experienced members of the group should be the back-marker, staying with the slowest member of the party to make sure no stragglers got lost along the way. (Our collie, Megan, considered it her job to keep us rounded up, but she tended to just race backwards and forwards between the fit and determined heroes at the front and the strollers sub-group at the back.)

Karen has been my “back-marker”, pointing out the missing links, the bits that don’t quite work from the reader’s perspective, and the sections where I’d left behind the scaffolding I’d built to construct the narrative on. Usually because I was in love with the words and phrases I’d used. Sometimes I was able to salvage my favourite phrases and put them in the mouths of my characters. Sometimes, they just had to go.

That’s the point about recognising that my early drafts are always about telling the story to myself. Although they do contain quite a lot of dialogue, as my characters tell me what’s happening to them, they tend to be heavy on exposition. On telling the story, rather than showing it as it unfolds. Telling the story to myself is the bit I find most exciting and rewarding. This is the part of the process that feels as if it’s coming from somewhere beyond myself, as I reach down into all the memories and experience buried in my subconscious, absorb influences from the news and stories surrounding me and process my emotional responses into the thoughts and actions of my characters. But it’s the very opposite of what works best for the reader. For the reader to invest time and emotion in reading the story, they need to be able to engage with the characters and travel through the plot with them. The motivations buried in the back-stories of the character; the history that shapes their present; the root causes of their problems and dilemmas need to become apparent as the story unfolds – they can’t be pointed out in flashing neon letters.

I used to struggle with the idea that when the final work failed to connect with people, failed to make its mark on the world in any meaningful way, that negated it’s significance to me. The conception of the story taught me so much, meant so much to me, it hurt that it meant so little to anyone else. But if it meant as much to others as it meant to me, it would have been a work of genius. And my rational brain knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a work of genius. So I didn’t know how to value it. I vacillated between valuing it at nothing and defensively thinking of it as having the enormous value it had to me. Not the most helpful state of mind to conduct a sales campaign in.

Whenever I finish that early drafting process, I have always needed a friendly reader to validate the story and persuade me that it’s worth polishing for publication. Because all I am aware of is the extraordinary, emotional, exhilarating process of creating it. I have no idea if there is anything in it that makes sense to anyone else. Grant used to be that reader – I always knew if it didn’t make sense to him it wouldn’t make sense to anyone. This time round, my daughter Helen was able to fulfill that role. She was invaluable in helping me understand what I needed to retrieve from the mist and where the scaffolding was getting in the way. And in retrospect, I began to understand, with the help of a little mindfullness coaching, a little more about my writing process.

The first stage is an outpouring of personal creativity that for me is expressed in story-telling, through the written word – others paint, dance, play music, talk, make things in wood, till the soil or nurture plants. Train dogs. Restore steam engines. Whatever. We do it for the pleasure and satisfaction we get from doing it.

The second stage is to tell the story to others. And that requires technical skills and knowledge that needs to be learned. It’s something that can always be done better. So if my stories don’t connect to readers, it’s not because my story is worthless. It’s because I need to improve my skill in communicating the story.

Of course, I also have to recognise that many people – perhaps even most people – will not be interested in my journeys of exploration. They want something that takes them on a more familiar journey – they want a formulaic tale, a re-hash of a story they’ve read a hundred times before. There are times when I want that kind of a read too – that’s when I turn to a Georgette Heyer, or an Inspector Morse tale. I don’t write that kind of story. I don’t want to write that kind of story. So I will never write a best-seller.

I am retired. I write mainly for my own pleasure – in purely monetary terms, my books cost more than they generate, just as my music always has. I’m going to spend my time writing the books I want to write, whether or not they’re the books people want to read. But I do derive a lot of pleasure from sharing my work, so I do want to improve my craftsmanship. I want the modest number of readers I do have to have the best reading experience I can give them.  What I’m aiming to do is delight and intrigue the kind of people who want a book that makes them work a bit. Think a bit. Dig a bit deeper.

I want to do it with enough wit and skill to keep my reader turning the pages. I want to create characters who behave like real people, that the reader does not necessarily like, but can relate to. I want you to feel glee when the villain gets his come uppance. I want you to feel frustrated with the obstinance of the anti-hero and the naiveté of the hero. I want their adventures to make you smile and their tragedies to make you sad. My characters teach me a lot about human nature and human folly as I swivel my writer’s lens to look at the action from their point of view. I want to share those insights.

Those of us engaged in the folly of trying to create the Fair Land in the real world have a really important story to tell. It’s about the survival and evolution of human beings on planet Earth. It’s about being part of the complex adaptive system of life on the blue-green world of dreams.

What I see happening right now is that there is a bunch of us who have told the story to ourselves quite lucidly. We are passionate about the outpouring of creative thinking that went into that process, and we have a tendency to yell at people who have just opened the book, because they’re making rookie mistakes based on the most rudimentary grasp of the problem. We’re like Olympic athletes condemning a toddler who has just mastered walking. He comes to us beaming with pride because he can walk upright on his own two legs just like us, and we scowl at him because he can’t get near the world record for the 100 metre sprint. He gets tired walking down the garden path, and we’re trying to coach him to run a marathon. How would you feel if that happened to you? Or worse, it happened to your child?

Those of us who have been active in the environmental movement or campaigning for social justice for decades need to learn how to tell the story to the reader. In a way that people who don’t want to do the deep dive into the fascinating complexity of the chaotic adaptive system of life on planet Earth can relate to. Negating the story of their own experience, telling them what they should and shouldn’t do (or even what they should or shouldn’t think) is as counter-productive as trying to get them to think like people who are fascinated by the complexity of the chaotic adaptive system. It just isn’t going to build the social consensus we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle.

We need to start condemning less and celebrating more. We need to talk less about the problems and more about the destination, the joyous hope of life abundant, that contrasts so markedly with the dark fatalism of the old economic story. Then, and only then, can we trust each other to find a way of getting through the clouds to reach our destination.

Enjoy the journey.

Oh – and buy the book(s)!

The Politics of Hope

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I think what we have been experiencing in the last decade or more is not a political argument between the Right and the Left. It has been the politics of denial vs. the politics of protest. 

What we are starting to see is the politics of protest becoming the politics of hope. Rather than just condemning the shortcomings of the old system, we are now starting to talk about what the new one should look like. This is a change from negative to positive energy that I believe can only gather strength and momentum. 

The politics of denial arises from a conservative mindset that believes that you can keep everything in a constant state, just as it always was, familiar, safe, business-as-usual. This mindset simply denies the negative impact of business as usual. It denies the poverty and suffering caused to individuals. It denies the impoverishment of cultural life, and the stifling of enterprise, innovation and creativity caused by an economic system that is no longer fit for purpose. It denies, above all, the fatal impact on the natural environment – on Earth’s life support systems.

It is a mindset most often held by those who benefit most from business-as-usual, but those who suffer most can also cling tenaciously to it. The socially inequitable structures of power and wealth distribution that are locked into “business as usual” engender a sense of fear and insecurity in society as a whole. As a result people stick limpet-like to the old and familiar. The closest analogy is the wife who stays in an abusive relationship because her self-worth is at such a low ebb she is more afraid of the unchartered territory beyond the abuse than she is of the abuse itself.

The more the evidence against the status quo mounts, the more strident are the voices of denial. When spurious evidence fails them, they resort to downright lies. When the lies start to wear thin, they resort to bullying and coercion. The more you challenge them, the dirtier they fight. We’ve danced a long way down that road to hell already. How far do we have to go, I wonder, before the dancers realise where the siren voices are leading them?

The opposition to the politics of denial has, up to now, been the politics of protest. It is a constant reaction to the outrages of the denialists, a constant cry of pain from the victims – mainly from the spokespeople of victims who have no voice. The politics of denial simply does not acknowledge the pain and suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, the sick, the homeless, the refugees. Of wildlife, farm animals, or the Earth herself. Every petition, every pressure group, every protest and demonstration has been a reaction against something. But that’s all it’s been. It has no agency. It’s continually fighting on ground of the enemy’s choosing.

During the EU referendum there was never really a positive campaign to remain in the EU, there was just a campaign against Brexit. The Remainers gave the Brexit argument a power and agency it inherently lacked – because the Remain campaign was so negative, it made Brexit look like a positive step. So huge numbers of people who felt the pain of “business as usual”, without having the first idea what disease was causing that pain, voted for something totally bereft of all meaning and content. Brexit only looked good because it had been so attacked and vilified by those opposed to it. Implementing it cannot be other than a complete disaster, because we are replacing a stable and productive agreement with our European neighbours with an empty vessel, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. The effect on the UK economy, coming on top of COVID-19 and the biggest global recession we have ever experienced will be catastrophic. But I fear we will have to live through it now to learn that lesson.

Which brings me to the politics of hope, which is sorely needed with such a bleak prospect ahead of us. What we are beginning to see emerge in the new world COVID-19 has created is a coming together of all the channels of protest behind an agenda of positive change. We are beginning to see a consensus arising around prioritising the wellbeing of people and planet over the broken record of economic growth.

There remains a huge battle to be fought against the entrenched and powerful forces of business as usual. They have individuals held prisoner under the cosh of economic dependency, in debt and enslaved to a system that is shrivelling their souls and destroying the ecosystem we live in. Resistance to the broken record is difficult and painful and sometimes it is too much to ask of people who need to protect their families and vulnerable dependants.

The politics of hope provides escape routes for such people. It builds communities that support them, local economies that work for them, a network of colleagues and neighbours who respect and care for them. Only by growing the capacity and infrastructure that supports a mutual aid response to economic collapse can we move forward and rebuild a human civilisation fit for the 21st century.

It’s a massive change that will affect every single aspect of our lives. It can’t be done through the power structure of the old system with all the dysfunctional attributes of control-freakery embedded in it – the hero-syndrome of people in positions of power; the measurement dysfunction that underpins so much of our organisational structure; and the money-myth that disables our ability to create true wealth. It is a change that has to come from the bottom up, a grassroots movement that simply sidelines the centralised authority unless or until that centralised authority aligns itself with the direction of travel. Democratic politics is not about politicians telling people what to think through a sophisticated media circus feeding lies, half truths and fake news to a divided, unhappy and fearful population of disconnected individuals. It is about the people collectively telling politicians what kind of society we want, and holding them to account for delivering it. We need to re-connect politics to the lives, activities, hopes, aspirations and needs of ordinary people.

The UK Government has abdicated all responsibility for governing the country in the interests of the people of the country, and it is time to start asking why we are letting them have power over our lives? How does lying and conning their way to an election victory give them the right to wreck our economy, destroy our public services and eviscerate our communities? The bunch of incompetents currently holding office at Westminster got into power because they understood that it is not possible to control the “global village” we now live in. What they have done is hijack that myth of control to line their own pockets. But the more people realise that it is a complete myth that humans are ‘in control’ of nature, or the economy, or any of the chaotic adaptive systems in which we live, the more we can start to understand how things do work. As we grow in wisdom, so we are able to  wean ourselves off the poisonous narrative of blame and heroism that is paralysing human society with hate, misery, fear and insecurity.

Things work in ecosystems. Through a myriad different connections and interdependencies. We do not need control. We need connection. Human beings are both sovereign individuals and social animals – we need connection, communication and understanding.

It is a long journey we’re setting out on, but the longest journey starts with a single step. That single step is for each of us, individually, to learn how to respect life, human and otherwise. We can talk about where we go from there.

The Big Picture

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I am a writer of fantasy. I do world building. I do big picture stuff. Not very good on the detailed practical work. I am a relative newcomer to the world of environmental politics, and I’m really not an activist. I have only ever been on one protest march in my life – the peace march opposing the Iraq war. I just write stuff. Talk to people, if they’re interested in talking. Listen, if they have a good story to tell. You never know the truth until you have heard all the stories, and as you never hear all the stories, you never know the whole truth.

I am what one of my delightful Facebook friends calls the chattering liberal middle class. I don’t just write about a fantasy world, half the time I live there. It’s nicer than the fantasy world the mass media try and tell us is reality – all that doom and gloom and death. As if doom and gloom and death were not an intrinsic and indivisible part of life. Just as much as love, hope and laughter are. 

Our living, breathing presence on planet Earth is the only reality. The gift of life that is given to us at birth and taken from us at death, and the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system we are born into. Economy, society, politics, religion, nationality – these are all stories told by human beings about how human beings live on planet Earth. They only have credibility because a significant mass of human beings believe the same story. We can change those stories. We can believe in something better. We can’t change the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system, nor the impact our stories have on it. But belief – faith – can move mountains.

To change our whole global economic system is a huge ask, and I think it will take more than one generation. I also think if you take the long view, we’re making huge progress in the right direction, it just doesn’t look like it from the front line. Partly that is because the media constantly batter us with news of our defeats. Stories about the triumph of gloom, doom and death. But a lot of the reason is that we do think of it as a battle. We think in terms of winning it or losing it. We have been conditioned by the story of “good and evil” to think that all life is a battle between the two. You can see it that way. Or you can see it more like the Tai Chi philosophy, as a constant flow of energy from negative to positive, the tension between the two being what creates energy. AKA life. Evolution. Everything. The complex adaptive system reacts to the pull and push of that energy flow – so there is no ultimate victory. Every life, every day, every moment, contributes to the positive, or to the negative. And often to both. Like COVID-19. It’s a human tragedy. But a chance for Earth to take a breath after the hammering humanity has been giving it. Maybe teach us to use our adaptation for survival – our large brains – a bit more than we have been doing.

If you want a battle, then seek out humanity’s main competitor for the accolade of most successful life form on earth. Viruses. Once we start realising that all humanity is on one side and the “aliens” (the viruses) are on the other, we might start thinking differently about where we invest our energy, resources and capital, including financial capital. We combat viruses with healthy human societies where no one is left without the basic essentials of life – food, water, shelter, warmth. Dignity and self-respect. We combat it with investment in healthcare, and scientific research. We combat it by looking after and looking out for each other, around the world. We combat it with a joint sense of purpose that celebrates life over money. Those are the foundation stones for sustainable human life on Earth.

Most people won’t want to understand any of that. They just want to do things the way they’ve always done them and bullishly defend their “right” to do so. But once a new normal is established, those people forget that they ever did it a different way. They’ll defend their new “tradition” just as bullishly as they defended the old one. So it is down to those of us who are privileged to have the time, security and inclination to try and understand more – those chattering liberal middle class people – to guide, shape, steer and above all, to dream. That’s where the magic of creativity comes from.

And in the meantime, we can start building a Wellbeing Economy one community at a time.

Re-think, Recover, Re-group, Re-shape

The Home of Shehaios Posted on by

There has been much talk in mainstream media about “centre ground politics”. It’s supposedly where most people are, politically – we talk about politicians being “right” or “left” of centre.

I’ve never been a fan of the term, and I’m even less so after the sickening farce, rapidly turning into a tragedy, of the last UK General Election. Where is the “centre ground” between evidence-backed theory and a blatant lie? Where is the “centre ground” between the politics of denial and the politics of protest? Stalemate. No-one wins.

I would prefer to talk about balanced politics. It will not surprise you to learn that I also advocate that the balance should be struck between five autonomous voices, speaking from the perspective of financial capital, social capital, natural capital, knowledge capital and created capital. We already have voices – loud, strident, dominant voices – representing the interests of financial capital. Financial capital feeds on competition, it excels at it. It is ruthless in pursuit of growth. It is cold in its assessment of human worth and social capital, seeing humans as simply economic units who contribute to economic growth either as Workers or Consumers. It is exploitational in its attitude towards natural capital, devouring whatever it can and discarding what it can’t use without a second thought. It is highly selective in its attitude towards knowledge, and funds only the created infrastructure which directly feeds its insatiable appetite. Financial capital is a cancer that grows too vigorously and replicates too fast. The predator without competition that has eaten its way through all its natural prey and, faced with starvation, is trying to devour the people who created it.

As it has risen to dominate the human story, financial capital has come to govern our politics to the exclusion of all else. There is no balance. It has created the winner-take-all, ruthlessly competitive politics that are laid bare in that champion of financial capital, the USA.

We do have political movements that try to represent social capital. Since people invented and continue to grow and replicate money, social capital – the will to go on growing and replicating money – is the key enabler of financial capital; and also its biggest rival. The political movement that tries to draw attention to the damage the exclusive pursuit of financial capital does to the very people who created it is attacked, pilloried, belittled and sidelined by all the formidable armoury amassed behind financial capital. Social justice is depicted as “unrealistic”, “irresponsible”, “the enemy of freedom” – all the things, in fact, that the story of financial capital itself is! The victims themselves are increasingly presented not as fellow human beings demanding solidarity and support but as pathetic failures in the global economic game; losers, scoundrels, scroungers and layabouts, unfit for survival. The story always asks us to identify with the winners.

Until COVID-19 came along, and made us stop and think. Those who devote their time, energy and skills not to the pursuit of wealth but to the care of others are now not ‘losers’. They are heroes. We start to see the people in the gig economy on the losing side of the economic game as human beings, doing their bit to keep us safe and get us through. We start to appreciate the artists, storytellers and musicians who give us solace and wisdom, and bring us together at a time when we have to be physically distanced, even as the pandemic destroys the system by which many of them eke out a living in an economic system that values popularity (and its consequent potential for making money) over talent, insight or originality. We realise, with a start, how vulnerable our ridiculously extended food supply chains are and how starkly that could impact on our own individual survival.

COVID-19 makes us choose. Which do we value more? Life? Or economic growth?

It’s a choice that should inform EVERY political decision. Including who you vote for. But the two-horse race does not deliver balanced politics. It represents only the two sides of the dysfunctional economic model we’re all working to – capital and labour.

Now the unstoppable march of Financial Capital has turned into a cancerous growth threatening to re-shape the entire planet into a form that may not even support the continuation of human life, there is a growing movement seeking to represent the natural capital we are born with and relinquish when we die. Life itself. Much of this movement is the politics of protest – that’s where people start. Those who have been in the environmental movement a long time have had the time to dig deeper into the root causes of the symptoms the politics of protest are reacting to, and they have realised that it’s the whole, interconnected global system that has to change. Just as the system of international treaties brokered by European monarchs and their cohorts had to change when they culminated in the First World War, our system of cold-hearted, narrowly focussed, international trade has to change.

The system we can change. Human nature we can’t change. We will continue to be a mass of contradictory, emotional, crazy, creative, indolent individuals, full of our own importance and equally full of our own insecurities, sometimes incredibly smart and sometimes incredibly stupid.

Without the power of social capital behind it, attempts to reverse the destruction to our planet will not succeed. And while people are still in thrall to the money myth, we do not have sufficient social capital behind the push to change direction. We do not have balanced politics. Because, normally, people are never actually asked to choose between economic growth and life. Normally, this is presented as the same thing. That’s the lie. It’s not. And COVID-19 has begun to show us why it’s not.

Part of the reason the vast mass of humanity doesn’t understand the choice is because the other capital flows – knowledge and created capital – have been subverted to the service of the economic growth that feeds financial capital.

“Financial Capital is highly selective in its attitude towards knowledge, and funds only the created infrastructure which directly feeds its insatiable appetite

This is the damage the money myth has done to the story human beings tell ourselves about who we are and what life is all about. These capitals must be released from their financial straitjacket and given their rightful place as equal partners in shaping our future. 

The Grant Rule Trust logo depicts five spotlights shining down to form a single circle of white light. None of the capital flows are servants of each other. They are all vital members of a dynamic team, each with their own unique experience of life and living essential to the creation of a clear, bright light of love and hope. We need a political system that recognises and values what each contributes to the health and wellbeing of life on Earth, which humans are part of. Not masters of.

The Final Edit

The Home of Shehaios Posted on by

News on the next two-volume story in the Shaihen Heritage series, ‘Leaving on the Tide’ and ‘The Hills of Gold’ is that I’ve done two or three passes through both books now, and I think I’m nearly ready to commit them to print. I would welcome some other critical eyes on the manuscript before that stage, so if you would like to read an advance copy, email me sa.rule@btinternet.com and I’ll send you a pdf manuscript. The quid pro quo is that if I do, I need your comments in the next few weeks – let’s say, by the end of April.

Writing these two novels has been an emotionally-charged journey. It’s taken a hell of a long time, and there has been a hell of a lot of Life in between, personally, politically, spiritually. The world we now live in is all but unrecognisable to the world of the mid-1980s when I first amused myself with the adventures of Therro the Pirate under the title ‘Leaving on the Tide’. Incidentally, I am sure that there will be those who think Therro is modelled on Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean. He isn’t. I invented my pirate years before Disney dreamed up their franchise – they stole my idea, I didn’t steal theirs!

I’ve said before that for me, writing is an intellectual exercise, an exploration of ideas. Shehaios itself started off as a joke – a feudal anarchy. It has morphed into an attempt to reflect the reality of a chaotic adaptive system – which when you think about it could kind of be described as a feudal anarchy – through a rose-tinted lens.

Therro started out as a joke, too – or at least a rather 2-dimensional character from an adventure novel. Leaving on the Tide circa 1980 rambled across hundreds of thousands of words, a series of adventures written for my own amusement, and not really shaped into any kind of narrative. But at some point in the saga, the idea of Shehaios, the Fair Land, emerged. And it was clear that Therro’s life was at odds with it. So as a storyteller, there’s my conflict. There’s my drama. That’s the story I started to tell. And it took me to places I didn’t expect. Out of it came the concept for the Cloak of Magic trilogy, taking the history of Shehaios back in time to where the natural magic ran up against a powerful human civilisation.

I always had the idea that I would return to Therro’s story for the next books in the series. Some of the adventures were worth telling – at least I thought so, and I hope you’ll agree that the thrills and spills, the humour and the energy of these pirate tales is entertaining and you’ll warm to Therro’s indomitable spirit and stubborn independence. But when I reached the point where the story got serious last time round, I hit a problem. I couldn’t re-tell Cloak of Magic. I had to go somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ is recorded in the books in the counter-point to Therro’s story, Myo’s quest for the Fair Land. Myo’s quest is my quest. How do you reconcile the fantasy dream of the Fair Land with the reality of how humans behave? This extract from Leaving on the Tide sums up Myo’s dilemma, and mine:

“The first time Myo received a request to address a group of students about his work he was both astonished and slightly terrified. He knew he had such an obligation under the terms of his project funding, but he had never imagined he would actually be called upon to deliver it. He spent several weeks in a sweat of apprehension, seeking advice from anyone willing to give it, and most especially his father, whose lessons he still looked back on with pleasure. When the day of reckoning came around, he took [his father’s] approach, sharing the insights he had found on his journey and inviting comments and opinions from the students rather than standing in front of them pontificating. The enthusiasm and feedback he got in response slightly overwhelmed him. They asked questions that hadn’t occurred to him, set him off on new trains of thought and rekindled his faith in the Fair Land all over again.

… It was only when he returned to his solitary apartment and shut the door on reality that he began to feel like a fraud again. Because, as the newspapers reminded him on a daily basis, the glorious idea that inspired all that creative energy was only that. An idea. As rare and fragile and beautiful as a snowflake. Exposure to the briefest dose of reality was enough for it to melt away into nothing.”

And that’s kind of how we all feel at the moment. The future has never looked more uncertain. Everything we thought we could rely on is disintegrating beneath our feet – the economy is lurching from crisis to crisis, democracy as a force for social justice is proving to be a joke, the glorious dream of a free internet is turning into a tool for hate, deceit and predatory behaviour. The Lie is rampaging around the world while Truth is still desperately looking for her knickers. And we’re destroying our own environmental niche, along with that of a large percentage of life on planet Earth. Nice one, humanity. Tell me again why you call yourself “Wise Man”?

How the hell do I write a positive tale about the quest for the Fair Land against that background? It wasn’t easy. I’m not entirely sure I’ve achieved it. But the young magician who features in Hills of Gold is a practical joker. He’s the kind of guy who, given a large red shiny button marked “do not press this button!” will press it just to see what happens. And he likes making people laugh. But he’s also intelligent, compassionate, gregarious and ultimately humble. He loves indiscriminately and appreciates people for who they are, without judgement. He knows his own limitations. He recognises how much he doesn’t know. Both he and the magical powers he wields are grounded in the Fair Land.

The term “sense of humour” originates with pre-scientific medical thinking which held a theory that health was governed by the various ‘humours’ of the body, which had to be maintained in balance. You got sick as a result of them being out of balance, and someone who had a ‘sense of humour’ was therefore someone with a healthy, balanced outlook on life. Which is why the leaders of Shaihen communities are called Holders. They hold the balance that keeps us on the tightrope of life in the chaotic adaptive system. Somehow, we have to persuade our leaders that’s what they need to be doing, too. Or we’re all going to fall off into oblivion.

As I said, Shehaios started out as a joke. Hope lies with the joker. And maybe with the pirate, too.