Corporate Power and Brexit Benefits

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It is becoming glaringly apparent that elected Governments don’t run the country, and haven’t done for decades.

Our society is run by and for the benefit of global corporates. And so is every other country, to a greater or lesser degree. The “richer” the country, in terms of GDP, the more embedded the control of corporate power is. It has become internalised, to the point where the majority of people accept without thinking the values set by corporate priorities – and, of course, vote according to these values. Corporate jobs are seen to offer status and security, whereas academic or creative work, or work in health, social care, education, food production, conservation and a whole host of other essential sectors offer neither.  Terms like “market”, “economy”, “trade” and a whole host of others are bandied about freely, bereft of their original meaning – because it is not these things that are prioritised. The priority of a corporate entity is to return value to its shareholders. It is legally obliged to prioritise return of value to its shareholders.

It is this tunnel vision that is running every human society on the planet. Everything in our lives is now organised to deliver greater value to shareholders. Public property, public services and household budgets are all re-directed towards delivering greater value to shareholders.  And so, not surprisingly, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

We are all trapped on a horrific conveyor belt to oblivion, destroying our health, our sanity, our creativity and our very humanity as well as the environmental niche in which we exist.

The cynical masterstroke of the Tory Brexiteers was to harness an undefined feeling of discontent and resentment at this dominance of corporate power and re-direct it towards the EU.  But the leaders of the Leave campaign did not want what most of those who voted for them wanted. They simply manipulated the emotions of enough of the electorate to get into power, and once there, they have doubled down on serving corporate interests, gradually abandoning any pretence of serving the public interest or respecting democracy, law or ethics.

The EU is, of course, indeed dominated by corporate values and priorities. But throughout its membership of the EU, the UK was constantly lobbying on behalf of those corporate interests and against greater political unity, which could have nurtured an evolution in democracy, devolving more power to regional governments who might genuinely be seeking to serve the communities that elected them and might therefore start to challenge the dominance of corporate values. Leaving Europe was never going to get us off the conveyor belt – if anything, it enmeshed us even deeper, made it even more impossible to change direction. It is the Westminster government and the Westminster “bubble” of opinion and influence in which it operates that wants to keep us on the conveyor belt. In their world, nothing exists outside that conveyor belt and its toxic, nihilistic values. You can hear it in every word Rishi Sunak utters, and in the way Labour challenges his government’s actions whilst carefully avoiding challenging the values on which they are based. (That, incidentally, is why Corbyn was depicted as “dangerous” and “untrustworthy”. For the guardians of the conveyor belt, he most definitely was both.)

As an individual it is almost impossible to counter the power of the corporate story. A handful of resourceful people lucky enough to have access to productive land might be able to do it, but for all their pioneering efforts in self-sufficient living, they can’t stop the impact the rest of us are having on conditions for life on Earth, the loss of habitat and loss of biodiversity, the contamination of soils and water courses, rising temperatures, and compromised air quality. Individual self-sufficiency is not the solution to this problem. Nothing individual is the solution to this problem. We have to act together, as communities.

Which brings us back once more to that vision of collective, integrated, European-wide democracy – the political unification of Europe that has always been an anathema to Conservatives. It involves increasing the power of regional governments to act in the interests of the people they represent, and decreasing the power of national governments in favour of a trans-national political entity that carries sufficient clout to exert some control over the machinations of the corporates. Hence all the bombast by Leave about “sovereignty”.

Nation states as we know them today are an intrinsic part of the story of Imperialism. Nation states go out and conquer other lands, creating colonies that return wealth to the conquering nation – if you’re not a powerful nation state you run the risk of being a colony, as Scotland found out when its ill fated attempt to create a Scottish Empire* resulted in the Act of Union, now shown to be an Act of Subjugation by the recent legal ruling that the Scottish people do not have a right to leave this Union without the approval of the British government. The whole concept of British patriotism is enmeshed with Imperialism, in just the way German patriotism was in the 1930s, and it feeds the same exceptionalism, the same intolerance and extremism, that gave rise to the Third Reich. You cannot hold the belief that “my people” are superior without also believing that “other people” are inferior. It is falling-off-a-log easy for politicians to manipulate this emotive patriotism for whatever purpose they want, and that is exactly what the leaders of the Leave campaign did. Ordinary people started waffling about “sovereignty”, “unelected officials” and “interference from Brussels” and of course the famous “take back control” with an absolute conviction that they were being staunchly patriotic and not the first idea what they were talking about.   

I used to be proud to be British. But I was proud of a tradition of free speech, fair play and tolerance that I believed the British people as a whole always valued. From the Magna Carta to the birth of the Labour movement via the Peasants Revolt, Britain has been a place where centralised power is challenged and a stubborn independence of thought persists. That, I believe, was the kind of British pride – and perversity – that prompted a lot of people to vote for Brexit, and now more than ever, that independence of thought needs to cut through. We need to start building the community strength, resilience and wealth that future generations will need to manage the environmental changes caused by corporate tunnel vision, and repair the health and social costs it has inflicted on our people.

Crucially, that will involve wresting power – and control of public money – away from the centre (ie Westminster) and placing more of it in the hands of democratically elected regional governments.  I cannot see how we do that without the umbrella of the EU to defend us in both the traditional sense of defence from hostile nations and also in the sense of defending us from corporate power. But maybe it takes the horrendous Brexit experience for people to understand the point of European co-operation, and the ends the power of that union should be seeking to achieve.  If and when I see that happening, I will at last be able to identify a Brexit benefit.

*See The Darien Scheme and the Act of Union.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/The-Darien-Scheme

Heading for a fall

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Why the Labour movement needs to be more socialist

I haven’t read Marx. But as I understand it, socialism is about holding things in common, working for the benefit of society as a whole.

But that’s not what the Labour movement has traditionally fought for. It has focussed very much on jobs and wages – the core function of a Trades Union is collective bargaining, fighting  for their members’ right to a decent wage.  The concept of individual ownership of wealth is as much enshrined in the working class as it is in the moneyed classes. It’s all about the ‘breadwinner’ earning good money to support the family. It carries with it a whole mindset as deeply embedded in capitalism as that of a hedge fund manager.

The  womens’ liberation movement of the 20th century fought largely for the right of women to fill that ‘breadwinner’ role. As a result thousands (millions?) of women ended up trying to divide up their time between career, child care and home-making. Being unpaid, child care and home-making carried little social status – “oh, I’m just a housewife” – and was therefore seen as inferior to paid employment, regardless of how fulfilling (or otherwise) that employment was. As the feminist movement matured, these issues have come more to the forefront – but still mostly in terms of support that allows mothers to focus on their careers. Child care (and any other kind of caring role) and home making are still seen as low status, unfulfilling work. The goal, wrapped up in ‘self fulfillment’, and ‘career satisfaction’ and driven by a social construct that continually ramps up prices,  is still to earn ever increasing amounts of money. That is your duty, the only route to happiness and contentment.

It used to be said that it takes a whole village to raise a child, but when status relies on the “breadwinner” model, being seen to need help carries the stigma of shame and failure with it. Superwoman is supposed to be able to juggle it all and she’s also supposed to be able to pay for it all, with or without a co-breadwinner. Anything less and she’s ‘relying on charity’.

When status is so closely tied to the concept of being the “breadwinner”, there is an inevitable shame associated with not being a breadwinner. Men – who were traditionally the key earners in a family – have come to invest their whole identity in their labour. Those who do ‘succeed’ as breadwinners take exceptional pride in their achievement, often to the point of arrogance. They consider their success is due purely to their own efforts and see themselves as superior to those who have done less well. When they cannot get work, they often suffer a whole range of mental health issues – including depression, which others (following the same status model) dismiss as laziness.  They see immigrants as competition, threatening not only their employment, but the identity that is wrapped up in their working status. Such mindsets are a gift to a mass media that has a huge vested interest in maintaining the capitalist myth of trickle-down economics, where wealth is accessible to all as long they work hard enough. All the media needs to do is amplify these prejudices to keep the mass population at war with each other instead of questioning the system itself.  

I believe this is why the Conservatives have dominated the political landscape since the 1970s, and gradually eroded the socialist initiatives of the mid-20th century – in housing, in education, in social welfare, and most notably, in health care, as seen in the abuse, under-investment and mis-management that has orchestrated the gradual unravelling of the treasured NHS. It is how we arrive at Maggie Thatcher’s famous declaration that there is “no such thing as society”. The dominant model of individual acquisition of wealth, which she so wholeheartedly espoused, was busy making it true. But it is important to recognise that her success was driven as much by misguided working class pride as it was by the greed and sociopathic tendencies of the rich. This is why so many dyed-in-the-wool Labour voters voted for Boris Johnson – Labour were failing to support them in acquiring individual wealth, and so they went to the party that openly promoted the philosophy.

But of course, the Tories can’t give the “Red Wall” voters what they want either. Because Brexit or no Brexit, the system doesn’t work that way. Money doesn’t “trickle down” from the super rich to the ordinary working man and woman – if it did, there would be no super-rich. They exist because the system is designed to flow in exactly the opposite direction: it puddles money in the hands of those who already have plenty, where it is removed from the public economy to stagnate in tax havens benefitting no-one. The statistics speak for themselves. The richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70% of Britons put together. Globally, the richest 1% have pocketed $26 trillion (£21 trillion) in new wealth since 2020, nearly twice as much as the other 99 per cent of the world’s population put together. (Oxfam report, Survival of the Richest, Jan 2023). A trillion is a million million. It’s an unimaginable amount of money.  I can’t help wondering how many individuals the 30 richest people in the world could pay a living wage to and still remain millionaires. I reckon it’s a pretty high percentage.

Thatcher’s party trick was to keep the myth that capitalist policies benefit everyone going for far longer than it should have done. She was able to do this largely by the introduction of the debt economy, most evident in the device of rapidly inflating property prices, encouraging everyone to borrow ever bigger sums of money and kid themselves that having a massive debt secured against their home made them somehow richer. The trouble with debt is that it becomes due for payment at some time; in other words, a debt economy is unsustainable. This is why Liz Truss’s ill-fated attempts to re-implement Thatcher economics had such a disasterous effect. The financial crash was the resounding sound of the credit card bill landing on the national (and indeed, global) doormat and what appeared to work in the 1990s will not deliver now. Not least because the bailiffs are arriving in the shape of global climate change to call in the massive environmental debt humanity has incurred in pursuit of individual wealth.

The financial crash of course happened during a Labour government. So in one sense Tory accusations are right – it was Labour’s fault, but only in the sense that Tony Blair perpetuated the myth that capitalist policies benefit everyone as well, and failed to turn the ship around when elected to office.

To give Blair the benefit of the doubt, it is only with 20/20 hindsight that the unravelling of the lie is clear. But if he had truly adhered to socialist principles, he would have had a much greater instinctive mistrust  in the capitalist system (as so many “Old Labour” folk had and still have).  But such is the power of the myth that if he had been more of a socialist, he may very well have lost the election, just as Kinnock, Milliband and Corbyn did.  The working class always tend to prioritise individual wealth obtained through highly paid jobs over the prosperity of the country as a whole – understandably, since no political leaders have ever genuinely pursued prosperity for the country as a whole. 

This is in no way to denigrate the actions of the railway unions, the nurses and teachers and others currently on strike in protest at the monstrous inequalities and impossible living conditions the UK government is asking its population to accept as normal and inevitable. Far from it – all the ordinary working person can do is fight their own corner.   It is worth noting however that the media debate on the current wave of strikes always focusses on pay, despite that fact that those taking action are protesting about way more than their individual pay packets. They are protesting about working conditions, inequitable contracts, lack of job security, safety concerns and the chronic mismanagement and underfunding that is crucifying our public services and national infrastructure.

The post-war Labour government tried to establish a welfare state. They put in place the foundations for it. But it was swept away by the myth of trickle down economics and the lure of individual wealth which put Thatcher into office. She sold the nation to private industry. Now her successors are surrendering the state to the forces of global capitalism lock, stock, and barrel.  They are not governing the country, they are simply reacting to events, clumsily, callously, without accepting any responsibility for the impact of their policies. They spend most of their time trying to conceal the evidence of failure and close down debate. They are presiding over the final demolition of the ‘country fit for heroes’ envisaged by a generation united by what many genuinely believed to be a just war against the aggressive Fascist Imperialism of the Nazis.

Its painfully ironic that it was Brexit that gave them the mandate to do it. Sensing a growing antipathy in those for whom wealth was not “trickling down” despite decades of Conservative government (including the New Labour government, who subscribed to much the same economic model as their Conservative opponents), the hard-line capitalists successfully shifted the blame onto the European Union. The EU, of course, is as much in the death-grip of corporate power as the UK government, but leaving the EU does not break that death-grip. It only strengthens it, as the leaders of the Leave campaign knew very well. The bigger the population of a political entity, the more potential collective power they wield. Divide and conquer was always a sure way for a minority to secure an iron grip on power.  

The 99% can only defeat the 1% by working together. If you leave it to the markets – to money – then the odds are strongly in favour of those who own more than 60% of global wealth. We need to use the Labour movement’s history of solidarity to start building collective wealth, and that starts by dispersing the chimera of individual wealth.

After all, most ordinary people, do not crave stupid amounts of money. They want what it represents. The security and comfort of a nice home, the ability to relax and enjoy life, to be able to look after your family and loved ones, to feel confident in your childrens’ future and be able to relax and indulge in a little luxury now and again. To know that you can access excellent health care when you need it, and there’s a safety net if life derails you. Most of us just want enough money to meet these needs.  It’s only the socially dysfunctional super-rich who crave billions upon billions that they can’t possibly ever spend. The trouble is that we live in a system that gives these disturbed individuals power and is totally incapable of holding them to account. They are set up as role models to aspire to, rather than sociopathic lunatics whose crazed activities are threatening the stability of life on earth itself.

Instead of awarding status to people because of wealth or perceived “success” (the so-called ‘meritocracy’) we need to start valuing everyone simply for being a unique human being. We need to afford care and compassion greater respect than wealth. We need to develop a society in which every individual can fulfil their potential, whatever that potential is, without being consigned to the scrap heap because they can’t cope with the overwhelming demands of the manic money-driven society we live in.

I dream of the day when “can’t afford it” ceases to be an acceptable excuse for not providing an essential service, for not stewarding the environment, for not doing something that life and humanity demands to be done. When we recognise that we are social beings, intrinsically connected to each other, and to remain healthy as individuals, people need to live in a healthy society. The society we live in right now is about as sick as a human society can be. There are so many damaged individuals in the developed nations, particularly the USA and the UK, who habitually act without empathy or compassion and aggressively defend their right to do so.  They dominate a political landscape where those with the thickest skins flourish.

If we don’t change the story, I believe the disease is terminal. But for anything to improve, we all need to move out of denial, stop trying to score cheap political points and face reality. Change is coming faster and faster – the climate is breaking down, our global capitalist society is breaking apart on the myth at its core and the abundance of life on Earth is shrinking with alarming rapidity. It’s not for nothing that those most concerned about the crisis facing us are known as “woke” (though why we don’t use the more grammatically correct “awake”, I don’t know!). The first step to addressing a problem is to accept that there’s a problem. Denying reality is just throwing fuel on the raging inferno.

The principles of survival are old-fashioned and timeless – honesty, compassion and co-operation. United we stand, divided we fall. As things are, humanity is heading for a fall.

WEIRDness and Evolution

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Last Christmas, I was given a book with the snappy title, ‘The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous’. The author, Joseph Henrich, is an anthropologist and chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. In the book, he argues that WEIRD people – Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic – have a civilisation like no other. It is individualistic and monogamous, as opposed to the overwhelming majority of human civilisations which place prime value not on the individual but on the status and prosperity of the kinship group (tribe, clan, call it what you will).

While there are many positives in such traditional societies – stability, long-term vision, respect for ancestors – the trade off is the lack of individual rights. There is no real concept of individual rights. Individuals are born into a role within the group, defined by their gender and by who their parents are. Romantic love, the whole idea that individuals can choose for themselves who to mate with, is an aspect of individualism. In most human societies, the choice is made for them. High status men typically take multiple wives, and women aspire to bear the children of high status men. WEIRD people (like me and you) think that is abhorrent. We have developed a totally different sense of moral value founded on the concept of individual rights.

The book looks at how this WEIRD mentality has developed over the last 2000 years or so, and how it affected the way European civilisation developed – particularly in relation to trade. It looks at the relationship to religious beliefs (the one, of course, begets the other) and the huge influence of literacy on human psychological development. (The very act of learning to read the written word, it turns out, actually changes the way the brain perceives and processes information.) It’s a fascinatingly different take on European history that goes to the psychological root of why Europeans created empires that spanned the globe – and all the misery, oppression and dislocation that goes with that imperialism.

I was most of the way through this book when I came across the transcript of an interview with an Australian biologist, Jeremy Griffith, who claims to have identified a science-based theory for why humankind’s natural state is peaceful co-existance and mutual aid, and that aggressive competition for land and resources, far from being intrinsic in human nature, is unnatural. He cites the example of one of our closest animal relations, the bonobo, with whom we share 99% of the same DNA, and who live in social colonies distinguished by the tenderness and care individuals show for each other.

Bonobo zoo keeper Barbara Bell writes that ‘Adult bonobos demonstrate tremendous compassion for each other…For example, Kitty, the eldest female, is completely blind and hard of hearing. Sometimes she gets lost and confused. They’ll just pick her up and take her to where she needs to go’ (‘The Bonobo: “Newest” apes are teaching us about ourselves’, Chicago Tribune, 11 Jun. 1998). Primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh says, ‘Bonobo life is centered around the offspring. Unlike what happens among chimpanzees, all members of the bonobo social group help with infant care and share food with infants. If you are a bonobo infant, you can do no wrong…Bonobo females and their infants form the core of the group’

Griffith’s argument is that the aggressive and competitive traits in humanity arise from the conflict between this ‘natural’ state of unconscious harmony, and human consciousness which always wants to free itself from the constraints of inheritance and push against the boundaries of cultural conditioning – in other words, the questing human mind which rejects the constraints of a pre-ordained life in pursuit of individual freedom. He believes this continual inner turmoil is where all human psychosis, anger, fear, guilt and insecurity comes from – we are all continually trying to work out the meaning of life as individuals, not as part of a tribe where the individual’s purpose is to serve the needs of the tribe in pre-determined ways. Griffith therefore concludes that the conscious re-discovery of that pre-conscious (‘innocent’) state of peaceful and harmonious co-existance resolves the psychological conflict and heals the human psyche.

Randomly, I also came across a new word the other day. The ‘noosphere’ is “the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution.” In practice, it means that people who have no apparent contact or connection to each other can come up with the same idea, invention or discovery at roughly the same time because the noosphere is right for that revelation to take place.

Working through in my imagination the conflict between the dream of the Fair Land existing in a war-torn, conflict-ridden, progress-obsessed human world governed by a patriarchal and individualistic god, I blundered blindly and unscientifically to the same conclusion as the anthropologists and biologists (as many others have done before and will continue to do). It may well be that the time is right now for us to discover our birthright – our capacity for peaceful co-existance. It seems to me that the ultimate stage of the search for individual meaning is the conscious re-discovery of how to live in harmony with each other and with the rest of the natural world – only in that state of harmony can the individual be truly free. We need to finally understand where we belong, and what made us.

It won’t happen overnight. But what I suspect we will see in the coming decades are more and more societies experimenting with peaceful co-operation, quite likely underpinned by concepts such as the doughnut economic model, or the Wellbeing framework. The governing structures, habits and mores of that culture will not be like those of our world today. The things people value and the traits they respect will be different. The interactions between different social groups will be different – the whole concept of ‘nationality’ is part and parcel of our dysfunctional conflict-ridden world, but the emotional connection people have to the land where they feel they belong, and the people they feel they belong with, is not.

Where I differ from Jeremy Griffith is that he sees a conscious return to some kind of Eden as an inevitable future for humanity. But it is not just DNA that makes us who we are. Humans are not bonobos. Bonobos walk upright, like humans; their young need a lot of nurturing, like humans. Unlike humans, they live in matriarchal groups, not patriarchal ones, which is why that nurturing of infants is central to their community life. Humans live in a global patriarchy where status and power are central to community life.

There are two forces I see at play in the world today – the awakening consciousness of a mass of individuals who are working with humanity’s key adaptation – the thinking, learning, problem-solving mind of each individual – to create a culture of peaceful co-existance and mutual aid. Ranged against them is the formidable force of the status quo which concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, and is aiming for the survival of just a few individuals on a world of drastically diminished resources. At the same time as some places and societies are experimenting with peaceful co-existance, we will see other places – and sadly Britain, or at least England, is almost certainly going to be one unless there is some kind of a revolution in its current political direction – where reactionary forces dominate. Resources will be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, dominant elite; some will be dispensed to a corps of people who serve the needs and fancies of the elite. Anyone else who has the misfortune to share a geo-political location with these oligarchs doesn’t get a look in. There is no support, no concept of public welfare, no recognition of common wealth, no respect for the rights of the individual – no real ‘government’ as we understand it. The legacy of cultural conditioning comes to the fore, giving rise to a popular culture that suppresses individual choice and individual rights. It’s fertile ground for corruption, crime, misogyny, greed, short-termism and abusive and addictive behaviours of all kinds; all the evils of individualism flourish, and it is barren soil for the compassion and creativity that might challenge the elite. 

These reactive enclaves are by nature aggressive and expansionist. They focus on immediate gratification, and very little on long-term thinking. The ruling elite are uninterested in understanding cause and effect because they are completely unaccountable – they have no internal conscience, and there is no-one with the power to hold them to account. They foster over-consumption, so they will always have an eye on other peoples’ lands. They may drive out the peace-loving mutual-aiders, leave them no space to be. In which case, whatever human-like creatures continue to walk the Earth a few generations hence, they will not be the thinking, learning, adaptive, loving creatures we are capable of becoming but something other. Something less.

The New Testament – a text that has been hugely influential in the formation of WEIRD psychology – says that God is Love. In other words, love is what has made us the way we are, which is the basic concept of the scientific theory proposed by Jeremy Griffith (and the basis of the infant-centred bonobo culture). The New Testament also says the meek shall inherit the Earth. Let’s hope it’s right on this as well.

Humans are conscious animals, we evolve by conscious learning more than we evolve through genetic adaptation. If our environmental niche is co-operative social groups living within the resources available to them, then we cannot inhabit it living under a competitive global system that fosters wars and conflict, and all the over-consumption that comes with those conflicts. But survival is not compulsory. Humans have to make a conscious choice to return to their environmental niche – co-operative social groups living harmoniously within the resources available to them. If we humans are collectively incapable of learning our place, if we surrender our individual capacity for critical thinking and revert to the cultural habits of the kinship group where rebellion against the status quo is shameful, individuals have no rights and creative thinking is heavily constrained by what is acceptable to those of high status, we surrender our future to the reactionaries. These are the choices we are living with today. Which path do we each, individually, want to tread?

Below is an extract from my book, the Hills of Gold. It features Therro, the pirate, the highly individual, typical rags-to-riches WEIRD hero, talking about life in Shehaios, the Fair Land:

“The people [Shaihens] saw themselves as just a part of the place, they supported the life around them and it supported them. It all went on just exactly the same, day after day, working in between the spaces left by all the bloody ants and all the bloody ancestors. And no-one could govern the place without the consent of these people. That’s why the rate of change was so glacially slow. Every bloody peasant had to think about it for half a lifetime and study the ants before they could decide whether to accept it or not. Why they called it the Home of the Free I did not know. Every slave-driven bugger beyond the Gate working for a starvation wage was more free than the highest-born Shaihen, tied to his inheritance and fettered by his obligations.”

Later, the Magician of Shehaios confronts Therro with the choices facing him:

“You don’t want to be tied down by the things and people you love.” [says the Magician] “I get that. That’s why you’re my hero. [but it]…Looks to me like you’re facing a straight choice. You do a deal with the higher authority – and we both know who that is. Or you make your peace with Shehaios.”
“I don’t belong in Shehaios. Never did. Never will.”
“Bollocks. Of course you belong here. This is the land of the free.”
Therro gave a cynical grunt of laughter.
“And that’s the biggest joke of all. No-one in Shehaios is free.”
“By choice,” said [the Magician] looking him in the eye. “And that’s the difference, Therro. The only difference. Anyone can be a Shaihen if they choose to give their allegiance to the Fair Land.”

 


Jeremy Griffith: Breakthrough Biological Explanation of the Human Condition,
https://www.humancondition.com/

Joseph Henrich: The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Pub. Penguin, widely available from booksellers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubKZ0IbX7Ic

S.A. Rule: Shaihen Heritage Series Book 5, The Hills of Gold www.shehaios.co.uk

 

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.