Alternative Editorial: Whose Dream Is This Anyway?
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In week 14 of (the slowly easing) lock down, we’re feeling it’s appropriate to continue dwelling on the liminality of this moment – liminal meaning “occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold”. In what has been an extraordinary period of time globally, locally and (for so many people) personally too, is anything changing to make our collective future more hopeful? Can we see the seeds of a new way of being political?
For our part, AUK is participating in many emerging scenes right now. As suggested on the front page of our site, these could be described as groups gathering to:
· Tell the Story (giving rise to new and better narratives to shape behaviour)
· Design Democracy for the 21st Century
· Share the Learning (of cutting edge thinking and practice, but also previously hidden lessons from feminine and indigenous intelligence)
· Build Economies – that’s deliberately plural: they can look quite distinct in different parts of the world, locally or globally, but still be aligned and integrated
· Shape the System – focusing on different parts, but also the whole cosmo-local socio-economic-political-virtual system
· Create the Feel – meaning both new modes of activism and developing soft power.
Each one implies the others in their inquiry, serving as a different entry point to the much bigger picture of what is possible next. Trying to stitch them together as spheres of integrated action, to make them more agentic than the sum of their parts, is a commitment—but no easy task.
Maybe the goal of fully-integrated action, even across those with great affinity, is illusory in some ways, as we discovered in our Elephant event last year. What we are more certain about, after that experience, is that any new socio-economic-political system will not be ‘put together’ like a Rubik’s cube, or a better machine, or even a jazz band. Meaning, it’s unlikely to be a discrete entity to point at. Mostly because once it become that entity, it stops having the properties of something living and responding to human interaction and development.
The current system was built on disconnection and capitalisation, which permitted the instrumentalising of human beings and the establishment of extractive economies. Any ‘next system’ must start with human and planetary connection on a scale never known before. Additionally, we need a more developed capacity for fluidity and re-invention, as we capture the much broader base of our creativity.
For now, any emergence of a new system is more likely to appear as series of relationships, new forms of agency. We will be governed more by patterns, metaphors and beliefs. Out of which our minds create narrative - new stories of Us.
Yearnings, longings and soft power
This week, following Civic Square’s extraordinary Department of Dreams Festival we kept talking with other groups about how narratives are constructed. We looked at the role of the imagination – but also of yearning and longing. We were keeping this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Author of The Little Prince) in mind:
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
What became clear in these conversations is that while most of us are yearning, we avoid engaging those emotions: thinking of them as disempowering or distracting. At the heart of this lies a lack of distinction between primary emotions – anger, joy, grief – which are organismic, elemental responses to change. And what might be better called emotional needs – the working emotions, or motivations maybe, that help us to flourish in society. The yearning is the need for meaning, belonging, purpose, status, freedom: through meeting them we become social and develop agency.
Without making those subtle internal and self-aware distinctions, our activity (indeed activism) becomes about getting people to build boats--as if on-boarding them was the basic response we needed. We build vehicles for addressing ‘decolonisation’ or ‘inequality’ – but by so doing, allow them to remain abstract terms. Rather, we should be doing the emotional labour of connecting how and why we allow ‘colonisation’ or equality to continue in ways that really have traction in society.
What has happened in the past few weeks with Black Lives Matter has made that distinction much more clear: it’s not enough for white people to support the cause, they have to do the emotional labour of owning it. It’s only when a critical mass of white people take responsibility for racism in their society will it change.
In political circles especially, the focus on policy and structure takes for granted what we are yearning for, after our material needs have been secured. We mean something by a better life: a tangible expression of our sensual, emotional selves. The part of us that, if we are not aware, can easily take control of our behaviour.
Hence, some of political activists’ most effective initiatives are constructed to attack current policy. But they leave little room to activate the ‘yearning’ power of our dreams, which would help us ‘be the revolution we hope to see’. Even those who acknowledge the power of yearning, such as Extinction Rebellion, prefer to use the power of our grief and our nightmares to motivate people.
Working at the level of yearning, however, is also not straight forward. Our dreams are not by themselves a safe path to more fulfilling actions for the future. In the Future Democracy Hub advisory group for example, Tom Atlee shared his important work – over decades - on Imagineering and pattern language. This in addition to the Story Field Conference he co-created with Peggy Holman in 2007. (Yes, this work has been going on for some time).
But we also talked about ‘soft power’ – a £$Y multi-billion industry that has kept most of us entranced in the pre-fabricated American Dream, or the Great British Dream or, most recently, the Chinese Dream. In each case, these are driven by cultural industries—Hollywood, Bollywood, BBC, Confucius Institutes—that shape how we think about ‘our world’ and what we find attractive. This is how we learnt to equate success with wealth, or freedom with dominance over others.
Add to that the ‘soft power’ of the news media to dictate values – what gets reported, how and why – and how that has led to cultural racism and inequality. Add on top of that, the ‘soft power’ of advertising – the branding of products to meet our emotional needs - and how that has led to serial addictions. Together these explain why, even as we dream, we are relatively powerless. We are already being entranced psychologically and neurologically by someone else’s dream.
In the light of ‘soft power’, waking up means not simply rejecting those values that led to destroying the planet, but learning how to reclaim and own your own dreams. To do that we need privacy – another core emotional need – and space for quiet reflection. Each of these trails leads to another aspect of system change that would make sense because it arises from a genuine emotional need. In this case, how shorter working weeks would lead to an increase in autonomy and responsibility.
Name the agenda boldly – and occupy it
How do we get from dreaming and our own internal revolution to whole new systems of action? The work we are currently doing with Catalyst 2030 and more specifically the SDG Transformation Forum – which includes the Wellbeing Alliance amongst other global actors – is more focused on the global economy. On the one hand, this has aspects of making new practices visible and assembling them in new systems – like the Elephant described above. On the other hand, the call for new narratives also appears in this space. It’s as if what was once a faint call to humanise theory, has now become necessary everywhere.
This confirms that without the deep dive into what motivates our current economic behaviour and how to reclaim our meaningful connection to a healthy planet, we are unlikely to transform. That’s not the same as agreeing to be good consumers: we already know superficial commitment don’t have much effect as they are too easily dropped. Each of us has to dig deep to understand what needs are being met by the old system and become response-able for getting those needs met in healthier, more compelling ways. It’s the new energy arising from that which forms as a new narrative that attracts many more people. It has to ring true to be picked up and shared.
Is this any different to the same call that Tom Atlee referred to 13 years ago or have we evolved in ways that make the appetite for more and better stories more likely to have significant outcomes?
Our sense is that so much of what we are doing looks on the surface like repeating cycles, reinventions of the wheel. But even old ideas are re-surfacing in very different conditions, offering possibilities of engagement and impact that weren’t there before. Since 2007 we have had far more experiences of not only the soft power of governments, but of movements and even small groups of people, intent on change.
Social media has ushered in an era of more conscious, connected activism. Even as we plan a physical intervention such as a protest or a campaign, we are also designing it as a story, a meme, a thunderclap. If we are not, someone else is probably already occupying the space we are hoping to. Worse, they may be hijacking much of our hard work to provide evidence for the story they are choosing to tell.
The most resonant are the ones that really chime with the way that people are feeling and thinking even in the midst of their busy lives. Government Advisor Dominic Cummings is the master of this: harnessing the public’s deep yearning - to regain the sort of control they once felt they had over their lives – onto the cause of Leaving Europe. Later, he harnessed the desire for stability and achievement – Let’s Get Brexit Done – to a vote for Boris Johnson. When politics appeals to our need for global status again – as it may well do in the post-Covid phase – will we be sufficiently entranced to ignore the abandoning of environmental regulations?
So as we make our plans to be in action in the coming year, let’s not ignore the soft power of others to shape and hijack our actions for their agendas. We don’t deal with this by using all our energy to turn on them. But by building our own deep, emotionally coherent and authentic context for action, articulating the bigger story within which our actions take place. Naming the agenda boldly and occupying it.
Once that is deeply embedded, we can be open to the needs and circumstances of whoever we meet. Knowing that we are bringing our broader purpose with us into every relationship we make.
