Alternative Editorial: Getting Coherent

Photo by Daniel Irwin on Unsplash

We often talk about disconnection as a prime cause of the problems we are facing in society. Often this indicates the alienation of citizens from the community in which they live and the land they depend upon. When our jobs require us to leave home early in the morning and return late at night, there is next to no direct connection between ourselves and place we call home. 

For many this would be a detail of their lives: improvement would be a 'nice to have' rather than a 'must have'. Yet the lack of investment of our time and energy in the place we live has knock on effects, especially for those that depend upon its resources to live. Walking through the streets at breakneck speed just to get to the train station, without ever noticing a high street that might be slowly closing down, or the growing number of beggars on the street… This has consequences.

Never engaging with the reality of those around us can leave us alienated ourselves. Often led by news headlines, we sit in judgement on others and feel as if we are living in increasingly hostile territory. At the same time, if we never grapple with the problems of our local community, we find we are unable to join the dots between what is talked about at the national level and the reality on the ground. A disconnect between theory (often ideology) and practice.

Some would say this is a mere truism. There is bound to be a gap between our macro-economic strategy and our ability to improve life directly for every citizen: these are the results of a growth economy trickling down at varying speeds. Others, however, increasingly see that this kind of thinking is dysfunctional, attributing resources and agency to only one part of a system. As if only the head mattered to a body that needs its legs to move around. We believe that the head tells the legs what to do—until illness defies us. 

Whole system thinking implies that each of these parts is interdependent. For a physical body to thrive, each organ must have a healthy ecosystem of its own. Together, these connected elements ensure that our lifeblood is reaching the furthest parts.The intelligence of the foot - its internal relationships between bone, muscle, sinew and the way this supports the ankle - is vital to the ability of the body to carry itself. Each part has to stay active and responsive to ensure blood circulation continues, without which the organs strain and collapse. In the most mundane way, keeping the blood flowing through the whole body moving is the best antidote to sickness and ageing.

The same is true for the body politic. The intelligence of the smaller communities is vital to the knowledge of the whole. When government diverts the essential resources that keep smaller towns and cities able to sustain themselves, and steers it instead to national and international 'status projects', the 'whole' suffers and deteriorates. Even more directly, when the mechanisms for distributing value throughout the system - the simplest of which is taxation - are manipulated in favour of a small elite, the 'whole' becomes unable to operate successfully. 

This wholism can sound overly simplistic to the educated mind, partly because in the Northern and Western hemispheres we ourselves have disconnected our thinking from our doing. We have taught ourselves to invest in theories of change that bear fruit for the very few. We are entrenched in economic thinking that has resulted in gross inequality; in scientific practice that has allowed the destruction of our ecosystem. When faced with the results of our bad practice, we continue to count on these broken rationales to get us out of our mess. New policies rain down on the people: the simpler act—of handing over resources to help people look after themselves better—never occurs.

In the midst of an environmental crisis, this act might look like empowering cities and towns to generate their own energy and food systems. Not only would this cut the cost of living for citizens, but it would also boost the national grid and make the whole country more resilient and viable.

In the midst of a livelihood crisis, this act might look like establishing a Universal Basic Income so that more people have a bit of space to become more creative with their skills and generate a local economy. At the same time, ensuring access to broadband for everyone makes it more likely that the new forms of value that are being created would spread across the country and beyond.

In the midst of a well-being crisis – represented by the psychosocial health of young people as they negotiate an uncertain future – this act might look like actively investing in new forms of learning that generate resilience and creativity with few resources. Uffe Elbaek's Kaos Pilots anticipated the need for this kind of capacity in young people over 25 years ago. KP has become training that’s deployed globally—although it’s yet to be recognised as a vital part of a national curriculum anywhere.

This kind of connected thinking - matching our theory of change to whole system, coherent action, where every part of the system is reflecting and taking part in the change recommended - is increasingly the way that activated communities behave. In our blogs this week we feature the Onion Collective - a prototypical community agency network (CAN) in Watchet, Devon - that has spent over ten years slowly uncovering the latent potential of its citizens and local assets. Bringing it into wider circulation, for the benefit of the whole. 

Next week we will share more about their exploration into what they call attachment economics - the capital generated from the reconnection of relationship between people and place. It's one of many signs that the intelligence of the grassroots is beginning to offer genuine alternatives to the failed thinking of the old power bases. 

At the same time, working in isolation would not be enough to ignite the system. How that new intelligence moves into circulation will be key to its role in transformation. How other CANs can benefit from Watchet's experience will be the next challenge. It’s one we are working on at The Alternative Global - not least by spreading the word through regular reports and connecting the dots between the CANs in this growing movement. 

This isn’t simply through spreading the news that communities are coming to life in new ways - as if it were an uprising. But we’re also pattern matching the complex ways in which these communities think, relate and build. For example, the impact of street theatre on generating new local narratives. Or the strengths and weaknesses of local currencies for building community wealth. Reporting from Knaresborough CAN, Amanda Faulkner notes that being able to see the wider value for others in the small local experiments they are undertaking makes a big difference to the kind of attention and investment each person brings.

Whether we are aware or not, our thinking correlates to action in the place we live. How we take part in our local community does reflect our beliefs, even if it might not reflect our ideals. If we tend to ignore what is happening close by, that is because it’s low on our list of priorities, deliberately or unavoidably. The more we hear about the power of this work to turn the fortunes of the whole body politic around, the more likely we are to align our thinking and doing more consciously, to have a direct impact on the places we live.