Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is safe. Edmund Burke
The Simpleton’s Solution
The British colonial strategy used to successfully divide and conquer eventually led to the partition of India and Pakistan. Similar strategies in recent history resulted in North Korea being separated from the South while Israel and Palestine were inelegantly wedged into the ancient land of Canaan. Putting all of that in the shade was the immoral scramble for Africa - the systematic invasion, occupation, division, and colonization of African territory by European powers during the brief period between 1881 and 1914.
Today, between Botswana and Zimbabwe, Malaysia and Thailand, Bulgaria and Turkey, China and North Korea, Mexico and the US, Iran and Pakistan, Israel and the West Bank, and Morocco and Spain, dozens of walls and border fences separate people from each other - ostensibly trying to thwart smuggling, illegal trade and immigration, and terrorism.
Partition is a simpleton’s convenient solution to the issue of human diversity and nefarious activities. In every case where arbitrary boundaries are imposed on lands and cultures, the act of separation itself is traumatic and nowhere has it resulted in less suffering than that which already existed.
People & Machinery
Every mechanic knows how to take an engine apart and reassemble it without too much bother. It requires a methodical approach, a blueprint possibly, or aide-memoir to know how the parts fit together, particularly in large or complicated machinery, like an Airbus A380, which has over 4 million parts. Skilled engineers of course. Trusted supply chains. Oh, and a very big and well-equipped shed. But nothing more (nor less) than that.
The life of a machine or any human construction is prolonged from routine maintenance of this kind. Living systems less so. Naturalists assure us that dissecting a mammal into a set of component parts, for example, is not the same thing as stripping an A380. It is easy enough to cut the body up - slicing through the neck to detach the head, and amputating the limbs. But piecing everything together again in a way that restores total functionality is impossible.
An A380 will be towed out of its hangar beautifully reconditioned. It will have felt no pain. Not so with animals. Even if the creature was anesthetized it will be irreparably damaged. And although death is not certain it will most certainly have suffered trauma and pain, and will be incurably disabled by the amputations.
As a general rule all living systems degenerate when attempts are made to carve them up. Sometimes that damage is irreparable. If the spinal cord snaps in an accident it may well take successive surgical procedures and a lengthy period of recuperation to restore even a semblance of functionality. At other times the body may partially heal itself. But, as a general rule, it can be safely assumed that soft tissues like muscle or cartilage, deteriorate far more rapidly than steel joists, rivets and springs.
That is not the only major difference between mechanical and living systems like sapiens of course. And I do realize that I am stating the obvious. But bear with me.
So imagine….
rather than just its healthy and intact physical form, the mind of a single human stretching across time. Hypothetically it extends back to the moment of conception - reaching out into an unknown future towards the moment of death. I call this capacity to contain the entirety of our experience in a single conscious 'moment' as the expanded now.
In its most basic state, the expanded now is a phenomenon we have all felt from time to time. It might occur out of the blue – such as a near-death experience. But it is a condition we can trigger if we want to. When we are young we sense the expanded now as a dream-like state where all kinds of possibilities, limited only by our imagination, are present simultaneously.
As we mature into adulthood our ability to access this expanded now tends to become more difficult - unless it is part of a deliberate, much-repeated ritual, in which case it can spark what others have described as an altered state of consciousness – a trance-like experience in which capabilities are amplified and the astonishing becomes routine for a few brief moments.
Musicians, elite sports men and women, orators, and circus artistes, in fact anyone at the peak of their powers, intentionally strive to refine and foster this condition by pulling all of their rehearsed experiences, as well as their teleology of an aspirational potential, into the current moment. In effect, they are endeavouring to keep the conjunction of past, present and possible poised in perfect balance - on the edge of chaos. In moments like this their learning metabolism[i] is highly sensitized and more rapid than usual.
Descriptions of what these individuals actually sense in these moments, which observers witness as periods of inspired performance, range from feelings of intense awareness that direct and guide flows of energy, to a state of ecstasy in which time appears to slow down. It takes practice to sustain this altered state for more than a few minutes at a time. Besides, physical exhaustion and mental fatigue often follow extreme concentration of this nature.
Now imagine…
that single mind also stretching across vast physical distances; touching millions of other minds as a consequence. Like a single cell in the brain of humanity, that one human intelligence now becomes part of a global society of mind. We do not have a name for it. We might call it the shared mind' of the species, or the 'encephalic wisdom' of the human family. It has its own past and teleological expectations. Its own expanded now. Its own collective consciousness.
And reflect upon….
the collective consciousness and sense of deep affiliation within that human family acting as a sentient living ecosystem where separation of any kind is felt as a harrowing sensation ranging from the despair of mental anguish to extreme physical pain.
The Human Condition
At one level I am defining a condition that is inherently human – a phenomenon located both within and beyond our consciousness as a species. Quite possibly it represents the fulfillment of Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future every person will experience 15 minutes of fame. Except that in our minds 15 minutes is vastly inadequate in comparison with those celebrities who colonize our minds with their unending extravagance.
Most of us try to carry on regardless, but some of us switch off – resorting to seclusion, prozac, and even suicide. Others, far more confident, plan on extending life indefinitely through the use of artificially intelligent upgrades. New digital implants or a mind in the Cloud conjure up the prospect of immortality for them.
Whatever explanation is used to define the human condition, or however it is described, it has become a crisis. A crisis of human consciousness.
The central predicament, to which we have all been progressively exposed, arises from an escalating schism between reductionist and systemic logic, between individual needs and the wellbeing of a global community comprising around 8 billion, and between differing worldviews that are pulling apart the moral foundations of entire world-systems.
Complemented by a rapid growth in human numbers over the past century, and a fervent preoccupation with delivering economic growth as an imperative, we have let many of our most life-critical structures deteriorate to the point of collapse. Along the way we have put undue stress on nature, ramped up an intense aversion to perceived differences, and sat idly by as the wealth generated by workers everywhere is owned by fewer people.[ii]
Given this situation, and in a vain attempt to protect everything we cherish, we resort to a default position in which our personal needs override all other concerns. Experiencing an interior life increasingly divorced from that of others, focused on self-interest, numb to the suffering of others, our carefully-crafted avatars, entangled within an exterior world of fear and avaricious fervour, conspire as best they can to avoid material privation.
More worrying is the immense gap opening up between the problems officials at a global level discern, and try to influence or treat - including their competence to do so - and local matters that assume priority over planetary concerns for most of us on a daily basis. While the price of a sack of rice, along with severe drought and the erosion of the top soil in the paddy field, are ongoing worries for my Thai family, the destiny story of our species is not something they can comprehend, least of all do anything to influence. Perhaps that is why the story of the human project is fast becoming a ghostly wreck floundering on an ocean of irrelevant theories and drills, captained by a handful of scared, uninspired, dullards.
Infatuated still by the delusion of 'trickle-down' economics, those we encourage to lead treat the human family as if it were merely a complicated machine comprising around 8 billion parts - devoid of any collective consciousness, and thus immune from pain. This perspective conveniently allows for our family home (nature) to be plundered without any sense of guilt, the family silver (natural resources) to be auctioned to the highest bidders, and family members to be treated with as much respect as rivets on an A380.
The Trauma of Separation
Separation of all kinds occur incessantly of course. We are accustomed to it, have become conditioned to expect it, and unconsciously adjust to it as best we can. From the moments following our birth, when we inhale our first breath and the umbilical cord is cut, to those seconds just before death, as our sentient mind fades and we bid farewell to all that we have known, separation is an intrinsic part of life’s rich tapestry. It is as certain as it is unavoidable.
We experience separation as innate, by virtue of being born into a certain family, country or religion, for example. But also by design, a deliberate severance of connection.
Routine as it seems, separation is often felt as distress when it comes from being ignored, diminished, or excluded. We sense it acutely if we are unfriended by a contact on social media, have our ideas dismissed, or our intelligence derided, or fail to get a credit card from the bank because of an inability to meet certain criteria.
Usually this kind of separation happens routinely. Embedded in our familiarity with the modern world, it is relatively trivial. We tend not to dwell on it or give it too much thought. It happens to everyone after all. Or does it? Occasionally I get the distinct feeling that certain individuals are able to exempt themselves and their immediate cohorts from the negative shocks of imposed separation, at least in terms of the way such severance effects the majority, by virtue of their status or wealth. Recent revelations in the British press that the monarch was above, rather than subject to, certain laws, is one obvious example of special treatment.
At such times separation feels wrong, insulting, or just archaic. In some situations, when the intent behind the separation has been brutal or iniquitous is finally challenged, and we begin to understand it, perhaps for the first time, as outrageously anachronistic, like slavery or apartheid for example, then we take steps to end it, heal the wounds, and do whatever needs to be done in order to move on.
Bitterness and resentment often linger in the memory, sometimes for too long. Yet it does not help our state of mind, nor our emotional wellbeing, to dwell on recriminations or to plan on retribution. Revenge corrodes the soul. Nor does it help to apportion blame to any single group as the embodiment of evil for, in truth, none of us can be totally immune from the dynamic course of events. As we can so plainly see in the history of genocide, at times of duress it is easy to shift from impartial bystander to complicit participant. And the move from collusion to quisling is but one small step away when the safety and security of one’s own family is threatened.
It is wiser, though distressingly challenging, to forgive those who slaughter our loved ones than to fall into the trap of enduring victimhood, even when that suffering is a result of the most considered evil - as occurred in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Russia, Kagame’s Rwanda, and Hitler’s Germany.
Looking back on the pageant of bloody human butchery from our vantage point today, it seems surreal that any sane individual could accept such atrocities as morally honorable or just. Yet crimes against humans, including passive extermination, persist in many parts of the world. They are usually perpetrated by the strong against the vulnerable. And they are usually hidden in full view.
In Australia, for example, successive governments have bungled every policy concerning those seeking asylum and our own indigenous populations. More recently the revelation of murders committed by Australian elite forces in Afghanistan is shameful and sickening. As a citizen of Australia I am deeply troubled by the manner in which we choose to treat those who are attempting to escape from oppression, seeking a better life in a country that is relatively open, affluent and free, or simply begging armed psychopaths to let them live to see the next sunrise.
There are always protests of course – some for and some against greater egalitarianism. The choice comes down to creating mayhem in the mainstream media, or giving voice to our agony on social media, but only with the soft screams of an Edvard Munch painting.
The next phase, of insisting that the conscious wishes of a majority of citizens be enacted, is one step too far for many of us. We have our own lives to lead and this default position locks us in. Better to look away for the time being, hope the situation will improve, or the problem will come to nothing as other matters achieve greater notoriety. We will elect a different mob next time, we convince ourselves.
Except the pain stays. And although we try to push it aside in order to go about our daily business, it is always there in the background, festering and eating away at the soul of our humanity.
What then should be our reaction when attempts are made to deliberately segregate the human family - for convenience, self-interest, greed or sheer savagery? Especially when it causes so much unnecessary pain and grief - and especially when we are aware that it is happening?
Again it is easy to be pragmatic. Humans have practiced compartmentalized organization and enforced separation of all kinds for most of our time on Earth. It is considered a sane way to maintain order, particularly when dealing with massive numbers of people. These days we analyze, divide, and separate as if it is going out of fashion. Without so much as a blink of the eye we nonchalantly self-organize into groups, tribes, clubs, castes, classes, communities, religions, kingdoms, empires and ideologies, without any comprehension that we also need to preserve the most precious characteristic of all, that of unity, before we all become alien to each other. If the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic imparted a gift, it was the realization of how much humans need and rely on each other, how critical socialization is to our mental health and wellbeing.
To a great extent categorizing in this fashion does allow society to work more efficiently. But is it any more than an administrative convenience? To what extent does it wound our sense of collective identity? Should separation be considered an act of violence if it is the source of pain for some and degrades the humanitarian ethos overall? Is it possible we are eroding essential aspects of our humanity by resorting to coercive division? A shared teleology perhaps? Or any intergenerational aspirations we might hold? Might it even impede our learning metabolism to the extent that our capacity to deal with the crises facing us is terminally compromised?
These are questions to which I have no answers. I find them disturbing nonetheless. We live in a space between two worlds, it seems to me, where progressive polarization, and even fragmentation, of society has already become massively destructive to any shared resolve or underlying purpose. Indeed there is a strong sense that humanity is losing its coherence - disintegrating into bits and pieces as never before. Each group seems only to listen to the sounds of its own voices echoing into a void. Each cell in humanity’s brain pursuing its own self-interests on a smart phone app but ignoring the transmissions between synapses that sustain any sense of common purpose or kinship.
This decoupling between groups encourages us to deviate even further from each other in ideals and perspectives. Any shared sense of our humanity seems to vanish like snowflakes in Spring thaw. As I have claimed on many occasions, we seem to be losing sight of what it genuinely means to be human, as well as the courage to face up to that promise.
Having only vague vestiges of harmony and shared intentions as a species we are far more inclined to distance ourselves in order to tolerate the horrors we perpetrate on each other. The most extreme example of this separation are the eyes in the sky that allow combatants to press a button and review their hideous carnage on digital displays – thousands of miles away from the sights and putrid smells of death.
Detached and clinical, though often with a frisson of graceless elation, we retreat into a cocoon of self-righteous outrage when challenged, resorting to the most depraved and bland excuses to condone such behaviour. We erect walls, and police borders, to keep others out of our own patch of paradise, much as we have done for the past few centuries, but at great expense to any sense of affinity or community, which then lie fractured at our feet.
The anguish of separation accompanying the death of an infant, a parent, or a friend, can be acute, as can the enduring despair. Pain from such a loss can continue to resonate for many months, if not years. If a simple legal device such as a divorce, often mutually agreed, can generate distress, how much more grief might be suffered as a result of separating entire families or communities when there is no such desire to part?
How much community value might we be depleting at its source by neutralizing the virtue, the kindness, and love in the human community of our shared existence? We live with toxic policies designed to do just that every day of our lives. Visas to visit loved ones arbitrarily denied. Jails overflowing with people who will later be judged innocent. Elite schools that continue to indoctrinate their students into believing they are better than others. How can we be at peace with each other when we allow these things to continue?
Strength in Numbers
Literally thousands of groups are springing up around the world, in a race to find answers to these and similar questions. While a few, mostly fringe activities, assess original ways to instigate second-order and third-order change, from a forensic appreciation of the human condition in context, most are content to promulgate answers that will sustain the current world-system - often by repeating the mistakes of the past, while aggravating still further the flaws in our assumptions regarding the need for unending economic growth.
Given that current modes of operating have reached the limits of their capacity to meet the demands of a human population fast approaching 8 billion, civilizational design must be undertaken from alternative ontological frameworks and apply new epistemological perspectives to any strategies for renewal.
All human behaviour arises from the assumptions, models and language used to imagine and express who we are, how we can relate to others, what matters, and what we desire. That is why, in a return to first principles, the main purpose of the Centre for the Future is to reimagine the human presence on Earth, helping to curate a world-system within which the truest expressions of what it means to be human can be realised, without damaging the capacity of the Earth for regeneration.
Our delivery capability deploys intervention capital to design, prototype and scale-up small experiments, arising from a proprietary process of wayfinding, across six theatres of human activity: power & governance, economics & production, cultures & communities, technologies & intelligence, learning & socialization, and ecosystems & landscapes.
Experiments incubated by the Centre, potential-shaping societal transformations rather than the customary recycling of present-day shortcomings rebranded as innovations, are defined by abundance rather than scarcity, connection rather than separation, harnessing rather than capturing ideas, and synthesis rather than analysis. It is also our intent to give those who suffer from the vicissitudes of the current socio-economic paradigm, a platform of visibility from which their voices can be heard.
It might come as a surprise that this latter group includes many incumbent leaders who are trapped by circumstances not of their choosing and feel burdened by the hopes and expectations of many. It also refers to forgotten and neglected people, those who have been disenfranchised, and those who endure hardship as a direct result of a paradigm whose prime purpose is its own relentless, machine-like survival.
This stance is in stark contrast to the many think-tanks, foundations, governments and non-government enterprises, who are still unable or unwilling to disentangle their own economic fortunes and motivations from the evolutionary needs of the human family.
Instinctively, unhesitatingly, support is given to false narratives - propaganda put together by a resourceful cadre of techno-literate business interests, media barons and empires refusing to die.
One such example was published by the World Economic Forum in 2020. Under the smokescreen of escalating crises facing humankind, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the automation of work, and the carefully fashioned branding of stakeholder capitalism, Klaus Schwab is encouraging a 'great reset' of production and consumption that will entrench the wealth of those in power, and our subservience to that control, still further.
The World Economic Forum is only the latest example of a non-elected body, the high priests of hegemonic capitalism, whose continuing plundering of the planet we permit. Standing at the altar of power, they permeate the public psyche with false premises of wealth and digitalized globalism, aimed at convincing us that there is only one possible future for humanity. The quickening pace and toxicity of our desire and consumption, amplified by the control and manipulation of data, and the fear of missing out, reads rather like a nursery rhyme in comparison to George Orwell's novel 1984.
My greatest fear is that any expansion of the current economic paradigm in a finite world, will lead to a moment of truth for humanity for which we are still not adequately prepared: evisceration of social and human relations, the failure of our most life-critical systems, and our civilization's eventual ruin, followed by the ensuing collapse of human societies, and even possible extinction.
For these reasons our attention must increasingly turn to creating platforms that provide greater access to, and improve the quality of, sense-making, imagination, and insightful action at a community level, as well as the pursuit of regenerative practices. At the same time, we must invite those charged with leading into a process of pluriversal cooperation, helping those who still call each other enemies to turn animosity into camaraderie, and repurposing an uncaringly harsh world-system, into one intent on the restoration of well-being, empathy, and integrity to our dealings with each other. This is impossibly utopian and also essential.
In 2016 our team visited people in the US who had expressed interest in knowing more about MiVote – our first venture into the theatre of governance, aimed at giving genuine decision-making power back to the people rather than through elected intermediaries. This was just weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the USA. Fear of the future was palpable in so many of those we had the good fortune to meet on that occasion. But what inspired me most was the vision of a few who saw that in order for the US to retain legitimacy in leading the free world, the world must necessarily be free first.
My friend John Picard conveyed this most eloquently when he suggested that the policy of the US should be not to erect more walls, not to get caught up between the ideologies of the left or the right, nor to spend more on wars and surveillance, but to open its heart, to share its ample resources with a world in need, to sue for peace rather than fight for it, and to demonstrate the innovation and generosity of spirit that helped create that nation.
This was a similar impulse that led to my own suggestion just a few weeks later that one possible way to resolve the ongoing tensions between Israel and Palestine would be to accept the reality of the West Bank occupation, to eradicate the barriers that ostensibly separate one group from another, and for the people of the ancient land of Canaan to embrace their unity as the first multi-faith nation in the modern world.
In terms of ontological pluralism, pragmatism is not viewed as the enemy of possibility. If seen through the lens of Cartesian logic, however, these two examples might appear ill-informed rejections of reality. Unless we can jettison our ingrained belief that arguments, conflicts, and forced compartmentalization are viable paths for achieving progress - the credo that has steered us blindly into our current crisis of unconsciousness - the potential for installing a communion of harmony and kinship will remain tantalizingly close yet destined to remain an unfulfilled dream.
We cannot allow further fracturing to embed. If a new kind of unity is a prerequisite for survival of the species then an evolution of consciousness will be required. I believe the sooner we take steps to reject separation, and to review our progress through the lens of the human family, the sooner we will understand and accept the gift of what it means to be human.
[i] Learning metabolism in humans is the speed at which an individual or group is able to sense changes of significance; make sense of these changes relative to what is already known - with specific reference to links, flows, emergent qualities, and impacts; process meaning(s); design; enact that design; and then monitor reactions to that design in the environment – all in the context of a dynamically complex system.
[ii] It must be said that many of those who have acquired enormous wealth are respectable people who are dismayed by this turn of events. Many of them have pledged to give their wealth away before they die. Unfortunately, because of the rift between reductionist and systemic logic, they tend overwhelmingly to give to causes that only address first-order change, not realizing that their generosity contributes further to sustaining the condition they are attempting to treat. Thus philanthropy as it is practiced never truly addresses the root cause of the world’s problems as a consequence.