Inviting Extinction
Almost every day we hear rumours and scuttlebutt concerned with the extinction of humanity. Anxiety and fear from various factors fuels this sense of foreboding. The potential for a nuclear accident, climate chaos, pandemics like the one in which we are currently immersed, creeping authoritarianism, conflict, economic disparities, technological disruption, and geopolitical jostling for power are just a few of the circumstances concerning us.
Unsurprisingly Hollywood and Netflix pick up these themes, shaping a narrative that holds many of us spellbound – or traumatized. After watching documentaries like Seaspiracy and David Attenborough's A Life on this Planet it seems as though we are inviting extinction with open arms.
Most people tend to dismiss such claims as implausible. Just look at the world we have crafted through generations of ingenuity and determination, they assert. It is unthinkable that major coastal cities could be under water by the end of this century. It is equally unthinkable that we might empty the oceans by commercial fishing by 2048, destroy most top soils from industrial agriculture by 2060, or accidentally trigger a nuclear war that would destroy all life on the planet.
Be that as it may, humans share a deep cognitive inability to face up to existential crises of this nature. We willingly ignore the facts, clinging to the hope that scientists are wrong or their models inaccurate. We convince ourselves that corporations are not selfish and governments would take instant action to protect us if any of these issues could put humanity in clear and present danger. And if, by any stretch of the imagination, any of them did turn out to be true, then we would just invent a new technology to solve the problem. Case dismissed.
But what if we are not up to that task? What if it all happens so quickly that we are caught napping? Surely it would be best to exercise the precautionary principle used in medicine and to address any doubts we might have by changing what we do and how we do it – especially if it also generates a safer, cleaner, healthier and more sustainable society?
Others will insist we are already taking sufficient action in any number of ways. They will point to the pledges by various nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. They will argue, as in the past, that possessing stockpiles of nuclear weapons on active standby is a deterrent against their use. They will see gene editing, and gain-of-function trials on viruses as legitimate ways to cure disease. They will argue that industrial fishing and agriculture is the only way to feed a population of more than 8 billion people. They will bow to the billionaires as they plan their escape routes. And if they want to live longer lives they might even see the dream of digital immortality by 2048 as a bonus.
But all of these events without exception, including the most virtuous and well-intentioned, alongside most entrepreneurial initiatives that simply add to a stockpile of stuff we do not need, skirt around the main dilemmas that trap us in prisons of our own invention:
1. Everything we do is underpinned by an assumption that the laws of science cannot apply to us, or that we are able to conquer nature because we are much smarter than that. The reality is we cannot bargain with physics. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic could be seen as nature giving us a chance to prepare and plan for something far worse. But no. All we want to do is to defeat this virus. So we have no compunction about shutting down the global economy and quarantining healthy people until we eradicate the threat. Not only is our thinking pathetically short-term – the language we insist on using keeps us from breaking out of a cognitive trap that remains silent and unseen.
2. Everything we do to prevent or alleviate systemic risks and threats is characterized by 1st-order change. Incremental improvement is the extent of our ambition. But 1st-order change does not fundamentally transform the games we play, or even alter the rules. The reality is that we need radical 2nd- and 3rd-order change – metamorphosis – if we are to resolve effectively the various crises facing us. This will depend on constructive disruption of the status quo, re-perceiving our world through different ontological frames, contesting our most deeply-held beliefs about who we are, how we relate to each other and to nature, and finally reinventing our most life-critical systems. Transformation, as opposed to tweaking at the edges, is needed and we are not good at that.
3. Societal transformation by design and at scale has never been tried or achieved by any species. That is not to suggest it cannot be done. Usually we prefer to adapt to changing conditions. We have been remarkably adept at this typically gradual process. But today we have run out of time and options. The ambient global conditions we have ourselves created over the past two or three centuries have turned noxious. In protecting herself, mother nature has turned rogue. Urgent and wise action must be taken between now and 2030, if we are to reverse the most harmful of the forces we have unleashed. That must comprise not just process re-engineering, and the redesign of entire systems from first principles, but the deliberate use of alternative design criteria.
4. The design criteria we routinely (yet unconsciously) reach for within the context of 1st-order change are so ingrained into our sense of normalcy that alternatives are almost impossible to imagine. Replacing competition with cooperation, for example, challenges every aspect of contemporary urban living – from making and selling to schooling, travelling, surveilling and policing. Equally, rejecting economic growth in order to pursue zero or even negative growth appears to be insane. GDP is government gospel after all. Yet growth is a cancer on developed society and many pre-industrial societies found alternative ways to subsist.
5. Narrative is the most potent and indispensable agent of 2nd- and 3rd-order transformational change. The code for unlocking radical change is to be found deeply embedded within the stories we tell each other as well as the elemental beliefs, themes, underlying intentions, and repeated motifs that comprise the stories. At a societal level we call these stories worldviews.
6. Worldviews determine the world-systems of reality that we inhabit on a daily basis, as well as the activities we conduct in response to any changes in these world-systems. While worldviews remain intact, there can be no transformative change triggered, for this depends on palpable shifts to the beliefs, motives, and language used in the overarching narratives. Of course this is why narrative management is so crucial in determining how we view reality. For example, the opinions we might have of China-US relations is totally dependent on how the narrative in both societies is constructed, conveyed, and utilized.
Conclusions
Transformational societal change at scale is a pre-requisite for avoiding extinction of our species. We do not have much time to act. The most critical element informing radical change of any kind is story: narrative composition and management. That does not necessarily mean imposed top-down change from governing bodies to the community will work. Indeed one of the assumptions we keep pushing to inevitable miscarriage is the idea that others with expertise and knowledge must tell us what to do.
For example, given what I am saying about the importance of narrative, it might be assumed that one of the first tasks in any kind of radical change initiative would be to craft an alternative narrative to give to the population. This is precisely what the UN must have wanted to achieve in crafting the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. They must have thought that sharing this knowledge of what needs to be done (even without the how) would be sufficient to stimulate informed action. But how? Without an understanding of how these goals might be conveyed, and no funds available for actual deployment, the ambition was bound to fail from the beginning. There are three main reasons:
• A global population of almost 8 billion people has far too much 'requisite variety' for imposed aims of any kind to be heeded, particularly where there is no authoritative mechanism in place to monitor and assure implementation. The goals, even if they were comprehensive, are far too easy to neutralize at a grassroots level. In any society the flexibility of behaviour to control both social and political systems is with the people.
• The catalyst for change 'at scale' is circumscribed by sovereignty – its interpretation within the context of the nation-state and the immediate commercial imperatives of those in power. The impulse to enact radical change, in collaboration with others who may well, at other times, be branded 'rivals' must be utterly compelling to overcome such inherent power structures and cultural diversity.
• The media has a critical role to play in societal change of any kind. In societal transformation at scale, the voice of the global media would be charged with conveying consistent and coherent messages in repeated reinforcement of the official story. That would entail a stream of strategic intelligence being fed through radio and television outlets, continuous briefings, and ongoing provisioning, none of which were available to the UN for this endeavor, or forthcoming from those who might have funded the initiative.
In the light of these comments it might seem obvious that unless one or more planetary authorities are established, charged with the pluriversal application of narratives for systemic renewal, the likelihood of any top-down approach working will be infinitesimal. Social activism and civil disobedience in the society, meanwhile, will become ever more intense as systems continue to fail and break down.
In contrast, a sequence of decentralized, tiny, benign, globally coordinated but localized experiments, informed by a system of strategic intelligence feedback loops aimed at raising people's consciousness for collaborative action across a range of activities (from regenerative farming to citizen budgeting, for example) would not raise the ire of citizens, but could relieve the stress on world leaders while getting better results faster.
This 'acupuncture-like' approach to transformational 2nd-order societal change could conceivably trigger a profound metamorphosis in sustainable manufacturing, construction, and agriculture; a much more equitable global economy; political justice, holistic governance, and higher moral standards; as well as how we relate to each other, the environment, and all other forms of life.
The accumulation of these activities against a backdrop of a more sustainable and inspiring version of the human story might just serve to nudge the world-systems upon which we rely for our physical and mental wellbeing, into ones that are far more healthy and viable in the longer-term.