Today, across Australia, hundreds of thousands of citizens will be demonstrating in the March for Justice - part of a protest against a culture that is claimed not to value women, and where sexual harassment, gendered violence and abuse extends into the corridors of Parliament.
Although The Human Rights Commission's Respect@Work report, the result of an 18-month inquiry by the Commission, was launched more than 12 months ago, no actions have been forthcoming from the conservative government. Some Ministers have been contemptuous of the findings in private, even though the Attorney-General, the highest law maker in the land, has stepped aside temporarily after being accused of sexual assault.
Humans shape and construct systems deliberately – but then they shape us. All systems-in-use are designed to deliver what we need. Agriculture for example, is the organization of farming and its associated factors, to provide people with nutritious, healthy food, at a price they can afford, and that remunerates all those who work within the system. If the outputs from farming are not what we want (or had intended) then we really only have two options:
1. We can redesign the system so that it does produce what we want by changing the inputs or improving one or more processes of production.
2. We can scrap it and start again – reinventing it from first principles in ways that fulfil more relevant design criteria.
For example, we might find the system of democracy as it is currently practiced too partisan, too ideologically limited, aligned too closely with exclusive institutional interests, biased and open to favours, and consequently unable any longer to adequately represent the will of the people – which was the original impulse. In these circumstances we might agree to redesign the system by introducing online voting, extending parliamentary terms, and restricting the number of terms an elected representative can stand for election. Or we might reinvent the entire concept of democracy according to criteria that ensure policy outputs are culturally inclusive, ethically responsible, economically and ecologically viable, technically viable, and socially compassionate. Different design criteria.
It is worth clarifying what I mean when I use a term like system because it can be interpreted very loosely to mean different things. The world is a highly complex system of interconnected parts - a world-system comprising ecosystems, landscapes, climate, oceans, living creatures, and a great deal more. Likewise the systems humans have fabricated to grow and distribute food, or govern society, for example, are also whole systems.
Whereas a natural system will not have any evident purpose, all manufactured systems are functionally designed as coherent entities with one or more intended results. Comprising a number of interdependent parts, or sub-systems, they are made to satisfy an identified and stated need, and have agreed inputs that are transformed by a collection of processes into desired outputs. In other words they are teleologically conceived to produce something that is desired by the system’s architects.
Dynamically complex systems such as these can be scoped and better understood by defining their boundary, structure and behaviours. We can then make simplified representations of the system (models) in order to anticipate and modulate its future behaviour.
One of the systems currently failing humanity is that of governance – particularly the ways in which power and praxis are applied in service to society, and how it has become confused with politics. Today few governance systems are working as intended. Arguably the Chinese model of state capitalism, administered by extremely competent technocrats, is functioning far better than most - with record-breaking levels of trade; continuing reforms in agriculture, social welfare, education and healthcare; income security for the 100 million recently lifted out of absolute poverty; massive investments in infrastructure; and a relatively contented majority of Chinese society who trust the Party.
China is not perfect by any means of course. But the most historically-effective democracies and quasi-democratic states are failing in their duty to protect, respect, and promote the well-being of citizens. The are many reasons for the failure of governance today. One particularly disturbing factor is the way in which politics has become infected with the dehumanization of women - a sadism that dominates almost every aspect of global capitalism in the same way it does pornography. By championing a world devoid of compassion and love, and eroticizing masculine power that conducts the degradation and humiliation of women, we have allowed politics to become an instrument of male lust and the usurper of governance integrity.
Common reactions to the still-unfolding political circus in the United States, with the focus firmly on exceptionalism, narcissism, celebrity and violence; the farce of the Brexit plebiscite in the UK; the barren flatland arising from political grandstanding in places like Australia; economic instabilities across Europe; and the corporatization of politics globally, has left many of us confused, angry and disengaged. Most people are beginning to wake up to the fact that political systems are benedictions to a capitalist purgatory, so thoroughly rigged they can only produce the cruel and iniquitous outcomes to which we are now witnesses.
The system is broken. We urgently need to address this fact. But how? In view of what I have outlined here the answer has to be by redesign or reinvention, inevitably supplemented by active resistance to the status quo - including non-cooperation. Right?
Unfortunately there is much more to it than that. In the past public protests, civil disobedience, and bloody revolutions did the job. I am not convinced they will work today against corporate media like Fox; large firms like Goldman Sachs bankrolling neoliberalism; militarized policing; and incumbent oligarchs who truly believe they have every right to bludgeon the citizens they are there to protect into submission. Against forces such as these, rebellion needs to be more subtle - an evolution of social consciousness, engaging people from all sectors of society in calling out and resisting the gaming of governance systems by politics.
This mindful uprising must be built on the back of a common understanding - that almost all governance systems are corrupted by political games that are diametrically opposed to the public good.
Let us not be duped any longer into believing that inequality, injustice, poverty, and brutality, are regrettable though necessary consequences of how we choose to organize ourselves in a civilized society. They are design features of the current system - intended outcomes from the tax policies, excessive budgets for military escapades, border protection and state-sanctioned violence; coupled with huge transfers of wealth from the productive majority to the coffers of a tiny but powerful elite. They do not indicate incompetence or a lack of design know-how. On the contrary, they reveal a system performing well in the way it was designed to perform.
Remember. If we do not like the results we get from a particular system, then there is no other option than to redesign or reinvent it - particularly in terms of its inputs, practices and purpose.
That means overcoming the illusion that the self-sustaining pattern of divisive social norms, media collusion, and political 'shame and blame' games upholding the status quo, are able to provide for the needs of contemporary societies. They can not. They are leading to the failure of states in which many people are suffering while a few become obscenely affluent. We must also face the fact that many of our elected representatives are so out of touch with reality yet lack the moral compass and tools needed to recover even a semblance of competence.
Contaminated by a toxic mix of fear and greed, stirred by the ever-growing complexity of the global environment, and lacking the knowledge that might change this state of affairs, those in authority preside over governance systems that are in crisis.
The spectacle of politics is gaming that system, pitted against healthy governance because of its self-destructive fantasy - a quasi-pornographic 'shades of grey' culture where anything goes. Politicians cannot even patch up the present adequately, least of all solve the more existential problems of the human condition. We should just stop pretending that they can.