NELSON MANDELA’S THEORIES IN USE.
Is anyone feeling a bit uncomfortable? Wondering whether you should make an excuse and leave? I ask, because if you are highly educated and/or have enjoyed a successful managerial or academic career, you will probably have agreed with both the world view of the power elites AND the alternative, ecological world view.
I can see heads nodding. It’s odd isn’t it. Here we have world views that are incompatible, yet many people can happily agree with and argue for both of them. What’s going on? Well here’s where our Theories of Action split into two parts. “Espoused Theories” and “Theories in Use”
Theories-in-use govern our actual behaviour and tend to be so internalised that we don’t really know they are there. They are a complex set of analytical rules we have acquired since the womb and use to understand ourselves, other people and the world we live in and decide what actions to take. Deep down, our ‘Theories in Use’ provide us with a set of what we take to be practical guidelines, rules, methodologies, that add up to a science of everyday life. The more educated we are the more complex our Theories in Use are likely to be.
Our Theories-in-use always determine the extent to which we can act upon our Espoused Theories.
Thus we can espouse an ecological and/or socialist or even anarchist world-view, but live by theories in use that make it impossible to turn our alternative world view into a reality.
The more radical the world view we espouse, the more important it is to examine the world view we actually use to go about the business of our daily lives. Going back Mandela for a moment, was INVICTUS any use when it came to choosing his economic Ministers and advisers? Many of the years he and his fellow-prisoners had spent reading and discussing the great thinkers would have been dominated by the ideas of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Gramsci, Che, Castro and other revolutionary theorists.
Then, just as they got the chance to put their ideas into practice, the whole Communist-Socialist project implodes and turns to the USA and its allies for advice as to how to adopt and implement free-market policies. What a bummer!! All the theories in use they had been acquiring in their prison university had been shown to be useless in the real world.
The only other alternative, Keynesian social democracy (aka capitalism-lite), had been more or less abandoned in the USA and its friends and satellites in the 1980s. So, Mandela’s speeches on economics – like Obama’s today – reflect the hard-line free-market Theories in Use that have dominated the USA and its friends since the 1980s.
The failure of Mandela, and every other would-be radical leader to deliver the revolutionary agendas that they genuinely believe when they espouse them, stems from their lack of Theories in Use that fit with and enable them to implement successfully, their ideals.
And this applies at every level and in every sector of society. None of us could have reached maturity without Theories in Use that are mostly rooted in the distant past, a past dominated by the ideas of – to name but a few – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, J.M. Keynes, and a few dozen other great thinkers. But all of those great thinkers were theorising at a time when no-one had articulated, still less adopted, a world view in which human societies had to learn how to co-exist with the ecological systems on which they depend and are a part. Concepts such as ecology, theories of action, viability, systems thinking, complexity, self-organisation, participatory democracy, problem-posing dialogues, learning organisations, sustainability, were totally unknown to them.
Yet those concepts and methodologies need to be the core components of the “Theories in Use” through which we can co-create Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.
For the moment, we don’t need to begin to discuss how our current Theories in Use have affected the way we act and behave and think. That can wait to our next meeting. For the rest of this evening we just need to run through what we mean by Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.
Let’s start with “GAIAN” after we’ve stretched our legs and had another glass of something.
After Obama?? 