VIGDEOCs and CULTURAL CREATIVES. Part 3.

ESPOUSED THEORIES vs THEORIES IN USE

Before the break we looked at the dominant world view of today’s power-elites and an alternative world view that relates the survival of our societies to their connection to a functioning ecological base. Duh.

This opposing world view is so sensible and understandable that you’d think that any sane and intelligent member of society – and especially those highly-educated and nurtured members of the power-elites – would adopt it as the basis for their policies and decisions.

But of course they don’t. Why not? Because – unlike any of us – they’re cowards? And/or deeply corrupt and dishonest? Many of them, probably, but there is another explanation that we need to be aware of and think about before we cast the first stone.

The more likely explanation for the failure of our power-elites to adopt and act upon an ecologically-based world view is that their unexamined mental maps, their “Theories of Action” stop them learning how to do so.

These are not just ideological issues. We all have world views, mental models, “Theories of Action”, that can stop us from learning how to tackle complex issues and when you start coming to VIGDEOC network meetings they will be the first things you’ll talk about, explore, evaluate.

Of course, not all world views, mental models, get in your way. Without them we couldn’t get through a normal day at home or at work or with our friends. They are what enable us to fit in, feel comfortable, have confidence that we’re doing the right thing, that people will trust and respect us.

So where do those theories and mental models come from?

Think who or what has shaped – and is shaping – the way you think? Parents, teachers, friends, films, books, plays, newspapers, blogs, radio and TV, sports people, neighbours.

We all have them. You don’t have to be an intellectual. Jenni Diski the British writer tells this story of teaching in a tough London girls’ school.

Most of the pupils were planning to get married or pregnant as soon as they left school, and they were worried about Ms.Diski’s future. One day, a sixteen year-old asked ‘Miss’ :

‘How old are you?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Why aren’t you married?’
‘I don’t want to get married.’
The rest of the class joined in.

‘At least have a baby, miss. Because it’ll look after you when you’re old.’
‘At least get engaged, miss, and get a ring. Then you’ve got something to sell.’

Those girls – and millions like them – had such powerful “Theories of Action” that nothing said by their teachers, had any relevance to their mental models of the real world, and the Theories of Action that shaped their behaviours and actions.

Or think for a moment about sports. If you spent your formative years playing American Football, Ice-Hockey and Basketball, your world-view would be very different to contemporaries brought up on soccer, hurling, cricket, tennis and even rugby.

Which brings me to the film about the South African team’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup: INVICTUS. Did you see it?  Why INVICTUS? Yes, its the poem that President Mandela recommends to the team captain, François Pienaar as a guiding philosophy that sustained him through 27 years of harsh imprisonment.

INVICTUS starts

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

And ends

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

Powerful stuff. And we see Pienaar inspired by words that had sustained Mandela to lead his team of underdogs to victory in the competition – and in the process seemed to create a joyously united nation out of the bitter embers of the apartheid system.

But noble sentiments, goodwill and sporting success can take you only so far. Fifteen years later, South Africa is falling apart: economically, socially, culturally, ecologically. No doubt, Mandela and his successors have done some good things. However the Theories of Action they brought to the vast array of problems and opportunities they inherited have not enabled them to transform the fortunes of the vast majority of their fellow-citizens.

Whatever they may say about justice and change and however sincerely they say it, they, and every other democratically elected leader in the world today operates within something similar to the mental models that John McMurtry outlined.

Often, like Mandela, their mental models operate alongside a quasi-spiritual view of their role in the world. Yet, in another part of INVICTUS we see Mandela making a speech that almost explicitly endorses the dominant power-elite world view that:

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.
• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.
• Governments should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.
• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

Remember that Mandela was a brilliant lawyer and had spent thousands of days in mutual-education classes with his fellow-inmates during his 27 years in prison. If, after all that, even a great man and a good leader like Mandela shares the same world-view as the rest of the global power elites, we have to start by trying to understand the limitations of our own Theories of Action before we can co-create Viable, Innovative and Gaian Democracies, Enterprises, Organisations and Communities.

Advertisement

VIGDEOCs and Cultural Creatives: Part 2.

THE POWER ELITES’ WORLD-VIEW

VIGDEOC = Viable Innovative Gaian Democracies Enterprises Organisations and Communities.

Look at this photo. What do you see? Not a trick question.

INSERT  PHOTO of FROCK-COATED 19th

CENTURY SURGEONS

Surgeons at work in the mid-19^th century? Yes.

What are their patients’ chances of survival? About 50%. Until about 1870, 48 – 50% of surgical patients died. This percentage had not changed in hundreds of years. Now look at this picture of a 20^th Century surgical team at work.

INSERT PHOTO OF  MID 20th.   CENTURY  SURGICAL OPERATION

What are this patient’s chances of survival? Better than 99% even for the kind of hugely-complicated surgery that was beyond the wildest imaginings of the gentlemen in the first picture.

Yet, this improvement did not take long to happen. The patients chances of survival had improved to around 99% within a few decades of that ‘first picture being taken.

Mortality rates today are only marginally better than they were at the end of the 19^th century. So, tell me, what happened?

After hundreds – even thousands – of years of stasis, had surgeons suddenly got better, cleverer, more dedicated? Had their training changed drastically? Had their instruments improved?

What happened around 1870 to make even the most difficult surgical operations vastly safer than they had been a decade or two earlier? Any suggestions? Any theories?

The answer is that surgeons everywhere started to apply the scientific knowledge that had just become available from Joseph Lister in England about Hygiene, using Carbolic Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide as Disinfectants, about Bacteriology from the work of Louis Pasteur in France, and about the Sterilisation of their instruments from Robert Koch in Germany.

Interestingly, because surgeons were all private practitioners at that time, it was market forces that drove even the most hidebound and blinkered of them to rush to implement the entirely non-surgical innovations that were making their more scientifically-minded colleagues very wealthy.

How does this relate to the VIGDEOC networks?

Remember the Questionnaire? We are agreed that

our current systems of  government and democracy do not know how to respond to crises we are facing

The reason today’s politicians, economists, business leaders, academics, administrators and commentators are failing so badly is because they have yet to use the scientific knowledge that has become available in the past half century to co-create VIGDEOCs that can define and eliminate the problems that baffle the current system.

Just as the 19^th Century surgeons before Lister, Pasteur and Koch, they are working within a set of theories and practices that go back hundreds of years. Here is a summary of how they see the world by the Canadian philosopher, John McMurtry.

• Each country is first and foremost a competitor in the global market and should act according to its own interests.

• All states have a right to use all resources within their reach.

State governments

• Are the ultimate source of civil order.

• Should keep out of the markets.

• Should encourage trans-national companies to play a full part in all national and international decisions affecting global trade and development.

Representative democracy

• is the nearest approach to an ideal democracy that is practicable in the real world and is the true guardian of a free society.

Science and technology

• We can ignore the ‘doom-mongers’ because science and technology will always find solutions to the problems that worry them.

The market economy

• All human needs express themselves in the market place in monetary terms and therefore the market will lead to optimal solutions for all problems.

• Permanent economic growth is desirable and necessary, with no inherent environmental or human limits to the conversion of life into saleable commodities.

• Individual consumer desires are permanently increasing, unlimited and good.

• Those who do not or cannot express themselves in the competitive process are a problem, but not one that calls for radical reflection.

• The great majority who have only their labour to sell must do so.

• Ever larger trans-national corporations are perfectly natural.

Market forces

• Competition is the dominant principle governing relationships of all kinds.

• Freedom to buy and sell in money exchanges is the basis of human liberty and justice.

• Profit maximisation is the engine of social well-being and is not to be hedged by public regulation or ownership.

• Private property s good in all things.

• Information is a proprietary and marketable good and a legitimate means for acquiring wealth, power and privilege.

• Aggressive individualism on the part of individuals, companies and states is acceptable.

With minor variations, those ideas have dominated human affairs for at least 200 years and have their roots in much earlier times. They go back 2500 years to Plato and Aristotle, 500 years to Machiavelli, to the Westphalian Treaty of 1659, and the thinking of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and, of course, to the free-market theories of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith and Ricardo that have shaped the dominant economic paradigms for well over 200 years.

If there were less than a Billion people on Earth, if wars were fought with muskets and swords, if the highest form of technology were the steam engine, that world view would not immediately threaten the future of either the human family or of the species we evolved with.

Today, however, with over 6 Billion people on the planet, with wars waged by horrific high-tech weapons, and technologies that rip off the tops of mountains or scour the coral reefs off the ocean floor, those values and assumptions have to be consigned to the trashcan of history.

In the 21st. Century,  our societies have to tackle the complex systemic new threats we face within a new world view,  one that assumes:

• The world is a system of interacting subsystems that have evolved together and depend on each other
• Viable Societies depend on a functioning ecological base and a finite, partly renewable resource-base.
• The principle of partnership applies to present and future human and non-human systems.
• The self-organising potential and diversity of natural systems is the model for the co-creation of a global network of VIGDEOCs.

Time for another little break, I think. Then,we’ll outline how being part of a global network of VIGDEOCs could  affect your lives and the lives of everyone you come into contact with and the future of every living thing on Earth.