Somebody Actually Did Something

Envisioning the good society

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In fact, quite a lot of people are doing things. Among the minority who have recognised that something is fundamentally wrong and that the western world is heading in a dark direction, there is a lot of activity.

Over the past two years I’ve witnessed or participated in a number of new groups and networks that have arisen in response to the question of our times: what do we do about the new authoritarianism? I don’t know what to call this new trend; the best name I’ve heard so far is the descriptive but rather cumbersome Truth and Freedom Movement. Part of the difficulty in naming the movement lies in its diversity: some groups are focused on resistance and reform, while others are about disconnecting from the mainstream and creating alternative ways of living. Approaches vary from traditional campaigning to the anarchistic, and include both the practical and the spiritual. Some combine elements of all of these.

In a world where most of us thought the battles for freedom, humanity and equality had long been won, finding an answer to the question of what to do is taking some working out. Everyone’s at different stages in this process. Some people, I regularly discover, ‘knew’ about the nature and extent of the threat years ago. Others are only just starting to confront the enormity of the challenge it presents, clinging to the hope that things will somehow right themselves without any action on their part, or that we’ll be saved by a better political leader or party.

'The Movement’ is an evolving muddle, inspiring and disappointing by turns. Far from embodying a fresh start, it’s a microcosm and mirror of the human qualities that got us where we are today: avoidance and denial, jealousies and insecurities, and contradictory and self-defeating behaviour run alongside all the good stuff. The new activism is repeating many of the patterns of the old: an alternative celebrity culture has already formed, with the same ‘names’ populating the interview and conference circuit. Their audiences sometimes show a tendency to look for simple solutions and a longing for all-knowing leaders. Meanwhile, the dark side of leadership is surfacing, with tunnel vision and monomania costing opportunities and useful alliances. And then there’s that old one – does it never go away? – whereby the men commandeer the lead parts and the women are firmly cast in the support roles.

There’s a ray of light amid all this messy activity: a common understanding, held at a core of each one of us, about what we don’t want. We don’t want surveillance and control. We don’t want to spend our lives feeding the greed of a powerful minority. We don’t want decisions affecting us in the most intimate and fundamental ways about what we do with our bodies, where we go and who we see, made by distant others furthering their own interests. And we don’t want the mental anguish of knowing – a knowing that persists at a deep level, even through denial – that we lack dignity, autonomy and purpose.

But what do we want?

As Penny Kelly observes, while westerners see that the current system no longer works for us, we have lost the ability to even ask the question: ‘what would we rather have?’ Having been being born into the current system, we tend to spend our lives seeking to manage within it. We have lost the habit of visionary thinking, and that’s a major part of our disempowerment.

Yet there is one person, now a group, seeking to generate a public debate about a better future. The public bit is important: so far, the little mainstream debate that has emerged has been confined to criticism of what has already happened, while in the alternative sphere of us ‘don’t wants’, ideas about doing things differently are rather patchwork. There's been no attempt that I'm aware of by any public figure or institution to envision how the whole of society could become a place where human life could flourish and we could reach our full potential.

That person is Jordan Peterson and the organisation he has formed is called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

The idea came to Peterson while travelling in Europe with his wife, meeting people active and influential in each area. ‘One of the things we encountered continually was the puzzled questioning, from especially the east Europeans, about just what the hell was going on in the West,’ he explained in this podcast. ‘They’re looking over at the West thinking: “what in the world are you people doing, toying with these ideas when the evidence is crystal clear that they took the lives of a hundred million people, devastated the lives of far more, and laid our countries to waste. Don’t you understand?”'

‘I’d certainly thought the same thing, being in the West. And it was very interesting to see that echoed by the people whose lives had included sojourns under those systems of oppression.’

Me too.

Looking over at what was going in Britain and Canada, people in Albania and other former communist states had ‘a sense of crying in the wilderness’, he went on. And that made Peterson wonder why, amid so much concern, people weren’t coming together internationally to share ideas and develop a vision that would form ‘an alternative to the globalist nightmare that threatens to engulf us all’.

So he set about formulating a way of conducting a public debate about the alternative. Working with others, he decided to present the public with a set of questions that would facilitate an exploratory, open kind of enquiry. This decentralised approach would provide a counterbalance to the top-down propositions coming from the globalists, with one important caveat that would distinguish any proposed solutions from theirs – no compulsion would be involved!

The result are six questions to which Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is seeking responses. They concern underlying values and governance arrangements, education, energy and environment. When I first took a look at them, I found they generated some immediate responses and some big blanks which I also found interesting. I began writing my answers with the intention of submitting them within a day or so and then realised that it was a bigger, more useful exercise than I first envisaged. So I gave them some thought and reproduce the results below in the hope that they might provoke ideas in others.

Before you read on, here’s something to consider: look at the questions first, perhaps jotting down some first thoughts and only when you’ve finished your own process, read my answers.

It’s important to stress that my current answers are provisional, an attempt to open up a sense of possibility in the face of the black-and-white prescriptions and sense of doom-laden inevitability that has overtaken Western society.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

1. Can we find a unifying story that will guide us as we make our way forward?

Human life is a unique and precious experience. From that recognition flows a sense of possibility that humans have the potential to evolve, to become more than what we initially are or seem to be, both individually and as a species. And from that flows a sense of responsibility: our lives, and the choices we make within them, matter.

Is that a radical idea?

The beliefs that have dominated the western world over in recent centuries would have us see ourselves in much more limited terms. The dominant worldview that has emerged out of Judaic-Christian thinking tends to focus on the travails and suffering of life on earth, with joy and fulfilment deferred until the life-to-come. The secular materialism that has largely replaced religion, while ostensibly providing a counter-narrative, offers a even more constrained view of human life as a matter of survival, with success construed in external terms. Progress seen in terms of domination of the material world and technological development while devoid of a sense of meaning and purpose – it’s no wonder its ultimate expression is turning out to be a coercive technocracy.

By contrast, seeing human development in social, psychological and spiritual terms opens up a very different horizon, one with a sense of expansiveness and abundance. This is not to dismiss the path we've taken so far or to exclude technological progress we have made so far. A mature assessment of the benefits and perils of industrialisation would avoid the binary futility of puritanical self-flagellation or the unthinking embrace of our current approach.

Recognising the necessity of change and learning from what hasn't or no longer works is part of human development. We did good, but we have learnt some lessons, and can now do better. There is no linear path towards Progress any more than there is an inevitable move into a fully digitalised, monitored world. The corollary of such a recognition would be finally giving up the perfectionist model of human society which characterised the tyrannical regimes of the twentieth century and has now returned, in new guise, with ideas about safety and control.

Accepting that, as evolving humans living on a fascinating planet, we are leaders in a creative experiment means recognising the inner authority that derives from the life force (or whatever phrase you choose) in each and every one of us. From that could come a shared sense of excitement and greater cooperation.

2. How do we facilitate the development of a responsible and educated citizenry?

First of all, western society needs to return to its foundational values of freedom of speech and freedom of thought. This means ending the censorship that has afflicted mainstream media and social media platforms in recent years and regaining an awareness of vested interests and the need for checks and balances in all systems affecting the public.

Over the past few decades, education in Britain has become increasingly focused on meeting targets and serving institutional needs. Young people tend to bear the burden of their schools’ anxieties, with lessons providing little opportunity to develop critical thinking or life skills.

I have a dream of an education system that develops practical and social skills as well as academic ability, one that fosters self-reliance, confidence and curiosity. Such qualities would form the basis for lifelong learning as the adult develops their particular interests and their life presents them with different challenges.

Rather than subjects for rote learning, particular topics could be treated as the means to develop transferable skills in research, analysis and expression. Taking a single topic and examining it from the standpoint of different academic disciplines would be a useful exercise in seeing things from different perspectives and help to counter the dogmatic ‘silo’ attitudes that often form within academic disciplines.

I have two specific ideas for school education, one for going in and one for going out:

- a period of ‘still time’ during the school day to help children learn how to slow down in a high-stress culture. This could form the basis of a meditation practice but should not be ‘taught’ as part of any kind of spiritual or religious system.

- every child could be assigned a part of their local area to ‘steward’ during the course of their education. This could be a patch of land or a body of water, part of a park or local woodland. They could visit it regularly throughout the school year, observing it through the seasons and under changing conditions. The place could be a site for practical projects such as tending or clearing litter and the focus of tasks in English, art, geography and science.

3. What is the proper role for the family, the community, and the nation in creating the conditions for prosperity?

The nuclear, or core, family in whatever form is essential. The first caregivers that surround a child are the foundation for adulthood: no society can flourish without psychologically healthy people.

But family is not enough. There is a deep need for community to provide a wider set of relationships, sources of practical support and a sense of belonging. While communities that do these things still exist in some areas, they have generally been eroded by a combination of factors that go under the heading of ‘modernity’ such as the need to move around for work and the retreat into individualistic forms of entertainment and leisure.

Britain has a flourishing civil society, with many groups and networks devoted to the betterment of local areas and the pursuit of activities of huge benefit to the individuals taking part, their communities and the life of the nation. But it is telling how far Covid-based measures succeeded in shutting civil society down, with some groups cancelling their plans even when they did not need to. This reveals an unhealthy level of dependence on the state and a lack of confidence in groups' own worth and judgement. Strongly-rooted communities have confidence in their own value and a resilience that make it difficult for them to be shut down by an edict.

Envisioning the role of the nation is more difficult. The nation state is, after all, a recent invention in the history of humanity, one that in many cases has been artificially created by geopolitical forces. It is possible to envisage a world arranged quite differently, but this is a long way ahead of the current situation and perhaps not a priority at a time when the main threat to humanity comes from globalist governance. However – and this ties in with questions to do with citizenry and the environment – attachment to place is real and, in modern times, an under-recognised part of the human experience.

4. How do we govern our corporate, social and political organizations so that we promote free exchange and abundance while protecting ourselves against the ever-present danger of cronyism and corruption?

As a first and immediate step, we should end membership of organisations which have over-stepped their reach and have clear plans to put an end to free societies: the WHO and WEF. As a lobbying organisation for big business, the latter has no place in developing public policy, while the large-scale commercial funding which now supports the WHO underlines the lesson that conflicts of interest can lead to corruption.

Any organisations aimed at facilitating inter-governmental cooperation should be much smaller, designed to facilitate communication between country leaders rather than being handed the means to grow into bureaucracies with their own agendas. Their staff should be skeletal and state contributions minimal.

More broadly, western society needs to go through a process of inquiry about what self-governance is, and how best to achieve it.

My provisional understanding about the revelation of these times is that liberal democracy is failing or has already failed. Its fundamental principle – that government serves the people and its authority rests on consent – seems to have been forgotten. Basic principles such as informed consent and freedom of speech have been cast aside by many individuals and institutions. This forgetting highlights the fact that the structures and processes of western democracy are only part of what underpins a humane and liberal society. Without values that are deeply-held and widely understood, they can easily be overridden or changed, with or without a democratic vote.

Here’s a difficult, interesting question to think about: perhaps democracy was just a first step on humanity’s road to self-government?

More psychology needs to be brought to bear on the understanding of the political. For example, a better understanding of emotions such as fear and anger and how they can be manipulated in the public realm would provide some sort of immunity against propaganda and narratives serving vested interests. Is it over-optimistic to think that more self-awareness in the public sphere might lessen the unconscious identification with Authority as the psychological mechanism which enables authoritarianism?

Statements that characterise western attitudes towards the political such as ‘we can’t do anything’ or ‘I’m only one person’ need to be understood as attitudinal statements which reveal an emotional state of passivity rather than as statements of fact. To put the same point in a different way, the public realm could benefit from the self-awareness that has been cultivated by popular psychology and the personal development movement in recent decades. (The work of James Hillman is pertinent here). When psychological maturity applies to the social and political sphere, people are likely to choose better leaders. Leaders who lie, show poor judgement and a lack of principle are less likely to be tolerated.

In practical terms, we should cut back the power of the state while we assess what form of government forms the best basis for human flourishing. This is a prescriptive point, made in the knowledge that it’s unlikely to happen soon or least, not in any formal way. But de facto, the breakdown of the current system is already underway as more and more citizens pull back from the state, individually and collectively.

On the ground, the withdrawal from the corporate state is already opening the way for new arrangements that could facilitate free exchange and abundance. Re-localising informally or as conceived in the Small Town movement would begin a natural process of removing the middle man (aka corporations) from transactions and form the basis for more human(e) arrangements in food production, healthcare and trade.

5. How do we provide the energy and other resources upon which all economies depend in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe and efficient, including in the developing world?

I don’t have ready energy solutions to propose – if they were that easy to find, others better qualified than me would have done so! But given that the current energy debate is both about itself and much wider, deeper issues, two contextual points are relevant here.

The pursuit of more and more growth is not sustainable, not just because some of the earth’s resources will run out, but because it’s the expression of the unhealthy relationship modern westerners have with the earth and to each other. The sectors of economies which derive profit from producing consumer goods that serve neither a useful purpose nor create beauty or enhance wellbeing are a symptom of this. From a consumer point of view, the over-consumption that fuels this kind of production perhaps is best understood as an attempt to medicate meaninglessness. Discernment is needed here: while mass-produced novelty items and plastic plants might be examples of destructive profligacy, the plastics used in modern medicine and durable household items are incredibly useful.

Again, this does not mean rejecting the developments that have brought us where we are or punishing ourselves for the sins of industrialisation. It is important to recognise that the nihilistic attitude that characterises some mainstream green thinking is now used to justify coercive measures that ultimately only benefit the corporate state. Britain, for example, is at the forefront of pioneering an unpleasant and counter-productive example of such an approach, with government installing roadblocks and cameras on the roads, thus restricting freedom of movement and imposing financial penalties that can only create poverty and isolation. By contrast, there is little attention given to improving the country's limited public transport system, one area where national investment and infrastructure makes sense.

Finally, more research and aspiration could go into developing new energy sources. It is hard to believe that alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear energy do not exist and it looks increasingly likely, given the vested interests involved and established evidence of manipulation by corporations to allow them to continue business as usual (the carbon off-setting industry being one example) that there has been some suppression of research into alternative technologies.

6. How should we take the responsibility of environmental stewardship seriously?

scale agriculture would have benefits on several fronts, from halting the march of agri-business to regenerating the soil, something which in turn would provide more nutritious food and promote biodiversity.

Such a move would be a first step in re-conceiving jobs and industry in ways that do not depend so heavily on extraction and destruction. A second, parallel step would come from the re-localising of relationships and practical arrangements suggested in the answer to question 4. Encouraging local relationships with place, as suggested in question 2, is also a powerful way tThe starting point should be a recognition that humans are part of nature.

Relinquishing the view of humans as trans-natural beings entitled to dominate the natural world involves a certain humility, but the increased sense of connection would also leads to expanded sense of possibility and cooperation. Without advocating a retreat to past ways of living, there is much to be gained from recalling the experiences of those who came before us and lived the earth without an unqualified sense of superiority. The wisdom of the past combined with an optimistic, can-do approach is a powerful recipe for a positive future.

With the world increasingly coming under the control of large corporations, it is imperative to recognise that natural resources cannot become the property of corporations or governments. Seeds, water and DNA are not for sale! There is a need to reclaim the land that is being bought up by big corporations and billionaires and make some of it available to families and communities for farming. A return to small-scale agriculture would have benefits on several fronts, from halting the march of agri-business to regenerating the soil, something which in turn would provide more nutritious food and promote biodiversity.

Such a move would be a first step in re-conceiving jobs and industry in ways that do not depend so heavily on extraction and destruction. A second, parallel step would come from the re-localising of relationships and practical arrangements suggested in the answer to question 4. Encouraging local relationships with place, as suggested in question 2, is also a powerful way to promote care for the environment – it is hard to stand by and allow the destruction of a place you know and love!

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If the above has given you a taste for these kinds of questions, Penny Kelly’s The Revival: Path to a New Earth/New Human has hundreds of questions on subjects from education to technology in the ‘workbook’ sections.