Rethinking Humanity: at the crossroads of change
Exploring Economics and Governance in a New World (5)
[This article has been based on the Rethinking Humanity report by RethinkX (2020)]
When in mid-2020, think-tank RethinkX published “Rethinking Humanity”, the report struck me as extremely timely. Which is no surprise as the report’s introduction explains: “Today, the five foundational sectors of the global economy — information, energy, transport, food, and materials — are being disrupted at an unprecedented speed and scale. The implications for the wider economy, societies, and indeed our civilization itself are profound. Indeed the 2020s will be the most disruptive decade in history. Covid-19 has simply pulled the curtain on the fragility of current models of production and governance. It is just one of a series of predictable shocks that threaten to devastate our civilization if, collectively, we do not make the right choices.”
The profoundness with which the report sketches the rupture point we currently find ourselves at, in light of insights gained from the rise and (often dramatic) fall of previous civilizations in the past few thousand years — and set against our (ever advancing) technological capabilities and (increasingly lacking) organizing systems, makes it mandatory reading material for those looking to gain a view on where we may be or — if continuing our current path — will likely be heading in the near-future.
Too often this potential of a dystopian future is seen merely or predominantly through the lens of climate change, however the implications of an impending collapse by mid century are far more reaching than that. It could plunge us into a new chapter of the Dark Ages, representing a reversal of social complexity and an implosion to a lower level of capabilities, in which humanity survives albeit not thrives with a much smaller global population than current.
Looking back at a few hundred thousand years of human history, we can note that leading civilizations have evolved ever-greater organizational capabilities in tandem with increased technological capabilities. While the latter dictate the potential of that civilization, it is the organizing system which determines how close to this potential a society can get. In this context, Rethinking Humanity considers the organizing system to encompass “both the fundamental beliefs, institutions, and reward systems that enable optimal decisions to be taken across a society, and the structures that manage, control, govern, and influence its population”.
The fundamental flaw with civilizations such as ours that have based themselves on an extractive, expansionary system — which also included for instance the Roman Empire — is that such systems were and are mainly concerned with maximizing income from useful outputs for the center. Considering the finite nature of both resources and geographical expansion, let alone the environmental and social ‘externalities’ of such an approach, future flourishing instead is most likely to come from breakthrough (rather than extrapolation) — meaning the adoption of a novel approach to the organizing system combined with order-of-magnitude improvements in technological capabilities.
Moving to a new organizing system however has always represented a formidable challenge for incumbent civilizations finding themselves at a similar rupture point as we do today. Reaching the limits of their ability to organize society and solve the problems created by its production system, civilizations throughout history have tended to look backwards when threatened with collapse, attempting to recapture the good old days by patching up and doubling down on their existing production and organizing systems rather than reinventing them.
Previous leading civilizations have as such mostly been blind to the long-term impacts of their reductionist approach. They postponed investments to support profound change until it was too late, prioritizing the short over the long-term and the narrow over the common interest.
Of course, the other choice we may have to soften impending resource and climate shocks — and one of the most common solutions put forward — is to drastically cut consumption now, which is almost impossible to do voluntarily with our current beliefs, institutions, and reward systems. Such deep and rapid reductions also risk creating temporary economic austerity (the strict COVID lockdowns being an example of that), therewith reducing the surplus available to support investments in technical and social innovation & experimentation, critical to help us ‘break through’.
In a sense, many solutions suggested to fix our key challenges are still rooted in a linear mindset: solving climate change for instance within a system of extraction holds the potential of creating major negative social impacts.
The solution is not to fantasize about turning back the clock, seeking comfort in certainty and craving the status quo. Nonetheless, the resistance to fundamental change is strong as our current organizing system is deeply entrenched and considered a constant, reflecting deeply-held beliefs and values. To many, the idea that the core concepts underpinning it — like capitalism, modern democracy, or nation states — could radically change seems inconceivable.
Instead, when threatened with disruption, we repeatedly postpone the short-term pain required to make the changes necessary for longer-term survival. This lack of flexibility means we cannot adapt quickly, locking us into a system that becomes increasingly unsustainable and unstable, preluding its collapse. History teaches us though that organizing systems are variables, rather than constants; and as the civilizations underpinning them collapse, these systems can and will change rapidly and fundamentally.
Even though the patterns of history are clear, incumbent leadership in both public and private sector are mostly making the same mistakes as those who have gone before them. Rethinking Humanity notes: “The response from today’s incumbents to these challenges — more centralization, more extraction, more exploitation, more compromise of public health and environmental integrity in the name of competitive advantage and growth — is no less desperate than the response from those of prior civilizations who called for more walls, more priests, and more blood sacrifices as they faced collapse.”
In short, analyzing history as well as our position today — in which we’re increasingly being pushed out of equilibrium -, we like face one of two possible outcomes and the choice is stark:
- Breakthrough: In which a new organizing system emerges that can make sense of, and manage effectively the emerging production system, allowing us to flourish in a new age of freedom.
- Collapse: In which we follow the course of previous civilizations and collapse back in a new dark age, as we fail to escape the constraints of our current organizing and production system. This process of collapse can happen remarkably quickly, as the collapse of leading civilizations in the past few thousand years have shown.
Breaking through will certainly not be easy. Among other things, it requires a strong vision inspired by a prospect of flourishing rather than by fear; self-organization, exploration, experimentation, as well as a willingness to question and renounce increasingly obsolete organizing principles. And this all without any guarantees in the midst of chaos, turbulence and uncertainty. The only certainty we do have is that rejecting change will lead us down the path of implosion and a new dark age.
Even then, in the face of each new crisis presented to us in the decades ahead, we will often be tempted to look back rather than forward, mistaking ideology and dogma for reason and wisdom, and igniting conflict rather than building trust in each other. Our main hope is that, as we walk a delicate tightrope in the decades ahead, we’ll have enough resilience to keep parts of our current system functioning long enough to let society’s creative forces drive the emergence of a new organizing & production system in advance of the collapse of the old one.
To close off, we’re currently in a unique position to enable the birth of a new organizing system without first descending into a dark age. Its exact attributes are not known today, so while we cannot precisely plan for it, we can help nurture it by supporting the enabling mechanisms that guide the process and allow the new system to emerge through trial and error. However, in order to succeed we have to wholeheartedly embrace a three-fold challenge:
- Rethinking the present and the future: by acknowledging our current state of play while harnessing the tools, capabilities and skills to bring about a novel organizing system that’s beyond our current models of thought;
- Enabling the future we want: by creating the conditions in which this new system can emerge and flourish;
- Bridging the journey: by managing the transition, keeping parts of the current system functioning long enough in the face of unprecedented change for a new system to emerge.
