The Great Correction
As I write this, the United States is undergoing a tragic and unprecedented convulsion, with protests in over 150 cities. The very fabric of American society seems to be tearing apart, with the possibility of martial law looming. While the ostensible focus of the protests is rage at excessive police brutality against black people, they also seem to be a referendum on current US social and economic policies.
While this spectacle has many of us transfixed and scared for the future of the US as well as the world, it is only one of many simultaneous events happening now that are shattering traditional narratives and established beliefs. While dangerous, such critical junctures in time also provide new opportunities. They can lead to large-scale reforms and change our approach to solving critical problems.
We find ourselves at an unprecedented historical juncture. Around the world, the Coronavirus pandemic continues to have devastating consequences for public health and national economies. The world economy remains largely shut down. In fact, we have not experienced a break in tempo like this since the end of World War Two. We could call it an unanticipated slowdown — something that is simply unimaginable until it happens, due to the seemingly unstoppable momentum of global industrial civilization.
As we know, the slowdown has had a number of strikingly positive effects. Environmentally, it has reduced air pollution. Animals have returned to areas that had been overrun with cars, shoppers, and tourists. As a result of what I call “The Great Correction,” many people are realizing that we have become slaves to a one-dimensional model of economic growth. For many people, the economic system has become a kind of trap.
The other day I was talking to a friend, a gifted Chinese lady who came to the US as a child, succeeded at a top Ivy League university, then took a job in finance. She was working fifteen hour days from her desk in a Manhattan skyscraper — the pinnacle of success in the eyes of that girl that worked so hard to get there. With the pandemic and the lockdown, she suddenly had space to think and look back at her life. It was deadening to her soul to sacrifice so much of herself for work, no matter how prestigious or well-paid. She is just one like many others now rethinking her future direction.
There are, of course, problems with seeking the silver lining in the Coronavirus doom-cloud. Even making such an analysis is only possible from a position of relative privilege. There are thirty million newly unemployed in the US alone, and the UN warns of a pandemic-induced famine of “Biblical proportions” coming this summer, potentially affecting 250 million people. We know the pandemic is going to create a lot of misery beyond the still-increasing daily sickness and death toll.
Even so, there is legitimate potential within this crisis, if we can access it. The pandemic could trigger a positive change in human consciousness, bringing about a necessary restructuring or redesign of global civilization. We know that our system is coming into increasingly direct conflict with the ecological limits of the Earth. The situation is becoming so dire that many scientists believe we only have a very short period of time left to engineer a massive shift. For instance, the IPCC Report of 2018 said we have only a decade to radically reduce CO2 emissions while transitioning to renewable energy. Even with the substantial slowdown in travel and industrial activity caused by COVID-19, we are nowhere close to meeting those reduction targets. Actually we only dropped 17% in emissions according to Nature Climate Change. The peak 17% daily decline occurred on April 7, when China, the U.S., India and most other major carbon-emitting countries were all under a high-level of lockdown simultaneously.
What matters though is that however small that dent in emissions may be, the pandemic could be our last opportunity to make The Great Correction. In this pregnant pause, we have an opportunity for deep civilizational redesign. It is an opportunity that hasn’t existed for many years, at least since 1989, when the fall of the Soviet Union shifted us from a bipolar to a unipolar world.
It would be wonderful if, through some act of civilizational aikido, we could move from falling into sudden episodes of unanticipated slowness due to global crisis to a world system that engineered occasional bursts of slowness into its design. So far, that has seemed out of the question. But, in the future, it might be possible.
Let’s go back a bit in history. The Fourth Industrial Revolution — “characterized by the fusion of the digital, biological, and physical worlds, as well as the growing utilization of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, and advanced wireless technologies, among others,” to borrow the Brookings Institution’s formulation — started after 1989 and has accelerated in the last twenty years. The value of technological innovation has sometimes become a strange kind of religious faith for the corporate and technocratic elite, who promote an approaching “Singularity”, as described by Ray Kurtzweil, where humans might merge with machines. Many have their opinion about how this might play out, including myself, but I won’t dwell on it here. The point is that the way society changes is reduced to a mere matter of technological adoption and there is a sense of the process being ineluctable. As a consequence, those who have some control over it are absolved of social responsibility, which is deeply problematic.
In 1992, historian Francis Fukuyama boldly, yet mistakenly, predicted we had reached the end of history in liberalism’s promise of endless economic and material development: “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” However, the countries making up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) actually experienced relatively low growth from 2000 on. In a sense, this kept the “rudder fixed” and didn’t allow for much social innovation. Meanwhile, the middle and lower middle classes in western societies continued to experience a squeeze on their quality of life as jobs moved overseas and automation increased. This engendered an ever-deepening frustration against the neoliberal and technocratic ruling elites, which finally boiled over with the 2016 US election and Brexit.
While both 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash were seismic shocks to the global system, they weren’t sufficient to create an opportunity for a global systemic correction. At this point in time, we seem to be experiencing the ending of an eighty year historical cycle, with the unraveling of the global coordination of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreements, and the resurgence of authoritarian regimes around the world.
As things are now, it is only during global pauses or slowdowns or sudden shocks to the system that we have the possibility to envision and introduce comprehensive alternatives. In effect, this is what protest movements like Extinction Rebellion seek to intentionally engineer: A mass moment of civil disobedience that forces a systemic stoppage or slowdown as an opportunity to rethink and redirect our productive capacities. There is much about Extinction Rebellion’s approach that is laudable, but I would wish that a greater portion of the collective called humanity had the ability to “engineer slowness” — in other words, design occasional temporary breaks in the system’s functioning that allow us to gather, reflect, and self-correct without it all coming apart at the seams. What we need, at this point in time, is something like an emergency brake or manual override.
I find an interesting relationship between this concept of “engineered slowness” and the idea of individual and collective flow states, recently made popular through the work of Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal. In states of flow, we find that the coordination between our ability to calculate and our physical actions gets massively accelerated.
In a flow state, a tennis ace is able to play at the highest level; a virtuosic pianist hits the right notes on the piano without thought. In a state of flow, in other words, your perception gets massively accelerated vis-a-vis events while your sense of time slows down. As in The Matrix, where the hero suddenly sees the bullets all around him, in slow motion, and dodges them easily.
During the slowdown caused by the end of World War Two, it seems that human society entered a kind of flow state, out of necessity. Bretton Woods is an example of this. Suddenly, a level of cooperation and consilience became possible that was unimaginable until that perilous threshold had been reached.
Similarly, our current pandemic could provide us with the opportunity to dodge some bullets, if we can utilize this pregnant pause for civilizational redesign. My viewpoint, shared by many peers in different ways, is that there are four critical areas in which this needs to happen now. These are:
- Planning for existential risk
We must change the way we plan for existential risk. The way to do this is to build much more resilience into our systems, from energy to farming to decision-making. Resilience increases when we build decentralized and peer-to-peer systems.
Currently, social institutions like governments and corporations have a largely reactive response to existential risk, driven by quantitative analysis. When crisis happens, a vast range of responses are possible. Those who have possible solutions — for instance, with Covid-19, the experts in infectious disease — must push their ideas up the decision-making chain. Leaders may respond in very different ways. Often, their decisions are shaped by their desire for self-preservation, rather than objective analysis.
But this is not just the fault of the leaders. It is a fault of response design. We don’t have a good qualitative anticipatory response strategy for handling existential risks and crises that emerge. We are leaving to chance something that should have been handled in a systemic way. What we need is a new kind of infrastructure, an orchestration of experts in various fields who collaborate on identifying the most critical threats and existential risks and developing protocols for emergency situations. These protocols must then be accepted and integrated into government and corporate decision-making at all levels. Just like the US constitution is designed to have checks and balances between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of power, we might need an existential risk system of that order related to a global governance body that is equivalent in authority to the UN security council and that has a more distributed form of power related to the quality of democratic decisions or intentions of global leaders. Making this happen is no minor task. Still, the security council was formed and has worked to forge a common aspiration for global peace amongst leading powers. This is naturally highly ineffective but we need to start somewhere to acknowledge that the existential threats we face are global not national, and more often than not will not come from other nations.
2. Redistribute authority
At the moment, due to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands that has occurred over the last decades, the authority to make decisions which impact the collective is controlled by an ever tinier elite. We must urgently make major strides to redistribute authority in order to shift humanity into a new relationship with the planet (actually a very old relationship). The word for this relationship is stewardship.
This of course may not be possible for the majority of decisions in the near term, or ever for that matter. I am not seriously optimistic about the notion of fairness when it comes to power. But there is evidence that it is in the interest of everyone, including those with the most control, when faced with such an event as a pandemic, that distributing authority for such cases is of critical importance.
At the moment, the global elite — a relatively small group who have the power to make decisions and drive the direction of policy — includes many brilliant entrepreneurs, technologists, and generational wealth-holders. The problem is, as a result of their personal journeys through companies and boardrooms, some of these individuals maintain an old-fashioned view that a small coterie of super-achievers and experts are best suited to run the world. They do not believe that the masses can, or should, govern themselves. This leads to mutual mistrust.
When the super-elite define large-scale philanthropic initiatives like, for instance, The Giving Pledge, where wealth-holders agree to give away a substantial part of their capital to charitable causes, there is a risk of some people remaining suspicious. They sense a control device hidden within it. After all, large-scale philanthropy can be used to influence or even control emerging markets and developing countries.
The qualities that lead to corporate success are not necessarily best suited to dealing with complex human problems, such as disease eradication or sex trafficking. Even though this kind of “philanthro-Capitalism” may be able to respond to critical problems faster than NGOs and inter-governmental aid programs, it may be disassociated from the intricacies of human realities, miss the interdependent nature of solution sets, and lead to unforeseen negative consequences. We may need to understand and accept that pressing the accelerator on this way of thinking and problem-solving is not the best approach.
The polar opposite approach is the “distribute everything” philosophy. I find this ideology in activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, in the anarchist ideology of cryptocurrencies, in the D-I-Y approach of distributed manufacturing, in the “new consciousness” movement which envisions a collective enlightenment, and in experimental governance systems such as holocracy. While I see the necessity for leadership and expertise across different domains, I believe that, in the future, “humanity” should function more like a collective enterprise. The current system — where 1% of the human population controls 89% of the wealth — is very problematic on many levels, and unsustainable. Through trial and error, we need to define a new synthesis between top-down command-and-control structures based on centralized authorities and entirely peer-to-peer systems that are designed to distribute decision-making power and resiliency.
3. Integrate regenerative systems thinking into our decision-making at all levels
Over the last decades, a growing intellectual movement has pushed beyond the concept of sustainability to embrace a new ideal of regenerative design. This approach is exemplified in the work of people like Daniel Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures, as well as the Doughnut Economics theory of Kate Raworth, which has recently been adapted by Amsterdam as the model for their approach to future development.
While the knowledge base around regenerative principles and practices has been growing rapidly, these ideas have not yet been integrated into the decision-making layers of most governments and corporations. As Wahl noted in a recent interview with Fritjof Capra, the regenerative model sees “the process by which life creates conditions conducive to life…” as “symbiotic and symphonic all together, optimizing the whole system,” rather than “about competing individuals one against the other.”
I believe that we must integrate such an approach more deeply into our leadership circles — into all levels of our civilization’s decision-making — particularly as we will be confronting tremendous ecological challenges in the next decades. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were an important effort to define both an ethos and a pathos to guide global governance. Yet we need to go forther than the SDGs, which silo certain forms of thinking and metrics, and think about how we can create linkages and build capacity for complex problem-solving.
Raworth’s Doughnut Economics provides a more nuanced analysis and a more comprehensive approach. She defines the sweet spot between the nine planetary boundaries and human needs and desires on a global scale. According to her analysis, we can enhance the lives of the world’s poor without breaking the world’s carbon budget, if the wealthy elite scale back their lifestyles (the top 11% use more resources than the bottom 50%). This type of analysis needs to permeate leadership circles and inform the popular understanding.
4. Transform our relationship to technology
We live in a global civilization that has taken the path of accelerated technological development. I don’t think we have a road backward. In other words, we aren’t going to regress to a more limited or primitive form of technology, unless forced to by a tsunami of global crises. However, it is becoming clear that our avid consumption of new technologies creates many negative impacts, for many of us individually and all of us collectively. These range from heavy metal pollution to ADD and skyrocketing depression and suicide rates in teenagers.
We must recognize where technology suppresses our humanity. It can cut us off from deepening our organic relationship to the Earth and our tangible, real-world communities. We must make technology our ally in redistributing power downwards, toward the greater human community. It is important to stress the haptic, analogue qualities of our lived experience — to re-emphasize the human factor, over dazzling, but ultimately dead, interfaces.
Unfortunately, technology is often Janus faced. These days, there is a lot of concern about the “digital divide,” with efforts underway to bring the rest of the developing world on-line. At the same time, we are entering a new era of digital exclusion, where the most valuable forms of news and information will only be available to a minority who can pay for it. For the masses, they will no longer be able to “opt out” of invasive regimes of digital control, nor “opt in” to access the most valuable sources of information.
At the same time, the pandemic has greatly accelerated invasive techniques of “surveillance capitalism,” from facial recognition to temperature scans, which increase the power and control of a ruling elite. As a result of these trends, it seems that people, as a whole, are losing their sense of agency. I support the approach of The Center for Humane Technology, which envisions “a world where technology supports our shared well-being, sense-making, democracy, and ability to tackle complex global challenges.” This requires establishing firm, legal boundaries around privacy and data-collection.
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When we consider the vast amount of global inequality and preventable human suffering, plus the destructive impacts of our post-industrial civilization on the Earth’s ecology, we realize we have an obligation and a responsibility to restructure our civilization in some profound ways. But this is no easy task.
I chose for a while to be silent on social media but have decided this is no longer possible. In future essays, I will explore different areas and opportunities where we might be able to use “systemic hacks” to inflect and influence the path of future development. The fact is that institutional formats for change-making are either ill-equipped or not sufficiently distributed for the challenges we are facing. Hacks on the way things operate offer a more promising route and that’s where we need to make an effort. We need to understand alternative societal models that create more equitable welfare; we need to involve the global community in co-managing planetary existential risk; and we need to capacitate the general population to help build resilience in a more distributive way. In this manner, we will be able to course-correct our civilization while there is still time.
While the pandemic remains a very real threat, The Great Correction we are experiencing together is an extraordinary threshold for humanity. It has opened new possibilities, forcing us to re-think our direction, both personally and collectively. It may be a while before we understand its impact on the collective consciousness.
It is quite clear that our civilization needs a deep realignment of values and goals. We are learning that the things that make us thrive on a personal level — time with family, time in nature, direct connection to the Earth — are also the things that can make humanity thrive on a planetary level. This is a deep insight that may continue to take root in the time just ahead.
As much as the protests in the US were sparked by the brutal police killing of unarmed black civilians, the power of the movement and its rapid spread are certainly due to long-simmering problems of structural justice and economic inequality. These reached catastrophic levels with the government’s response to Covid-19. The US Government has failed to protect its citizens from massive job loss or provide necessary social services in this time of need. The four areas I discuss above — responding to existential risk, redistributing authority, integrating regenerative design principles, and changing our relationship to technology — are all part of the necessary solution set for the US to overcome its crisis, and for the world as a whole to move forward.
