The magic eye
Crafting and telling a story that can change our world
For me, the last 13 years of organizing have been like one long Magic Eye puzzle. If you’ve never seen a Magic Eye, it’s pretty…magical. You start off by seeing a beautiful pattern on a page. But then, if you know the trick (move the page right up to your eyeballs, cross your eyes, and then slowly move the page away from your face), a wholly different 3D picture emerges. You’re looking at the same underlying thing — lines and colors on a page — but when you have a different perspective, a totally different picture can emerge.
When I started working with The Public Interest Network as a Green Corps organizer in the fall of 2006, and then throughout a lot of my career, I was pretty motivated by some core stories. These stories, probably familiar to most of us who have made a career in social change activism, say that we go out and build power to carry out strategic campaigns to pass laws and change corporate behavior. We secure incremental wins that make tangible changes in people’s lives. Our visible victories bring hope that more improvement is possible. Many of us are also motivated by other, related activism stories: the save the planet story, the public interest vs. special interest story, “think globally, act locally,” the story about transpartisan action for a change, the story of the importance of student empowerment, and the story about organizing to build power. These stories have carried me, excited me, and changed the course of my life, and I am not the only person for whom this is true.
But there’s another story. This story has always been The Public Interest Network’s backbone, but in the last few years we’ve placed more emphasis on telling it and talking about it. For me, this story has been the 3D picture emerging from the page. As I learned more about it, the world started to make more sense. This story explained confusing things I had observed about politics, the nature of the problems that I wanted to solve, and why we were not making more headway in reaching their solutions.
We sometimes call it the post-scarcity story.
This story starts in prehistory — when humanity struggled to overcome material scarcity and provide enough food, water, shelter, clothing and energy for everyone — and brings us to the present, when we’ve created the technology to meet those basic needs and explore the possibility of lives filled with satisfactions beyond work.
This story seeks to explain how our political institutions developed over time and we ended up with democracy, as well as how our economic institutions evolved into capitalism: both institutions were aimed at maximizing economic growth to overcome scarcity. The post-scarcity story ties together the stories The Public Interest Network has relied on in the past and contextualizes them as the result of a massive disconnect, in which people believe they must work to overcome scarcity, but we have created the productive capacity such that the stuff we require to live is no longer scarce.
Like with a Magic Eye, I have gained a new perspective on the work that I’m doing. I’ve long struggled with how my vision for the world never seemed to match up with the reality of life on the ground. I would find myself asking why we weren’t making more progress in saving the planet or protecting public health. We have run strategic campaigns and built power assiduously, but the world I want seems as remote as it did 13 years ago. The post-scarcity story explains that for me.
We think this story will make sense to others, too, which is why our network has a goal of developing it and promoting it to a wider audience. A good story is going to help us shape the conversation, change how people think, and shift the paradigm for looking at the world. If we can do that, then we can win the country over to our way of thinking about problems and solutions, and we can channel that support into winning the policies we need for lasting change.
What does our story need to do? It needs to do a better job of explaining our lives today than the other stories that are going around in society. What are the challenges that our society faces that the right story can help explain?
There is always the question about the meaning and purpose of life, especially as the old stories about the meaning of life cede ground in the face of economic and social changes. For example, one story that has been around for a while about the meaning of life is that we derive meaning and value from contributing economically to our community. That story is still strong, but it is beginning to clash with reality, as more and more economic production is outsourced to other countries, robots and computers.
Another hard truth in our world today is that we have the capability of producing our way to self-destruction. Life has never been better at the precise moment we risk spoiling the planet that makes our lives possible. That’s hard to wrap your head around. We need to live within our means if we’re going to live sustainably on this planet. We need a story that makes that way of living noble and desirable if we’re going to get people to embrace it and make it a reality.
We also need to make sense of rising inequality in a sea of affluence. We need to wrestle with how our individual genetic lottery — whatever intelligence or talent or other potential we’re born with — determines a good bit of our academic success and athletic ability. Those traits are going to matter more and more to wealth accumulation, all other things being equal, in the future. Do we want to live in a world where your genetic lottery determines how good a life you lead? I know I don’t. We need to figure out how we can have a cohesive society built on an economy that values contribution but where many cannot contribute — one in which there are social constraints on greed even as the wealth of the few no longer depends on the contributions of the many. These and more questions must be aired and demand answers. A good story can help us articulate the questions and find answers.
If we want to build a political movement for the change we want, then we need a story that explains how most people are living, that speaks to their aspirations and hopes, and that suggests a pathway to a better world. We think we have the seed of a good story with our post-scarcity story, but others are also hard at work developing versions of this story. I recently attended the launch of a new organization called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. WEAll is an international network of more than 30 groups committed to developing an economy of wellbeing. (We have recently applied to become a member.)
WEAll’s theory for what is blocking this new economy from emerging is that “there is no pervasive overriding set of stories or narratives that open up a new paradigm and make it accessible and compelling to a wide range of people.”
Many thinkers in the academic world have reached a similar conclusion. Oxford professor Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, “calls on us to tell a new story about a sweeter view of economics.”
I recently picked up A Finer Future, a new book by Hunter Lovins, in which she argues, “Many advocates of human survival have tried to overcome the juggernaut of neoliberalism. But without a compelling alternative narrative, none of the organizing, agitating, lobbying, litigation, and legislation has succeeded.”
You can find thinking along these lines from leaders in the business world and even at some levels of government. We will collaborate with these and other allies on this essential project of developing a new story for explaining our world and future.
To accomplish humanity-wide social change, we need a story that is up to the task of explaining the world to millions and millions of people. We believe we are onto something with our post-scarcity story. We’ll keep telling the other stories we have and the stories of our campaigns or projects, but we also need to dedicate ourselves to developing and then getting out and telling what we are calling (for now) the post-scarcity story.
Is it audacious to think that we can help craft and tell a story that can change our world? Hell yes. Is a new story necessary to address the most fundamental problems facing our country and our planet? I’m convinced it is.
