Four more years of Trump? Around me people are depressed. I too am discouraged and anxious. So why do I feel a tiny bit less pessimistic than them?
I am a slow reader of fiction. It’s ten pages a night at best. On the day of the US election results I finished reading ‘Any Human Power’ by Manda Scott. The book is impossible to describe - a fantasy and also a thriller. In it the younger generation persuades people to shake off their fatalism; to raise their sights and move on to better approaches to politics and economics.
Imagination plays a vital part in the turnaround. It is fruitless, the book tells us, to dedicate all our energies to opposing what is wrong. ‘That’s like trying change the sea while you’re swimming in it’ says one character. The protagonists in Manda Scott’s story found ways of transcending, not reinforcing, the existing politics. They shared:
AI-crafted future visions of car-free cities where Guerrilla Gardening had become mainstream and aerial views saw grey replaced with green , public transport was electric and cargo-bikes moved things around hubs where people spent more time connecting and less- or no – time locked to the nine-to-five. Water was conserved, human waste was recycled and the rivers were clean.
..a countryside full of grazing livestock where the fields were smaller, the hedges thicker, the woods more plentiful and the soil was alive, growing back topsoil at a rate that shocked everyone who hadn’t looked at what was possible. Biodiversity was increasing and the number of species on the ‘endling’ list of those heading for extinction was shrinking. ..Mussel beds started filtering out the microplastics and the outflow of nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial agriculture ceased, returning the oceans to stability in time to avert the Gulf Stream’s collapse. Carbon dioxide stabilised and began to fall.
These changemakers showed people across the United Kingdom how to lead the world in regenerative technologies, distributed democracy and transparent governance...People spent more time with their communities, creativity soared, toxic tribalism vanished and all the wellbeing indicators soared. Yes the world was hotter and ecosystems were still collapsing, but regeneration was happening, and everyone took it seriously.
This visionary – indeed utopian - approach may need filling out with practical detail. Nevertheless it feels particularly relevant to people in the USA and the UK at this moment.
\Will the lives and prospects of young Americans be improved by an unchanged Democratic Party waiting to take advantage of the mistakes of a new administration? US politics cries out for a reimagining of the American Dream – a credible path away from widespread poverty, growing inequality, choking cities, continuing racial discrimination diminishing biodiversity, and poor educational attainment?
And what about the UK, where our election of a new government owed much to the stumblings of its predecessor. Will we – and even more our offspring, sit passively by when the two-party pendulum swings back again, or demand something better?
Now is the time to encourage the rising generation – those now between 15 and to 35 years-old who have so much to lose from politics and business as usual, to tear up the politics textbooks. The time to champion a new, long-term , anti-tribalist politics of stewardship - a vision based on distributed democracy, transparent governance and regenerative technology and economics.
Building blocks for the new vision (to which some of us in the older generations could still contribute) might include:
· Revolutionising accounting and the way in which it measures value (for example the value of nature)
· Prioritising profit that serves future generations and penalising profit that shortchanges them.
· Dethroning GDP growth as the primary measure of economic progress and initially accompanying it with the Human Development Index.
· Prioritising company stewardship by directors and incentivise steward ownership by employees, communities, customers and long term pension funds.
· Harnessing science, technology, agriculture and food production to regenerative purposes with a focus on what I have called Harvest Economics.
· Revolutionising regulation, so that while petty red tape is eliminated in the interests of enterprise and human judgement, every regulator’s first priority is the wellbeing of future generations not today’s consumers or shareholders.
· Revolutionising savings, pensions and investment, so that people saving for the future are empowered and equipped to put their investment where their values lie.
· Revolutionising learning, so that the narrowness and tedium imposed by the UK’s current National Curriculum is complemented and enriched by a fresh focus on challenging and equipping each individual to explore and exploit their individual capacities. Give them early experiences that allow them to bring to life their aptitudes in everything from work experience, community volunteering, sport, drama, music the arts, entrepreneurial activity.
· Revolutionising governance and public decision-making so that significant decisions about the future are made through deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies.
· Revolutionising Health and social care so that the whole community/ neighbourhood is mobilised and equipped to interact with the vulnerable, with service to others becoming a core component of the reformed National Curriculum.
Working together with those youngest citizens, we could change our politics to serve their long term interests. To do so we need to appeal not only to people’s anger and frustration about today, but also to their imagination about tomorrow.
'Power to the wise and wisdom to the powerful’. That was the slogan of the new changemakers in Any Human Power. Or as one of them puts it
‘We are being pushed over the edge of extinction by people who don’t get it and don’t care and we ..are better than this…So let’s bring the best of ourselves to the table and find ways to make it happen’
Mark Goyder is Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board intelligence think Tank. He is co-author, with Ong Boon Hwee, of Entrusted – Stewardship for Responsible Wealth Creation (World Scientific 2020).