I was looking over the glossy magazine in my weekend paper today (which I collect via a 60km round trip on my bicycle) and noticed a fashion advertising piece. Now I don’t usually notice these paeans to the consumerist urban curb crawling culture except a subliminal note to observe that the ‘male model’ turkeys all dressed up like fops wouldn’t last 1km on a bike…or in a garage, or, really, anywhere where there is work to be done. But this particular spread seemed to have the prices for all the gear so displayed in a larger font than usual; so I noticed the amounts involved. Pants, $750, Shirt, $510, Gucci Blazer (who would or could ever wear such a thing with a straight face), $1755, loafers (that means shoes, I think), $690 and, believe it or not, belt (by some bloke called Ralph Lauren), $249. That adds up to $3954. $3954! And for that you get to look like one of those more dodgy extras in Brideshead Revisited.

Now I’ve been reeling in guilt for a few weeks now over spending too much on a pair of cycling shoes. Now I feel way way better! My shoes were hand made by someone with a purpose to hand: to build a tool to improve the efficiency with which we cyclists use our feet. My blessed Italian racing shoes were made to achieve something. The poncy shoes in that fashion spread were designed only for, well, loafing. Why would you want to pay more for shoes to loaf with than you would or could pay for shoes to win races with? Beats me.

You see, class, this is why I think we are now in a Global Financial Crisis. I reckon that foppish loafing gear is the uniform of the culture of the uber banker set; the set that has thrown global markets and the livelihoods of we, the more earthly citizens, into total chaos. The clothes match the personality and character of the job they did (now, fortunately, many of them are now looking for real work instead). Loafers?! Who could ever conscience a purchase of that magnitude just to help you loaf with? And if loafing is what the banker set did with all our money, it’s no wonder the markets collapsed.

OK, so my neck is all red from my ride today, but I am not a gun toting, gum chewing hillbilly moaning about the neighbours kids on my lawn, the price of gasoline and the virtues of Sarah Palin as the next US President. Though I am no doubt disowned and a noted inhabitant on the fringes of respectable academia (whatever respectable might mean for such a worthless profession as that), I was and am a professor and my area is ecological economics. Which I admit to here only to assert the point that this caper of spending obscene amounts of money on a uniform that does nothing but attest to an intent to loaf around explains quite a bit about the way that section of society to which this advert is pitched - including, I propose, those in the financial sector - actually works. There’s some deep pathologies at work in the business of money. One of them is a culture of playboy-casino, coke-sniffing, consumerist exhibitionism. That’s a culture that sustains ego over toil and sweat, a culture of appearances and deception rather than one that realises gain through the transparency of talent and skill. No wonder the world is all in a mess.

I have long advocated the need for transforming the world through cultures which connect toil and gains in more obvious ways. Like cycling, farming, road mending and taxidermy. You can’t hide lack of talent in those games. You can’t cover up the excesses of a lavish life wearing your $1755 Gucci toy coat when out for a ride or mending a fence. Even ‘latte cyclists’ can’t hide their excesses while swilling at the coffee shop with their $10,000 Colnagos propped against the table. Actually, I’ll put this straight; I can’t comprehend a culture that would encourage anyone to dress in such a way as to proclaim the vision of spendthrift loafishness to which this advertisment is pitched. That this advertisment exists indicates that there is indeed a market for dysfunctionality of that kind. The scary crazy fallout has indeed hit the fan and we, the citizens of the rest-of-the-world are left to bail them out. Even if the loafer Gucci wearing set are not all in the banking game, the excesses of their puffed lifestyles are hitting us through that even bigger crisis seemingly forgotten now that finance is front page news: the crisis of a planet more stretched than this guy’s $1755 replica school boy coat. Remember global warming? Our prancing pony model depicted here is modelling a lifestyle that projectile vomits contempt at the vastly more reasoned, environmentally resilient lifestyles to which we all should and must aspire.

So, bless the more earthly cultures out there; the salt of the earth will indeed prevail. I am not shedding any tears over the eviction of the Wall Street crowd from their loafing-lounge inner city apartments. But I would suggest that the persistence of both the demand and the supply side of a market devoted to ‘loafing’ fops is an indicator of a world not yet quite right.

But there is good news from all of this. All my cyclist bruthas - go ahead - buy that top end bike. Buy those serious shoes, and related gear. Because the metric of extravagance is a higher bar than we could ever meet when you look into the fashion pages of weekend magazines…Plus anything at all to do with cycling (except maybe the support caravan to the Tour de France) is vastly more environmentally tuned than the BMW/Mercedes/Porsche/Ferari prancing ponce culture that’s ired my rage on this otherwise fine Spring day.

How much of your time do you think you devote to servicing the egos of others? How much time do you devote to servicing your own?

Let’s get our immediate reactions to these questions out of the way before looking more closely. First up, I bet you’d claim that far too much of your time is devoted servicing the egos of others and second, I bet you’d be thinking that little time is spent pandering to the needs of your own. Most of us would refute we even have an ego. So we can’t be spending too much time as its slave, can we…

The background to these immediate reactions is the usual assumption that egos are bad. Most regard an ego as some kind of a fantasy delusion that drives personal behaviour. That’s kind of right but a bit too harsh. The ego, you see, is the perceptions we each have of who we are. When I think of me and you think of you, there is a you or an I to be considered; isn’t there! What’s this picture we have of ourselves? You do have one. We all do. It’s a picture that is perpetually under construction, with the face provided by what we perceive in the mirror. The ego is the reflection point against which we interpret the world through the focus of all the experiences and all the knowledge we have accumulated (or constructed). If something is perceived to look ‘great’, the benchmark we use to make that judgement is the sense of aesthetic that’s part of our internal ego ‘bundle’. If you think something is good or bad, you are making that judgement on the foundation of the you who is doing the looking.

This self to which we each refer is a multi-layered tyrant that rules with the ultimate fascist fist. If there were more than one you inside your head, you’d get pretty confused. The you that’s you is always in total charge.

Buddhists believe that our ego-selves represent a perpetual source of suffering; because our ego-selves are perpetually demanding and any and all attempts to slave to such a master will only ever lead to disappointment and drama. The reason being is that our ego’s are not real, they are constructed by each of us via the lived experiences of our lives. If, for example, I perceive myself to be a highly successful, or potentially highly successful stockbroker, say, then all I do, the image I present and my behaviour will be focused by the need I perceive to live that particular role. I’d probably wear a suit, spend far too much on a fancy car, frequent the places and socialise with the kind of people with whom I imagine a person who I believe myself to be would connect. My aspirations would be focused by the role I choose to play, or perhaps, by the role I believe I am fated to follow. Naturally, there’s all kinds of free will in this mix; I know I have some choice to switch roles, and to create a persona of distinctiveness from others with whom I engage. I could go for a seachange, head off to climb the mountains or join the Foreign Legion. This makes us feel less trapped. But we still tend to take our old selves along for the ride.

The other game Buddhists play is to observe the games our ego’s play, to watch the standard inward mental ploys, to watch as a parent might observe a child. Why do I want that ‘thing’ so much, let me sit and observe, watch the dramas of our unfolding compulsions and laugh at the silliness of our mental routines. This is called the art of insight, or the art of being reflexive. It’s a game most of us don’t play. But it is indeed a game with which we all should be engaged. Looking inward, observing our inner selves is usually vastly more interesting than the thrills you might get from watching any sopie on TV. The acting we each deploy to live the life our inner-selves decree is enough to outplay the performance of any academy award nominee.

Who are you? If you can answer that, then we can begin to understand why it is that you, I, and everyone else does the things we see them and ourselves do. If serving the tyrant our inner selves can become is our preoccupation, then how much of the things we buy, and the things we do, are really necessary if those needs are actually only placations to the whims of a self that’s running to some kind of a delusional script? Imagine if every resource-hungry person could suddenly reconfigure to a different self; to a new inner self that was more in tune with the realities of a planet now under such stress. How much of the stuff our current inner self decrees to be essential is merely superficial to a new reconfigured you? How much of our current consumption, your current consumption, is directed by the inner tyrant raging inside our heads? Fashion choices, transportation choices, travel choices; all the accoutrements of the life we imagine ourselves to be living are significantly if not singularly dictated by the self we perceive ourselves to be; by a self that may, in fact, be more fantasy than real. Oh if only we could each take a holiday from the settings of our minds; float above ourselves and observe with a clinical eye. Of course, the self that would then be observing would need to be at least slightly someone else so things could get kind of tricky… But that’s precisely the task those meditating monks are seeking to perform. To observe within from without. The cheapest, most resource sparing tourism a person could ever do.

Such are my thoughts when I observe the antics of those who are distressed by the current financial market collapse. By those who claim a singular incapacity to live a more environmentally benign lifestyle, by all those who proclaim the abject necessity to own and use a car. And yes, by those who seek to ride bicycles the champions use when something vastly more modest would do (guilty as charged…). Consumption patterns that can, perhaps, be explained as a necessity to fit the character of the self we are can easily become the excess baggage of a self that we could each become if only we could self-consciously follow transformational journeys such as that. The key is to reflect, to look inwards and observe. Try to observe from the perspective of a mind cleared to slightly off-side and above the noise and furies of our ‘ordinary minds’. Concentrate on nothing. Let nothing prevail, then watch each thought as it slips across your mind. Don’t let these thoughts take hold. Observe them like the waves on a beach. Observe the demands each thought is trying to assert. Consider the needs these thoughts would impose. Shed these needs like the skins of an onion. Because the needs we seem to think are so important to feed the demands of our egos are often, if not usually, nothing but the layers of a skin of noise covering the inner self we would all probably rather become. When each layer is gone, we wonder why we once needed and once so heavily invested in ephemera such as that. And so onwards to discover the inner core, where needs are fewer and a more sustainable world awaits!

Or, if all this sounds too hard, just get on a bike and eschew the car. Once you get your cycling-mind, your real journey can begin. Cycling-mind, zen-mind. But it’s best to ride for the ride and not to emulate Lance! No one ever said this inner door was easy to find…

I continue to be astounded by the lack of criticism directed back to the true source of the global market collapse. Apart from simple, eternal human greed, there is one big shadowy figure lurking at the bottom of this pond, escaping accountability and inquiry.

Where did the advice on our now flailing governance structures and market mechanisms all come from in the first place? Who helped craft the global infrastructure of deeply layered supportive and enabling policies to make it all work? What are the foundations for this hitherto largely unchecked system?

At the root is an accumulation of essentially unchallenged and seriously over privileged ‘theories’ from the social science dimensions of academia. That tax payer funded pontification club has much to answer for and little cause to do so. The economics discipline, in particular, has been unchecked in its perpetual wallow of self-referentialism for so long now that any prospect for external inquiry is largely pointless. How does one gain entry into a fortress with no doors? How can an outsider shed light when the only light allowed is emitted by those barricaded against review within the inner shrine their profession has created? How does an outsider converse with people such as these if the language of exchange is so encrypted with in-house jargon to virtually exclude external interpretation? In short, you have to be an economist to speak the language and the first lesson is an oath of affirmation to the sacred scriptures of the ‘conventional wisdom’. To proclaim anything else is to wither away at the poverty-end of the academic payscale until the overload of exile to the mundainities of grass roots teaching sends all upstarts to an early grave. Only the priests and their followers get to congregate around the professorial bar fridge of endless Friday afternoons of argument and exchange. This is a classic closed shop; an over privileged and profoundly out-of-touch ‘House of Lords’.

Think about academic teaching for a minute. Where else on this earth is there a more privileged system of knowledge than here? Students must agree with all they are told or fail their exams. Subtle differences are tolerated by a rare, more enlightened few, but to stray too far from the magnetic field of the peer self-referentialed core is cause to fail. Intellectual progress in closed loop learning settings such as this is slow and ponderous. Which is why the abstract notions of the Great Theory of Monetarism has retained its privileged position to cloud the incursion of dedicated external inquiry for so very long; until now.

Fundamentally, economics has always been lousy in its capacity to understand and represent the idiosyncratic perceptions and behaviour of individuals. Which is why economists’ models are always directed at the level of the statistically aggregated. The statistical average as a target for economic theory disguises the noise in the vastly more interesting tops and tails of behavioural bell curves. Innovation, lateral thinking and real inspiration comes from those places. So too does the aberrant statistical behaviour that slowly, surely, accumulates to disrupt well-behaved economists’ models every time we cycle to the next market collapse. The tails take over the middle and theories take a dive. Or, more realistically, the economics profession simply blames policy implementation inadequacies, ‘unruly external events’ and ‘bad advice’ (from rogue crazies such as myself, say). But it is rather interesting that Keynes is back on the agenda now that the West’s prolonged affair with Monetarism is falling apart.

Which, perversely, is all wonderfully good news for the academics. Now they get yet more funding to reconsider positions and carry us across the used-by dates of theories they once proclaimed. The ignorant masses look for more advice from their deranged oracles. And so it goes on and on in the only important cycle that matters: the tidal flow of cash to an academic establishment so profoundly out of touch with reality and relevance as to render their racket all but invisible to the outside world. Which is precisely the place they would wish to remain.

In the current debate, I noted one particularly insightful argument (by John Sloman): that it really does not matter what set of market theories a government follows. What matters more is that the people who follow these theories simply believe in the advice they provide. Believe and the market will follow. I recommend this commentary as a frontispiece to any modern economics text book. This simply asserts the irrelevance of any one market theory; of over indulgence in devotions to the pontifications of one school of thought over any other, and, above all, to know that the only theory that really matters is the reality of complexity, chaos and the continual emergence of understandings (which rather recommends the end of the old school of locked-in text book economics). But I somehow doubt the prospect for establishment academic endorsement! If there is one thing we should all note about the market place these days, it’s all more casino than direction from profound economic insight. Those pesky untamed eccentricities of human nature keep on interrupting the perfections of academic advice. This is so mainly because, as I said, economics has so singularly failed to capture the realities of how humans really behave. I start to listen to academics when their theories attempt to embed rather than deny the chaotic irregularities of ego-driven human-kind.

Once, when I was an academic myself (reaching the heady heights of a full professor, I might add), I had to read a spectrum of ‘peer-reviewed’ journals to maintain my position in the anti-room of the professorial bar fridge. But now I don’t bother, except for one single remaining source of inspiration: the Journal of Economic Issues. That’s the communication exchange for my fellow fringe dwellers of the Institutional Economics fellowship. Here the protocols for unreflexive peer self-referentialism are off limits. It’s a regular shop floor setting for ideas and inspiration. I mention all this because the mess we all find ourselves in these days is most accurately described from within the discourse of the Institutional Economics arena; a rare perspective of economics that admits unruly human behaviour into the core rather than to the fringe.

So, if I were in charge of funding these days, I’d be restructuring some breaches into the disciplinary walls of a conventional economic wisdom that everyone else can see no longer applies. I think I’d be supporting a new deal for funding models: the demonstration of relevance to external community review. That would, quite possibly, represent the most furiously feared heresy of them all! Take the roof off the inner-sanctums and watch how they play in the rain for the very first time.

There’s a great theory that can, perhaps, explain why we are rushing so quickly and certainly into a head-on collision with the brick wall of climate change. I shall refrain from going all ponderously academic here*. Suffice it to say, we know we are on a collision course. We don’t know how big the crash will be; and many of our politicians have devoted themselves to the task of building ever more convoluted air bags through which to cushion the blow. But why are we on this path when it’s obvious to anyone at all that in a closed system like Planet Earth, the more junk you chuck into atmosphere, the more toxic our world will become. Anyone who has kept a fish tank and neglected diligent cleaning duties will know what happens. Multiply this on a planetary scale. Poison the nest and we all die. All the remaining bits of the story are to do with how much is too much and when will we start passing out.

I think there is a singular lack of discussion and debate around the ‘how is this happening’ side of the Climate Change story. There’s far too much discussion on putting numbers on the symptoms and on the search for solutions. Climate Change is one big mother of all complex stories. Looking into the currents of this stream is like looking into a moving meander of mud.

I’d like to take just one mug-full of goo from this muddy stream to examine. Just a sample from mid stream. Maybe I will find a single piece of the 1 billion piece Climate Change jigsaw to table. But every journey requires a first step…

This piece is to do with wondering how it is that our society has become so inseparably infatuated with the motorcar. If you don’t think cars contribute to the toxic contamination of our world, stick your nose into the exhaust pipe of one of these things while its engine is going. After all, that’s what we cyclists have to do every time we use the road. We certainly know that these fumes are a significant contributor to the warming of the world. There’s debate about how much (at least 10%, and probably vastly more). But there’s no debate about the innocence of the car. If we know cars are a ’significant contributor’ to a problem that has the potential to be an extinction level event, how come we still allow cars on the road? How is it that YOU still drive a car (don’t look at me, I am a cyclist).

There’s a theory I think is instructive here. It’s the theory of Technological Somnambulism. Great title, interesting theory. Here’s an excerpt from academia’s Great Satan wikipedia site:

Technological Somnambulism is a concept used when talking about the philosophy of technology. The term was used by Langdon Winner in his essay Technology as forms of life. Winner puts forth the idea that we are simply in a state of sleepwalking in our mediations with technology. This sleepwalking is caused by a number of factors. One of the primary causes is the way we view technology as tools, something that can be put down and picked up again. Because of this view of objects as something we can easily separate ourselves from we fail to look at the long term implications of using that object. A second factor is separation of those who make the technology and those who use the technology. This division causes there to be little thought and research going into the effects of using/developing that technology. The third and most important idea is the way in which technology seems to create new worlds in which we live. These worlds are created by the restructuring of the common and seemingly everyday things around us. In most situations the changes take place with little attention or care from us because we are more focused on the menial aspects of the technology (Winner 105-107).

Without taking the true path of rigorous scholarly argument here (*ibid), it seems to me that this theory has got something interesting to say on the persistence of the oil-fuelled motorcar**.

Apart from a few (mainly young male) nutters, most people don’t personalise their cars too much. Their cars live, at least physically, in their garages and not in their living rooms***. Out of sight and out of mind until the next trip to town. Cars are, as the theory suggests, a tool to be used and a rare source of introspection into the implications of use. Except the cash cost of use, that is. The only concern most people have about the use of their cars is about the money they need to spend. Not the ecological impacts their vehicles are having on a planet that is now gagging to the core. Even if they do think about the fumes they emit, that worry passes out of mind way faster than the stink they leave behind. So this passes the first step of our separation from the tools we use. Globalisation and the machinations of the market place accounts for the reality of the second factor of separation (between those who make cars and those who use them). Once upon a time, car production was a cottage industry that engaged the communities within which they were produced. People had an attachment and a sense of ownership. Nowadays, cars are put together as an exercise in an accountant’s least cost path routine. Bits are made here and bits are made way way over there. Assembly is the task of unpacking boxes from global supply chains. There’s as much romance about car construction these days as there is with a meat packing house, or with the construction of a washing machine. The connection between car driver and car maker is a path with many unbridged chasms. Consumer concerns in relation to the damages that cars do feeds back via the by-pass roads of marketing and finance departments; not directly to those who do the designs. So we pass the Theory’s second test.

As the Wikipedia extract suggests, the third idea of Technological Somnambulism is the most important. That is, we have so effectively disconnected ourselves from the meaning and impact of our cars that the tidal ripples that cars cause throughout the fabric of society and of the environmental systems with which they are connected are out of sight and out of mind. Right up until the final call for global warming is sounded by poor old gassed out Gaia. We are, as Langdon Winner suggested, more focused on the menial aspects of this technology than on the changes that its use induces.

In my view, the gate breaker to use against our sleep walking-anaesthetised relationship with cars is to directly connect the impact this technology is having on the climate we all must share. Routing a tube from the exhaust pipe into the car is one possibility. Sticking a greenhouse emissions gauge on the dashboard is another. Paying an emissions tax on every drop of fuel in the tank is pretty sound. But, I think we need to think more creatively. We need to reconnect folk with the meaning of transportation. People need to be re-engaged with travel. Travel needs to become a physical thing once more. People need to reinvent the notion that travel connects to the brain via their brawn. The muscles need to be re-engaged. We need to connect directly to the road. Not be floating above it (in both a physical and metaphorical sense) as cars provide. Travel needs to become a thing we do, not a task for the tools we use. People need a cultural reconfiguration with the physicality of travel. If, for example, car use was to be rationed, our reversion to walking or cycling on out-of-quota days might re-ignite a re-found appreciation for what it is that a car can do. Their off-day proximity to the exhaust fumes of those still permitted to drive might awaken a real experiential sense of the wider costs that this amenity involves.

There’s one other thing I can conclude about Technological Somnambulism. It’s not a characteristic to describe the relationship between at least myself and the bicycles I use to travel! You can’t sleep walk around technology such as this. Ride up a hill and you will know. Get caught out in a summer storm and you will know. Ride the hairpins of an alpine descent and you will know. Cross the line first and you will know. Cycling to my mind is the smelling salts we need to stun the travel-stupored out of their car-driven somnambulance. Cycling is the chaotic butterfly wing fluttering spark of rebirth we now so desperately need to extend our lease on a world that oil-motivated technology has otherwise spurned .

*Fat chance, my academic critics would suggest, but hey, they are not likely to be reading this anyway, given a endemic falling-off-the-edge-of-the-world fear of reading anything outside of peer reviewed journals or other self-referentially validated pontifications from their exclusive towers of elevated and tragically lonely intellectualism.

**The rich picture to be explored here is the playing field of Institutional Economics; always a lovely place to explore. Specifically, The theory of Technological Sonambulism is kind of an antithesis theory to that of technological determinism which was developed by one of the fathers of Institutional Economics, Thorstein Veblen. The depths to be considered concern the distinctly different ways that different people see the world. Technological Determinism is, as you would imagine, a deterministic theory and therefore reflects a rather distinctly cause and effect view of things. At the other extreme is the theory of the Social Construction of Technology that suggests that the play out from introducing a technology is a matter of emergent interaction with people and culture; there is little that’s determinsitic or predictable via this last pathway for technology. Finding pathways in this rich picture of significantly conflicting pictures is the nature of the game of good academic exploration. A worthy task for any Phd student!

***Fascinatingly, all my bicycles live in my living room where I can admire them like the works of life-enhancing art they are.

We all live out our fantasies, at least to some degree. The trouble is that very few of us would recognise that reality for ourselves; for others, yes, but not personally. The stuff of our lives is the real deal; not fantastical at all. Most of us are, however, pretty quick to identify the fantastical delusions of others.

The reason for our general lack of introspective clarity in this regard is that fantasies might be defined as the gap between how others observe us and how they think we really are. The fantasies we perform are performances only they, generally, can see. Unless we are particularly introspective and self-aware. Which is not to say that the observations others make are not delusions, or perhaps mis-allusions, as well. After all, the frame they are using through which to observe us are the constructs of their own minds which may well be equally ‘disturbed’. Perhaps we are all crazy all at the same time!

The very process of living gives rise to imagination and the customised colourings we each have that allow us to interpret and interact with all that we see. Some would describe all this mental imaging as the exercise of the ego that each and every human must possess. There’s no more elaborate construction in this world than the infinitely layered, always emergent sense of self that most of us would identify as person we imagine ourselves to be. Our behaviour can be regarded as the performances we provide to the scripts that our egos write. If you don’t believe all this, ask yourself..who are you? Every time you use the word ‘I’ or ‘me’, there’s a self in there to which you are referring. That’s the ego; the construct of our mind; fed by the world around us and the engineering of our brains.

There are thousands upon thousands of people who devote their lives to watching, observing, criticising and laughing at this inner sense of self. Observers such as these might be Buddhists, cognitive scientists and philosophers; but rarely you and me. That’s a shame as there’s lots to entertain from introspection of this kind.

It’s fun (and sometimes tragic) to observe the way we play the games of our ego minds. To observe all the imagery, equipment and the method acting involved. We all seem to attach ourselves to a large, eclectic but finite group of typecasted tribes. There’s the tribe of the pontificating expert set (the professors of the world), the corporate CEO tribe, the political leader, the fireman, the plumber, the farmer, the fashionisti of the boulevard, the tribe of the mountain biker or the road racer, the footballer, the heroic beer and chips man, the young-upcoming-urban-professional set; the musclebound gym hulk, the underdog underling world’s-against-me type, the banker; the old reflective soldier. We usually belong to more than one tribe at the same time. Observe the performances we provide to gain and maintain connection with these tribes. Observe the compulsions involved. See how singular all this can become.

Isn’t it a shame that the only baggage the airlines don’t ever seem to loose is the ego baggage we carry in our minds. Wouldn’t it be great to take a real holiday from who we imagine our selves to be, to become, for a while, someone else? Preferably someone we admire or wish we could become. Or someone we might wish to supplant.

If we could take such a trip to become someone else, wouldn’t it be great to understand how it is that those we temporarily could become observe those things that cause us concern; to really understand why and how it could be that they see things differently to you? To fly to the mind of our enemies to observe how they really think. To dress our temporarily relocated minds from the wardrobe of the world views that their egos project.

Well, going on a trip such as that is not a flight most of us can take. But we can meet half way. And if we can go even some of the way, we move towards understandings that will at least be different to those we have now and at best, might add some colours when all we could previously perceive was an image in black and white.

Co-operation should be an intentional move towards the explicit airing of difference and then of avenues through which to connect that difference into intentions of common purpose. Co-operation is not just an exercise in the sharing of empowerment and democratic consensus making. It is a process of learning and the learning that matters is in understanding the nature of difference; difference in perspective and in the infinitudes of ways that we each have in seeing and knowing how things are and should be.

I’m looking at the abject absurdity of the recent process of decision making in Australia on how this nation proposes to address the issue of ‘climate change’. It’s been a typecast process of egotistical pussyfooting around the chessplays of a process of learning-constrained arbitration over meaningless targets. I refer, of course, to the furore and focus on the reporting of a single overblown academic by the name of Professor Ross Garnaut. One single world view privileged above and beyond all reason has been privileged to pontificate on an issue that has more dimensions and nuances than could be understood by casts of thousands let alone by just one. Climate change is profoundly, demonstrably, emphatically not an issue to be resolved through the assertion and assertions of the hierarchy of the top down. Especially by the machinations of the world view of the tribe that, really, has caused the very problems we now seek to address. Putting this issue into the mental model space of the economics profession for resolution is like presenting your children to the attentions of a pedophile for baby sitting duty. We need to understand; to recognise; to know that the pontifications of the Professors Garnaut’s of this world are the pontifications of just one singular tribal view on how things are and should be. One of millions. One of billions. Just one. Just one shade in a spectrum far far beyond the palate of the individual, let alone the broader spectrum of a single tribe, or even an alliance of tribes, which has been privileged here to report. This is NOT the way we should proceed on issues such as this. Why should we raise the perceptions of just one man to inform the responses a government should take? Sure, the government concerned is not compelled to do exactly as it has been advised; it has the capacity to add nuance and additional layers. And adding layers is precisely what governments of this type love to provide. Layers upon layers of clouded obtuseness when clear cut, razor defined action is what is really required. I am furious and dismayed at all the space being provided in this debate to the pontifications of a tribe of one. The result has been a hang up on the specific mangnitude of a singularly pointless emissions reduction target. As though that’s the real agenda. Which it is not. Targets are the baggage of a mechanical mind trying to grasp the feedback driven convolutions of the amorphous mass of a problem that climate change really is. This is a culturally-induced environmental issue; not an issue for the contemplations of mathematics, or more specifically, of that ugly inbred and deformed lovechild of mathematics and economics: econometrics. What we see here in this expertocratic pontification puddle that Professor Ross Garnaut has delivered is a tragic perversion of a process.

Stop it now! What we need is to know that we all see things in different ways. We each have a tiny part of the solution in our minds because the problem is the consequence of the way we each act and perform. The problem has been caused by us; we are each responsible. The things we do and the things we don’t do have accumulated to deliver the nightmare of a planetary climate system thrown off the rails. Know that the things we do and the things we don’t are shaped by the way we each see and by the way we each know. By our seeing and our knowing; by our idiosyncratic, different, nuanced ego-driven individual contributions to the collective consequence we call culture. Step one to address the greatest catastrophe of our times is to know that the problems we face are our fault; and that the we to which I refer is a multi-billion cosmopolitan mix of world views that are never the same, but nonetheless, must all adjust, each and every single one of us, to the demands of a situation that is intolerant to needs of 6 billion egos for perpetual individual assertion.

The process through which we should proceed to address the challenges of climate change (and of wars, plague, famine, deforestation, and, really, just about everything else) is one that works from the foundation of knowing that we each see things in different ways; that if we, the people, are to respond to new direction, our masters must realise that any change must first usurp the direction of six billion egos intent on compliance with fantastical self-imagined realities often vastly removed from those described by the laws of physics and ecology. This is the starting point for the monumental change process we now must embrace. This is not a process of target management. It’s a process that must embrace the transformation of individual behaviour and even more fundamentally, to rail against the dictates of egos likely to be cornered into positions of ultimate confrontation; a final fling of assertiveness; a fight to the death…to keep the self-myths some of us have alive. Like the need to dress our imagined cosmopolitan selves in fast oil fuming cars; to indulge our egotistical needs for individual assertiveness with the rubbish of the fashion marketplace, play CEO assertive games on the ecological cancer of golf greens, to consume, consume, consume…and heat the engines of an economy beyond the realm of ecological responsibility.

Step one is to engage with this wonderful, awe inspiring mess of discursive mindfulness. Not to ignore it. But to embrace, engage and dive right in. We need to catalyse a species-wide learning process. Because change can only ensue through learning and learning must be at the level of the inner self. Self transformation and emergence, collectively ensued, collective mass change. The need is for a cultural shift of an unprecedented kind. We need a new living relationship with the planet that presents the stage for our existence. Not pussyfooting targeted emissions reductions by the year 2020 or some other arbitrary exercise in the mass deferral of individual responsibility.

It can be done. But it needs a different approach. This is the game of the catalysed grass-roots up emergence and transformation process. The key is the facilitation of the catalyst. The classic systems intervention challenge. I have devoted the past 22 years to challenges of this kind. I am certainly not alone! It’s a different game to play. It works, it’s profound. But it is a revolution to the way things are generally done. That is the real challenge. If space can be provided to mumbling pontificators of the kind now indulged, surely space can also be provided for an accelerated process of cultural transformation. I recognise that significant cultural emergence is taking place already. But it’s a process proceeding outside and beyond the direction of our political masters who are intent on playing out the game of expert top down change as the rest of the world shifts ponderously to a playing field where those processes no longer apply. There is so much more that governments could do to facilitate and expedite real and meaningful change than the dismal stupidities of their current play.

What’s wrong with this picture? If we can get inside the pathologies that underpin the message being presented here, the root cause of global warming will be revealed in all of its ugly simplicity. It’s not strictly to do with the mere existence of monstrously big four wheel drives on our roads; the fuel they use and the emissions they generate. That’s bad enough of itself. No, what this advertisement is really indicating, perversely, is that the real sickness is not the vehicles but the tragic mental state of those who would buy them. The dysfunctional world view revealed here is the root cause of environmental tragedies like global warming. This particular advertisement reveals more about the strange sick character of contemporary society than just about any other marketing spin piece I have ever seen. It’s spectacularly poignant that the real message being delivered here is through the medium of an overweight, unnecessary, gas guzzling, environmentally contemptuous SUV.

It’s a hugely pregnant advertisement this; enough material to cover an entire semester long postgraduate course on the sociology of antisocial behaviour. Consider the banner headline. ‘Rethink Safe’. Indeed. What’s the message? Without reading a word we can see that message is constructing an idea of safety to the driver of a vehicle such as this by inserting, somehow, greater barriers between us and the rest of the world; barriers to assert the security we might be dumb enough to believe is ours once we lock the doors and the wider world away; away from us.

The message is simple. Safety happens when we add barriers. We are safe of our selves. It’s everyone else that is a threat. If, somehow, we could drive around in our already hefty two tonne SUV with crash barriers wielded like shields, we’d be even safer still. Clearly, the threats come from outside, not from within. The need is for shielding. Armour.

What an astounding bit of psychology we have here! It explains why so many people seem to believe that driving trucks like this is a safety feature. The bigger the safer. Much worse is the message that it is other people who are the source of concern. All they need to do is hide behind their shields of tin. They, the drivers of these things, could never be the cause of concern or threat.

This advertisement advertises the pathology of self-centeredness. Of seeing the world from the world view of them against us. Of seeing ourselves as victims rather than prospective perpetrators of damage to others and to the environment that sustains us. This truck is really just an instrument of armour for our overloaded ego’s.

And, dear reader, that’s precisely why so many cyclists are being killed by car drivers. Because, when the drivers of these things do pause to consider questions of safety, their concerns are not what they might be about to inflict on others but on what others might be about to inflict on them. If all that’s true, drivers of this kind have no concerns at all for their own personal safety when they see and pass a cyclist. So they don’t need to be careful, do they! After all, their big muscled piles of tin will protect them from those nasty cyclist fleas… So, they drive close, they drive across our paths, they head us off and generally treat us like a bug that their shields can easily divert.

I have always maintained that what we really - really - need in this ongoing war between cars and bikes is for car drivers to be made more vulnerable to the offences they inflict rather than less. If, somehow, a motorist could be fully exposed to the world outside, I’d guarantee they’d drive with more care. Put them in an open spider framed car without panels and glass and watch the transformation on our roads!

Exactly the same point pertains to how we perceive the link between people and the environment as well. When we are cocooned in this mound of tin, we are cocooned from responsibility and liability to the universe outside. It’s other people who cause global warming, not we, the saintly set who cocoon ourselves away behind the crash barriers we erect around our own shielded sense of shared responsibility. Inside such an armour plated crash barriered contraption as this, we are safe and protected, we are apart from the rest of the world. We are in our own private universe and inside there is sufficient space to carry the aura of blamelessness that our egos project. This thing is a crash barrier to sustain our sense of being safe and apart. Apart from shared blame, apart from contribution to problems. In here, we are protected from outside to in. Inside there is a universe of our own protected, self-privileged mind. This safety zone’d SUV is both metaphorically and physically the carrier for the abject selfishness that has caused every single human-directed environmental problem that now plagues our planet.

This advertisement is an offence. It is obscene. This car company should be the subject of a class action from the cycling community, and from all of our children and grandchildren who must live the consequences of this metalic manifestation of putting and protecting one’s head in a cozy hole in the sand. But it is also an advertisement to confirm the hideous obscenity of trucks like this; and of the mental models or world views of who choose to drive them. In this picture is a ten thousand page thesis on what’s really, truly, wrong with this world of ours. Abject self-centredness and companies that sell directly to that vice.

I am not convinced that the answers to our current environmental challenges lie in the domain of better policy instruments, regulatory reform, targets or schemes (of the carbon credits kind). No, I am convinced that step 1 is to reconfigure, upgrade or, to be more meaningfully colourful, to re-story the relationship between people and their environment. What is needed is a quite cataclysmic culture shift. Kind of like the order of magnitude of a shift that we always get to see as the final chapter in all those global holocaust movies (where only a few people survive/the world is now snowed under/the Martians have all died of earthly viruses or country and western music). That order of magnitude of culture shifting. Wherein people finally get the message that everything we consume takes inventory off Gaia’s pantry shelves. Wherein every fume we emit into the air will poison each and every one of us; not just ’someone else, someplace else’. No, stuff that goes around will come around in ever decreasing circles and through an ever and ever faster cycle. Treat our shared planet with the disrespect that is now customary as part of the contemporary human condition, and Mother Earth will fight back, no holds barred. Time’s up, patience is up. We the noisy, destructive, abusive, nest fouling tenants of Planet Earth are about to be evicted. All that human cultural packaging of fantasies of ownership; that it was all created just for us, is over. Gone. We, the now unwelcome house guests are heading unwillingly for the door. Go find some other planet to despoil. That kind of cultural shift.

But how do you do a cultural shift? This, of course, is the real challenge for political leadership world over. Not deep immersion in the intricacies of carbon credit targets and the like. No, the job for leadership is how to facilitate or catalyse an epoch-changing cultural shift that will take humans back into something approaching a genuinely sustainable relationship with the only planet to which we have current access. That’s a tough one and I am not aware of any leadership, anywhere, that is attempting to exercise leadership direction of this kind. No, our leaders are intently engaged in a perpetual wallow of vomitous ingratiation with the voting public so as to not upset or unduly agitate/confuse or challenge those who vote to sustain their positions of power.

I could go all academic and suggest that what we need to institute around here is a non-linear acceleration up the anthropocentric-ecocentric scale; sufficiently far that people start to genuinely believe and understand that conservation and preservation does not need to be justified in human value terms. But I prefer to be histrionic instead because I am getting really wound up by the current international fixation on worthless carbon credit trading schemes and even more worthless environmental targets. We don’t have time for all that fine tuning stuff. You can’t fine tune an engine that is actually totally worn out, rusted away and crashed over a cliff. Time for a new engine. A new shared culture of shared responsibility and respect for the astonishing gift to occupy this magnificent, gorgeous, life-giving planet.

So how do we DO it? How do we jump right into the greatest intentional, purposeful culture shift of all time?

Conversation is the key. The mechanics of culture shifting is communication. Conversation where each and every person’s deep seated fundamental philosophical roots are exposed, aerated and re-sown as a consequence of purposefully facilitated conversational cross pollination. It all starts from communicative engagement of the dedicated, intentional kind. And for that we need ruthlessly effective, considered, reflexively-purposeful leadership from those we empower to lead. These leaders have to know how to pull off such a cataclysm. They need to become ruthlessly effective catalysts of communicative engagement. For that, they need to know how engagement works; they need to understand the nature of human knowing, of human cognition, of human interactive process, of world views, and of epistemology. These are serious skills. Most of our current leaders would not have a clue. We need new leaders who do. The good news is that there is some huge help and insight to be tapped, insight that is available right now. There is a rather huge inventory of knowledge about stuff like this; it’s just that the people in the know are not usually politicians because usual political process does not work towards models of engagement such as that which I propose. Usual political process is more like the selling of soap powder and used cars. It’s driven by the charlatanry of marketing; that ugly deformed in-bred sister of the economics profession. No, let’s look up those quiet achievers and insightful characters from the philosophical domain, from the organisational learning game, from the systems thinking, critical theory, and from the institutional economics domains. Let’s bring these folk out into the open and change the guard.

Here are some opening thoughts on how human communicative process should work. I recommend a two-stage communicative model. The first stage is summed up well by Dan Kahan from the Yale Law School:

If as a citizen you would like to form well-considered views on a culturally divisive risk issue - for example, global warming, or gun control - find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural outlook but who disagrees with you. You are likely to give this person’s arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset that natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different to our own. Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, in ‘Keep Your Head’, New Scientist, August 30, 2008, p. 36.

The second stage of my recommended communicative model goes much further. Conversing with those of a similar ‘cultural outlook’ is fine but too easy. The result of that is learning but it’s all a bit ‘home town’. What if everyone in your shared culture is wrong? That’s pretty well the case when it comes to our current understandings of human-environment relationships. We tend to talk only to those who agree with our most basic tenets. Like those who share a dubious religiosity that suggests that the earth is a gift for our privileged use from an anthropomorphised god. That it’s ‘ours’. That we are ‘owed’ our existence. That we are, somehow, ’superior’ and worthy to use up and destroy. Like a shared culturally embedded belief in the imperialism of one specific country’s mythology, or of the hegemony of traditions that are border-defined. No, to spark this cultural transformation, we may need something vastly more unnerving. Like talking to those who don’t share our basic cultural outlook. Because in that fundamental asymmetry of difference, something catalytic might take hold.

My contention is that the really big discoveries and transformations happen when we purposefully set sail for the edge of the known world. Like Columbus, Buddha, Salvador Dali and John Cage. We need the energy of critical introspection that only distinctive difference can spark. So, I recommend Dan Kahan’s culturally centred Stage 1. But we need then to progress immediately to Stage 2. This is the realm of the ‘discursive community’. Where the intention for consensus is off the agenda. Rather, the intention is to shake up all our insights and ways of seeing things, and ways of knowing things. Stage 2 throws the notions of consensus making right out the door where that tired old intellectual levelling scheme really belongs. Rather than strive to hammer sameness, we need to embrace difference. We need to understand difference because from those understandings we will derive new insights to apply. The outcome from Stage 2 is chaotic reconfiguration and the emergence of new trajectories; to discover a new trajectory for human-environment harmony that probably is not apparent to us now. Stage 2 leads to a world of emergence; of emergent understandings and broader systems thinking. Only then can we sensibly reconfigure the prospects for our survival.

In a previous post, I discussed the tragic containment of society by the mindless compulsion to be politically correct. I didn’t define political correctness at the time so will do so now:

Politically Correct

adj. (Abbr. PC)

1. Of, relating to, or supporting broad social, political, and educational change, especially to redress historical injustices in matters such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.

2. Being or perceived as being overconcerned with such change, often to the exclusion of other matters.

I think the reality of this concept is a bit broader. I consider the urge to be politically correct is the compulsion most people have to conform with the written and unwritten social memes and morays that apply or are perceived to apply at any point in time. Always changing and never precisely defined, to be politically correct is to make an effort to not say or do anything that might excite the sentiments of opinion or perceptions that fit within the boundaries around the zone of sameness or shared values that political correctness would describe. If you operate within this zone, your actions will cause a minimum of offence and you will float your boat through winds swinging gently from calm to light and variable. Step outside that zone and you are surfing on raging seas, winds gusty and dangerous. Out there, you are in uncharted seas. You might, perhaps, sail right off the edge of the world.

Politicians, in particular, seek to stay contained within these walls. Largely to avoid vote loosing controversies and the compromising of what their spin advisors tell them are the sentiments of poplar appeal and behaviour. And as politicians empower policies, the policies they enact are likely to conform with the sentiments of the hive-mind of generic political correctness. That influence extends way out into public organisations and the corporate sector. Even into sport. When it extends to the arts we end up with the artistry of the bland. When it extends and contains our responses to environmental crises, we get carbon credit trading schemes…and endless debate over emissions targets. Academics are held at ransom through the need to publish (to tinker within the zone of ‘collective wisdom’) or perish (to adventure outside to discover the vastly more interesting stuff). The medical profession is bound in a bench press of conformity applied by the legal profession (which embeds the very architecture of what it means to be Politically Correct) and to stay within the boundaries set by the tyrannies of ‘collective wisdom’ (or risk becoming an ‘alternative practitioner; or witch doctor…). And so it goes. To adventure outside this zone is to be tagged ‘pretentious’. Or to be a loony.

Pretension is another fascinating (related) concept.

pretension ¹ |priˈten ch ən|

noun

1 ( pretension to) a claim or the assertion of a claim to something : their pretensions to culture | we cannot tolerate pretension to infallibility.

• (often pretensions) an aspiration or claim to a certain status or quality : another aging rocker with literary pretensions.

2 the use of affectation to impress; ostentatiousness : he spoke simply, without pretension.

I’d offer an update on that definition too. Pretension, I would suggest, is the label those committed to the hive-mind of the politically correct would provide to those who seek to escape; or who suggest that the world outside the ‘zone’ is indeed a place where decency and intelligence might be found, if not to prevail. Pretension is to aspire to knowledge or position outside the wallow of the home-zone contained by the great wall of the memes and morays of the politically correct. You see, if you don’t sound and act like a fellow traveller within the uniformity of the zone, you are seen to be elevating yourself from the mob. To sound authoritative on subjects too near or outside the wall is to be different and difference is a social assault. Political correctness requires sameness; a gravitational well of abject conformity.

Which all explains why, these days, I am sitting on my verandah watching sheep. Having sailed off the edge of a world of well ordered disciplinary silos, zealous devotion to a collective wisdom trapped within the morays of hierarchically organised intelligence and authority; and away from the adulation of those in charge. This black sheep now sits watching his white sheep grazing serenely on this fine, Spring day.

I am sitting here on my verandah. It’s a fine Spring day after a morning of frost. There’s a breeze; not a cloud in the sky.

At my feet are a pair of superb fairy wrens. They are dancing between the low branch of a callistemon bush, a shallow bird bath and the front row boards of my verandah. Spring is on their minds. The coin-sized female is thrashing in the bath like a fish flapping in shallow water. The royal blue flushed male stands guard until his mate is done.

My view extends downhill over an acre of casaurina, melaleuca and eucalyptus trees. The wattles are out in full bloom; nature’s flag that winter is done and summer is soon to return.

In the mid-distance is a shearing shed; old, historical, organic. Before it are a few hundred sheep intent on grazing a Spring flush of grass. Willy Wagtails hop from sheep back to sheep back, to wag tails and cavort - all beyond the notice of their intently grazing hosts. There are horses too. Vaguely tail swatting flies while also intent on the grass at their feet. It’s not all freeze frame; some sheep are returning from a visit to a small dam off to one side. Way overhead, watching this shop floor scene of wool in unhurried production is a wedge tailed eagle riding a thermal; like a kite in the slow lazy breeze.

Further out is a square paddock of oats, greening up in time for the lambing to come. A row of wind break pines takes off in a perpendicular into the horizon of hills.

Time passes. The sun moves the shadows ever further out. Colours deepen as the mid-day sun recedes. Such is the frenzy of change that this place currently sustains.

Between the yellow foam of the spring flowering wattle and the shed is a road. It’s a one lane affair; more cycle path than a track for trucks and as a cycle path it does me just fine. Barely a line to emphasise the boundary between the near and middle distance zones of my view, this road is as sleepy as the rest of the scene. One car an hour or less. It’s poignant that the road cuts across my view, left to right, right to left. It comes from somewhere and goes someplace else. Only a few hundred metres sit within my viewframe. It’s a connection from where I am to places somewhere else. Indeed, it is the only connection between my solitary sojourn and the frenzies, commerce, customs and cultures of the world outside my frame of interest and concern. All journeys start with the first steps applied to that road. Journeys to the village 30 km travelling off to the right or the small city 30km off to the left. And from there, onto a plane, to Spain, or to Peru. To the pyramids of Egypt or of Mars. This tiny road is a thread to connect to places from which I am, mostly, willingly removed.

It seems to me that most of the frenzies and furies that crash or ignite the world can only be accessed through travelling this road. If I stay sitting here, that’s all the stuff of ’someplace else’. To engage with the ballistic mosaic of a world of change, I must step first, with purpose, on that road.

The sheep I watch were born where they graze. Most will die there too. They will never travel the road. I wonder at the ease with which I might disconnect, and stay forever in this sleepy spring oasis of calm. What compulsions would cause me to venture forth? My writing occupation does not require it. My one time insatiable desire for the merchandise of the wider world of commerce has receded to the point where now, I really don’t care for more. The mail man uses this road to bridge the wider world to this space, my place, my grassed-in Walden Pond. The road constrains and contains any inclination he might have to step from the world with which he is connected and this place, my place, this space I define by the direct and peripheral zone of my vision; and of the soundscape with which that vision is meshed.

I find it satisfying indeed that my adventures in any direction along this road are almost entirely by bicycle. My riding emphasises the distance I have to travel to connect with the dramas of a more peopled world. The bicycle softens the transition - the culture shock - when shifting from the paradigm of tranquility with which I am currently engaged to the monied, bomb dropping, shouting world outside. The bicycle is a bungee cord with which to sustain my core connection with this place. On those occasions when I must travel by car, the shouting and screaming world outside starts straight away; with the fumes of that infernal machine and the metalic plastic, sound system’d, environmental dislocation of claustrophobic containment within the bowels of its fake leather chairs. All the bad things of this world are connected by car. All the good things by bike. Or by a solitary run, or by foot. I have begun to believe that the exits we deploy from those spaces of serenity and contentment we might be lucky to find should be most carefully devised. Like travelling through the airlock into outer space. Depart too fast and you might forget your reservoir of air. To travel by car is to defile the contentment we would otherwise take from that centred place called home. To travel by bicycle is to maintain the space of contentment further afield; and through extending that range, we help to contain the domain that the darkness of the hive-mind seeks to shroud. In the place where I am, I can contemplate the memes and morays that befuddle the rest of the world without concern for the protocols that would otherwise constrain what I say, do and think. To connect with that, I have to step outwards to the road. My movement in that regard is as sedate as the unhurried grazing of my sheep.

As someone facing ever fewer bicycle rides from my fixed lifecycling quota, I find myself pondering more and more about the contrasts between these times and times now in the distant past. That’s something that old cranky geeks like me can enjoy; you younguns have a narrower gap across time to compare.

So, I guess you can guess the statement to come next: When I was young…

Well, when I was young(er) (there’s still life in these legs yet - I’m not as fast as some up hills, but still faster than most…so there!) things were relatively less competitive and respect was more culturally ingrained. Of course, 20 years or so ago, there were those who had no respect for others and there were those who race paced across all others to stand at the top, no matter what the cost. Of course. But, at the risk of looking backwards with too rosy a tint, I recall that a kid could rid a bicycle to school, to the shops, or just go exploring without even contemplating the merest concept of being abducted, being levelled by a car or taking in too many toxic fumes. When I was eight, I would head off with a mate at 9 am and return not before 2. We’d bash our bikes through the bush and end up in some very surprising places. We’d head off into the wilderness for all day treks, pitch a tent, and collect bottles to cash in for a ginger ale. I bashed out a tooth on a tree and broke a leg through my cycling adventures; but it was all part of a story within which I continued to want to play.

Nowadays, parents drop their overweight, pale and unhealthy kids off to school; even if school is only two kilometres away. And when the young pudgies get home, they hit the fridge, the TV and the the internet; closed off to the adventures that can happen only outside. If they do venture forth, it’s only to visit the local DVD store or to stand around like zombies in the mall; preoccupied with texting themselves rather than talk.

I have a wild and wacky theory to explain all this. I introduced the basic theme in my last post. It’s to do with our inclination to emulate the scrub turkey’s predilection to building a thermoregulated nest.

As our world takes on ever more people, and as those people crowd into smaller and smaller spaces, the detail to contain, constrain and define the societies within which we live takes on more an more layers of rules. Rules of custom, and rules of law. These rules govern all we do, say and think. In the language of contemporary systems theory, rules are governance and governance is one big complex, chaotic dynamic system that writhes and warps in a continual heat of change. Just like compost. A composted turkey nest becomes a dynamic living system that produces heat. The turkey pecks and digs, prods and builds an environment that will incubate the life it has seeded within. Just like the governor of an economy. We are all a bunch of scrub turkeys. We nest our lives within the layers upon layers of the humus our governors decree, and within that bigger nest we each do some pecking and prodding to arrange the micro climates of our own local places; our homes or immediate communities. Just like a nest, as the environment changes and emerges, we repair, upgrade and replace the rules (including the rules of custom and culture) as we go; this is our life long preoccupation. We are all engaged in the perpetual customising of our mounds.

To return to my main point, with the fullness of a good time frame to observe, I can declare that our nests are higher these days. Nest building is more frantic than ever before. And as the distance between each nest declines, territorialism is on the increase. Nest defence takes ever more time. Now any complexity theorist will be able to advise that as we keep on adding layers to systems that are already complex, the proclivity to chaos is ever more evident and fraught. Our nest building is producing more and more heat (the true cause of global warming, I think).

Another thing most of us know is that as a complicated machine wears out, we need to apply more and more maintenance. The rule structures within our societal nests become ever more convoluted; like layers upon layers of bandaids on holes and gaps erupting as the turbulence within seeks to really blow! I think we are, these days, relying on a particular kind of gap filler to patch our nests. It’s a plastic filler to replace the more solid foundations we no longer can afford. This plastic filler is the egregious stinky stuff of our intent to be politically correct. We’ve long since dropped the fine crafting of idiosyncratic, individualised furnishings for our nests. These days, the pull of the flock spins us all in a gravity well. Spinning like a top, fixed in the one spot and achieving nothing at all.

As our society wallows and broils from the overheating of our ever more deeply layered nests, we keep adding and filling with the concoction of being politically correct. This potion seeks to calm us all down; to reduce the heat. It’s difference that creates the most friction in the places we build. To reduce the friction, we need to become more alike. The spray of the politically correct cauterises out the greatest sources of heat. We evict the different and the distinctive from the rest, in the nest. Edges are smoothed, frays are tied and inspiration is curtailed (except in those places set aside and shielded to contain that creative spark - and contained it generally is - see my comments on universities in my last post).

The raging fire of our once discursively interesting world has been bucket quenched by the plastic foam of the politically correct. That’s why kids stay at home. Until we can get ALL the pedophiles off the streets. Until we can be totally secure to know that our kids will not see what they should not see, hear what they should not hear and do what they should not do. So we encase them in this plastic cement instead. In our politically corrected shrouds, we can really do very little at all; other than to conform and comply with the dictates of the plastic mass society now has become. To act otherwise would apply too much heat and our nests might ignite.

When I was young… spin was what you did with the pedals on your bike. Spinning was the mechanics to adventure and escape. Nowadays, spin is the thing of politics and corporations. It’s the propellant which which to spray us all with the cement of constraint to be politically correct. So, you see, cycling really is a metaphor and the vehicle of escape, we can spin our pedals instead and ride on through these sorry times into fine adventures and exotic places, just like I did when I was a kid. Step one is to step outside.

There is no doubt that running a one person business is easier than running one with 3,000 employees. Or even one with only 10. The problem or, to be more diplomatic, the challenge, is that we all come pre-packaged as little self-contained organisations in our own right, which need to mesh into the larger organisation with all the cross-compatibility issues that multiple-people organisations involve. It’s all about rules and policies. As individuals, we each carry some highly complex and ordinarily convoluted, ever changing, sometimes contradictory, ‘policies’ that shape our reactions to the things we see and do. Some of us are highly rule-bound. Some of us do stuff with extraordinary regularity; a regularity that might infuriate those with less fixed habits. We call these folk ‘inflexible’ and those who aren’t might be variously described as ‘amenable’ or changeable depending on who is doing the describing.

So, when we put together an organisation involving more than one person, all these differently configured bundles of internal rules and policies need to be in a continual process of adaptation or (for the more rigid types), defence. The rigid players are more predictable. Their various buttons tend to stay in the same place and produce the same results when pushed again and again. The flexibly-deployed folk keep on changing the way their buttons work. That makes life fairly exciting, particularly for those who like things to be nice and machine like: predictable and reliable in response.

I have a theory that only the flexible folk should be put in charge. A flexibly adaptive person in charge of a rigidly steadfast subordinate is going to have an easy, if not frustrating or exasperating time. But if we put a rigid type in charge of a flexibly adaptive person, the recipe is one of continual confrontation and containment. The only response the rigid leader is likely to devise through which to retain control is an ever more labyrinthine system of rules and policies to contain the behaviour of their idiosyncratically difficult underlings. The flexible folks will then devote their lives to finding loopholes, bypass routes and other vehicles of subterfuge through which to exercise their innate empathy with change and difference. The rigid manager becomes a jailer. The flexible employee becomes a perpetual threat or challenge to be ‘managed’ (contained).

Things really get skewed and strange when you fill up an organisation with lots and lots of adaptive, emergently configured people. There are two options. The first is to let the show flow and engage in a perpetual change process of adaptation and emergence. Nothing stays the same and the organisation is in a continual process of redefinition (with the ever changing environment with which it interacts). The other option is to run the show like a Nazi concentration camp. Rules of barbed wire constrain the behaviour and waywardness of those who, the rulers will decree, must remain contained.

The option of choice, it might seem, depends on what the organisation does and how it is intended to interface with the rest of the world. If an organisation is set up to follow a larger set of pre-configured rules, the concentration camp organisational system is likely to prevail. Government departments and branch offices of all kinds would seem to fit in that school. If the organisation is designed to seek, explore and create its own interface with the world, it needs to be free to fly. Razor wire rules will cut the creative wings of all those who seek to soar, glide and dive around the challenges the rest of the world provides.

The problem is, there are actually no situations where the rigidly managed concentration camp model is a good idea. The problem is, the whole world, and every bit within it, is one big seething mass of chaotically reconfiguring complexity. In the real world, change is perpetual, there is no escape and no place to hide; for long. I would declare the rigidly constrained organisation to be a toxic place; disfigured in its capacity to adapt, learn and grow.

Take a university. Or a fruit stall, government department or shopping mall. Take what you want; but I will pick on a university because I spent 22 years at one of those one day in times recently past. A university provides a great illustration of the point I want to make, and of any university I could name the one from which I have recently escaped provides the best illustration of all. The University of New England in Australia is an organisation in terminal decline. It’s a place that is self destructing in a most spectacular, and public way (see ‘UNE Leadership Crisis Talks Fail in the Australian Newspaper). The two chiefs in charge are engaged in a public brawl. The story is in all the news. Camps of support and opposition for each and both are forming like alliances in any other war. The generals (the professorial clique) have declared support for one side, others are declaring for his opponent, or staying quiet. Most are staying quiet. They fear for their pay. At the core of this war is a fundamental division over the way things should be run. The problem is that the ruler who has had the freest hand is a machine man of the most mechanical kind. He thinks the world should run like a clock. His rule is to contain and constrain. The kind who declares an intent for participation and communication but only in one direction, from him down to the rest. He’s an autocrat with no communication skills. He destroyed the Centre I directed for ten years before he came on the scene. He unilaterally decreed a deployment of razor wire rules around my seething mass of change evangelists. We did not fit his policy rules. So we had to go. Despite that fact that we were doing all the things for which we were, originally, in more enlightened times, deployed.

When rigid machine managers take over, they develop an urge to reproduce. All layers of administration and management are soon filled with clones. Very soon, the entire organisation becomes a rigid ladder of inflexible command and control with a spectacular incapacity to see the world through anything other than the squint vision that bights the sight of those who cannot see. The blind then lead the blind and the entire place becomes a purpose built hell for those with more inquisitive, reflexive, reflective eyes. The organisation assumes the rigidity of an iron cage. An inflexible cage to time freeze the now dominant culture within and hold the messy complexities of the rest of the world at bay. Of course, that iron clad retreat can’t last forever as it starts to both rust from within and weather from without. But the rigid straight jacket that the University of New England now wears is a suit of torture for the students and flexible thinking academics who now find themselves under siege and their intelligence under house arrest.

The key issue here, and the issue that seems to have fallen below everyone’s radar, is that a university is supposed to be a facility for learning, a place where knowledge is nurtured, nourished and set free to change the world. The least likely and least appropriate place to play games of iron clad rules is a university. There’s a word used to describe the maniacal clock works manager in a setting such as this: managerialism. Managerialism (see this most excellent story on the subject) is a system of rules designed to manage an organisation along the lines of a plumbing system; or like a train. The more challenges unwieldy creative types impose on their machine managers, the more convoluted those rules become. Rules on rules on rules accrete like the layers of humus in a scrub turkey nest. Now there is a real point to the humus layering obsessions of the scrub turkey; it’s to create compost warmth from the layers he applies to his mound. But in the case of a rule layering managerialist CEO, the heat that’s generated is of a vastly less productive kind. That’s the heat of conflict, flight and fight. It’s the heat of war and decline.

And that is what happens when you put a rigid thinking type in charge of an organisation full to the rafters of creative, flighty flexible thinking folk, like, well, us - or, in this sad case, like the we we used to be before we where evicted from the nest. You get a war at least of attrition. Hence the stories of bellowing confrontation spread across Australia’s national newspapers over the decline and fall of the University of New England. Kids: don’t go to that place to learn!

It’s no huge leap to apply this story to organisations of all kinds. It’s no huge leap to make the case that our collective, confounding and exasperating incapacity to seriously address complex issues like global warming, wars, poverty and deforestation is the rigidity or rules-bound organisational machines we keep on deploying through which to manage our responses. There’s nothing quite as perverse as a rigid organisational structure response to the breathtaking complexity of climate change! I’ll tease these thoughts out in later posts. Got to do something with the time I now have on my hands…