‘They went because their open eyes could see no other way’
Thus reads the inscription, from C. Day-Lewis’s poem ‘The Volunteer’ (1938), on the memorial to the International Brigade on London’s South Bank, tucked beneath the London Eye, in dedication to those who gave their lives to help fight fascism in Spain. These words ring sharply true today as we finally embrace fully the existential threat that is climate change.
‘We are not as good as we think we are’ an esteemed colleague said in a workshop a week or so ago, as we collectively wrangled with what the appropriate response to this genuine emergency might be. The meeting was held against a backdrop of the incredible Extinction Rebellion protests that through beautiful passive resistance and soulful collaborative creativity brought climate change and ecological collapse sharply back into the collective consciousness. Around the table many who have spent the last two decades of their professional lives campaigning and consulting on climate, we were forced to admit our own shortcomings and failure to deliver the requisite shifts.
Anger and frustration bubbled beneath the surface. We’ve been holding the boundaries, suppressing the visceral ‘this is NOT OK!’ reactions, hoping in our delusion that yet another round of incrementalism might just work. But feeling and sensing that the client-service cage we have created for ourselves, the economic lock-in that has led to this deadly mindset of dependency is over; we can’t criticise or bite the hands that feed us, and so we become effectively enslaved to a form of mutually assured destruction.
Is it any wonder in this context that people feel unhappy? Unable even to authentically live a bigger than self purpose, let alone an organisational one, prohibited from speaking truth to power. Overworked, over-wrought, we are frazzled and wilfully blind. Constrained by commercial ‘realities’ we are mired in a tawdry loop of self-centred, selfish, egocentric and narcissistic feedback. The trite manipulation of behavioural psychology, the ‘happy heroes’ of neoliberalism, focused on our own vested individual self-interest drowning in a sea of virtue-signalling and atomisation. Half-truths sugared for pallatibility. We have every reason to be miserable.
The moral imperative of our times is not the one-dimensional brittle and arguably dishonest ‘optimism’, nor the hopelessly fatalistic resignation, but a combination of both. Perhaps the new ‘Outage and Optimism’ podcast best encapsulates this? We simply cannot expect to achieve the substantial and unprecedented changes required without ‘telling the truth, and acting like that truth is real’. We have an intellectual obligation to be straight with people. At this point courage is more important than hope.
Some organisations shall and must fail in this shakedown. And for this to happen we must rise up. Not just onto the streets as XR have done so cleverly, colourfully and compassionately, but as better versions of ourselves. It is time to speak out, to unblock the obstructions to real progress, not some subjugation to ‘Death Star Economics’. It is time for tough choices, making space for difficult decisions to unlock our potential. We must find new tools, such as Citizens Assemblies and dynamic, deliberative, demographically representative systems, because our democratic system has proven itself woefully inept at delivering the change required — turkeys won’t vote for Christmas, and the shifts we must make will change our lives materially. But in the process we have the capacity to unleash our much greater potential to live, love and work better alongside each other, and nature, to create real meaning in our lives.
We need brave conversations beyond the toxic public discourse. We must threaten the cosmology of our responsibility to the false Gods of money, status and power, so beloved of those who would try to nudge, or covertly persuade others to act, whilst denying them the lifeblood of real context and meaning for their actions — the very narratives that might engage not just logical, rational brains, but pluck the compassionate heart-strings of empathy, and stir the visceral instincts of the gut. This is not right. Something must be done. This is ours to do. Together.
Our security ecologically, politically and socially depends not just on transactions but on relationships. Those of us who feel we have become refugees from a sick system must speak out. We need to have the campaigning conversations. We need not just science based targets. Not just new business models that tweak the status quo. Not just bravado and grandeur and self-congratulatory back-slapping. We need change like we’ve never needed it before.
Our eyes are open. We can see no other way.
Ed Gillespie is the author ‘Only Planet’
