We live in an age of revolution and counter-revolution. This can become obscured amid the timescales that rest easily in our thoughts, which rarely extend beyond a few years. By shifting our frame of reference to longer historical periods, partly by the choice to learn about them, other consequential patterns start to emerge. One of these patterns is the importance to our shared well-being of the structures and systems with which we order our communities, including the relationship between classes, what we simply call "politics".
There are myriad experiments with governing societies that humans have tried over time, deliberately or otherwise. Our political structures have often been in flux, but the pace and direction of change in recent centuries, stirred by technological, material and intellectual shifts, has been unprecedented. We are in revolutionary times. Revolutionary moments are times conducive to change, but what change happens, whether it makes the world better or worse, and who it becomes better or worse for, is contested.
Progress
Over recent centuries, the moral arc of the universe has bent towards justice. Political power has been devolving from the exclusive domain of elites to, in many places, being shared by the population. Democracy, once generally dismissed as a fanciful, even ridiculous dream, has become commonplace. In many democracies, people's rights have become mostly universal. Though progress remains uneven, the idea that people should be oppressed because of their race, gender, sexuality, faith, abilities or identities is increasingly a fringe position. Across recent centuries, people have raised their voices against power in numbers never known before. We have witnessed popular movements against slavery, sexism, racism, environmental destruction, war, cruelty to animals, and many other forms of injustice. Humanity's trajectory is such that, in moments, Arundhati Roy’s words feel within our grasp: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathe.”
Societal progress, however, does not emanate from any natural law. It is neither inevitable, smooth, nor irreversible. Most steps toward equality and justice have resulted from activists. Activists are individuals who envision a better world and incur some, often substantial, risk to make it real. Elites invested in the status quo have usually ostracised or persecuted activists; at other times, activists have been resisted by the majority of society. Yet these activists continued their struggle and sometimes ended up overturning the elites or having their ideas accepted by the majority. If our culture is more civilised, imaginative, productive and diverse, it is thanks to activists - these rebels, dreamers, thinkers, and outcasts who forced society to imagine, reflect and become a better version of itself. We owe these countless, often nameless, people a debt that can only be repaid by continuing their work - by joining our voices and energy to the ongoing struggle for justice and fairness.
We must awaken our inner revolutionary.
Violence
The word "revolution" carries many meanings, sadly often entangled with violence. Violence is unfortunately not something we can wish out of existence, nor can we unilaterally decide for the world to renounce the power of violence. Thus, we must understand violence and consider ways in which it can be non-violently resisted.
Violence may sometimes become the only way to resist oppression, particularly to resist tyrannies irredeemably based on violence and censorship. Kennedy said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Even if we put moral considerations about violence aside, violence is usually a poisoned chalice as a mechanism of political change. The history of political violence shows that it more often perpetuates and entrenches suffering than it leads to desirable goals. The willingness to use violence is more often a reflection of an individual's psychology and the limits of their strategic thinking than it is of any thought-through political ideal. The cliche of violence begetting violence seems especially true in the political realm, leading to cycles of revenge, poisoning lives and minds, and creating hardened resistance and deafness to the justness of a cause. Gandhi, a revolutionary thinker on violence and non-violence, warned, “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” Violent struggles that have overthrown tyrannies have generally devolved into a familiar tyranny under new elites. Gandhi questioned whether the sort of people who have the mindset necessary to lead militant revolutionary upheaval would be the sort of people with the skills and mindset to lead a community towards lasting peace and stability, and history confirms Gandhi's intuition. Violence is also a weapon that excludes many people in society, for whom a struggle based on physical power simply isn't an available option. Violence is a tool that inherently favours groups of powerful, aggressive men. Violence must therefore be a last and reluctant tool in revolution, and once picked up, should be thrown down as quickly as possible. As thinkers through the ages have attested, in utilising violence, we damage our inner selves.
"Revolution" is used here in the sense of fundamental transformation. Given the scale of our problems, this is what is needed: nothing less than a reimagining and reordering of society's structures and especially its power relations. Important steps have already been taken, such as democracy and individual rights, but we need to push harder given the urgent tasks before us. We want to continue the peaceful redistribution of power over the past centuries, which has not been without regular setbacks and opposition. We have not reached the end of struggle, nor the inevitable dawn of utopia, but recent history is proof that activism and collective goodwill can move mountains.
To extend and defend the political revolution of our period of history requires more of us to embrace our power by deepening our political and historical knowledge and participation.
The end of history
People wanting to implement radical change often justify, or mask the flaws of, their own ideas by exaggerating the flaws of the current system and denying the possibility of meaningful reform. Many backwards steps in society have been pushed by people who justified their bad ideas by saying, "Anything is better than this."
I write from within the context of a liberal democracy that has the theoretical tools required for peaceful political change. This society has free elections, free speech, a free press, free political participation, public education, public libraries, public healthcare, public housing and highly open access to information and the Internet. There is more to say on all of these things, not least that they are fragile, imperfect and under constant attack by selfish interests, yet I feel blessed to live in the time and place I do. If we did no more with our political struggles than make the freedoms and standard of living generally enjoyed in my country a universal standard across the globe, we would have made progress of historical proportions, though it would be a tragedy for the non-human world.
After the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama was ridiculed for writing about “the end of history.” He believed that in liberal democracy with free markets, humanity had come to a reasonably settled form of government, and that the task before us was no longer to argue about complete systems of government, but rather to refine, improve and extend liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama acknowledges he was overly certain and bullish in many of his assertions and predictions about the world, but there is something worth rescuing in the underlying claim. In the liberal democratic social welfare state with relatively free but regulated markets, I believe humanity has reached a form of organisation capable of realising our shared, progressive aspirations. There is more to say about participatory democracy, inequality, media ownership, financial instability, environmental concerns and so on, but I see no reason that these problems can't be substantially addressed within the current system. I am also not convinced that there is any other system immune to many of the same problems, while potentially bringing new ones. Almost all places in history are worse places from which to launch our mission towards utopia.
It is the perversion of our system that enables elite capture, not anything about its fundamental nature. A functioning liberal social welfare democracy is more naturally aligned with popular power than it is with elite capture. This is why wealthy elites expend so many resources on trying to pervert the proper working of democracy. In recent times, we have seen almost monotonously regular regressive reversals on laws and policies, including political donations, taxation, media monopolisation, financial regulation, voter suppression, privatisation, and welfare. Here lie clear progressive priorities to unite in a struggle around these contested laws and policies, rather than focusing on wider systemic change. The previous laws that better regulated wealth and power, that oversaw a more equal though imperfect society, emanated from the same system we have today.
Within liberal democracy, our progressive ideals are realisable if we can effectively resist elite power and are willing to do the long-term work of involving, educating, and gaining the support of the population.
Radicals
Some progressives embrace the term radical as if radicalness were an end goal in itself. It is a badge of honour, status and identity for them to stand outside of acceptable discourse. This makes them essentially invisible to our political system. While some progressives are drawn to unpopular all-or-nothing plans to upend our economic and political systems, wealthy and conservative groups have for decades been pragmatically working on smaller, tangible, immediate changes to undermine and reverse the progress that progressives have already successfully fought for. Plutocrats have worked on ideologically capturing sections of society, gaining their support by stoking and provoking their identity, anger, envy, and fear of change, while at the same time undermining the same people's social and economic interests. Wealthy elites have realised that if you say something that triggers people's emotions, such as about guns, religion, or unfamiliar minorities, those people will look away while you give your own class tax cuts and subsidies. Using these tactics has been successful in enabling right-wing ideologues to gain power, where they expend more energy structurally shifting the system to maintain long-term power than they do responding to the problems the voters mandated them to solve. This is all fairly transparent, but given that the mass media is almost entirely funded by corporations and governments, there is no one with an interest in educating people about what is going on. Creating a media capable of doing this, of getting political information into the hands of the wider population, should be one of our most urgent and immediate tasks.
People attracted to radical ideas need to understand that the more radical the proposed changes to our political and economic systems are, the more likely they are to be seen suspiciously by the electorate. Stability, security and safety are much higher on the hierarchy of most people's needs than implementing more ambitious and positive things. History has taught us to be cynical about people offering us a better world. People are more likely to be motivated by smaller, more tangible, immediate benefits. This, however, has been a trap for progressives, who get into a bidding war over trivial economic benefits with the right. The right is happy to play this game because they see the government largely as an enemy, a source of constraint, regulation and red tape, and direct competition for workers and wages. Anything the government does, regardless of how well it does it, the right would prefer to be privatised so they can make a profit from it. When it doesn't threaten their own economic interests, the right is increasingly happy to do what they call "starving the beast" of government, by putting them into crippling debt. This also cripples the government's ability to implement social programs and do long-term planning. Thus, one side of politics has a single answer to all economic questions, tax cuts, usually heavily weighted towards the corporations and the wealthy. The question the left must ask itself is, given how little a small tax cut will materially change the lives of most people, what programs can they offer that could?
Civic engagement is one area that could begin to turn around the increasing trend towards isolated consumerism. One idea is programs that strengthen local communities through engaging people to come together to make positive changes. Perhaps through a local grants scheme, where citizens of a locality have their own budget to democratically allocate funds for schemes to improve their local area. This would focus on cultural, environmental, social and infrastructure improvements. We need to move democracy down to the communal level, to make people feel heard, to make them believe in their own power to make change, to connect them to other people in their communities, to rebuild societal trust and shared purpose. We also need to get people into the habit of playing a part in their community. As someone who has done his share of volunteering and community organising, I am not saying this will be easy. The Left, however, cannot hope to implement its vision if the population continues to view democratic participation as infrequently voting on the marketing campaigns of self-interested politicians. Wealthy people are much more connected to politics and politicians than the rest of society. They believe in their own agency to make change and influence society. Progressive politics must be about returning this sort of agency to the rest of the population. More trusting, connected, engaged, democratic local communities must be the foundation of the progressive program.
Citizens' assemblies are a powerful way to get people more involved with democracy. The beginning of a new politics might be to hold a range of citizens' assemblies on subjects like taxation, political donations, and media concentration. By engaging people more powerfully with a conversation about the choices we make in building our society, we can build buy-in and trust for larger changes. Treating all voters as though they were purely selfish consumers becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Certainly, some people judge political platforms purely by how they will benefit themselves, but most people also consider what will build a better society overall. People want to feel safe, included, hopeful, and heard, all things best delivered for the majority by a more collective rather than purely individualist political and economic structure. This is our case to make; a case that is difficult to make in the short soundbites of most commercial media and election campaigns. If the population can be reached with the truth, it at least gives them a chance to engage with a greater collective vision. People who are cognizant of deeper political themes will be more empowered to recognise attempts to appeal to them as angry, isolated consumers. Most parts of the progressive, even socialist model, are popular shared aspirations and can be substantially implemented within a liberal democratic social welfare system. We have positive, larger stories to tell, but they must be tangible, and we must be trusted for those stories to be believed.
Incrementalism
The urgency of change often overwhelms the compassionate person, but we cannot be daunted by the tasks that face us. We must be strategic and patient. We should be suspicious if we drift into magical thinking: "It will all be better when…". We must be cautious. Those who wish to influence or hold the levers of power must remember that in upending society, we upend lives, each of which is important. I agree with many people who consider a staged approach to change to be the safest. Socialism is often considered a necessary step to take before communism, and then on to anarchism. People need to experience living in a more equal and collaborative society to gain knowledge and trust, and to give consent for greater change. The system also needs that time to ensure it has time for error and course correction, to adapt to unforeseen problems. When advocating things as powerful as system-level changes in the political and economic order of complex societies, the transition between them must be gradual and careful.
Marx would not have approved of this gradual approach; he saw incremental welfare improvements in society as reducing the population's revolutionary potential. The certainty he must have in his ideas if they relied on the continued, even greater, immiseration of millions is hard to accept. It's a good thing Marx didn't have more power in his lifetime. Anyone so convinced in their plans for other people's lives should be viewed with suspicion.
Political movements should earn a social license for change. Their intellectual ideas, especially more radical ideas, must be tempered by trialling them in a world that is larger, less static, more complex and often more counter-intuitive than human comprehension. We build trust and consent in the electorate by building and implementing models that make the world and people's lives better, which they are drawn to be involved with and want to see more of. The mechanism for changing society and the goal of that change are the same - informed and empowered people creating a society of mutual support together.
The implementation of libertarian socialism should be staged within liberal democracy, not to replace it but to expand it. Existing systems should not be discarded without thought, as if they never had any stability or merit, but instead should slowly wither and fall off like parts of a disused husk as they are improved and superseded from within.
Our shared project
What is it we are all doing here together?
The further one drifts from the centre of politics, both left and right, the more common it is to find people who object to the idea that humanity could even have shared projects or aspirations, as if humanity were composed of irreconcilable evolutionary species. Accords such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the United Nations Sustainable Development goals, show we can and have agreed, at least in principle, on many fundamentally important shared aspirations. Part of the problem in recognising areas of substantial agreement across cultures, political systems and identifications is that many people are invested in division. Especially among such people, there is a tendency to polarise political systems.
“Call it socialism or whatever you like,” said 1880s German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.
Much ink has been spilled on whether Scandinavian societies are capitalist social welfare states or a combination of market socialist states and capitalism. The generally acknowledged success of Scandinavian societies motivates each side of economic debates to claim them as their own, when they so obviously blend aspects of capitalist and socialist systems. The governments of Sweden, Finland and Norway, in addition to overseeing the industries common to social welfare states, also wholly or partially run areas like gambling, alcohol, airports, mining, and have major interests in other areas. It is almost taken for granted that the United States of America is a capitalist society, but it has a mixed economy, with high levels of government spending on healthcare, welfare, education, childcare, the postal service, utilities, infrastructure, policing, the justice system, military and so on; major sections of its industry are also heavily subsidised, including agriculture, energy, and transport, not to mention how much of it is regulated by the state. Turning to the other side, even perhaps the most repressive totalitarian state in the world, North Korea, which has alternatively defined itself as socialist or communist, has official markets where individuals trade goods for profit, which is then taxed.
Modern societies blend elements of socialism and capitalism, existing along a spectrum rather than as absolutes. This makes sense, as governments copy what seems to work to solve problems in other places, without worrying too much about the system in which the solutions are implemented. The words socialist and capitalist, however, have gained a much greater power, both positive and negative, in certain sections of society than they warrant. If people could loosen their grip on their political flag a little and were less reticent to acknowledge the positive parts of both systems, it would help to encourage sensible discussion about progress. The important things are what we are trying to achieve, including well-being, freedom, democracy, progress, culture, equality, trust, safety and sustainability, not the particular tools or names by which we get there.
Freedom
Democracy has been with us for a long time as a very natural way for humans to coordinate. It is intuitive in making group decisions to see what members want and go with the majority. Thus, democracy was present in most groups until larger societies led to the need for more hierarchical systems. Increases in population also resulted in greater competition for land and resources, and this was another area in which the centralised decision-making by hierarchical systems could be useful. These systems, however, offered individuals the benefits of power and were prone to usurpation. Thus, most governments were basically tyrannical. Eventually, we created liberal democracy to try to make the hierarchical systems needed to govern complex societies less easily usurped. The liberal democratic social welfare societies, of which there are numerous examples in the world, are a long-awaited historical achievement. The majority have partially reclaimed the political freedom and equality that had once been our birthright.
Despite the imperfections of all liberal social welfare states, if given a choice, they are the places most people would want to live. Potential migrants are often not bought into the cultures of these societies, but want their freedoms and economic opportunities. For the citizens in these societies, their free and materially comfortable lives can sow the seeds of their decline. Citizens often take their freedoms for granted, as they go about their lives with little need to consider political or class struggle. The systems and institutions that underpin their quality of life become invisible to them. They could potentially better contextualise the freedoms they enjoy if they knew more about the story of why they have the vote, universal suffrage, the social welfare state and a free press. They might also value these things more if they understood the ever-present threats to them.
People identify themselves through story, and the story of the liberal democratic societies we are part of is inspiring and important. We should know the long cross-cultural history of democracy, not just a history beginning in Athens, as remarkable as it was. We should know important points in the direct lineage of our democratic and civil rights, Magna Carta, yes, but also the Levellers movement, the Quakers, the Chartists, conflicts like the Peterloo Massacre, the contributions of the union movement, and the foundations of the social welfare state. If this sounds like an overly progressive history, it was the ultra-conservative Bismarck who created the first social welfare state in 1880s Germany.
The reason we are taught the history of our nations, rather than the history of how people wrested power from elites and came to have a voice and a vote, is that the former can be used to control us, and the latter would make us harder to control. There are many interesting and important parts of history, but the parts that are most essential in forming citizens are how we came to have our political and civil freedoms.
Elites
First, a bit of definition. I use the word "elite", where others might prefer terms such as upper class, moneyed, wealthy, privileged, the rich, ownership class, well off, and so on. I use the elite in reference to those who possess disproportionate power to affect society, and in no other sense.
No one, on any side of politics, has ever asked me to justify Lord Acton's famous dictum - "Power corrupts." It is one of those truths that people seem to recognise the moment they hear it. The statement's power is not that it teaches us something necessarily new, but in its crystallisation of our thoughts, in a way that makes our discussion and thinking about the issue easier. Milan Kundera added the poetic, and I think necessary, expansion to Acton when he said, "The struggle of the people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
The struggle for democratic rights resulted from the failure of elites, over thousands of years, to govern in the interests of the majority. The elite classes have often wanted the people they ruled to see themselves as part of a shared project, because the support of the masses is needed for wars, taxation and so on. Elites generally saw common people more as a resource, or at worst, the enemy within. Empowering the population, through education or political rights, was potentially dangerous. The upliftment of the common people through social programs and charity was sporadic and generally funded by individuals or churches rather than governments. The elite's distrust of the masses was a primary reason they resisted democracy, beyond their own desire for power and status. They believed that the masses were wracked with envy at elite wealth, and if given a universal vote, would overthrow the elite class and distribute its wealth. In this, elites perhaps projected their own avariciousness and murderousness onto the rest of society. When elites were murdered and overthrown, it was generally by people of their own class, often their own family.
Most democracies were not born in or through elite bloodshed, but through political pressure and social struggle. Rather than the birth of democracy representing triumph in a stark class war, more enlightened sections of elites have often played an important part in movements for political emancipation. Class interests are not monolithic; there have also been sections of the majority who see their interests as aligned with the wealthy minority, whether motivated by religion, ideology or economic self-interest. Elite paranoia towards the many, centred around maintaining their exalted positions in the social and economic hierarchy, has continued. While few among the majority currently think of their politics or place in society primarily in terms of class, elites have maintained a very class-conscious mindset. Any group of individuals coming together in a common political cause is seen as a threat to elite domination. The surveillance and undermining of organisations focusing on civil rights, human rights, environmental concerns and animal rights has been ongoing. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is their continued obsession with undermining unions, even though unions are at their weakest point in generations. Elites see democracy as a similarly threatening collective power, though perhaps not as directly threatening to their profits as unions. For all of the elite undermining of democratic government, there has never been a political movement that gained democratic power with the platform of taking and distributing all elite wealth. This fact says something about the general fairness of most people. Most people generally accept the idea of the social contract and accept the existence of some inequality so long as elites appear to provide some useful, or at least not destructively parasitic, role in society.
To understand the mindset of the conservative side of politics, it is worth remembering the origins of the very terms Left and Right wing. In the French revolutionary assembly, the commoners, liberals and radicals sat on the left side of the speaker, and those who supported the nobility and wanted to conserve the traditional social order sat on the right. Whatever policies a party of the right might subscribe to in a moment, at the heart of their beliefs is the legitimacy and even desirability of high levels of inequality; that it is acceptable for a self-selected minority to rule over the majority. Tyranny is the more common historical alternative to democracy, and we have not banished it from every heart. Instead, tyranny lurks ever near, waiting for its moment, at which time many people, wealthy or otherwise, and corporations will fall in line to support it.
My great-great-grandparents are the last of my ancestors to grow up in a society without universal suffrage. After generations, the cultural memory and reality of alternatives have faded, and we have slipped into taking our political systems for granted, seeing only their flaws. We forget they are relatively new, unique and precious, both historically and globally; they were also hard won. This long enjoyment of freedoms has created politically disengaged people, whose aspirations lie more in material consumption than in any political or ethical principle. Freed of the historical external forces and class-based society that limited people's attainment of social status, they now see their main struggle as against the limitations of their bank balances. The transference from class-based collective identities into amorphous individual consumers has been a boon for elite control of society.
Having made people's lives better, the political parties, unions, and other collective organisations that made modern lifestyles possible seem now to have little relevance. Instead, the consumer looks to the corporations that sell them goods and provide employment as the primary vehicle for improving their lives. This is, of course, the corporate class that fought for continuing child labour and unlimited work hours, fought against environmental improvement, the minimum wage, employer responsibility for safer workplaces, universal healthcare and social welfare, and even was happy to murder or imprison people for membership in unions. In the United States alone, hundreds of union members were killed by the military, police and hired gunmen in the late 19th and early 20th century. Though the USA was unusually brutal towards workers and unions, most countries have their own such history.
Once we had an aristocracy performing a similar role, though their titles have changed, we now have a corporate class. They undermine our democracies and politically advocate against all progress that might interfere with their status and profit margins. In modern politics, some leaders of the political right have come to the point of opposing fairly trivial and unimportant progress, for fear it might inspire hope. Their worry is that small victories might "give people ideas" and help them organise for meaningful change. If progressives can make people's lives better in any way, even in ways that don't harm elite power, it makes the progressive movement more attractive, and therefore they must be resisted at all turns and against all reason.
Inequality
At face value, some might wonder why inequality is a problem. The problem in the world is that some people are crushingly poor, rather than people being too rich. So long as all people have decent lives, then levels of inequality seem irrelevant. The problem, however, is that inequality levels in almost all societies mean that some people don't lead decent lives. Part of the reason this crushing inequality exists is that financial inequality isn't walled off from other forms of inequality, political, cultural, and personal. In market-driven societies, wealthy people don't just have more material goods than others; they also have advantages in almost every realm, from having a more powerful voice culturally and politically, to the opportunity for better education, healthcare and individual flourishing. If having wealth were more closely aligned with individual achievement and reflected an individual's positive contribution to wider society, inequality might be more easily forgiven, but this is not so. Wealth is often the result of inheritance, luck, rentierism, unearned opportunity, power laws, monopolisation, social connections, identity, and corruption in various forms and levels of intensity. Just to look at the garish lives and tastes of many wealthy people is to know that their opulence was not the result of decency, moral character or nuanced understanding.
Even the most prosperous societies conceal deep, harmful distortions. Wealth buys political influence and access to decision-makers, corroding democracy from within. Corporate media ownership and media influence bought through advertising perverts the gatekeepers of democratic oversight and buys the acquiescence of the political classes. A society can have either a healthy democracy or extreme inequality, but not both. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the unwavering motivations of elites for counter-revolution.
Utopia
We are taught to distrust utopianism, to see it as naive or dangerous. Yet every meaningful advance in history - from democracy to civil rights - began with a utopian vision. There have also been atrocities committed under the banner of implementing “utopia”, but they were not caused by the idealism of their visions so much as by the willingness to utilise the tools of hatred and dehumanisation in getting there. The means towards Utopia should be consistent with the vision of the ends.
Utopia need not be abstract, indeed a large part of it is obvious and pragmatic. It is a world where people walk safely anywhere and at any time, where healthcare is apportioned by need, where homelessness is a choice, and where everyone receives the same quality of education, even if they have special needs. It is a world without factory farms and slaughterhouses. It is a world with thriving ecosystems, clean air and water. It is a world where products are made and consumed by people with the same level of dignity, where borders do not define compassion. It is a world without bigotry, where Indigenous peoples have full respect and autonomy, and where justice is not related to wealth and power. It is a world that does not spend so much of its resources on arms, defences and locks. Utopia is the journey of a thousand miles that begins with a destination and becomes more real and recognisable with each progressive step.
Utopianism is considered the domain of idealists. In its more naive forms, this is true, but intelligent idealism must combine itself with realism. Cynicism and scepticism are not the opposite of idealism, but they are vital qualities if ideas are to be tempered and implemented in a complex and imperfect world. Some people don't appreciate the complex reasons why many things are the way they are, and naively think about change. This positive naivety is often matched by the negative naivety of those who deny the possibility of significant improvement, despite so many examples of this in our world. Neither negativity nor positivity has a monopoly on the truth, and our path forward lies in finding a balance.
It is easier and more enjoyable to imagine utopias than to build them. Though the vision must come first, ideas must be proved in reality before we can have much confidence in them. Utopianism is therefore better served by the practical people who lead even small improvements in the world, than the visionaries who dream of grand plans they leave to be implemented by others.
Circles of compassion
Our instincts toward group loyalty—family, nation, religion—once helped us survive, but now divide us unnecessarily. We must move on from our evolutionary social consciousness and, in response to our much greater power and scope, widen our circle of identity and belonging.
Einstein described this expansion: “A human being is a part of the whole… an optical delusion of his consciousness. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Across cultures and centuries, thinkers have echoed this call to empathy. It runs through many myths, religions, and moral codes because cooperation, not selfishness, has been the key to our survival.
Selfishness may have served us as evolutionary beings, especially in times of competition for resources, but this is less relevant in a modern world of abundance. Modern abundance has been created by a highly interdependent society, countless people and complex processes are required to maintain our personal material well-being. For most of human history, an individual could walk off into the wilderness with nothing and forage for survival without much trouble, but few people have such skills now. If it were ever true, the idea of the self-reliant individual has been a myth for a long time, if it were ever true. Many people who promote selfishness as an appropriate way of organising society rely on the myth of the self-reliant individual to justify it. One would think selfish people might not need any justification, but to quote John Kenneth Galbraith "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." Selfishness is, of course, not only the province of conservatives; the union movement's greatest contributions to our culture have been in advocating universal goals, and the slide of the union movement into social irrelevance has coincided with the diminishment of the public perception of some unions who serve primarily the selfishness of their leadership and members. Selfishness of whatever political stripe is corrosive to a society; it breeds distrust, undermines institutions and creates social fragility.
Most advocates of capitalism enshrine selfishness as a positive motivating force, with a distillation of this view being "greed is good". Selfishness certainly is a motivating force, but any force that fuels momentum towards the destruction of our global ecosystems cannot be approved of with such simplistic naivety. Selfishness is only one primary motivator, even within capitalism, as we see in the difficulty even well paying companies with poor environmental and social records have in hiring and maintaining quality staff. Those who see selfishness as their only motivation mistake their psychological qualities for something more universal in human nature. It is interesting that exposure to capitalist economic models seems to encourage selfishness. The increasing elevation of neo-liberal economic ideas that the Reagan and Thatcher administrations encouraged, is likely to have been partly responsible for our more isolated, untrusting and disconnected society. Neoliberal economics were implemented not just in the developed world but were pushed globally through mechanisms such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Many people have talked about the necessity of trust in building better societies. We need to move to economic models that discourage selfishness, rather than ones that promote it and think they can harness it for the wider good. The idea that making a harsher and more competitive society was a good idea because we would have more material goods was always a tenuous one, and as we can see some genies are hard to put back into the bottle. Once you have pushed people towards selfishness and undermined trust, it is harder to reverse this process. Still, this is an effort we must make and the fact that levels of trust and pro-social motivations were once higher, shows us that some proportion of the problem is in our systems not in our fundamental nature, and thus can be reversed.
The political program progressives should unite around is an acceptance of the liberal democratic social welfare system, its wider implementation in all countries, and making that system function more fully in line with its ideals. I believe this progress is both an immediate moral necessity and perhaps a necessary intermediate stage for further progress.
Building change
We do not have to be dedicated activists, not all of us, but we must all do our part. Part of that is lending our power to movements. Individual activism is essential, but individuals alone cannot respond to the vast resources that powerful interests have. Lasting change comes from movements - whether small collectives of activists, to larger more diffuse groups of people, where the level of engagement might vary between an active core and a wider supporter base. We might consider ourselves activists on some issues, and supporters on others, but there is one on which we should remain isolated.
Building and sustaining movements of any size is difficult. Values can be aligned but not personalities, people have different expectations from and assumptions about each other. Schopenhauer used the hedgehog metaphor to describe human interaction. We want to huddle together,, but then prick each other with our quills. The simple reality of people getting along can derail, and be used to derail, movements of people, even though they closely align in values. A movement, no matter how large, is composed from the atoms of person to person interactions and a movement's cohesiveness is governed partly by the quality of those interactions. Activists should contribute to the overall health of their movements, and so must learn how to deal with people through patience and empathy. Narcissists and other destructive personality types can be attracted to groups of people. We can seek and gain prominent positions, but we must find ways to manage and sideline them without undermining the social health of our movements. Our movements should be an image of the world we wish to create.
Movement members may align strongly on broad goals, but are unlikely to agree on every related issue and every tactic to be employed. This is to be expected, even encouraged, a diversity of tactics is better than conformity so long as they push towards the desired goal. For some personality types, those who tend to be overly certain of their own views, disagreement will be seen as conflict. They generally come to the opinion that the main problem is not the injustice or problem they are fighting against, but the people on their side who disagree with them. Freud warned of “the narcissism of small differences” - the tendency to fight with those closest to us ideologically. Those nearer to us offer us more hope of accepting our views than those who oppose or ignore us. We don't tend to compete with people far away from us, so we don't interact. Instead we compete with those closest and most familiar to us, often who remind us of ourselves, whether or not this makes sense in achieving our collective goals. We must actively resist this tendency, for in fracturing our movements we do the work of those who oppose us. It has been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing; we might add a second version of this for movements which ends instead with "for good people to spend most of their time attacking other good people". None of us have the infallible blueprint for social change, human psychology and culture are more complex than even experts understand. If we think we or anyone else has the one true path for others to follow, we probably need to rethink our position. There are few infallible heroes, and the likelihood that we are one is slim; to be a flawed hero though is still a very good thing.
Opposition
History teaches us that progress always faces resistance. This resistance comes from those who benefit from the status quo, those who fear change, and even those who are confused and angry at the world. Those most benefiting from the status quo will use their wealth and power to harness the other sectors of potential resistance in the population to maintain their position. Every tool that activists try to use, including media attention, public opinion, ethical arguments, grass roots activism, scientific studies, etc, money and power can be used to counter. While activists try to influence politicians and corporations, the status quo is seated with them at the tables of power. Wealthy people have direct influence with politicians, and interact with them much more than the rest of the population. The roots of inequality lie in this privileged access the wealthy enjoy. Money has weakened democracy. We must curb political donations, end the revolving door between politics and corporations, and fund a diverse and independent media that represents something beyond corporate or opinion.
For all the relevance of class as a framing for understanding power and privilege in society, we should not descend into simplistic class antagonism. The world is not divided neatly into the honest hard-working poor and the corrupt and idle rich. Many who are poor would, if suddenly wealthy, act exactly like the garish, selfish sections of the rich. Many people without wealth argue for economic equality, from the same motivation that wealthy people justify economic inequality, because it is to their benefit. Injustice and selfishness are not the exclusive property of any class or group but a common flaw of human nature. We are primarily against an economic and political system that entrenches wealth and power, let us not turn potentially powerful allies or bystanders into enemies by simplistic understandings of society, including those based in the realities of 19th century Europe.
The gestalt
To create change and better societies, we must understand the force of human motivation. Motivating people by appeals to self-interest will only haphazardly lead to general improvements. It is in the self-interest of an oppressive class to continue their oppression. It is in the self interest of an environmentally destructive generation to ignore future generations. Self interest, fear and competition, while certainly strong psychological forces, are not the only ones which humans respond to, and come with significant social and personal costs. Luckily those who say all human motivations are selfish are wrong. We can also be motivated by empathy, compassion, identity, loyalty, love, joy, pride, hope, heroism, friendship, connection, pleasure and fairness. Our path lies in finding a productive equilibrium between our many emotions. Positive and compassionate motivations may not always be as instantaneous in their effects, but they are better for us in the long run, individually and collectively. Selfishness is a small, disconnected, temporary story that limits us. Our greater flourishing lies in recognising our place amid a much deeper, more beautiful and expansive connected story; the story of culture, consciousness, life and our universe.
We tend to think of politics as something of the human realm, but politicians also govern over the flora and fauna of our world. Politics is therefore incredibly consequential not only for humans, but for animals and the environment. If we care about almost any facet of the world and history we live within, we cannot ignore or stand aside from politics. You may not see yourself as a political or any other sort of activist, but our actions always support some version of the world, even if that is a disengagement that supports the current status quo. In revolutionary times, especially, there is no neutral place to stand.
The next r/evolutionary step for humanity lies in balancing the relationship between the individual and the collective. Whether we rise or fall depends on the collective sum of our individual choices, and those choices are grounded in our ideas and meaning. If we want to change the world, it means we will have to change, including embracing and promoting a more scientific, holistic, evolutionary-based meaning. Those who look to technology to save us from ourselves have a cherry-picked version of our historical relationship with technology. Technology is not an inherently progressive force; it is mostly up to us to be that progressive force. We already possess the knowledge and technology needed to create a better future; what we lack is the connected meaning and ethics from which to create that future. Each of us has a role to play in society's ethical transformation. Every act, including our work, shopping, hobbies, silence and speech, supports some vision and version of the world. In an interconnected global economy our choices ripple out across nations and ecosystems. There is no neutral place in which we can stand; our only choice is what sort of world we are helping create.
All moments of history have their own urgency. It is what we do in response to the important issues in our moment that defines us as a meaningful or ethical being. If we seek a meaningful life, we must start by harnessing our individual potential and power. We must be well informed. We must embrace our political animal. We must ask, with courage and clarity: What part do I play in these revolutionary times?