The changing narrative – A new ontology for the progressive movement?
Have you ever wondered why the world works like it does? Why things seem skewed in favour of the rich and the powerful and why our so called ‘democratic’ systems seem so inherently unjust? Why we have rampant inequality, poverty, hunger and accelerating species extinctions and runaway global warming?
The answers are not simple because these problems are systemic.
The system within which we operate gives rise to the terrible outcomes listed above. But the outcomes are the expected, emergent behaviour of ‘managing’ our planetary affairs in the ways we do. They are the direct results of the way humanity has chosen to handle concepts like ownership, governance and economics.
We can sit around asking “why aren’t things getting better?” and protesting against the status quo but, ultimately, mitigating the outcomes and effects of a system which works in a certain way is like sticking plasters on a severed limb. It will never help. It might make the patient, and the helper, feel good in the short term but it will never address the underlying issues.
As Buckminster Fuller so eloquently proposed: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
So, in an attempt to address the problems with the present system by ‘building a new model’, a few years ago some brave colleagues and I embarked on a systemic mission:
Our aim was to co-create an increasingly democratic, equitable and sustainable society. Our mission was to normalize a worldview that was conducive to achieving our aim.
There are some important specifics in that mission. We took our anger at the present system and identified that “a new model” would not work without a compatible “world view” or “ontology”.
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