Reframing the past to create a new future
What a Roman god, Greece adopting the Euro, the toilet paper panic, the Great Resignation, and the Oi Polloi executive summary all have in common. AKA a brass tacks and immersive story teaser.
If holiday memes ranging from facetious to exasperated are anything to judge by, folks are feeling the strain as we enter the 3rd season of ‘When Rona Came to Town’. Instead of doing a personal reflection this new year, I wondered, if our civilisation could look back to course correct our way forward, what events would we survey? How far back would we look?
Looking back to look forward is a practice the Romans embraced with their two-headed god Janus, after whom this month is named. God of beginnings and endings, Janus, could simultaneously see forward and backwards, inside and out without turning around. He held a staff in his right hand, in order to guide travellers along the correct route, and a key in his left to open gates.
What course corrections would we make and what doors would open if we possessed Janus’ unique ability? This was my thought experiment for this first day of 2022 as I take a break from writing a book on immersive systems change.
Looking back: a civilisation based in rationalism and its end
I’m not a fan of short-termism, and I am a fan of socioeconomic innovation, so I thought I’d look further back than 2021 to see what I could learn. Then look a little further forward too. And since we live in a system of globalised, capitalist market economies, a cursory search reveals new year’s day has been popular with the powers that be…
- January 1st 1992: Europe breaks down trade barriers with the Maastricht treaty (although this was signed in Feb)
- January 1st 1994: The North American Free Trade agreement comes into effect making trade easier between the US, Canada and Mexico
- January 1st 2002: the Euro becomes official currency in 12 EU countries, including Greece.
It seems we’ve been on a course to unite the world, even if it did start with trade — and not cultural identity. Could this be how we ended up in the midst of culture wars? But let’s home in on Greece for a quick minute – since I have a theory that it’s where modern civilisation was both born and is now dying.
Greece: the connected threads of modern civilisation, a case study in human nature, and where past meets future
Greece as the cradle of our current civilisation based in rationalism (the idea that we are rational creatures, capable of reason and logic) and the birthplace of democracy, is also their grave. It’s also where the seeds of the new, as yet unformed new system have been growing for some time. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s do a Janus to get some perspective.
The original rationalists, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others influenced the progress of European and Islamic thought. They laid the groundwork for the beliefs developed during the Enlightenment. Namely natural rights, the social contract (an actual or implicit agreement between the ruled and their rulers defining the rights and duties of each), and the right to overthrow the government if the social contract was violated. These went on to influence the American Revolution.
Rational Uncle Sam later went on to fuel what some called the Greek Economic Miracle. Grants and loans from the Marshall Plan were channeled into the backward post-war Greek economy to help it participate in international trade. This period from 1950 to 1973 saw Greece go from a mostly agrarian society to a modern industrial nation. My father, who grew up in the 50s, remembers forests a few blocks away from where we lived smack in the middle downtown Athens. The rate of development was breakneck.
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve 2001
Partygoers are amused and confused over the new currency. How did prices quadruple overnight? What followed was equally illogical. Greeks having access to international products, markets and cheap credit ignited a consumerist hunger and a borrowing spree across all levels of society.
Modern rationalists such as René Descartes may have proclaimed ‘I think, therefore I am’. But the neoliberal philosophy that has driven government policies and spread along with capitalism and ‘free’ markets mutated this credo into something more akin to ‘I spend, therefore I am’.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
George Monbiot, in the Guardian
Cue Greece’s 2009 sovereign debt crisis, precipitated by the Collateralized Debt Obligations bubble bursting (remember Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — and the entire house of cards that came down?). Bail-outs of French and German banks began, since they had underwritten all the Greek debt. The Chinese bought major Greek assets such as key ports.
And so a proud nation became a debt colony. Suicide rates went through the roof. The remaining people entered into a form of indentured servitude despite the overwhelming majority voting to not accept the harsh terms of the EU’s bailout conditions in the 2015 referendum. 61% voted to reject them, as opposed to the 39% in support, with the ‘No’ vote winning in all of Greece’s regions. ‘What is logical or rational about that?’, asks the backward facing head of Janus who just reflected about social contracts.
If that is not the end of a civilisation based in rationality, then I don’t know what is. Sociologist, Max Weber, argued that capitalism was a rational reaction to ‘salvation anxiety’ as non-secular beliefs receded in importance. But when tweets can send stock markets soaring and crashing, or stores globally run out of toilet paper in the face of uncertainty, we are anything but rational creatures.
Add to that, the tidal wave of people leaving their jobs known as the Great Resignation (According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021, with similar trends being seen in China). And there’s a major opportunity here to course correct based in the true nature of homo sapiens and the fact that we are emotional creatures, wired for empathy.
Looking forward: the unknown as our ally, immersive systems change and co-creating an empathic civilisation
If I imagine I’m the two-headed Roman god, Janus, with a consciousness that straddles the razor’s edge of beginnings and endings — having just surveyed the past I described, I get a warm glow inside. Covid has accelerated the breakdown of inefficient systems, and has highlighted the structural problems of capitalism for all to see. Suddenly, systems change is not a niche pursuit — but something everyone is consciously or unconsciously seeking.
We have been in a womb since 2020 shattered all new year’s resolutions, and been desperate to get out — not recognising the perspective and paradigm shift that being birthed entails. It makes the times we live in exciting and pregnant with potential — the real upside of uncertainty we’ve not stopped to acknowledge in our desperation to get back to a ‘normal’ that wasn’t working, just because it is familiar.
And so, my forward facing view looks a little like this. The following is an excerpt from Oi Polloi’s business plan. It’s an arts and culture development agency I founded that aims to develop a technology of peace and prosperity. This is essentially a community innovation toolkit developed through successive creative placemaking experiments — since localisation is seen as the answer to the ills of globalisation. The project is my answer to the tectonic shifts in society, and what I see when I look into the future, so I am sharing some of this with you:
The internet levels the playing field. We have access to all the information that exists. And the technological potential to achieve the unprecedented has never been greater. Yet we’re still living and working in ways developed during the Industrial Revolution — where we assumed resources were infinite. And the job of workers was to be repetitive, boring, and efficient — almost becoming part of machinery that needed human assistance to function.
We live on the verge of a revolution, where technology automates production and supply chains, enabling collaboration, imagination, and entrepreneurship directed towards high impact solutions to global problems. That currently makes humanity, in effect, a poorly managed workforce. What if this tremendous resource of human capital was harnessed and directed toward solving the world’s biggest and most urgent challenges?
Oi Polloi was created to help humanity harness its latent potential — and direct it towards creating a society that puts people and planet first. In practical terms, we are a development agency focused on empowering communities to innovate their way out of crisis and hardship. The concept for this entity was borne out of observing capitalism’s structural problem in practice (ie eroding the ground it stands upon), and the urgent need to reimagine how society operates — so we can ensure humanity not only survives, but thrives.
Our aim is to mobilise the masses, and create a virtuous cycle of crowdsourced to open sourced socioeconomic and sociocultural technological solutions, and do this by making localised, global change:
- Simple to understand
- Fun to be a part of and
- Rapid to implement
You can also think of this as a revolution in culture and consciousness.
To achieve this aim, we use an immersive systems change approach to allow every tier of society, and every type of person to participate in the creation and unfolding of a new, global zeitgeist. This systemic storytelling, customer experience (CX) approach relies on technology, philosophy, and art (defined as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination) to harness human attention, and refocus society on the highest good of people and planet. We call this zeitgeist a renaissance of humanity. With Greece, the former cradle of civilisation, as central to this elaborate show.
Through an ambitious, educational, and fun programme of immersive social innovation, we crowdsource the rebranding of Greece as the theatre of the future where regenerative cultural practices are prototyped and developed . Everyone is invited to watch, or participate and become a driving character in the unfolding of the emerging renaissance.
And so, by collaborating at scale in the endeavour of innovating our way out of a tight corner, and documenting this process through documentaries and ongoing content, thought leadership, conferences, and academic oversight, we reposition Greece as a marketplace of ideas and the incubator of a model for an enlightened society.
How do we achieve this?
We use a hybrid approach designed to thrive in the Age of Noise, Distraction and Polarisation in order to harness and hold attention, with the aim of directing and sustaining collective action toward the reimagining of society.
At its core, Oi Polloi uses a business model aimed at creating a healthy product ecosystem. The unfolding of this model has been packaged up as an immersive campaign and epic story that pulls a person into a new reality that enhances their everyday life (by facilitating their agency to create short, medium and long term solutions). Every activation, event, or interaction with the Oi Polloi brand is both a waypoint in the unfolding of this narrative — and a stepping stone in our business model.
The business model we’ve adopted is the Ascending Transaction Model as defined by Daniel Priestley in his book, Entrepreneur Revolution. This product strategy is designed to create a healthy product ecosystem, and uses 4 types of product that work together to generate leads, loyalty, and revenue.
These 4 product types are woven into our immersive narrative. The activations with the lowest barrier of entry, the open calls and online challenges, are released first to the public — even if they don’t occur early on in the story. The simultaneous release of allows for different audience groups from different parts of society to enter the narrative through whatever theme resonates. These entry points are themselves fractals of change, taking the participant deeper into the journey of cosmo-local, social innovation.
What kind of narrative can rise above the noise?
Our starting premise is that storytelling is an evolutionary force enabling rapid innovation of social behaviour, and collaboration between large numbers of strangers. To that end, the immersive narrative seeks the largest possible common ground and finds it in Greek mythology. References to Greek mythology are found everywhere in Western culture – from science, technology, chemistry, biology, medicine, astronomy, and astrology. To social science , film, television, video games, painting, sculpture, literature, poetry and more. So it is only natural to use the foundational nature of these stories as a fulcrum on which to place our lever of change.
The story recognises the breakdown of current systems by recounting how the Greek gods return to reweave the world that is unravelling. Recognising that they set a bad example for humanity through their smash and grab ways, the gods now collaborate to turn the tide. We set out a central story spine from which activations, events, and projects spin off — and then share the methodology for immersive systems change to crowdsource a body of work — and a global canon of hope. Naturally, people can create their own changemaking stories using pantheons and archetypal narratives local to them. We even envision pantheons from different cultures collaborating as the immersive programme begins to spread.
Once upon a future — an excerpt from my immersive systems change book, an Almanac of Madness and Redemption
Let me tell you a story of people gathering round a fire not stolen from the gods, but ignited by their own imaginations. A tale of adventure spun from past and future, known and unknown — and woven into the fabric of the city.
Some thought adventure was a thing of the past, a relic of the Age of Heroes and seeking new lands. But there was one frontier humanity had not truly explored: the imagination. And whose world creating, reality re-shaping power was barely remembered. Little did the mortals know, if they followed the urban trail of breadcrumbs, a path strewn with forget-me-nots, they would arrive at oases glistening with possibility. And as everyone knows, an idea burned into the mind shines brightly out into the world.
The end of ordinary reality and the reunion with the divine all began when goddess Artemis went missing one day from the painting she inhabited in a dusty 60s apartment block in central Athens she’d come to call home. It was a strange place for a deity to retire to. But grace the entrance hall she did for a good 60 years. Some blamed an influx of immigrants to the area — once semi-aristocratic. Now, reminiscent of the more ethnic parts of London. Others said she was abducted by an art lover with blank walls.
But the truth was more fantastical than any could imagine. In the busyness of the 21st century, drunk with the arrogance of science, Enlightenment, and ‘free money’, people everywhere lost touch with the Sacred — and forgot that symbols were charged with the energy of their depiction. The more ancient the symbol, the more potent the charge.
Athenians and tourists wandered among a pantheon of gods and a cast of mythological beasts oblivious to being silently watched over. While the gods waited for the need to be great enough for them to come out of hibernation, they never could have guessed that the call would come from the beasts, and not the people.
And so came a time when the once bustling city fell silent, night after night. The stores, the bars, the eateries shut up shop. The people sheltered in their homes for fear of illness and plague. All that was left in the streets was the wind through the leaves and the urban wild things. Cats, rodents, birds. And all of it stirred a little differently this time.
You see, nature’s rumour mill had come alive. Some heinous crime had been committed against Artemis’ dominion: the wilderness and wild beasts. It all became clear when the heavens turned deep amber, and ash rained down from sky… (to be continued)
