An essay: “Crisis? What Crisis?
Crisis? What Crisis? Conversations with Mark Swivel
Conversation#1: With Damon Gameau.
Breaking the Glass. How to respond to the emergencies we face in inequality, climate and governance. Our time is now!
A Short Essay by Mark Swivel
We need to break the glass. But how? We have emergencies - in climate, equality and governance - so profound that we are called to act with urgency and unity. Yet our institutions are uniquely ill equipped to deal with the challenge. Our people rightly distrust government and everywhere we see polarisation and rancour. To respond, ‘government’ itself needs to be rethought and regenerated. Without that fundamental shift, we will struggle - locally, nationally and globally to create a just and fair democratic future. My Conversation series aims to connect with the ideas of those who inspire me, from economists Mariana Mazzucato, Kate Raworth and John Kenneth Galbraith to future thinkers Ari Wallach, Carlota Perez and Grafton Tanner. I am a relentlessly optimistic person. I try to work hard and with heart and humour. Yet we must be realistic and see where we truly are in this moment before we move to the next.
Our world in 2024 is disabled by war. Russia in Ukraine. Israel in Gaza. Yemen and elsewhere. The violence is extreme. The lessons from history are not being learnt by our leaders. The conflict and the details of killings is endlessly contested. Facts of suffering and wrongdoing are disputed. We watch the dance of claim and counter claim, taking us into deeper impasse. The fog of war is our ordinary daily news. There is no guiding hand to lead us out of this abyss. The conflict is so deep. The contempt for norms is unchecked. Democracy is reduced to a vague expression of hope and pointing to a ‘truth’ contradicted by chaos. Our institutions - the UN, Nato, the World Court struggle for impact, because the primacy of universal human rights is not held sacred.
I find myself unable to post or publicly comment on any war. Social media seems too slight for the gravity of the horror and complexity of these conflicts. I cannot express in short form what I feel or think. The current violence marks the end of our brief democratic era, but I hope presages a new epoch. It seems pretentious to comment on Russia with its deep fraught history. I have visited and there has never been democracy on that soil. Israel is a grand corrective project turned terribly sour. Many friends hold that nation dear. A bold solution to the twentieth century’s great crime now eats its own tale, its government fails to learn the searing lesson of its dominant culture’s own recent genocide.
How then to come from this moment? Why is there no reflex sense in our politics that the only way is peace, that the logic of violence must be broken? A peace grounded in a vision of human rights and flourishing based on our common irreducible shared humanity should be our harbour. Yet we list, we wallow, in repetitive, aimless combat. Locally in Australia, Aukus casts its shadow over our own politics and government. We plan to build submarines that will not come for well over a decade. We pay tribute - like a medieval vassal - to the Americans and British, whose decline we prop up - with political and financial support. Why do we accept such terms when we cannot spend at that scale - in tens of billions - to solve the obvious problems besetting our own young and poor and excluded? Aukus epitomises how the macro politics of the world and the policies of domestic governments have detached from the ordinary life as experienced by the vast majorities of our democracies.
Our climate emergency is here. The heating of the planet. The chaos of our weather events. The shrinking habitats of our living creatures. All moving inexorably to or past the brink. Yet we are moving so slowly in response. We electrify and decarbonise. We recycle as forests fall. Species disappear. Change is too slow. We can barely raise houses from floodplains. We repeat old arguments. Protest is marginalised and exhausted. A nostalgic echo of its heroic past - among workers or eco warriors. The answers now lie less in outrage and dissidence than serious engineering and broad community collaboration. Vested carbon economy interests and timid governments hold us back. How can people combine to respond more effectively?
Our inequality emergency is here. Most youth even in wealthier countries can only dream of owning a home. Exclusion is becoming accepted. Structural inequality, the result of deliberate policy with predictable results (especially in Australia), is now ‘reality’. The older protect their wealth. The young are pensioners on the affluence of the old. The motivation for the young to participate in this economic system is unclear. Somehow we barely seem to see the political impact of this punishing structure - and elide the mental health impact of the competitive hierarchy we have created for everyone but especially the young. What is love in our modern workplace? Do we still aim for development in less well off countries? The data on inequality across the world is in - within our wealthier countries - and between wealthier and poorer. But do we understand what it means?
Our governance emergency is here. It is almost impossible to watch. I have followed the news avidly since childhood. I no longer engage as I did. It once felt like we were part of a story. For all our troubles, wrongs and stupidities our world was gently and falteringly improving with honourable arguments at the heart of its politics … how should government involve itself in the economy, how should the state involve itself in our lives, what kind of future should we make for ourselves? Our politics are not like that now. Government is reduced to a series of trivial arguments trapped in the suspended present, almost designed to avoid material change. All set against world events so intractable that it overwhelms our private hearts. It is as if The Future has been reduced to an afterthought, an abstraction, rather than the one, true subject of government. We have wealth and technology without measure but lack the wisdom to harness and direct it. When direction is what we sorely need.
We scour our feeds for inspiration. Like prospectors panning for gold. We get glimmers. Exciting achievements in a community overseas. An inspiring talented child. An improbable alliance between adversaries. Amazing new green tech. There are always shards of hope. But the structure is hollowed out. Biden v Trump? The best of the USA and a parody of decadence. Our own Labor government? A rational professional political party, preserving the bulk of the modern Australia created by its opponents, accepting that only incremental change is possible. Meanwhile, social media descends into silly invective. A chaotic expression of fears and anxieties. An added identity politics rules. A cacophony of personal brands leading us nowhere.
Government everywhere has lost its purpose and method. We have allowed it to shrivel during my lifetime. Its declared purpose - and apparent success - has been to get out of the way of the market. We live in a maze of outsourcing, contracting, privatising, consulting and blame-shifting enquiries. The power and capacity of government has been diminished and marginalised - deliberately so since the 1980s when Thatcher, Reagan and the ideas of Hayek and Friedman won the ‘intellectual’ war. It is a gigantic act of self harm and self loathing that needs correction. The markets and mere money will never solve our problems and respond to our emergencies. As Mariana Mazzucato reminds us we need to remember the grand achievements of past government to construct new futures.
Government – as the expression of the will of all of us, directed to the simple problems of life - is the only method of guiding us from the reefs we are stuck. Government must return to centre stage to orchestrate The Future, working with the people and partners across the economy and civil society. These Conversations have the role of government at its heart - from discussing sovereign citizens who defy the law to TGA approval of psychedelics to deal with mental health, or in arts policy and funding, to recognition and treaty after The Voice or our sustainable green future, the delivery of housing and the fundamental role of economic thought in human affairs. The Conversations explore this vision: an ‘active’, collaborative government, responsive to the needs of ordinary people, working within the physical limits of our habitat, as the focus for action and practical renewal.
The pandemic response across the world shows that government does have the capacity to intervene and lead, however reactively and imperfectly, in delivering health programs and managing our economies. We need to reflect and build on that experience, to accelerate our work on climate and engage with inequality. We could drift into dystopia and play out the politics of the past or move towards ‘protopias’ - ways of imagining our futures and working together towards then. Radicalism today is about the bravery to imagine a tenable future for everyone on earth.
How do we move forward? The answers for people and communities remain much as they have always been. Make time in your life to make a difference. Take whatever action you can with others that benefits as many people as possible. Think of the whole and act in the particular. Look to the future and be urgent in the present. Stay healthy as an example and so you can be useful. I have always thought that change starts by considering the needs of strangers and trying to meet them as an end in itself. This includes the natural world and all living things within it.
As our starting point, let’s be honest that the very idea of government needs a revolution. We speak vaguely about the public interest. What does that mean today? How many kids can explain that concept? Can we even imagine that ourselves now, as communities, as countries, as a species? I do not know … but I know that we must. If we are to act on the emergencies of climate, inequality and governance, we need a solid, clear and practical idea of who we are beyond individual selves and family units. We have become addicted to self-interest as the sum total of our humanity.
Our starting point must be the opposite of self-interest - a fresh idea of community that understands the whole and transcends division. That is the challenge for all of us. Otherwise we shall balkanise. Fragment further and shatter. The early signs of terminal decline will become the diamond hard facts of an accelerating disaster for our grandchildren and their grandchildren to experience.
So. Who are we? What shall bring us together? How does a naturopath in Billinudgel connect to a FIFO worker in Kununura? Or a Bangladeshi garment industry worker with a Mozambican fisherman? A trans plumber in Milwaukee and a laundress in Shanghai. In our time of fevered disputation we need to see the differences between us are shallow and vanishingly small. That is our launch pad. A lesson to teach ourselves and our children. The old language of human rights. We need to reboot it and get walking! Human rights are rights that we all share because of our shared humanity - our mere, vulnerable state of being human. Human rights are not personal rights exclusive to an individual; they are the foundation of how we come together, how we recognise similarity, respecting difference but seeing that we all stare into space or the barrel of the gun in the same way.
So let’s explore this. The first emergency to solve is in governance. How can we foster a belief in its power? What is the process for its transformation? A new way of doing governance - running things and making decisions across our communities - in companies and schools, in organisations and public authorities. We need government that rules for everyone - all of us, in our diversity and differences. Powered by a clear vision of who we all are. Directed to a vision of The Future. Empowered to orchestrate our society and economy. Respecting each type of person in their subjectivity because of our common humanity. Aiming above all to improve ordinary life for as many people as possible, all over the world and all living things on this earth.
Let the conversations begin …
Mark Swivel
16 April 2024
This essay accompanies Mark’s conversation with Damon Gameau. The first in a series of conversations in collaboration with Byron Community College. Crisis? What Crisis? How History, Law and Policy can save the World!
Reading / Watching list
Mariana Matzucatto. Mission Economy. Penguin. 2022
Kate Raworth. Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. Penguin. 2018.
Grafton Tanner. Foreverism. Polity. 2023.
Adam Curtis. An Emotional History of the Twentieth Century BBC. 2021 (youtube)
Michael Ignatieff. The Needs of Strangers Macmillan 1984.
About Damon Gameau - film maker, campaigner
Damon combines storytelling with impact campaigns to motivate social change
2040 A Handbook for the Regeneration. PanMacmillan. 2019