"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”
The quote above is often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, although there is no record of him saying it. It is more likely a synthesis of his principle of Satyagraha, or “holding onto truth.”
In a week that has seen a total eclipse of the sun, I found myself reflecting on how long it took heliocentricity to become accepted and the trouble it caused for its proponents along the way. Originally proposed by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BCE, it eventually made the mainstream thanks to Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, shortly before his death. It took the Catholic Church sixty years to take umbrage and another thirteen years until Galileo took its full force, prompting the Inquisition to lend a not-too-delicate hand.
…to abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it... to abandon completely... the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.
— Bellarmine and the Inquisition's injunction against Galileo, 1616.
It seems what goes around comes around. Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” to a similar reception:
First serialized in The New Yorker in June 1962, the book alarmed readers across America and, not surprisingly, brought a howl of indignation from the chemical industry. "If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson," complained an executive of the American Cyanamid Company, "we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth." Monsanto published and distributed 5,000 copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled "The Desolate Year," relating the devastation and inconvenience of a world where famine, disease, and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson's integrity and even her sanity.
Guy Calendar published the first authoritative data on climate change in 1938, reinforced by Charles David Keeling in 1958. It wasn’t until 1990 that the first IPCC report was published, and yet we still have the descendants of the Inquisition at work.
Current economic models have been called into question ever since Karl Marx published Das Kapital in 1867, but rather like heliocentricity and climate, it is taking a while to evolve into an engaging critique that covers the span of our economic model’s Wetiko-like effects.
In its Native American meaning, wetiko is an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people's minds, leading to selfshness, insatiable greed, and consumption as an end in itself, destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity.
Economists such as Mariana Mazzucato and Yanis Varoufakis are beginning to articulate in 21st-century terms what Marx started and kindle meaningful debate. It is past due, but that seems to be the way of these things.
While they can inform us, they cannot rescue us. Only we can do that.
I think maybe we need a contemporary heliocentricity moment, one in which our lives do not really revolve around corporations.
We have become path-dependent.
Path dependency is a phenomenon whereby history matters; what has occurred in the past persists because of resistance to change. The resistance to change could be based on the financial implications or because policymakers are making cautious or uninformed decisions.
Our institutions, from education to “corporate culture,” convince us that there is a path that, if we follow it, will lead us to what we want.
It is, of course, a convenient lie. Antonio Machado understood:
Traveler, your footprints Are the path and nothing more; Traveler, there is no path, The path is made by walking. By walking the path is made And when you look back You’ll see a road Never to be trodden again Antonio Machado
The assumptions that built the path, such as they were, have long since crumbled away, eroded by the forces of globalisation and shareholder supremacy. Those of us whose work experience includes the corporate world recognise this and the fact that within it, we are overhead with legs. It may be toxic, but it is neither “wrong” nor “malign”—it is the business model we are part of.
What is malign are the stories that suggest otherwise, that the organisation is the sun around which we must orbit in order to remain safe. The path has become an industry, from schools to universities, recruiters, and HR, increasingly automated and moderated by technology. Yanis Varoufakis describes it as technofeudalism.
We know at an internal, visceral level that the path we are treading does not serve us. We have record levels of inequality, mental health issues and social dysfunction, yet we keep on walking.
Why?
Perhaps because we find ourselves not only inside the walls, but that those walls are closing in on us, with the result that we find ourselves surrounded by other people experiencing the same as us, and so assume it’s “normal”.
It isn’t.
I think we suffer from what Margaret Hefferan terms “wilful blindness”. Passivity combined with a form of Groupthink. Like B.F. Skinners pigeons, we are conditioned to stay behind barriers that are no longer there.
We lack Requisite Variety.
When the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of a system (natural or artificial) the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system.
Ashby’s Law. The first law of cybernetics.
Or put more prosaically, we need to get out more.
The organisations we work in are more than happy to tell us why things are the way they are, citing “productivity”, “efficiency”, a range of generational attitudinal issues and that their stellar leadership is not to blame for what ails us.
The reality is often very different, with Leaders who do not have the authority, courage, or scope to lead effectively because the rent is due to shareholders, who must not be kept waiting for the returns they expect and on which the remuneration of senior executives relies.
We would do well to spend more time outside the walls, meeting with those we do not normally meet, working in areas we know little about, talking about the things we notice, comparing notes and gaining different perspectives.
Many of our large organisations have been so busy harvesting that they have not been planting. They are beyond maturity, with little alternative than to exploit monopoly positions or deep cost-cutting (and often both) to maintain the illusion of earnings growth.
The area between post-maturity decline and the emergent is outside the walls of the old and before walls have formed around the new. It calls on things that the gods of efficiency and productivity abhor—creativity, experimentation, uncertainty, and risk of failure.
Yet, we must live at the start of the second curve if we want to do work that matters, which enhances our lives and that of those we care for.
My intention is to make this Substack a place to gather for those wanting to venture outside the walls, to identify and embrace their own second curves, in the company of others doing the same, without a company in sight.
Be good if you can join us.
Here's the problem. The anti-path is a path. Climate change is a path. Technofeudalism is a path. Living inside the walls is a path. Every ideological perspective is a path. Each demands our allegiance and sacrifice to it.
An answer to this practice is to be an anarch. Ernst Junger, a German World War I hero, to the position of anarch during the Nazi regime. Here's how describes this perspective.
“The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I ‘ultimately’ do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer”
“Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.”
“The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
The path of the anarch is to question the path of the anarch. Self-criticism is essential for living outside the walls. All the signals gained through a lifetime within will misguide us into thinking that creating a path outside the walls is the way of being outside the wallls. This is why your work here is important. You are helping us to dispell our cognitive bias and dissonace in favor of open inquiry.