Introducing Rheocracy
And why getting back to normal feels like defeat.
Does the prospect of getting back to normal feel like something of a failure to you? Let me offer you an explanation of why that might be. What has happened this last strange year, I suggest, is that we have heard the sound of a spanner thrown into a vast cog: we’ve felt the grinding almost to a halt of the cycle of produced meaning in our lives. And glimpsed in that hesitation has been the invitation to completely reverse the cycle of perception and interpretation of this phenomenon of being alive. If you missed it, if a critical mass of us have missed it, we will no doubt be given that opportunity again to become acquainted with the smell of those burning gears, as nature shift the imbalance of the Anthropocene into equilibrium.
The way the world turned before saw energy as a force for manufacturing objects (that which matters) which we consumed and which made us its subjects. Subjects, in turn, to feed this machine needed to expend effort through work to afford to purchase these objects that gave our lives meaning (including status). It wasn’t always like this but the dynamic created such a momentum we bought into the illusion that it was a spiral of growth and progress, when in fact it was going nowhere. Since this has up until now been our everyday experience its familiarity needs no further explanation.
The strangeness of this Covid-19 global lockdown is that many of us have sensed, in this short reprieve from what seemed before the only reality in town, an affordance perhaps not thought of as possible before. We are encountering a kind of liminality that was associated with a much more post-apocalyptic scenario in our imagination.
Where once one might have thought that this unsustainable spiral into ecosystem collapse could only stop if the machinery of this society were destroyed, what is in plain sight is that all it needed was the removal of human effort from the equation — a global strike. Admittedly, it is not a voluntary strike and there is undoubtedly untold suffering in this crisis, but apparent to everyone who was not entirely convinced by the merry-go-round of ‘normal’ life, is that there is here an opportunity for a radical redirection, a reversal of the flow.
What that looks like cannot be easily described. This is such an important point because when we move away from using energy to manufacture meaning; when we allow meaning to emerge from its absence, it does not show up with some preordained schema, with some business plan for change. It’s a movement appropriate to context and context is infinite and unique to every unfolding moment.
A fundamental property of the absence of meaning, when we finally give up trying to find a purpose in our lives and suddenly find we were always sitting on it (like the TV remote), is its benevolence. A symptom of this can be sensed in how our carers have become our heroes, not our rubber barons. The applause that erupted at the first lockdown from the town in the valley below me at 8pm every Thursday is precisely the sound of meaning emerging from nothingness — gratitude for kindness.
That is the force that powers this opposing cycle and which gives insight into what is the next most appropriate action to take. The paradox in this state of Wu Wei, into which we are all being invited to step, is that no one is doing anything…things are just happening and we are flowing within it without effort. In fact, when all effort is surrendered what emerges from the insight is a creativity that is not led by a desire but by compassion. Opening your empty hotel to the homeless, not writing a hit song, is what creativity looks like in this new world.
Don’t expect a return on your creative investment in this new world because a sense of meaning will not come from your contribution to society. Neither will it come from the appraisal of others. You will return, like an actor at the end of a great performance, to the emptiness that is within you. The spiral goes down, not up, down into the abyss of you. This dying society was structured to throw the world, its people, and all its riches into that abyss just so you can avoid its gaping inevitability. Time to say no more. We will look into this abyss and find redemption there.
So what is the politics of this new world? I call it…
Rheocracy
Rheocracy operates according to the principles of The Reciprocal Well-being model. This model replaces Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs by reframing the human as a part of a creative cycle rather than an individual striving towards a pinnacle of achievement.
While it updates Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ‘as if the planet mattered’ it is also a model that unifies governance, economy and religion. These are the three universal orders that Yuval Noah Harari identifies as having driven the global expansion of civilization, for better or worse.
The downward swoop of the cycle of the Reciprocal Well-being model could constitute the ‘economy’, the bottom activators of well-being as the ‘religion’ component and the upward sweep as ‘governance.’ That said, this is a whole systems approach and while it is not complete unless it addresses these universal orders, it only does so in order to transcend them.
The central column describes the 7 spheres or nested domains of activity.
The right column is what we derive or draw from those domains (the output).
And the left column is what we contribute (the input) to the domains that produce the output.
The bottom row is human activities, ways to wellbeing, that support the healthy flow of reciprocity around these nested spheres. However, these are not prescriptive but arise spontaneously from the flow, just as greed, envy, shame, fear and control arise spontaneously from our current models.
Rheocracy is not a construction but a renunciation. It is not achieved but is surrendered unto. It arises when we are undone and starts when we accept that the way forwards is towards a…
Viable Poverty
The idea that rather than escape poverty we should make it viable might seem perverse to many who suffer it or who work to alleviate it in the world. More so perhaps for all who have been denied a place at the banquet due to institutional racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. But every day the world machine, hell-bent on economic growth/environmental collapse, starts to gain momentum the more certain the destiny of our species.
In the aftermath of this pandemic, the massive and growing inequality in the world necessitates greater tyranny and injustice to sustain. Resources are dwindling, economic instability rife and the precariat is teetering on the brink. The resistance grows as people who have less to lose take greater risks in their activism. The fabric of civilisation itself is being stretched. Is this the turning point?
No, it is not if we aim simply to hang the rich upside down and shake the wealth out of their pockets. Or to wrestle governments into divesting from the security apparatus that protects private property and release to the commons our shared inheritance. We must do better than redistribute the plunder of our oppressors.
While this might need to happen the externalisation of the problem will always lead to another circuit of the cycle of history and the planet just can’t do that again. We might attribute the problem of sustainability to overpopulation or the price of progress but underneath all this, if we take the time to notice its movement within ourselves, the root of the problem is the orientation towards the production and consumption of content as a basis for meaning.
So the only revolution that will have any chance of reversing environmental destruction is a change in the direction of meaning-making. That is letting meaning arise and play out from context in each moment. This is the circuit as shown in a previous post — the anti-clockwise movement around the Energy, Matter, and Meaning triad. We see this form of meaning-making in indigenous peoples whose lifestyle could be described as viable poverty from the viewpoint of capitalism. From their point of view, it is a life enchanted.
So the process of de-colonising ourselves must also recognise and redress the cognitive injustice that has rendered these epistemologies of the south, that existed also in the north before Roman times, as unviable and in some way sub-human.
No one can now argue that the clockwise movement around the triad, whose best intentions is a march towards the utopia of material wealth for all humanity, has the momentum of a juggernaut and if left to roll will inevitably lead to the destruction of us all. But the shift, I suggest here, requires something esoteric religions have embraced for thousands of years. In Christianity it is the 40 days and nights in the desert; for many indigenous traditions it is the vision quest; the Sufi’s surrender, and the Hindu Sannyasa. But can a whole society, a whole civilization engage with such an act of renunciation? If we can’t, if we can’t turn together towards viable poverty then the inequality, populism, isolationism, and scapegoating we see around us is going to get much worse.