how to save the world

I am coming to believe that our bodies’ organs co-evolved our minds for a purpose other than their immediate and selfish self-protection. The second purpose of our minds, I think, is self-restraint. Why? Because self-restraint of creatures with exceptional capacity to influence their ecosystem is essential to the health of that ecosystem, and hence to the health of all creatures within it. Most creatures do not need self-restraint because, at their worst, they can do little to perturb the balance of life. But larger, fiercer, smarter creatures can wreak havoc, so their minds (in the collective interest of all-life-on-Earth) should inevitably have evolved self-restraint as a critical characteristic and determinant of decision-making.

Most of who ‘we’ are continues to be the autonomous processes of our bodies’ organs, and the subconscious realizations that we call ‘instinct’. Our conscious thoughts comprise a tiny proportion of our information activities. So what happened to us that we now equate ourselves with our conscious thoughts, and even believe we have an identity, a consciousness, that transcends our body entirely, and even defines reality? Some would have us believe it is our abstract consciousness, our ability to conceive, that ‘makes’ the world — that there is no reality without consciousness. (This belief reminds me of the equally arrogant belief of religious fanatics that the world was created six thousand years ago by a superhuman. It defies all credibility. But whatever gets you through the night, I guess.)

Most creatures exercise self-restraint, a manifestation of a humility that appreciates and realizes that the delicate balance of nature that has evolved over billions of years is the best model of sustainability, the best way to live. They ‘voluntarily’ reduce their birth numbers to keep them in balance with the rest of their ecosystem. This remarkable phenomenon seems to arise as a result of hormonal changes that respond to overcrowding and other stresses, changes that indicate a collective awareness. Only if that fails do nature’s other remedies kick in — increases in other predators, disease, and, as a last resort, aggression and violence leading to rising death rates.

I believe we had this same self-restraint, until, as an unexpected consequence of our sophisticated brains, we invented civilization, and its artifacts, including the suppression of our ‘natural’ self-restraint. “To be nobody else” is indeed, as cummings said, “the hardest battle”, and it requires that we rediscover our instinctive self-restraint, become truly natural creatures again, each one of us, alone, and free ourselves from the slavery and propaganda that our society, with the best of intentions, has imposed on us. We have lost that humility, that self-restraint. We have become disconnected from all-life-on-Earth so that we no longer sense that we are devastating the planet, that our way of living is unsustainable. Why?

My theory is that it began with either the ice ages, or with the rapid extinction of large mammals that followed our invention of spears and arrowheads. Suddenly, what had been a life of astonishing and continuous abundance became a world of great scarcity. That scarcity bred fear. That fear (in an autonomous process that Hall has shown occurs precisely the same way in mice) produces murderous violence, which in turn precipitates mental illness, trauma, shutdown, suicide, and vulnerability.

At about the time of this collective mental breakdown, we also invented, perhaps as a means of trying to manage social disorder, abstract human language, a tool that enabled the invention and dissemination of propaganda: Once we learned to communicate accurately, we quickly learned the advantage of lying.

The combination of emotional illness and psychological vulnerability, and propaganda exploiting this weakness produced, I would theorize, four phenomena that exemplify our modern society: groupthink (“becoming everybody else”). frenetic behaviour (inability to pay attention), disconnection, and dependence (on others higher in a hierarchy). A very sad, unhealthy, destructive and unnatural way to live.

If this is the case, what would we need to do to become our natural selves again? To stop being “everybody else”? To regain that humility and self-restraint?

It would be difficult, even more difficult than cummings suggested. We would have to deny all the conventional wisdom that we are taught from birth. We would have to live simpler, in order to re-become self-sufficient. We’d have to shut off the noise and propaganda that bombards our every waking moment. We’d have to refocus on the simple joys of life: eating, sleeping, loving, playing, and spend less time doing things that rely on others, people we don’t know. We’d have to talk less, and talk about what’s important. In place of the inane chatter we’d spend time reconnecting with our senses, our bodies, our instincts, and the natural world. We’d have to stop living the dread-ful life inside our heads and start living as part of all-life-on-Earth, in the astonishing, joyful, real world. We’d have to stop living in clock time and start living in Now Time.

We’d have to re-become simply who we are: A collection of organs amazingly complicit in realizing their collective success and happiness, inventing and reinventing and succeeding ourselves, connecting with love and without restraint, instinctively, under the spell of the sensuous.

Could we even do this? I think it’s possible. I think artists are, by nature, closer to this simple, open, vulnerable, natural, truthful way of living. We have a billion models — the wild creatures all around us, and the children, not yet disconnected and damaged and beaten into submission. They are showing us the way.

Painting above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival.

What’s more, they know that even if they were to try to ignore these risks, they would be squeezed by two groups who would punish them for doing so: Investors, who are increasingly concerned about the ethical conduct of the companies they invest in, and customers, who are increasingly willing to boycott irresponsible companies and favour responsible ones.

For most, then, the right thing to do as a citizen of their community and the world, and the right thing to do as a business decision-maker, are one and the same. So why are so many businesses, including many Canadian businesses, still part of the problem instead of part of the solution?

For the most socially and environmentally irresponsible companies, like ExxonMobil, the cost of coming clean is just too great. Such ugly corporate citizens use a variety of tactics to obfuscate their wrongdoing and scare off anyone who would dare hold them to account:

• Spending massive amounts of ill-gotten gains on greenwashing ads and fraudulent PR campaigns
• Funding and promoting phony Lomborgian ‘junk science’ research and setting up phony ‘citizen’ websites attacking their critics
• Threatening critics and victims with massive countersuits if they dare sue them for their misdeeds
• Paying for politicians to pass laws protecting them and deregulating their industries, and regulators and enforcers not to enforce what weak laws remain
• Forming oligopolies with other massive reprobate corporations, so customers have no choice but to buy from one of them

For the majority of corporations though, the issue is one of ignorance, not malice or deliberate negligence. Like the majority of citizens, the majority of companies don’t know what harm they’re doing, don’t know that there are more responsible ways to operate without hurting the bottom line, don’t know that their practices are utterly unsustainable.

For them, it makes sense to bring the discussion back to risks. The chart above shows what large corporate executives in the US think is the probability and consequence of a variety of risks. For the most part, they think social and environmental risks have a low probability of occurring, but would have serious consequences if they occurred.

On the chart below, these risks are mostly perceived to fall in the lower right box, the ones executives (and individuals) tend to keep a watch on, but, because they are seen as longer-term risks unlikely to occur, not otherwise acted upon. They include these risks:

• the risk that oil prices will rise to, say, $160/bbl and stay there (remember that most of our food and all plastics depend on cheap oil; it’s not just transportation that would be affected)
• the risk of significant water rationing being needed, permanently
• the risk that the Chinese economy will collapse (and with it, cheap labour), resulting in a famine and humanitarian crisis for over a billion people
• the risk that reckless lending/borrowing and other factors will make the US dollar relatively worthless, and hence bankrupt the US treasury
• the risk that a global flu pandemic or bioterrorist attack, even if it only kills a few million people, brings the economy to a near complete halt for eighteen months or more
• the risk that Middle East instability leads to a decade-long regional war involving nuclear weaponry
• the risk that the current debt crisis will spiral into a major recession as discretionary consumer spending drops by 50%
• the risk that (as is now happening in India) artificially low borrowing rates boomerang to produce an interest rate spike to double digits
• the risk that global warming will produce global desertification, rising sea levels, huge and frequent storms, floods, droughts and other catastrophic consequences  
• the risk that one or more of the above problems will produce chronic long-lasting blackouts and telecom system failures
• the risk that a natural disaster like an earthquake will damage a major city so badly that it cannot be rebuilt and has to be abandoned
• the risk that a new and unforeseen competitor will introduce a disruptive innovation into an industry that will cut volume or margins of the major players in half
• the risk that activist shareholders and/or an ethical investor movement and/or a consumer boycott in response to a company’s perceived irresponsible social or environmental behaviour will reduce market price of the stock by one third

It’s the old important-not-urgent problem — it’s our nature to put off acting on these issues until they become more probable and hence more urgent. Even if (as often happens) that’s too late.

If we perceive the probability (and therefore risk) to be a bit higher, we’ll buy insurance, just-in-case. If the probability becomes even more certain, insurance becomes too expensive, so if the economic consequences are relatively small we’ll self-insure (set aside a bit of money to cover the cost when it occurs), and if the consequences are greater (e.g. we live in a major hurricane zone) it makes sense to have a substantial mitigation plan to prepare for, and if possible reduce exposure to, the risk. Maybe.

In other words, we will only act to become more sustainable if and when we are relatively certain that our sustainability is immediately at risk. That’s true whether we’re a corporation in denial about our dependence on low interest rates or cheap oil or cheap labour, or an individual in denial about the continued economic viability of our SUV for our hour-long commute.

So what can we do to persuade socially and environmentally conscious organizations to stop watching and start acting? Two things:

1. we can help them develop, and if necessary require them to disclose, what I call resilience measures; and
2. we can educate them when the probability of the risk is actually higher than they think it is (i.e. the risk is in the upper right quadrant, not the lower right).

Public companies are currently required to disclose ‘significant’ risks in their annual filings, so that investors can assess their vulnerability. What I would like to see is, for selected risks (like the bulleted list above), what would be the consequences if these events occurred — how vulnerable is the company to each of these risks? Perhaps the risk of each is low, but what happens if or when the probability increases suddenly. Shouldn’t investors have this information, and make their own assessment on just how low the probability is? Shouldn’t management know, and employees, and the people in the communities that depend on (and often subsidize) these companies? Shouldn’t the regulators?

I’m not saying companies should have to guess how likely these risks are, just that they should have to assesswhat would happen if these risks were suddenly realized. And then they should develop (for their own benefit, not just shareholders’) resilience measures — programs that would enable to organization to reduce either the negative impact of these risks, or their exposure to these risks, such as:

• lowering dependence on non-renewable energy, cheap labour, or low interest rates
• reducing consumption of resources, recycling everything, reducing waste and pollution
• sourcing locally and having alternative sources of supply
• reducing financial leverage
• enabling people to do their work from home
• recession-proofing the company
• eliminating socially and environmentally risky and harmful activities
• developing a continuous innovation program

I’m sure that quantifiable measures of these and other actions to increase organizational resilience could be developed. These are measures that matter, and they should be reported.

Education is a longer-term project, but I think just by starting to think about vulnerabilities to these risks, organizations will self-educate themselves and learn that some of the risks they thought were low-probability (lower right quadrant) are actually greater than they imagined. And some of this education should not be difficult — there is a ton of data that indicates that a pandemic is not only highly probably in the next twenty years (and it could happen anytime, with no notice), but it will last a year or two, and even if it is mild in death count it will be global and will wreak havoc on the economy worldwide.

Perhaps Canadians (and perhaps Europeans) are more enlightened than Americans, but the more I speak to Canadians in business in a position to make a real difference, the more I realize they do get it (most of them, anyway) and do care, and the more optimistic I get that we can be models, we can show the world that there is a better way. Not sohopeless after all.

Meanwhile, people change slowly. We are change-resistant. We change when we have no other real choice. Social change is therefore a complex phenomenon: It occurs only when a large group of people have no other choice. Bomb the hell out of Iraq for four years and you can get four million people to flee the only country they know, the land they love, and try to make another life, somewhere else, anywhere else.

The change to ecological consciousness, and the change to a life without the automobile, will have to go through that same slow process, until a very large group of people have no other choice, and finally accept that they must change.

Each of that large group of people has to agree to Let-Themselves-Change. In that group, some are likely to be open to doing so, while others will not. Openness to (capacity for) Let-Self-Change is a function of:

• Your freedom to change — social, cultural, economic and political freedom, from responsibilities and other constraints that would prevent you from changing
• Your worldview — liberals are inherently more open to change than conservatives
• The time you have to change — time you have, or time you make, to think about and then act on your intention
• The information/knowledge you have that provides a context for supporting the decision to change
• Your level of awareness and attention to what is happening in the world
• Your critical thinking skills and imagination, that enable you to assess and conceive of possible change

If you have the capacity, the next thing you need is a catalyst, a provocation to change:

• New information, ideally first-hand observation or a context-rich, moving story, that determines or upsets and changes what we believe to be true, or
• A compelling argument increasing our passion or sense of urgency, or
• An important event or profound environmental change

When we first formulate our position on something, we tend to accept the first information, argument or other determinant of belief that resonates with our prevailing worldview. It’s easiest to ‘get’ to us before we have already ‘made up our mind’. Once we’ve done that, the bar is raised — the catalyst for change must be profounder. Or, to put it another way, the ‘tipping point’ is higher.

But when we finally reach that tipping point, we can change remarkably quickly. Today I listened to a presentation (with a great story line) that changed the thinking of a whole room of people (more on it tomorrow). I’ve been through similar sudden, major Self-Changes, for example when I read each of the fifteen critical books on my Save the World Reading List. And I have Let-Myself-Change each time I’ve made a major geographic move or career change in my life. I had no choice. More recently, as I’ve started to pay attention to the world, these changes have come more often, and more easily. The wild creatures in my life have continually provoked profound changes in me, because I am now open to change, and because I learn so much from them. Every day, it seems, brings new revelations and new changes.

I think sometimes we crash through this tipping point in a hurry, and astonish ourselves at how quickly and dramatically we’ve Let-Ourselves-Change. And sometimes it is as if we sit just short of the tipping point for a long time, and then some little thing, some final straw, nudges us over it.

An exercise: Tell a story about some significant Let-Self-Change in your life. What was the catalyst? Did it happen suddenly or gradually? What did it feel like — was it anAha! or a sense of sheepishness (“how could I ever have believed that?).

What does this teach us about how to bring about change in others?

(Thanks to Lugon at Fluwikie2 for the inspiration for this post.)