A Crisis of Action

Growing up, i developed a strong sense of urgency about the situation on the planet. I grew up with the understanding that we need to change our ways as humanity in order to survive as a species.

So far we have failed to do so. And now the discussion has shifted from avoiding the disasters to mitigating them. From finding new ways or organising human life on the planet to creating deep adaptation to the challenges to come.

From any action i have ever taken in my life, i can say one thing for sure: taking an action is the last step in a series of events that lead up to the action. Most of the time these events happen too quickly to notice, somewhere in the depths of my subconscious. But they happen. Always.

Our paralysis, our inaction in the phase of the challenges we face our — crisis of action — might be caused by a crisis of the events usually leading up to action: Imagination and Decision.

Imagination: First you need a goal — something worth acting for. You need to have an image of what the world — sometimes your tiny little personal world and sometimes a bigger one — should look like.

Decision: Then you have to make a decision. Not only a decision that it is worth the effort of taking action or even possible to arrive at the desired outcome, but a decision on how to best achieve the outcome — what action to take.

In this post i would like to explore the linked crises of our imagination and our decision making that are the underlying fabric of the larger crisis of action.

A Crisis of Imagination

Positive and negative liberty

During the 1950s Isaiah Berlin deepened the thinking and the definition of the dichotomy between positive and negative liberty.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints — the freedom "from" something while positive liberty is the possibility of acting — the freedom "for or towards" something.

For a long time our leaders practiced freedom towards something — they started revolutions, had visions of utopian futures and … failed. And we lost trust in the process. Trust in the leaders but also trust in visions and utopias.

As a result we decided we wanted to be free from the dangers and hardships of life. We wanted a safe territory in which we could feel and act freely, a territory just big enough that we could avoid touching the edges.

And now, that the safe territory is shrinking and now as the edges keep coming closer and closer, we don't know how to dream up a way out. We don't know how to practice freedom for a goal worth living — a goal worth dying.

This type of freedom is not for beginners, not for the faint at heart. In exploring unknown territory you can — and will — make mistakes. You will encounter questions you never even imagined could be asked. But you will also find answers beyond anything you could have imagined.

But most of all this freedom will give you a reason for being, something to strive for it will fill you with the force of life.

A Crisis of Decision

Our collective decision to be free from fear came with consequences. We handed leadership over to managers with the task of ensuring the safety of our territory.

This resulted in an ongoing dispute around ideologies of how to best achieve this goal.

These ideologies can be characterised by their relative position on a small number of dichotomies.

This dispute has become the focal point of the political, economic and societal discussion which is paralysing us in our ability to make decisions because we stay on an ineffective, probably even irrelevant layer of reality.

We don't act because we can't decide. We need to unpack and diffuse the most important of these dichotomies just enough so we can start making decisions again.

Emergence >< Planning

Probably the most paralysing dichotomy of our age is the question between the “invisible hand of the market” and the strong plan of a wise leading elite. Of course, both are wrong.

The planners fail to acknowledge the true and deep complexity of the world and are forced to simplify every thing and being in order to fit it into the plan.

The ones at other end of the spectrum fail to acknowledge that even though the mighty invisible hand of nature — as the ultimate market — does not plan to create all the beauty she has to offer, she still operates on a very rigid set of rules.

Stephen Wolfram, physicist, entrepreneur and author offers a very compelling way to satisfy both. In his book — A new kind of science — he makes the case for an algorithmic way of thinking about life.

Based on a set of very simple rules a few very simple elements create enormous complexity. It is almost impossible to make sense of the patterns his experiments generate from the most mundane set of rules.

Neither can we explain and plan the complexity of life top down, nor can we just let the world run its course. There is common ground between them — one that is hard for us to accept and understand, but one that integrates both.

Rationality >< Irrationality

During the height of the cold war, the mathematician and nobel laureate John Nash created a model to describe the world. As the underlying assumption for his model he decided that humans are rational and selfish beings. His model showed that if everyone behaved in the most rational way and always towards maximising their own benefit, the system would find an equilibrium that benefitted all participants.

We are neither only rational, nor are we only selfish. But since the model worked so beautifully, we decided that it would be easier to work with a simplified model of humans than to bear the uncertainty of unpredictability and start basing our political and economic models on it.

Since then a lot has happened and Dan Ariely even showed us how predicable we are in our irrationality while nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman gave us a whole way of balancing our understanding of rationality versus irrationality.

Let us rest the case. We are both.

Nature >< Nurture

We know — science has shown — that our environment has a strong influence on which genes are expressed and which are not. And this effect can be seen for our emotional and our physical environment.

Are we enslaved to the nature of our genes or are we molded by those who introduce us to the world? Even though some still find this subject debatable, the verdict seems to be out that it is a mixture of both.

Free at last

Let us embrace the ambiguity of the dichotomies that fuel our distraction from taking action. Let us embrace and face the fear that tempts us to trade true freedom for the illusion of freedom.

You don't remember this, but you fell and failed four hundred times before you could take your first real step.

If you had been protected from falling, you would never have learnt how to walk.

Let us allow each other to fail, let us allow ourselves to fail because this is the only way to learn how not to fail.

Let us allow ourselves to build the future we love.