Somebody Actually Did Something
In fact, quite a lot of people are doing things. Among the minority who have recognised that something is fundamentally wrong and that the western world is heading in a dark direction, there is a lot of activity.
Over the past two years I’ve witnessed or participated in a number of new groups and networks that have arisen in response to the question of our times: what do we do about the new authoritarianism? I don’t know what to call this new trend; the best name I’ve heard so far is the descriptive but rather cumbersome Truth and Freedom Movement. Part of the difficulty in naming the movement lies in its diversity: some groups are focused on resistance and reform, while others are about disconnecting from the mainstream and creating alternative ways of living. Approaches vary from traditional campaigning to the anarchistic, and include both the practical and the spiritual. Some combine elements of all of these.
In a world where most of us thought the battles for freedom, humanity and equality had long been won, finding an answer to the question of what to do is taking some working out. Everyone’s at different stages in this process. Some people, I regularly discover, ‘knew’ about the nature and extent of the threat years ago. Others are only just starting to confront the enormity of the challenge it presents, clinging to the hope that things will somehow right themselves without any action on their part, or that we’ll be saved by a better political leader or party.
‘The Movement’ is an evolving muddle, inspiring and disappointing by turns. Far from embodying a fresh start, it’s a microcosm and mirror of the human qualities that got us where we are today: avoidance and denial, jealousies and insecurities, and contradictory and self-defeating behaviour run alongside all the good stuff. The new activism is repeating many of the patterns of the old: an alternative celebrity culture has already formed, with the same ‘names’ populating the interview and conference circuit. Their audiences sometimes show a tendency to look for simple solutions and a longing for all-knowing leaders. Meanwhile, the dark side of leadership is surfacing, with tunnel vision and monomania costing opportunities and useful alliances. And then there’s that old one — does it never go away? — whereby the men commandeer the lead parts and the women are firmly cast in the support roles.
There’s a ray of light amid all this messy activity: a common understanding, held at a core of each one of us, about what we don’t want. We don’t want surveillance and control. We don’t want to spend our lives feeding the greed of a powerful minority. We don’t want decisions affecting us in the most intimate and fundamental ways about what we do with our bodies, where we go and who we see, made by distant others furthering their own interests. And we don’t want the mental anguish of knowing — a knowing that persists at a deep level, even through denial — that we lack dignity, autonomy and purpose.
But what do we want?
As Penny Kelly observes, while westerners see that the current system no longer works for us, we have lost the ability to even ask the question: ‘what would we rather have?’ Having been being born into the current system, we tend to spend our lives seeking to manage within it. We have lost the habit of visionary thinking, and that’s a major part of our disempowerment.
Yet there is one person, now a group, seeking to generate a public debate about a better future. The public bit is important: so far, the little mainstream debate that has emerged has been confined to criticism of what has already happened, while in the alternative sphere of us ‘don’t wants’, ideas about doing things differently are rather patchwork. There’s been no attempt that I’m aware of by any public figure or institution to envision how the whole of society could become a place where human life could flourish and we could reach our full potential.
That person is Jordan Peterson and the organisation he has formed is called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
The idea came to Peterson while travelling in Europe with his wife, meeting people active and influential in each area. ‘One of the things we encountered continually was the puzzled questioning, from especially the east Europeans, about just what the hell was going on in the West,’ he explained in this podcast. ‘They’re looking over at the West thinking: “what in the world are you people doing, toying with these ideas when the evidence is crystal clear that they took the lives of a hundred million people, devastated the lives of far more, and laid our countries to waste. Don’t you understand?”’
‘I’d certainly thought the same thing, being in the West. And it was very interesting to see that echoed by the people whose lives had included sojourns under those systems of oppression.’
Me too.
Looking over at what was going in Britain and Canada, people in Albania and other former communist states had ‘a sense of crying in the wilderness’, he went on. And that made Peterson wonder why, amid so much concern, people weren’t coming together internationally to share ideas and develop a vision that would form ‘an alternative to the globalist nightmare that threatens to engulf us all’.
So he set about formulating a way of conducting a public debate about the alternative. Working with others, he decided to present the public with a set of questions that would facilitate an exploratory, open kind of enquiry. This decentralised approach would provide a counterbalance to the top-down propositions coming from the globalists, with one important caveat that would distinguish any proposed solutions from theirs — no compulsion would be involved!
The result are six questions to which Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is seeking responses. They concern underlying values and governance arrangements, education, energy and environment. When I first took a look at them, I found they generated some immediate responses and some big blanks which I also found interesting. I began writing my answers with the intention of submitting them within a day or so and then realised that it was a bigger, more useful exercise than I first envisaged. So I gave them some thought and reproduce the results below in the hope that they might provoke ideas in others.
This post is continued on Substack: https://alexklaushofer.substack.com/p/somebody-actually-did-something
