Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the membership program and the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and very much your fellow traveller at this time of total transformation. Democracy is breaking to pieces all around us, and a small percentage of those in power would, it seems, like us to become at best obedient subjects, in a world dedicated to the destruction of ecosystems and the annihilation of compassion, empathy and all that is the best of humanity. And we are better than this. So how do we harness the astonishing wonder of human co-creation in service to life, and create a world where humanity thrives as part of a flourishing web of life? This week's guest, Jon Alexander, has devoted many years of his life to thinking about this and to making change in the world. As you'll hear, John started off his professional life as a highly successful advertising executive, until the inherent contradictions in what he came to call the consumer narrative led him onto a new path to seeing people as citizens. In his words, as people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to our community and institutions. Who can imagine a different and better life, and who create opportunities for others to do the same. These words come directly from his book Citizens, with the subtitle Why the key to fixing everything is All of Us.
Manda: This is a genuinely thrutopian view of possibility from one of the sharpest minds and biggest hearts in this space of all potential, and I wholeheartedly encourage you to read it. Bearing in mind that it came out three years ago and the world has changed somewhat since then. In fact, it's changed since John and I first mooted this conversation over six months ago, when we still thought Harris was going to win the US election and that democracy was stable, and that, in Jon's words, we could affect change by pressing on certain acupuncture points within the system. And now we are where we are. And truly, I don't think any of us believes any of this is possible now. And yet the cracks are where the light gets in. And this is a time when we can abandon any belief that the old system is functioning any more. So if it's not fit for purpose, what doors does knowing this open? What new light is there at the end of the tunnel? And how do we find the agency, motivation and connection to the people and places we love, to make the changes that need to happen, if we are going to create that future, we'd be proud to leave behind?
Manda: Jon is so well placed to answer some of this. He is co-founder of the New Citizen Project, which works to help organisations and businesses find ways to enhance citizenship in everything they do. And then more recently, he helped to found the Citizen Collective, which we can all join and should, and which holds regular meetings online to connect people who aspire to citizenship all around the world. Because connecting now, I think, is one of the things that really matters. So here we are, connecting. This was a raw, honest conversation that took each of us to the edges of ourselves, and neither of us is pretending that we have all the answers. But we are exploring the ideas, and John brings such a wealth of experience to the table that he is able to open doors for all of us. So I did come away from this heartened that the routes forward are opening up, and I hope you do too. Here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Jon Alexander of the Citizen Collective and so much more.
Manda: Jon, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. We have sleety rain out there. It's just about to freeze and it's horrible. Where are you and how are you this cool Monday morning?
Jon: I'm in south west London. I have blue sky outside, actually. It was chucking it down a little while ago, but seems to have given me a bit of sunshine for this conversation.
Manda: There you go: east of the country. Alrighty, so it's a week since the inauguration of whoever it is that's actually running the US at the moment. I suspect Trump is quite low down the hierarchy. What is most alive for you as the world is turning over?
Jon: I think the reflections that you posted the other day on the frame of the death of democracy, I think is where I'm at, really, and I don't really feel able to stare at anything else. But I think there is power and opportunity in that. There's something huge to be gained from acknowledging that in some way we have now lost, and that the work is now from a position of a kind of insurgent movement rather than from the defence of something. And I think that creates a huge amount of space, actually. So that's some of what's alive for me that I suspect we can go deeper into.
Manda: Yeah, let's. Absolutely, definitely we want to go deeper into that. But let's take a brief step back and introduce listeners to you, to the entire concept of citizens rather than consumers and subjects. I think that that was an interesting framing. And there are forces who would like to turn us back into, at the very best subjects, if not serfs, I would suggest. So give us your edited highlights of how you got to be the person who wrote citizens and who set everything up and who we're talking to today.
Jon: Well, in many ways, the story starts with a conversation with my first boss when I started working in the advertising industry. And he described my job to me by saying, what you've got to remember is that the average consumer sees something like 3000 commercial messages a day, and you have to cut through that. You have to make yours the best. And by the way, this was 2003. So those numbers elevate somewhat. And for a while actually my upbringing, my context, I embraced the first part of that challenge, so I made mine the best. And then I started to ask deeper and deeper questions about what was going on in the world. Like, what are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we're consumers 3000 odd times a day? What does that do to what futures we can imagine? What relationships we can create, what what contexts we can operate in. And as you can imagine, asking those questions while sat at a desk in an advertising agency was not the easiest thing to do, and I went through a pretty dark time. There was a period when I actually got to a sort of crisis point, and there was a period where I was stood on Oxford Circus tube station every day for a week and wracked with kind of visceral pain, to the extent that I physically threw up each and every day. And I don't know, I can't really remember if I was thinking about actually ending my life or whatever, but it was a full physical embodiment of rejection of the story that I was part of. And actually, in some ways, I think a kind of priest of. But I rebuilt from then, Manda!
Manda: Well, yeah, but let's just take a brief pause there. Because within the Dreaming Awake and Accidental Gods, we teach people about heart, mind, head mind and body mind, and that each has its own wisdom and that we work best when all three are in alignment and working together in service to life. And your body mind was telling you. It's really clear and you write about this in Citizens; your body mind was in rebellion, probably before the aspects of your head mind that you were aware of caught up. And I think that in itself is a really powerful knowing. And what's amazing is you listened to it. You listened to your body mind and your heart mind and brought your head mind along, in the understanding that the system that you had been domesticated into was not fit for purpose, I would say. Is that a fit framing?
Jon: Yeah.
Manda: And that it needed to change. And then you gave your life to changing it from the inside with someone who had credibility with people who were still high priests of the old system. Is that fair?
Jon: Yes. I think, in many ways, and this can sound a bit grand, but I do think it's apt, that if you think of consumerism as a religion, it's one that calls its adherence to prayer 3000, 10,000 times a day, which is pretty insistent. And to see that and feel that, and yet also have many deep friendships and connections with those who are also perpetuating in that system and telling that story, I think has been an incredibly difficult but also powerful place to stand. Because I think I am able to see the trappedness rather than the committed, deliberate darkness that surrounds us.
Manda: Yes!
Jon: I deeply believe, and this is my definition of a citizen, really, the idea of humans as citizens is that we are by nature collaborative, creative, caring creatures. But we are also story dwelling creatures and storytelling creatures. But the link between those things is that we need, and we can't help but depend on the stories that surround us to make sense of who to collaborate with, what to care about, what to create. And while the consumer story is the default for that, it's not that people are trying to be bad, even those even those right at the heart of it. It's that the story that we're appealing to is, I sometimes describe now, consumerism I think of as a sort of species level self-hatred construct.
Manda: Oh, can you unpick that? Because I've been calling it a death cult for quite a long time. That predatory capitalism is a death cult. And you're right that it tries to give people a sense of meaning and a sense of being and belonging. But the meaning is in consumption, which is inherently meaningless. So the entire advertising industry, as far as I can see, is designed to create this kind of smoke and mirrors of you will get meaning and self-worth in things that, if we stop and think about it at all, cannot possibly give us a sense of meaning and self-worth. But can you unpick what you just said? Because that feels really in alignment and really interesting. And how did you get to that and where does it take you?
Jon: So I think there's a couple of differences between the way I frame it, and the way you just articulated. I think one is this idea of talking about consumerism rather than talking about capitalism, which I actually think is quite a significant shift for us to make. Because I think when we talk about capitalism and communism and post capitalism and anti-capitalism and all these negations of capitalism, we're looking from the system, in. And I find that quite a disempowering way of looking at the looking at the world. For me, thinking about this challenge through the lens of what I call the stories of subject, consumer and citizen, and particularly the consumer story, it almost flips the telescope. So you're looking at the individual and the story that we're trapped in and building out from there, rather than trying to look at the whole thing. Which means that you can't really change anything unless you can come up with some prescription for how the whole thing should evolve. Which to my mind, is why we end up stuck in just using post capitalism, anti-capitalism, whatever; just all these things where we're still actually talking about capitalism. Whereas if you start by thinking about consumerism, if you start by thinking about the story of the individual, then I think you're able to say, what if we inhabited a different story of ourselves as individuals? What if we could step into another logic, which we can all actually start to do on a day to day basis? And then rather than having to define exactly what the parameters and structures of the system that will emerge as a result before we even begin, we simply reorient in the world today as citizens rather than as consumers. And how that might then connect and manifest, we trust to emergence rather than trying to dictate before we even begin.
Manda: Okay. So for people listening who haven't read your book yet, and everybody, this is a genuinely thrutopian book, and we'll come to the fact that it was published three years ago, and a lot has happened in three years, but it is still genuinely thrutopian. So can you give us the edited highlights of what a subject is, what a consumer is, and what a citizen is? And then let's take citizenship forward.
Jon: So the the easiest way to introduce this framework, I guess, is as a likely quasi historical shift. And I won't insist on this to graduates in history programs, but to introduce it: at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, the dominant story of the individual in society, I argue, was something like the subject. As subjects the right thing to do is keep your head down, do as you're told, get what you're given. On the basis that the God given few who run society know best, and they will lead us to the best outcomes for society as a whole. Critically, each of these stories is a thesis for how the best society results.
Manda: And it seems to me, in your book, and it goes a long way further back than the 1900s, Roman citizenship was actually subject-ship. Greece was subjective. I would say every part of the trauma culture that goes back 10, 12,000 years to the origin of our dominance based agricultural system, where we enslaved the more than human world, created that hierarchy, which says the people at the top are actually God given. They have done something that's elevated them there, which gives them the right to subject, not just people, but everything. That's a ten 000 year old story. Yes? Does that fit with your framing?
Jon: Yes. And it really arrived at full dominance from the age of empire and so on and up to the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. I'm coming into the climax of that story. I mean, it's very interesting, I think of these things as paradigms. And Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions talks about when a paradigm has kind of fully dominated everything that the flaws in it become irretrievable.
Manda: Yeah, I think it still hasn't dominated the people who live in initiation cultures as opposed to trauma culture. They can see, but they're not talking in our language through our media systems, and nor are they endeavouring to take over the entire world. So our culture's hegemonic narrative is that.
Jon: Let me come back to subject-consumer-citizen and then maybe we can delve into this a bit more. Coming into history at the point at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, for sake of simplicity. At that point, the dominant story is something like the subject story. So the right thing to do is to keep your head down, do as you're told, get what you're given, on the basis that the God given few who run society know best. And if we do what they say, that is how the best society will result. That story collapses around that time under the weight of its own contradictions; industrial revolution, rise of the middle class and so on. And out of the two world wars, we more or less deliberately, more or less consciously construct what I call the consumer story to replace it. And in the consumer story, the right thing to do (again, the right thing to do) is to pursue self-interest. On the basis that self-interest will add up to collective interest, and that is how the best society will result. And I think this is why I talk about consumerism as a self-hatred construct, because it's essentially built out of the idea that we are inherently selfish and individualistic, and therefore the only thing that we can do is have that self-interest channelled into the collective interest. That's the only possibility because we are fundamentally bad. And yet we are now in this moment where that story is collapsing in on itself, because you can't face the challenges of our time from within the story that created them. And because actually, it's just a disguise for the subject story, and the mask is now very much slipping.
Manda: Yes. So that was something I did want to ask you. I don't think the people at the top ever believed this. You know, do what we say and it will be better for the collective good. They were just very good at promoting narratives that let people default into that. Fair?
Jon: I think you and I are quite different on this, actually, Manda. I don't believe that. I genuinely believe that there was a golden dream that many got caught up in.
Manda: And you've lived in the city. I haven't. I just look at it from the outside thinking, surely you can't actually believe this? Um, so...
Jon: Well, so when you read Truman's inauguration speech from 1949, for example, it's very easy to see the hubris in it now. But I believe there was a very genuine belief in this idea that economic development would make everything better for everyone. It was wrong. And I think there's a very important understanding of what evil is and means, that is about epistemic duty, right? It's about holding up the outcomes to the hypothesis. But for my part and the way I see the world, to see it as a kind of plot from the beginning is actually to ascribe too much intelligence for those who are leading it.
Manda: Yeah, I wasn't quite going there. But anyway, let's not get lost. It's another rabbit hole. It's fine. So: subject, consumer, let's get to citizen.
Jon: Subject. Consumer. Citizen. What's going on in this moment, I'm arguing, as I say, the consumer story is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The subject story is rising, it's raising its ugly head again as that collapse happens, in the chaos and uncertainty, the bargain of protection in return for obedience is a very powerful one. But what's also present has been throughout human history and has always risen, but never quite taken hold at these sort of times of change in crisis, is what I call the citizen story. And the citizen story says the right thing to do isn't to keep your head down and do as you're told, nor is it simply to pursue self-interest. It's to get involved, to contribute your ideas, energy, and resources to the pursuit of the best outcomes for society as a whole. And critically, to reimagine and redesign our institutions, to tap into that collective energy, collective wisdom, collective resource on the basis that, the logic of this story is that all of us are smarter than any of us.
Manda: Right. Yes.
Jon: And that is how the best society results.
Manda: Brilliant.
Jon: The book was essentially an effort to map the emergence of that story across sectors. And in that moment, at the end of 2021 when I finished writing, and in 2022 when it was published, interestingly it was published the week after the first tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine. But even in that moment, still the theory of change that lay underneath the book was one of social acupuncture. The idea that we could sort of release the energy for the emergent system from within this fraying and collapsing system, but that work could be done from a position of strength.
Manda: And you give amazing examples of people. If we could just look at a lad called Kennedy, because that was extraordinary, because he didn't have a position of strength. He came from the worst kind of hierarchical top down, we're going to grind you to nothing, and he still was able to create something astonishing and beautiful. Can you can you give an edited highlight of his story and then we can move into okay, what's possible now?
Jon: Ken's story is phenomenal. He grew up as a street kid in one of the largest slums of Nairobi. I mean, dreadful beginnings. He had to watch his sister marry the man who'd raped her, because otherwise she would have been turfed out of the community. Watched his best friend get stoned to death.
Manda: And his mother had done much the same, from the sound of things.
Jon: Yeah, absolutely.
Manda: It wasn't the first time.
Jon: Then the story sort of turns; Ken got hold of a football and started charging kind of micro cents for people to play football together. And then they started to organise themselves to clear streets. And there was a sort of basic insistence from the very beginning of building their own resources on their own terms to do this work. And that momentum built through kind of giving circles and so on, and got to the point where they started to open girls schools and medical clinics in Kibera, the slum of Nairobi. And got to the point where effectively the organisation that resulted, which is called SHOFCO, Shining Hope for communities, was responsible for supporting something like 2.5 million people through the pandemic. And Kennedy was then invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos to share his ideas and learning. And he got there and he said, we don't need a World Economic Forum, we need a World Communities forum and I'm going to start one. He held an online conference to bring together people working with similar ideas of kind of community led development, locally led development, from all over the Global South, which has now birthed a network organisation called the Global Alliance for Communities that is attracting some pretty serious energy and power. And Ken, it's worth looking up what he's up to at the moment, his voice in Kenya and the current context in the aftermath of a pretty serious environmental crisis, the floods and so on in Kenya, is growing. And I think it will be a very interesting year for Kennedy Odede.
Manda: And I think one of the things that I found interesting, his whole story is fascinating, but there was a point where he was offered more money than he'd ever seen in order to fix an election, and he turned it down. And that told us a lot. First of all, about his integrity and second, about the fact that the ruling, the establishment, which has a lot of money is still interested, it was at that point still interested in fixing elections. So yeah, I found that fascinating on every level. And you said energy and power is coalescing around him. And you said earlier you thought that the acupuncture points could work. And your book details so many really, really good people who are creating communities of place and purpose and passion that are affecting change. What they're not doing is reaching the level of the legacy media narrative that seems to still shape within people what is possible. Which doesn't mean to say their change isn't happening. And yet you said earlier you felt that we'd lost and that now we were an insurgent resistance, more or less. First of all, did I frame that right? And second, just tell us where you think we are now and what we can do.
Jon: So first of all, I still believe that this citizen story, this citizen logic, firstly I think it's the deepest truth of who we are as humans, and I think it will always express. I think it's growing and spreading across the world and in pretty much every community I go to. One of the things I did when the book first came out is I created a page on my website that said, invite me and I will come.
Manda: Wow, that was brave.
Jon: I'm a bit more extrovert than you, I think Manda.
Manda: That's not hard, guys.
Jon: The joy of the last three years has basically been being invited into places and spaces across the world, actually, and seeing the truth that this is everywhere. But as you say, is not visible through the eyes of a media narrative, actually a worldview that is rooted in the idea that people are consumers and that political agency equals choosing between a fixed set of options every now and then. And that these stories end up through that worldview only being visible as sort of cute exceptions rather than as an emergent new rule.
Manda: Right.
Jon: And I think that in this moment in time, that is actually probably a good thing. Because if this were visible as a direct competitor to the to this now dominant logic, it would likely be crushed. Whereas as it connects and weaves as a kind of mycelial phenomenon, rather than as a political movement on the terms that those people would recognise, it has a chance of developing real strength.
Manda: Okay. All right. We're completely aligned with this. So let's see where we get to. What are you seeing that feels like it's joining the dots. Because it seems to me if people like Ken and the other people that you mentioned are all doing little individual things, that's okay, but what we need is a global movement. What we need is a global narrative shift. What we need is a sense of potential that has the capacity then to create a different systemic narrative. Are you seeing this happening? First of all, do you agree this is the thing? And second, what are you seeing that gives you hope on this?
Jon: I think the way I would describe it is that the potential is now very present. I haven't yet seen the intervention that I think will connect it up, but I think moments are huge in this. And I have a few ideas and I'm spotting a few things that I think could be it. So when I talk about moments, one of the things I'm tracking is some work around the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the United States in 2026. And the possible reclamation of a narrative of interdependence as opposed to independence in the context of that moment. I'm very interested in the work around bioregions, that's started to find itself globally. And right now for myself personally and my work, I'm particularly interested in what I'm picking up as a movement of what I would call people's charters. And so just to put this in context a little bit, I think when major moments of democratic and evolution have happened through our history they have often been first expressed and brought into being through some kind of charter. So whether that's Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence or the great Law of Peace in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. They're not quite constitutions, they're more kind of statements of direction that precede constitutions. In Poland in the aftermath of the election campaign, which turned back the far right in Poland at the end of 2023...
Manda: Okay, you told me about this offline ages ago. Actually, can you just outline for people what happened there? Because I think fomenting political resistance, you know, the kind of holding actions that Joanna Macy talks about, is as important as the systems change and the shifting consciousness, and that this was a really radical holding action that worked.
Jon: So if I may, I'll expand a little bit, because I think there were two elections at the end of 2023 that actually were archetypes in a way, and they were within a couple of weeks of each other. One was the Argentinian election, where the people of Argentina ended up with a choice in a presidential runoff between Sergio Massa, who was the finance minister in the Peronist government that had essentially led the country into hyperinflation and recession and was totally, totally unconvincing as someone who could solve the challenges facing that nation. Or Javier Milei, who's nickname is El Loco, the madman. He was Musk's first adoptee. He brought a chainsaw to an election rally, saying, I will take this to government if you elect me, and has done. And when you offer people a binary choice like that, which I would argue is the direction that pretty much all systems that I would call consumer democracies, where agency is limited to a choice between a fixed set of options are going, then that is what you end up with. And obviously they chose Milei. And Milei has been the practice ground for for Trump in many ways.
Manda: And where has he gone with that? The chainsaw of democracy, where has he taken them?
Jon: Ripping apart public sector, welfare state protections. Ripping apart environmental protections. Kerbing inflation wonderfully. And so, being the sort of poster child in many ways. So these narratives can be told as success in the first few years. And this is part of my warning on Trump and so on, that there will be ways for media narratives of success to emerge in the first while, that will invite many people to come in behind them. But the deeper protections, the underlying system, it's all part of the kind of techno optimist manifesto, race to keep us ahead of nature. As if it were a kind of competition between us and it. So that that is what has hold there now.
Jon: In Poland, the pretty far right, but not extreme, were in power; the Law and Justice party. It looked like the default outcome of that election would be that they would end up in coalition with the actual far right, a party called The Confederation.
Manda: And was it another binary choice in that election, or did they have a more of a multiplicity?
Jon: You were looking at a hard right coalition or a centrist coalition. So it's the same choice, really, slightly better. What happened, though, was that young activists, young women mainly, organised, came together. I think 12 civil society organisations pooled resources and pooled energy to create a series of campaigns and interventions. There was some phenomenal communication in there.
Manda: Can you tell us about the video that went viral? Because that was really interesting.
Jon: So the video that went viral was in the last few weeks of the campaign, they produced a film that had vignettes, like scenes, where an individual woman was standing with a finger to her lips, silencing herself. And the background audio is far right politicians, real footage, like captured audio of the governing party and the hard right coalition partner to be, politicians from those parties, saying things like the woman is between a man and a child. And talking about Poland's coal. And the moment that the film flips is the audio fizzles out and the first woman who is in picture at that point in time rotates her finger, to reveal that it's not her index finger, it is her middle finger that has been silencing her. So she rotates from silence to giving 'the finger'. And then all of the other women do the do the same, and it becomes a kind of you pan out to sort of mass movement of women holding that finger to their lips. And this became a kind of viral gesture across the country.
Manda: It was something people could do, passing in the street, to show solidarity.
Jon: An embodied action.
Manda: And very hard to crush.
Jon: Right. And one among many net results was that voter turnout among young women went up spectacularly. I won't get the numbers right off the top of my head, but it was something like 50% turnout to 75% turnout among a key demographics, that was actually the difference. And the critical thing is, and I agree with you in the importance of holding actions and Joanna Macy's work, and it's insufficient.
Manda: Yeah. Of course. No I don't think anyone's pretending. But you need some holding actions or they roll over the top.
Jon: They have not stopped there.
Manda: Okay.
Jon: And this is the point I'm making. That group is now moving themselves into a space of creating the space for the politics in that country to move into, not simply accepting the terms of it. The process of doing that is popping up in the UK as well. There's communities starting to starting to work with these ideas. I'm connected into a few of them. I think this is work that actually, as it weaves, is some of the work I'm most excited about.
Manda: Okay. And I really want to go down. Let's go down there. But just one question: was the Polish election paper based or electronic?
Jon: I don't know, I'm afraid.
Manda: Okay. I am guessing paper based. Because what we've learned from the States is if you have electronic elections, they now know how they can tweak those. Paper based, where you have actual evidential, you either have to do what Kennedy was asked to do and stuff ballot boxes with fake papers, which is harder and more obviously seen, and what Putin does in Russia. Or the election is capable of moving in a way that the right doesn't want. Electronic elections, I think are wholly lost now, but paper based elections might not be.
Jon: Again, I contest a little bit. Like I think there's a risk of us ascribing too much. The fact is in the US that the story was lost.
Manda: I think there's a reasonable reasonable doubt the woman who ran Biden's cybersecurity for 2020 published an open letter saying you need to do a hand count, and that hand count didn't happen. And I think had the hand count happened, there's some very interesting studies. There's subreddits that take quite a lot of digging into, but there's some people doing some really interesting stats on stuff. And then Trump said at the inauguration that Musk is really clever and he knows how to work computers. And we won Pennsylvania stonkingly, which they did, and I don't think they had lost the narrative as much as the narrative that we have been told now tells us they had.
Jon: We may have to agree to disagree.
Manda: We may have to disagree. And it's too late now. They've got the silent, the peaceful, whatever, bloodless coup has happened. So we are where we are, but I think leaning into paper based elections is really important. Okay. So we are where we are. I would really like to know more about the charters. What do they say? What are they offering people? What's the narrative? And what's the agency they give people and what what can people listening do to begin to be part of this insurgent movement?
Jon: The reason why I contest a little bit is because I think there's a victim complex that we can step into that can be unhelpful. And I think claiming our agency and stepping into that space is what's needed in this time. And I guess that work of, the story in the research for the book that I think that most excited me and that I've learned most from, and I know You love as well, is the story of the transformation of the Taiwanese government and the role that Audrey Tang took.
Manda: Yes. Audrey Tang. Yes, yes.
Jon: If anyone listening to this hasn't also listened to Manda's conversation with Audrey, then I would encourage you to do so and maybe pause this and then come back.
Manda: So we don't have to say it all. Yes. Good thought.
Jon: But the heart of that work was Audrey describes demonstration over protest; the work not simply of reacting to the existing dominant power, but of creating space and possibility elsewhere. So in Taiwan, the gov-zero movement, creating parallel websites to the government websites with URLs ending g0v.tw, that's a lovely encapsulation of this work.
Manda: Forking the government. Yes!
Jon: This work of charter crowdsourcing is emergent, by which I mean nascent. The 'what's' that would be in it are obviously things like citizens assemblies, they're sort of open policy making processes. I, I wrote a whole thing with an organisation called the Apolitical Foundation, charting the emergence of participatory democracy processes all over the world. Legislative theatre, participatory budgeting, all of this kind of thing is part of it. But what I would emphasise in this conversation is the process rather than the outputs.
Manda: We're finding chinks in our togetherness, but I think they're really interesting and really fertile. Because I would say I was devastated that Kamala Harris did not win. But I am looking at it, the system is not fit for purpose and she would have maintained the system. In Ginie Servant-Miklos's amazing book called Pedagogies of Collapse, she says what we're given is the binary between a neoliberal establishment that waves pride, flags and has a Black Lives Matter badge, or the one that now is waving swastikas. But they were still both integral to the old consumer based system, and we needed that system to break. And the chainsaw wielding locos are breaking the system, and it's pretty horrible, but at least it then gives us the space to do something different which otherwise would not have happened. So whatever our framing of how the election was won, in the broader view of the continuation of complex life on Earth, we needed the system to break. And my bottom line is continuation of complex life on Earth. I am in favour of that. And how do we make it happen? And so given that that's where we are, it seems to me that the continuation of complex life hinges on a shift in values, and that citizenship inherently has a different value base.
Manda: It trusts people. We give trust to gain trust. Audrey's really big central thesis. We allow the innate creativity of humanity to emerge. And we accept that more people together solve problems better than few. There was a brilliant bit in John Vervaeke talking to Nate Hagens recently, where he cited a paper and he didn't name it, but he said there was work done where you give a student the test that you give them in North America, I don't remember what it's called, and they get a certain amount. You put four of them together and encourage them to work together and give them the tools for collective working, and they go from a 20% pass rate to an 85% pass rate. And each of them got the 20%, and together they get 85%. An absolute concrete demonstration that people bringing their creativity together, it's greater than the sum of the parts. And so that seems to me integral to the values shift that moving into citizenship entails. I would add that we also need to be listening to the web of life, which isn't necessarily integral to your view of citizenship. But what are the values that you see underpinning citizenship? I guess, is where I'm going. And are they emerging in these charters?
Jon: I think you've described them very well. But there's an interesting thing about, declaring it to your audience is fine, about the role I play and can play in this moment in time. Because of who I am and the body I live in and the life I've lived thus far, because I was in the advertising industry, because I'm six foot white, male, athletic.
Manda: Full of energy and extrovert.
Jon: Full of energy and extrovert. There are places I can go and be invited into that many can't. And walking into those places, and inviting those I go and see in those places into into a depth, and bringing people with me into those places, I think is the dance of my life. And so, in some ways, bringing all that with me totally on the surface, I don't think is necessarily helpful, but a lot of it is there.
Manda: Okay. Can you unpick that slightly? What do you need to keep hidden to cope in the places that you can go because of your tall, white, athletic male state?
Jon: I guess my belief in indigenous wisdoms, the depth of my deep commitment to the more than human world. One of my favourite reviews of the book, probably my favourite review of the book was a man called Stephen Green. I mean, he's a hilarious human being, for a start. Had spent far too much time in the music scene in America in his formative years. He wrote something like: society's like an out of control house party, and they're going to burn the house down. But out in the garden there's a campfire, and people are figuring out what the new house is going to look like. And Jon's sat around that campfire, but he's the one who sometimes goes back to the house. And I think that that role, I like that description. I find that powerful. I think the ability to invite people out of their house and to join the campfire rather than to solely kind of construct, is I think a role and a gift that I can play.
Manda: Right. Yes. Okay. And this takes us back to earlier in the conversation and this concept that almost everybody is trying to do their best and sees themselves as wanting to be useful. Not everyone has kids and grandkids, but they want to leave something to future generations. They want to be good ancestors, in Audrey's terms good enough ancestors, but they don't see how to do it. And I guess what you do is you get in there in a way that doesn't trigger innate defences over which they have no conscious cerebral control, really, and offer them pathways through. Is that fair?
Jon: Yeah, and I love them, right? A lot of these people I mean it like in individual terms, they are friends who are trapped in this self-hatred complex. I worry for them. And another way of looking at this, one of the most powerful emotional experiences in the research for the book, was I went a little way into the QAnon conspiracy theory world.
Manda: Wow.
Jon: To try and understand it. And the gateway into that world is here's your first task. We need you here. Here's how you can contribute.
Manda: Yes, yes. We're not going to give you all the answers. You worked it out and you're amazing and we need you.
Jon: To a group of people who have been told that they are surplus to requirements, largely. Implicitly, but they are costs to the system. They are people who need rather than people who contribute.
Manda: Right.
Jon: And very deeply, looking to the right as well as to the marginalised, I genuinely start from a belief that humans want to be useful and kind. And I think if we can come from there,and maybe this is a step too far, but even looking at Musk. Like this guy, he's got serious daddy issues and serious trauma from his relationship with his child as well. And that is what is being acted out on the world. But when we see that as action from sort of universal power and deliberate evil, I think we miss the deeper sophistication that we need to have, and I think Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed would argue that creating that story of Musk is to take away his vulnerability, and it's us who are doing that. We're removing our own ability to see his vulnerability.
Manda: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Jon: A friend of mine, a woman called Claire York, I really love her work. She's a professor of war studies in Australia. And Claire talks about strategic empathy, by which she means not being the sense of finding a way to love, but understanding what is the story that these people are acting from? What is their belief about what's good? Because I'm in some very interesting conversations with some of the most influential crypto bros in the world at the moment. And what I'm trying to do is understand how they think they're being good.
Manda: Right. Yes. And this goes back to street epistemology and all of the ways of of connecting and is the framing of the trauma culture and the initiation culture. It's another binary. But we've got 10,000 years of separation from the web of life leading to unhealed trauma that goes back many, many, many generations. And people are acting in the best way they know how to try and heal the wounds inside. And what happens if each of us is able to heal those frozen parts and let them thaw? Within ourselves, between each other and between ourselves and the more than human world. And that's an open question, but I think it has to happen. And you're absolutely right, it does come from a place of understanding and empathy. And within the therapeutic world, there's sympathy as 'I see your pain', empathy is 'I feel your pain and I want to fix it'; and compassion is 'you're perfect exactly as you are. And and I will do my absolute utmost to hold you in compassion'.
Manda: And doing the seven generations meditation, where we go back to we were hydrogen boiling in the sun and back before that and back before that, and back to the moment of potential before the Big Bang. And realise every single one of us alive today is the result of ancestors who survived long enough to have children who survived long enough to have children. The odds against us being here are astronomically high. We are all total miracles of evolution. And what happens if we see every single person we meet as a miracle of evolution who has got something to offer to the web of life? If they were just able to stand into their power and offer it. And that framing for me, with all of the rhetoric that I have of of binaries, which keys into my own trauma, that rhetoric of we are all utter miracles and the web of life is waiting for each of us to step into our place as self conscious nodes; and ask, what do you want of me? And respond to the answer. And we're all trying to do that, we just haven't been given the tools. And I'm wondering, first of all, how does that land and how does it mesh with what you're seeing?
Jon: It lands powerfully. And I think in a way, maybe some of the part that I play is trying to have that view, even facing into those who who are powerful.
Manda: Like the crypto bros. Huge power.
Jon: And maybe I want to compliment it and just lighten the tone a little bit with my favourite recent reference, which is Tyson Yunkaporta, who I love deeply, was telling me about the creation story, the dreaming story of Tiddalik the frog.
Manda: It's in his book, but tell it anyway. Go for it. Yes.
Jon: So Tiddalik the frog drinks all of the water in the landscape, the rivers and the ponds and the oceans. So all of the animals are dying of thirst, and they try to find ways to get Tiddalik to release the water. And nothing works. Like shouting at him and pestering him and asking him nicely. And then they make him laugh and in fits of laughter he releases all of the water.
Manda: Fantastic.
Jon: And I think there's something in that as well, as we do this. A friend of mine in the US talks about off ramps; you allow and invite people to step in. And I think that's in a way, what I'm describing with this thing of going from the campfire to the house, right? And I think that's a huge part of the work right now and maybe that comes back to this thing of like, if we acknowledge that we have lost, as it were.
Manda: Is that a useful frame, do you think?
Jon: I think it can be because it stops us trying to defend something.
Manda: And it doesn't give us victim status? It feels to me like it's the other flip of the... It's a binary win-lose. Could we not say the system is clearly not fit for purpose, and it is breaking apart and trying to protect and defend the old system is not working anymore.
Jon: Maybe so, yeah.
Manda: That doesn't necessarily frame us as losing? I don't know. This is an open question. I don't have an answer to that.
Jon: I think that's right. To the extent that I think the framing of we have lost is helpful, it's that the idea that a Labour government will fix it for us, or a Democrat government will fix it for us just has to be allowed to drop.
Manda: Yes, totally.
Jon: And there is therefore organising and building and creating to be done by all of us, not simply voting.
Manda: So the cracks are happening where the light gets in. So for me, the very exciting thing just now is that we can abandon any belief that the old system was functional. You know, the old system does what the system is designed to do, which is to perpetuate the system, but that was taking us over the edge of the cliff. I came to this in 2017, when Corbyn was so completely not allowed to win an election that would have done minor, minor, you know, not even got us to the level of where Sweden was at that point. But no, that's not going to happen because the establishment is going to defend. And the establishment ran well into the Labour Party and still does. Old politics is not going to get us where we need to go. And I think Audrey's great understanding was that the whole governance system is not fit for purpose, but that it's changeable by peaceful means. Let's not necessarily take that rabbit hole. I'm really interested in how you're building off ramps, because it seems to me that the off ramps now, it's not just that you need to get off the treadwheel. And everybody knows we weren't born to pay bills and die, but we don't know what we're born for.
Manda: Are you creating what I would see as thrutopian visions? Off ramps are the beginning of how we get from where we are to where we need to be. But for me, you need not just a sense of direction, you need motivation and agency. And the motivation is: the light at the end of the tunnel is a light I want to reach. And it may be by the time I get halfway down the tunnel, there's a different light, but I'm at least seeing a vision of a future that isn't, let's say, just the Democrats winning and then everybody relaxes and we carry on bombing the fuck out of Gaza and, you know, cutting Nord Stream pipelines and fracking the heck out of the US. Which is what would happen if the Democrats won. So what is the vision? What is the light you're offering at the end of the tunnel as well as the off ramp? Does that make sense as a framing?
Jon: Yeah. Look, I think the work of the campfire is the work of face to face, face to place. It's showing up in real life. It's committing to community, places you live and love, finding the others and building. And again, this is one of the reasons why I think that that sort of charter work can be very powerful, because the nature of it is a conversation that can be had in those contexts and at those levels, and then can network together. And it's why I spend a good bit of my time going to spend time with community organisations and offering them a way of seeing what they're doing in a wider context. I also think that the work of speaking into the institutions, and maybe actually this is where the frame of 'we have lost' is most powerful. Less actually to people in communities and more to those who are in the institutions. More to those who are in the civil service, who are in political parties. And the way I've started to describe it in, in my work in those spaces is: we're in a catch 22, right? I acknowledge that they feel they have to defend the existing institutions against the rise of fascism, the far right, but also point out to them that by defending those institutions which now are manifestly incapable of facing the challenges of our time, they are actually pushing people into the arms of fascism and the far right.
Manda: Right.
Jon: And the only way to rip that catch 22 is to open up the institutions. Remember, I'm saying there are kind of two audiences in a way.
Manda: Sure. But how do you see that happening and what does it look like? What does it feel like?
Jon: Well, I mean, the Taiwan story is a very powerful encapsulation of this. So there were two key things going on in that Taiwan story. You had the gov-zero movement kind of building and connecting and forming and showing the possibility. But then you also had the moment where Speaker Wang in the Sunflower Revolution endorsed the protest.
Manda: Right. But I can't see that really happening. I think forking the government is really exciting, because you create a parallel government. And we still theoretically and this is open to question, have government by consent. And if we were all, and this is what I was doing in Any Human Power, we all create a parallel government that is manifestly working better, which is what the gov-zero effort did way back. Then we could all just have a better governance system. But I am struggling to see, say Musk, fingering someone who's got gov-zero working, an Audrey Tang in a Western nation, and going, oh, that's a really good idea, come and reverse mentor me. I mean, I might be othering and binarying and stuff, but I'm not seeing that as a likely option. And therefore are we talking about extravagant holding actions within institutions? Or do you have a vision of the agency and the direction of where people inside these institutions could lead them, that they will be allowed to go?
Jon: So let me come back to Poland, the UK, these places. So in those sorts of contexts, I do believe that that there are Speaker Wangs still, who really are actually pretty desperate for an alternative to watching themselves be the people who hand over power to their iteration of Trump.
Manda: Okay. Yes. Okay.
Jon: And I think that is very meaningful work, therefore.
Manda: And we have a small space of time till the next election here, where technically we're still free to to create the gov-zero. And Poland, I don't know how often they have their elections, but they've got a space until the next one.
Jon: And in many geographically and geopolitically significant places, that's also true. The other thing I would say is, and to refer you to your own take on this; these people are trying to impose linear logic on complex systems, and therefore there will be moments of collapse and opening and possibility. If we are ready for those moments with something else to step into, then you have... So one of the one of the conversations I've been having using some of these ideas of crowdsourcing is charters is maybe one approach. Another might be to, to crowdsource disaster response strategies, so that communities have a disaster response strategy ready that they have co-created, and that when disaster strikes, because what is happening, of course, is that they're eroding all of the resilience in systems, then the community, having prepared its own resilience.
Manda: Can step into the breach.
Jon: May well be able to step into something and find its confidence and be able to see how badly they have been failed. And at that point, if there is a doubter or a state level in looking at the US, if there is someone at a state level, then there are openings to be made and stepped into.
Manda: Governor Newsom springs to mind. But yes. So here's the thing. I haven't planned this, but I've been putting in applications for grants in the last couple of weeks. And one of them was to do R&D for a feature film. And part of my R&D idea was that we would convene, particularly this had to be in Wales, so we're looking at the Wye, of which the headquarters are in Wales. And there are communities that are riven with quite carefully curated, I would say, structural chasms, where the people who want the chicken farms not to be tipping everything into river against the farmers who have the chicken farms. And the people who do ceremony and evoke the spirit of the Wye, are hated by the scientists. They hate each other passionately. And I thought maybe we could do Tang style AI facilitated community groups, online, you don't have to actually meet in face, you don't have to poke each other's eyes out. But where you are given the task as a group, you're not here to just talk your talking points or tell each other why you hate each other.
Manda: You're given what really matters to all of you. Can you coalesce around five, a series of five problems? And can we give you a problem that another group thinks is at the top of their list and what would you do to solve it? So you're bringing people together, trusting them to be creative, even in spite of the tensions that have riven them, which was my understanding of what Audrey Tang was doing in Taiwan. Can we do that? Can we do it on camera? And can we put that into a feature film that blends fact with fiction, and can we scale it? First of all, do you think this will work? Basically I'm asking you to help me do my research. But second, is that anything like the kind of thing that is happening? Because I could see that narrative taking off. Look, we hated each other, actually we found friendship in the solving of joint problems. And now we're bringing those joint problems to the world that we live in and we're not having to scream at each other across chasms from our woundedness. Am I making sense?
Jon: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's completely possible. And I think it also depends on some really smart face to face facilitation conversation elements within that, that could also be wonderfully cinematic. So something like Polis, which is the tool that sits at the heart of a lot of that work, I would argue is best used in two phases. And what it does is it helps in an initial phase where if you ask people what matters to them, what they believe, it's an incredibly powerful mapping tool. So you can see where people cannot agree. And in a way, I think that's something that we currently try and repress and ignore. So the famous case study from the sort of origins of this work in Taiwan is they're crowdsourcing their regulatory framework for Uber. So the first step of this is you get Uber drivers and passengers and taxi drivers and civil servants to put statements in about Uber. And what I'm referring to is that first output is essentially a map that goes, well, you guys are never going to agree, right? Like you've got these four very different groups who hold very sort of opposed beliefs, but the act of showing people that map as if you are the kind of problem holder who's trying to go, I need to come up with something here.
Jon: And the vulnerability of that is an incredibly powerful step. And then to say if we want to all still live in Taipei, we're probably going to have to do something. And then holding that with them. And to my mind and in the facilitation I've done, I've introduced things like spectrum line work, where you say, well, okay, if there's this statement that a load of you really feel passionately in favour of and, but you guys completely disagree with, let's line out. Ten is complete agreement over there, one is complete disagreement over there. Stand where you are on that 1 to 10 scale and let's hear some soundings from you, like why are you standing there? And let's see if we can find, through that hearing and that witnessing, ways that we could articulate statements that could actually get us all to a positive place. But I do believe that that you're going to need some face to face in that as well.
Manda: Okay. That's interesting. I'll take that and and we'll run with it. Alrighty. So we're heading over time as ever. Half of us are in the UK, half are in the rest of the world, of whom half of the other half are North America. Estonia. Large places around the world where we have a number of listeners. Anyone listening, if we accept that the current system is breaking apart and we would like something new to grow, the light to shine through the cracks. What kinds of things can people be doing do you think, that gives them a feeling of agency and connection and motivation and direction?
Jon: The latest deepening of this situation is pretty new for all of us, and I wouldn't pretend that I've got perfect answers to this. I'm one voice and one participant in this moment as well. But there are a few strands that I would offer. The first is I'm working with a group of people to build what we're calling Citizen Collective, as an online community that exists to connect up and help people who are doing the sort of face to face, face to place work. To learn from one from one another, to feel like they're part of something, to know that they are part of something bigger and broader. So Citizen Collective is there. The best way to access that at the moment, because it's very early, is is through my personal mailing list, which you can sign up to on my website, jonalexander.net. There will be many more places to access that. It's not all about me, I promise. But it's very early days.
Jon: The second thing I would say for people in the UK, again, a nascent thing, but the Our House campaign, which you can find if you Google our house and people's charters, you'll find the various strands of that. Very early days, but this work of charter crowdsourcing in the UK is being led through this initiative called Our House. And then the final thing I would say for now, and maybe the most important thing actually, is turn to the local. The counter movement, the insurgency that we've referred to once or twice, I deeply believe is face to face, face to place. And so where you are, the place you live and love. Look around, there will be stuff happening. There will be people who are organising and expressing themselves, whether that's local food, community energy, anything. A community garden. There will be people finding ways to do this because this instinct, this urge, the the understanding, even if we haven't all kind of named it and articulated yet, is in all of us. And so look around, find it, join in, join up with it. And if it isn't there at all, then put the bat signal up and see who else is feeling it. Because there will definitely be others who are feeling it and feeling feeling lost. And that's where it begins. Find the others.
Manda: Find the others. That could be the title of the podcast. Excellent. And I will find as many of those as I can and put them in the show notes. Also following you on LinkedIn this morning, you had linked to some people who were talking about citizens assemblies for governance of AI, and following the threads on that, I found that the Brazilians are looking at the concept of a global citizens assembly. Yes! And that they're looking for people to set up regional citizens assemblies all around the world. And wouldn't it be amazing to set up at whatever scale works for you in your local area, a citizen's assembly? I think that would begin to be the forking of the government. We have a group of local people, even a people's assembly, which is slightly different because citizens assemblies are technically selected by lottery as juries are, but with very careful views to demographics, whereas the People's Assembly is basically whoever turns up and wants to be part of it. Which means it's a self-selecting group of people who are already in a particular space, but at least they're there. Citizens assemblies can be quite be quite expensive just because of the nature of gathering the voter rolls and working stuff out. Whereas the People's Assembly, I know there's one local to us here, organised by Up Sewage Creek, which are the people trying to stop the the complete annihilation of the Severn. But they've got people across a really broad political spectrum gathered and coalesced around we want our river to be clean. Clean water, clean air, clean soil, clean connections. And and it's working so brilliantly. Yes, I hear you. Get together with the people local to you who care and see what matters most and make it happen.
Jon: Because once we start to find that agency, maybe as a last thing, another Stephen Green ism, he's cropped up a couple of times in this conversation. Stephen had this, citizenship is a muscle you build, not a cup you empty. Right? And so the beginning point of this.
Manda: Oh, I love that.
Jon: Find the others. Do something together. And I don't mean to be dismissive in any way, but it is the spirit of demonstration over protest. Not just what are you angry about, but what can you start to do? Because it's going to require us doing and connecting up our doing in order to create something that's an alternative, rather than just to complain about what is actually already broken.
Manda: Yeah. Which which is not going to achieve anything except get your face on somebody's file so that they can look you up when they feel like it. Yes, building stuff that works rather than complaining that the old stuff doesn't work, seems to me absolutely, this is the year where that's where... We've got limited bandwidth, limited energy. Some of us have more limited energy than others, but we still have to make a better world happen. And waiting for other people to do it, I think is is obviously not going to happen. But what we can do is connect up the people who are making it happen so that we know we're not alone. A sense of solidarity around the globe. I genuinely believe there are more people who want the continuation of complex life in a way that is compassionate and connected and coherent and courageous, than the people who want to turn us into serfs and subjects.
Jon: We may have disagreed on a few things, but I'm 100% with you on that one.
Manda: Yes, I think the rest is nuance of semantics, to be perfectly honest, I think we're coming from pretty much the same place. But thank you. Jon this has been amazing. Is there any last thing? I'm going to put all in the show notes, all the links to the things that you said. You're going to send me a link to Stephen so that we know where he is, because he's clearly a fun guy. Is there anything else that you wanted to say at this moment of total dissolution of the old system?
Jon: I think just to underline this is is a time now for building, not to spend too much time staring at what's falling apart and what's breaking, but to stare at what's wanting to be built. To feed that with our attention and our energy.
Manda: Brilliant. And because I can say it because I'm not a six foot straight white man; if we keep asking the web of life what it wants, the help is there. The synchronicities begin to stack up. I think that whatever is out there is really desperate for us to ask, and that offers connection also. And that it's less tangible doesn't mean we can't and mustn't do the work of connecting. But it offers us a sense of knowing that our citadel minds are not citadels, that our minds are porous, and that there are energies awake and aware that our other culture, our old culture, didn't allow us to see and hear.
Jon: From Citadel mind to citizen mind.
Manda: Yes! Thank you so much for this. It's been such a joy to talk to you. I hope there are many more conversations. Thank you.
Manda: There we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jon for all that he is and does. For bringing his understanding of his own privilege to let him open doors into places that those of us who determinedly sit around the campfire would never get to go. And yet he goes in there with the narratives that work, offering people off ramps out of the things that they already know are not working, but they don't have the scope or the vision to see where else they might go. This is how we dismantle the old system. This is how, in the words of Buckminster Fuller, we create the new system that makes the old system obsolete. This is how we get to total systemic change. So thank you, Jon, really, for being so heartful, for being so full of genuine possibility and optimism and joy and all of the things that go with it. Please, all of you listening, do go and join the Citizen Collective. If you can listen to the online work, then please do. Connecting ourselves to each other. Building those mycelial networks that massively outnumber the people who want us to be obedient servants by orders of magnitude. There are more of us, but we need to connect to each other and begin to build the narratives of change that will work, that give people a sense of vision, motivation, of a place they want to get to, and a sense that they too have agency and empowerment actually to get there.
Manda: So please, the old system is gone now. It is breaking apart in front of us in real time. What can each of us do to help build something new? How can we all be the light that shines through the cracks? So there we go. That's it for this week. We'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot and for this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the lengthy conversations about who we are and where we're going, and for the website and the tech. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how we can be part of the change that needs to happen and that is happening, then please do send them this link. And as ever, like us, subscribe, give us a review - it really helps. The algorithms are not necessarily all bad yet. So let's go for it. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.