Episode 50 - New Logic for a Better World

As Peter Drucker so aptly stated in his book "Managing in Turbulent Times," the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself but acting with yesterday's logic. In this episode of "Reimagining Our World," I will highlight and explore 10 new ways of thinking proposed by Stephen Heintz in his report "A Logic for the Future," that should be included as foundational assumptions upon which to build a better world.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. We all know that our world is falling apart at the seams and that the processes of disintegration are accelerating from day to day. It is clear to many of us that the world needs a new logic upon which it builds a better world. The old ways of thinking and perceiving and understanding our reality no longer serve us. So we need a new logic, a new way of thinking. In this episode, I'd like to share with you some highlights from a document entitled A Logic for the Future by the President and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Stephen Heintz. I was very excited when I discovered this document, because it demonstrated that there are people out in the world who have new ways of thinking that are fit for purpose for this 21st century and for the challenges that face us. It's heartening, it gives us hope, and it helps us reimagine the possibilities for this new better world that we want to build. I want to start with a quotation from Mr. Heintz, in which he says "The old order is dying and a new order is demanding to be born." This is so true. This is definitely what I believe and what many of these episodes in the series Re-imagining Our World have focused on. How the old ways of doing things are not working and how we can replace them with new ways, both of thinking and acting, new habits. Mr. Heinz says that the fact that the old order is dying out simply means that there is now an opportunity before us for inspiration and invention. In other words, we need to activate our powers of creativity and imagination in order to come up with a better system for governing our world. There's a very interesting quotation from Peter Drucker, an Austrian American management consultant, educator and author. He says this in a book. He wrote that the greatest dangers in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself. Rather it is acting with yesterday's logic. What do we mean by yesterday's logic? It means the old set of assumptions that underlie and underpin the systems we have built and all of our thinking. So let's move on. I want to get straight to ten new ways of thinking that have been presented to us by Steven Heinz in his document, A Logic for the Future, and you can see and judge for yourselves what you think. Okay. The first old assumption that needs to be replaced is that of great power dominance. He says, we need to replace it with an idea of collaborative or pooled or shared global leadership. Wow. This is an amazing statement. Straight off the bat. So essentially what he is proposing is that we shift our mindsets and assumptions from the idea of great power dominance, which he points out has been rejected by the global majority, to the idea of a multi-nodal power. So the shift from what we knew as unipolar power at the end of the Cold War, to what is the reality of today, which is multi-nodal power. He says that the age of turbulence and the challenges of the 21st century essentially demand a new, more equitable distribution of power. He says, we therefore need new international, planetary bodies responsible for managing planetary challenges. In other words, we need to craft a new collective system of governance. Now note how this tracks with several conversations we've had over several episodes, particularly episodes 9, 10, 11, and 15, for those of you who want to go back and take a listen, in which we proposed an entire framework to accomplish this, including the creation of a World Parliament, a collective decision making legislative body. In other words, a world executive and a massively reformed international court of justice. So the time has essentially come to move to a system, a model of collective governance, collaboration, and collective decision making. At the same time as he proposes basically the supernational approach to governance, he also proposes devolving sovereignty to smaller units within nations, a concept known as subsidiarity. In other words, he says that within nations we should think about moving decision making from centralized sovereignty, the central government to subnational levels of governance to the extent possible, in other words, to cities, to states and provinces. And the reason he gives is that by 2030, according to the UN estimates, one third of the world's people will live in cities with populations of 500,000 or more. And then he also suggests formalizing the connections between these subnational governments and the international system, so creating a balance. In order for this to be done well. He says that leaders have to develop the capacity for honest and courageous reflection, which is something that we really don't see very often. And once they do that, they can then also harness their imagination and free will in order to come up with these new systems. And in fact, he says that the creation of the United Nations itself was an act of imagination. And that since then, leaders seem to be suffering from a failure of creativity and imagination to keep up with the needs of the time and create institutions and processes and ways of thinking that are fit for purpose for the challenges of our times. The second assumption we need to dispose of is that of nationalism and adhering to nationalistic interests and making them the primary interests in any decision making. And he says, we need to replace that with an assumption that what is good for the world is good for our nation. Now, he's writing in the United States, and he's definitely talking to America and the American nation, but it applies equally to all nations. He says that if we in America and other nations pursue national interests with an understanding that in an interdependent world our well-being is directly tied to peaceful and prosperous conditions elsewhere and to the fate of the planet, then we'll be better off. And he also says that our national goals can only be achieved in concert with others and by forging common ground to generate collective benefits. And he ends this segment of this document with the statement, which I found very interesting that we need to get to the point where we understand that America's role in the world is based on the premise that what is good for the world is good for us. We've talked about this, again, a lot in these episodes: the idea that in an interconnected world, the good of the part, i.e., any one nation can only be insured by guaranteeing the good of the whole. And we gave many analogies, including the analogy of the human body, where any single organ cannot ensure its own health unless the entire body system is healthy. Or that of cabins on a ship where each cabin may be very run very well internally, but if there's no captain or crew minding the helm of the ship, then in times of turbulence and storm the ship is in danger of sinking. Right on to the third assumption. He says, we have to identify and agree upon a set of shared values and principles. Now, this is something that we have spoken about at length. And he proposes that we start with the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We've talked a lot in our episodes, again, for those of you who want to look, episode 35 lays this out very well with the idea that we first need to identify a set of shared global ethics, then achieve consensus around them, and then apply them methodically to solving any given challenge. The fourth concept and new assumption that he introduces is this idea of replacing what he calls strategic narcissism with strategic empathy. I love both these terms. So strategic narcissism was a phrase that apparently arose in 1978 with a particular international relations theorist, and it's basically the inability to see beyond the narrow viewpoint of one's own national experience, perceptions and self-interest. And he suggests that we replace this notion with the idea of strategic empathy, which encourages deep listening in relation with others and seeking a greater understanding of their views and needs, and investing, therefore less effort in persuasion. So remember we had a whole episode on consultation as a practical expression of justice. This is essentially what he's talking about. The idea, not of going into a conversation, trying to persuade the other person, but going into it in a spirit of openly offering one's views and opinions, and then detaching one's ego from them, and then through the clash of the opinions, rather than the egos, that the spark of truth is able to come forth. And so we then we don't find ourselves in a position of trying to persuade each other and talk over each other and dominate each other. The next idea he proposes is that we replace this notion we have that peace is merely an end to war, with the idea of a positive peace which is grounded in justice, and which he describes as the elimination of violence that stems from social injustice and systemic conditions like hunger, poverty, inequality, racism, patriarchy, and so on. And that we need to focus on conflict prevention, not just how to win a conflict, which is where we are right now, and we're seeing a plethora of conflicts. The system of our body, the human body is flaring up. Think of it as suffering from an autoimmune disease. We're flaring up in Ukraine, and we're flaring up in Gaza, and we're flaring up in Myanmar and the DRC and Yemen, and so on and so forth. The entire body is on fire essentially, and flaring up and it needs something to calm it down and to restore it to healing. So this, again, is in complete alignment with the views we articulated about justice being the driving force and the indispensable foundation for creating a peaceful world. Without justice, there can be no peace. And again, you can go back and find the episode that talks about that. Okay. The next idea that he posits is that we need to shift from the idea of a mutually assured destruction. Remember, this is what we were doing, especially during the Cold War, and we seem to be reverting to it. Like "if both sides have nuclear weapons, then neither side will use them, because if they do, then they know that both sides will destroy themselves and each other." So this idea of mad, and it really is mad, M-A-D, mutually assured destruction. So he suggests replacing it with an assumption of mutually assured survival. I would go a step further and suggest that we think in terms of mutually assured thriving. It's not enough anymore for us to just look to survive in this world, whether as individuals or nations. We can and must find ways of creating systems that ensure that we thrive. The next idea that he proposes is that we link national militaries. We replace national militaries with a global system of collective security. Now, you've heard me hold forth on this topic a lot. It's a topic very dear to my heart, and there are two episodes in particular that I would recommend and commend to you episodes 23 of this Reimagining our World Series and episode 30, which takes Ukraine as a case study and it demonstrates what a global system of collective security ought to or could look like, how we can attain it and what the benefits would be of it. What would be the benefits of constraining the number of arms that each nation can have to a certain amount to maintain order within their borders. And what would it look like to destroy the excess and then to set up a global system based on a global agreement of collective security that if one nation breaches this collective agreement, all the nations collectively would arise against it, having at their disposal an international standing police force. So all of these details and the steps we can take to get from here to there are laid out in those episodes that I referred you to. The next idea he talks about is shifting from the idea that our democracies have become fraudulent to the idea that our democracies are merely flawed. He says this is important, because democracy facilitates the identification of common ground and requires compromise. But it requires a lot of rehauling to be made more inclusive, more fully representative, more participatory, and more effective, so that it can assist us in creating a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world in this century. And he points to the danger that if we think that our democracies have become fraudulent, that we will then chuck them out. And he argues that an imperfect democracy is better than having no democracy at all, which is why he says a better premise, a better new assumption to build our thinking and actions off of is to say that yes, our democracy's flawed, acknowledge it, identify the weaknesses, and then seek to fix those. The next really big idea, which is very important, is his very candid assessment that the world needs a new global economic model, a change in our global economic model. Given who he is, the president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, he's somebody who knows a lot about this topic and somebody who it might be worth listening to. He argues that in pursuit of neoliberal economic policies, greed has been rewarded, and that this is dangerous and that the accumulation of material possessions is celebrated and he categorically denounces materialism as the answer. He says, materialism cannot be the answer, the solution to providing us with happiness or systems that work, a political economy that works. He says we need to move away from materialism and rewarding greed towards human and economic global well-being, so we need to create a new model. He also says, and I found this really interesting and wanted to share it with you, that we need to stop conflating materialism with democracy. And he offers an example of the kind of damage done to the idea of democracy in Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War when the West came in and offered capitalistic economy in the name of democracy. So Russians came to associate democracy with massive economic benefit. Except it turned out that was only true for a handful of people. The rest were not so well off, and so they concluded why would one want a democracy if we're not all going to be better off economically? So this conflation of the ideas of materialism and democracy really did us in. So he proposes that it's time to put our thinking caps on. And again, exercise creativity and an active imagination and in consultation with each other, come up with a new political economy. At least our leaders need to be doing this. The next big idea is that we need to have institutions, especially global ones, to ensure accountability and sustainability in the use of resources. Ensure their equitable distribution. So there's a clear need for the equitable management and distribution of critical resources like rare earth minerals, which we've been hearing about a lot, and the sharing of the global commons. And how is this done, again, on the basis of justice and fairness. We have talked again in these episodes a lot about a vision of a future in which a world global legislature, like a World Parliament, would act as the trustee of the world's resources and would ensure that they were exploited in a sustainable fashion and were properly distributed for the benefit of all. And there's a whole episode on an of the idea of the global commons and of how we can set up a supranational system for pooling the management of these resources. That's episode 34 for those of you who are interested. The last idea that I want to share with you is he says that ignoring the need for reform constitutes a greater failure than striving for reform and falling short. And he reminds us that history is replete with examples of hinge moments when change was thought improbable or even impossible, and then it happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall, many of us my generation remember that collapse of Soviet communism, Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. Another example of a visionary act was the Atlantic Charter that was conceived by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a ship off the coast of Newfoundland in 1941, boldly articulating a vision for a post-war world in which all people would live in freedom from fear and want, and in which all nations would eschew the use of force and work collectively to advance peace. And it was on the basis of the principles that they adumbrated that the United Nations came into being. I want to end with another quote from Steven Heinz, from this amazing document. He says, we need to act, now, exercise free will choice Again, one cannot emphasize this enough. We have free will choice. We need to exercise and harness imagination, creativity in order to do what? In order to ensure this is quoting Steve Heinz, "that the age of turbulence does not become the age of catastrophe." In other words that this ship that at the moment appears to be rudderless and lacking a captain and crew, to use the metaphor that we've used in a number of episodes, does not sink when it hits the iceberg in turbulent seas, or when those storms come and it gets tossed around and battered and buffeted around. So we need to act swiftly in order to bring the ship of humanity into safe port and safe harbor. All right, I hope that you all have enjoyed today's episode. Please feel free to give your comments on the YouTube channel, and I'd like to end by reminding you all that all of these episodes are now available on your favorite podcast platform. So if you prefer to listen while taking a walk or doing housework or driving, or doing something else, running errands, you can listen to these episodes on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, on Podbean, whatever your platform of choice is, and you can still also watch and listen to them on the CPGG Center for Peace and Global Governance YouTube channel. Please share it with your friends, and I look forward to seeing you back here again for the next episode. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful month. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.