Right now, in the second decade of the 21^st century, what Lionel Trilling referred to as “something like a mutation in human nature” is taking place. Now, after half a millennium of a broadly understood way of being in the world, we are having to deal with the fact, not just that some things are different but that, potentially, everything is different: the landscape and the disposition of everything within it is unfamiliar; the maps that up until recently helped us navigate our way around are out of date, useless.

Whatever happened?

Put simply, digital technology happened. Slowly at first, then in a blinding rush. Everything was okay, in the sense that it was comprehensible (which is not to say that things always ran smoothly – of course they didn’t) until the full impact of the digital revolution hit society. Then all bets were off.

One evidence of the lightning progress of digital tech is the image at the top. It’s an AI generated response to a brief description that I wrote about what I wanted to achieve. Ten seconds later … bingo! The copyright goes to Shutterstock. Is the image good? You’ll have your own opinion about that but one thing’s for sure, it is an impressive facility. But how does this resource impact the potential future for human photographers? Does the image itself represent a challenge to the very point I’m exploring?

Whoa! Hold on! I’ve dived in, haven’t I, without first explaining what I’m trying to do. My apologies. Let me first set the scene.

We’d probably all agree that the world is constantly changing. In all sorts of ways. And being an integral part of the whole scheme of things, we – homo sapiens, that is – are directly impacted by those changes and, indeed, are part of the change. That, in and of itself, is a key part of the complexity: it is particularly difficult for something to analyze a system when it is itself part of that system … and we sure are an integral part of the dynamic system I’m referring to. In fact, we undoubtedly do more than our own fair share of instigating change. After all, we’re a jolly creative bunch. You don’t, for example, get rabbits building airliners. But, arguably, we are sometimes too clever for our own good, and it’s technological developments, especially those that bear on the ways we communicate with one another, that seem to have a particular capacity to mess with our tiny minds.

There, that’s the topic I want to investigate – call it The Techno-Human Interface (THI for short).

On Trilling

Now let’s go back to where I started: what’s all this about Lionel Trilling and events half a millennium ago? Trilling was an American literary critic who, in 1970, delivered a series of lectures at Harvard University. Here’s how he launched into his topic:

Now and then it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue. 1

A little later, he made reference to a historical hinge point:

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, something like a mutation in human nature took place. 2

That’s the half-millennium-ago that I refer to. A key point is that it was associated with a specific technological development that happened just a little earlier – Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type. That was around 1440, but things really hotted up when, in 1455, the Gutenberg Bible appeared.

Picture the horrified alarm from those in power: “Hell’s bells! How can we maintain control if every Hinz und Kunz, every Tom, Dick and Harry, has access to the biblical message in their own language?”

It’s all, always, about Power and Control.

On McGilchrist …

We’ll come back to the technology factor but, before that, I’m going to ask you briefly to turn your attention to a really basic rule that helps govern how life develops. Yes, really! I have one particular rule in mind. It is, eat or be eaten. Let’s put that into context.

In 2010, British psychiatrist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, put forward the argument that left-brain thinking (which favours a focus on logic and detail and facts, and order and pattern, all in a rather two-dimensional way) has usurped its place as emissary to right-brain thinking (which favours a ‘big picture’, more complete and nuanced, multi-dimensional view of the world).

“So what?”, you may say.

Well, how about it being, arguably, a fundamental factor in the overall evolution of human society. I say that with reference to a founding challenge that McGilchrist states in his magnum opus, The Matter With Things (2021). It’s this: to survive and thrive, any and all living creatures need to eat while themselves avoiding being eaten. Getting food requires highly focused attention – think of a bird seeking out seeds on the ground – but, while that close attention mode is being deployed, there is the need somehow to also maintain a broader view of the surroundings lest a predator is stealthily closing in, intent upon turning the food-seeker itself into a tasty snack.

Thus, in order to gain a complete view of anything, there is the requirement to adopt two ways of seeing:

These two ways of seeing the world are each vital to our survival. We need to simplify and stand apart to manipulate things, to deal with the necessities of life, and to build the foundations of a civilisation. But to live in it, we also need to belong to the world and to understand the complexity of what it is we are dealing with. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both. However, it is a handicap – in fact, it is a catastrophe – when we use only one. 3

The question then, of course, is how best to achieve this objective in everyday life? Particularly at a time, as now, when developments in digital technology are enabling what French philosopher Bernard Stiegler termed denoetization (about which a little more later) to dominate as never before.

Anyway, you get the point: digital technology is absolutely amazing, it is providing the answers to some hitherto intractable challenges, and will continue so to do … BUT, are we – homo sapiens, that is – going to have better, happier, more fulfilling lives as a result? Which leads to the question, What’s the best outcome at the Techno-Human Interface?

Whatever the solution at the THI, one thing is surely certain, it really must take account of the human condition - our strengths and, crucially, our frailties – if we are to retain our sanity.

To investigate this context, it is useful briefly to revisit the McGilchrist challenge mentioned earlier. Is the ‘eat or be eaten’ challenge the fundamental challenge – or, at a minimum, a fundamental challenge – of continuing existence for life on Earth? It seems perfectly reasonable to me to suggest that the answer to that is YES!

Imagine that you are the intelligence (however you envisage it) behind whatever set up the experiment to test the resilience of life in a universe of the kind we inhabit. Surely, a startlingly simple yet reliable way to keep things, not only, moving forward, but rather to keep things moving forward in an ever-improving fashion, would be to implant the ‘eat or be eaten’ imperative as a basic tenet of evolution? As an ontological fundamental it is surely one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to ensure progressively ‘better’ outcomes, however ‘better’ might be assessed?

It does, of course, bring with it a corollary: the “eat or be eaten” law must inevitably mean that life will be a never-ending battle and, quite possibly, therefore, an extremely risky and dangerous one, BUT, over the long term, it must surely be the most certain way to encourage the fulfillment of the concept that Herbert Spencer described as “Survival of the fittest”.

And, for humans, there is an astonishingly simple way to test the sense of progress or otherwise in this struggle. I slipped it in just a few paragraphs ago: simply ask, “Are we moving forward? Do you think we are we moving forward?”

For those of us with language, this non-specific, generalized enquiry is one of the most basic tests of life, the universe and everything. There is no need to ask what the question means. What it seeks to establish is a felt sense – something that may arise and be based upon any number of conscious and subconscious triggers. What it will always do is help bring to the surface any concerns that people have regarding progress or regression in any part of their lives.

And it’s particularly important now, precisely because of the challenge with which I started. A big change is underway at the Techno-Human Interface and it’s not just about who holds the loudest microphone, but also about the nature of the medium carrying the message.

… on Stiegler and Buch …

Earlier, I also mentioned Bernard Stiegler and his concept of denoetization which refers to the fact that we humans have, and always have had, a very close relationship with, and reliance upon, technology – a category that includes any and all of the things we make and use because, in Stiegler’s terms, anything from a toothpick, to a cup, to a book, to an axe, to a power station, to a computer … they’re all technology. All of the things we make and use are, so to speak, prostheses. But, the more technology we create, the more reliant upon it we become, and the more potentially dehumanised we become in the process. That’s denoetization.

Dr Neville Buch writes extensively on this topic and one of the points he makes is that social media platforms carry Stiegler’s denoetization further than any medium before them: complex problems collapse into soundbite and binary opposition, and argument gives way to what he calls ‘transactional truth’ — where whether a claim is actually true matters less than whether it wins, in the moment, for whoever is making it. A public square built to reward persuasion over understanding will, over time, select for exactly the people and claims most willing to treat truth as disposable.

All of which is to say, we have a problem, and, if we do not raise our awareness and take steps, I think it reasonable to say that we can expect said problem to become ever more deeply embedded. Which takes us briefly into the world of function systems.

… plus Luhmann …

The problem with the left-brain, close-up, ‘simplified’ view of everything is that, before you know it, it has commandeered all of the attention. Which means that, inter alia, the larger setting, the bigger picture, the context, is sidelined, or just plain ignored or forgotten.

There has always been some risk of this, but its likelihood has increased dramatically in the digital era — courtesy, in part, of a second, deeper current running underneath Buch’s point, one that isn’t really about bad actors at all. The German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann argued that modern society can no longer be usefully understood as people talking to each other. It has to be understood as a set of self-running function systems — the economy, the media, the law and so on — each processing its own kind of communication according to its own logic, largely indifferent to the humans who are involved.

So, buying a chocolate bar, watching a soap opera, casting a vote: as Luhmann sees it, each of these instances is better described as an event within a system rather than as an act of connection between two people. Buying a chocolate bar? That occurs in the economic function system. Watching a soap opera? The mass media function system. Casting a vote? The political function system. And in every instance, as Hans-Georg Moeller details it 4 (in Luhmann Explained, 2006), human beings do not do the actual communication - only communication communicates.

Put these realities together and something clarifies. Buch shows what one particular system has learned to reward. Luhmann explains why nobody — including the people nominally running that system — is fully able to correct it: the system has its own momentum, its own criteria for a successful communication, and human intention only ever enters it indirectly. These factors describe an environment that doesn’t merely tolerate distortion. It, itself, initiates the distortion by, so to say, regarding each system as closed and at liberty to evolve itself without reference to any human preferences – a process that, borrowing from biology, Luhmann named autopoiesis.

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It’s all, always, about Power and Control

All of the above is in addition to a dynamic that has operated since time immemorial: communication and its influence can be manipulated by those who have power by virtue of their positions in society. We have always understood this point: it has always been recognized that power begets power and is susceptible to misapplication.

So much so, in fact, that, throughout history, societies have recognized the benefit – need, even – to contrive means to somehow exercise at least some control over the powerful. It’s why numerous cultures have sanctioned the appointment of those who can say things to authority that would get regular members of that society into a great deal of trouble.

The court jester is the best-known version, but the type is older and wider than any one court — it runs through Carnival, through the morality play, through the feast of fools, through every custom that set aside a bounded time or a bounded body through which the humble could address the grandees without being destroyed for it.

Writing about Shakespeare’s King Lear, the critic Frank Kermode stated the mechanism plainly: the Fool carries

the commentary on grandees allowed by custom to the humble. 5

Allowed. It isn’t that the Fool happens to be witty, or that Lear happens to tolerate him. It’s that a license exists permitting a specific kind of truth-telling that might well be considered treasonous from anyone else. The Fool doesn’t threaten the throne. He simply tells the truth inside a space custom has agreed to protect.

What’s easy to miss, if you think of the Fool only as comic relief, is how much that license costs him to hold, and how little comic distance he actually gets. The scholar A.C. Bradley made this the centre of his reading of King Lear: he imagined Shakespeare setting out to prove that a fool was about much more than lightening a tragedy — that he would and should stand inside it, “in the very tempest and whirlwind” of Lear’s own suffering, rather than commenting on it from the wings. The Fool isn’t safe. He’s exposed to the storm that his master is exposed to, and his wisdom is earned, in part, by that shared exposure. He isn’t being clever about Lear’s pain. He is in it.

That distinction — license without cost versus license earned by proximity to the cost — is relevant.

Where did the (Wise) Fool go?

The fool’s licence has been handed to different parties at different times throughout history. In the middle of the first century BCE in Greece, for example, in around forty plays, the dramatist Aristophanes proved to be a master Wise Fool: “Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right. I shall not please, but I shall say what is true.”

And, for the most obvious examples of jesters, the English medieval world is usually considered the archetype. But, long since, the formal role of the jester evaporated.

It is, arguably, one of the favourable outcomes of the trend in the West towards democracy. Once everyone in society had equal rights and responsibilities then the role of the wise fool was available to anyone who chose to take it on. It emerged and was exercised in a variety of ways, in all manner of environments. And a truly interesting point about this phenomenon is that it happened spontaneously and informally, below the threshold of any conscious decision. However, the more digital tech became a part of our world, the more the informal machinery that used to carry this function has been dismantled.

The pub conversation, the corridor aside, the letter to the editor written under a joking pseudonym, the member of the awkward squad in the workplace who declares “this plan’s mad” — all of these depended on a kind of protected marginality, a person or a place understood by common consent to be safe to be honest in. Much of that has thinned, digitized, or been optimized away.

What replaced it — social media chief among the candidates — promised something similar but delivered something closer to its opposite: not protected honesty, but unprotected exposure, where saying the true thing carries more risk, not less, than saying nothing at all.

So we have, in a fairly literal sense, a Fool-shaped hole. And it’s a space we need to reclaim.

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You are cordially invited to play the (Wise) Fool

So, if the “eat or be eaten” imperative is at our very core … and if the adoption of, and addiction to, technics is in our blood … and if function systems have a mind of their own, it’s surely pretty damn obvious that we really do need to take care of our humanity if we are to survive. Any fool can see that.

Earlier I referenced A,C. Bradley. That’s Andrew Cecil Bradley, since you ask, born 1851, died 1935. He was a literary scholar, now most remembered for his volume Shakespearean Tragedy featuring lectures that he delivered on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. And if this all sounds like a rather abstruse detour, let me explain the connection.

As already mentioned, the Fool was licensed to speak to power in ways that might well have brought deeply unpleasant consequences down on the head of anyone who was not thus authorized. But that’s only part of the Power-Fool confrontation. And it’s where Bradley comes to our aid. Introducing the Fool in King Lear, he imagines Shakespeare’s reaction to a conversation in which, perhaps, Ben Jonson has deprecated the concept of the fool as a dramatic character. Walking home afterwards, Shakespeare thinks to himself:

Come, my friends, I will show you once and for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or your audience…. He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to seeing him, the company of a king. Instead of amusing the king’s idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion.” (My emphases) 6

Lear’s Fool does not get his wisdom from having nothing to lose. He gets it from having chosen to stay — to walk out onto the heath with his master rather than seek the safety of somewhere warm. And he stays and talks when leaving would have cost him nothing at all. Presence and loyalty are what give him his moral authority. He is present and loyal by choice.

This is why we need fools. And everyone, every single one of us, is welcome to participate, to act the fool. All we need is a mechanism so to do – a mechanism that overrides or outwits the powerful autopoiesis that is a feature of techne-generated function systems.

We’ll expand on this in future posts but, for now, the good news is that, I do know, efforts to liberate and energize the Wise Fool, reformatting the Human-Technology Interface in the process, are underway. In fact, this series intends to explore five of them, listed at the conclusion of this article.

I should declare at the outset that I have a particular connection with one of the five: the Mass Relational MetaCognition (MRMC) concept which is the brainchild of Dr Olaf Hermans. But I think the five topics we’ll review provide a fascinating panoply of potentially complementary approaches to the challenges of the future.

Keep in mind … it’s all, always, about Power and Control

Part way through King Lear the Fool disappears from the action and things go from bad to worse. Chaos ensues. Then, at the very end of the play, there’s this deeply ambivalent speech from Lear himself, holding the dead body of his faithful daughter, Cordelia, just before he himself dies (King Lear Act V Scene 3):

And my poor fool is hang’d! No, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? 7

If we are to reshape the Techno-Human Interface to reinvigorate the flow of loyal wisdom that is vested in the mass, rather than re-engineering the mass into a confrontational duopoly, or just caving in to an increasingly concealed but ever more powerful Power, we need to resurrect the character who can help assure delivery. So, come on, it’s time to act the Wise Fool.

To begin at the end

At the outset, I described this as “Part 1 of a new series that tries to to do the impossible - work out what the future of Business might look like!”

So, what has this installment had to do with that objective? Well, it’s my attempt at a kind of universal intro to try to communicate the scale of the challenge. Congratulations if you have got this far. But where does it go from here?

Well, there are, no doubt, thousands of attempts, large and small, to fathom various aspects of the future of Business. As mentioned earlier, I’ve lighted upon just five. Five approaches that seek, in different ways, to try to get some traction on a pathway to future success. What appeals to me is that although they differ enormously in their intents and practices, they all recognize the vital requirement to harness the energy, the imagination, and the loyalty of humans. Never before have Wise Fools been so necessary. As you’ll appreciate, Wise Fool is by no means a pejorative term.

Here are the five:

• Enlightened Enterprise Academy - Paul Barnett

• Mass Relational MetaCognition - Dr Olaf Hermans

• MICE: Management Institute for Contributory Economy - Dr Neville Buch

• Sapiopoiesis - Dr Leon Tsvasman

• Venture Mode - Hunter Hastings

Do subscribe, won’t you?

A quarter of a century ago, I was privileged to be briefed by management consultancy Accenture to compile an overview of the state of technology in 2001. What were the trends? What was shifting? What was coming into being? That sort of thing. It was a wonderful project that gave me access to some of the leading technology minds of the time. It really was a privilege: I am not, myself, a technologist but am fascinated by our technological progress. Anyway, my task was to assemble the information from the experts and compile it into a form that a general readership might find informative.

Recently I happened across some of my drafts and the thought occurred that it might be interesting to repeat the exercise; which is to say, try to determine what the 2026 equivalent might look like.

It has proved an illuminating exercise.

The image at the top is from Shutterstock.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

That cross-head, the opening line of the Prologue to L.P Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between, is spot on: the difference between the world of 2001 and that of 2026 is extraordinary; the world of just one generation ago is, now, a foreign country.

If you’re already familiar with my scribbles, you’ll know that I write quite a lot about tech trends, particularly in the contexts of Business and the outcomes for customers, and more generally in terms of the impacts on human Society. Even with that caveat, however, I am amazed at the amount of change.

Back in 2001, discovering and assembling the required information necessitated my travelling to Europe and the United States on multiple occasions. The 2026 update necessitated my travelling the few metres back and forth between my workstation and the coffee machine in the kitchen, and across a few local fields on the occasions that the dog has taken me for a walk.

Back in 2001, I was assisted by my friend and colleague, Ken Short, a human copywriter of genius who has since, sadly, died. In 2026, I am assisted by Claude, a multi-talented, non-human colleague which, in terms of knowledge access if nothing else, is also a genius.

Back in 2001, the task took several months and involved extensive input not only from me and Ken, but from dozens of technologists. I particularly remember a session in St Charles, Illinois, on the west side of Chicago, when forty or so specialists came together and we spent a whole day discussing the key drivers of change. In 2026, the task-time has shrunk to a few days with the involvement just of Claude and me, with me accounting for 99 per cent of the time use.

All of which is by way of introduction to the strange word that heads this essay.

Denoetization.

In his magnum opus, The Matter With Things, the British psychiatrist and philosopher, Dr Iain McGilchrist, writes:

Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us. 1

Well, for some time now, I have been putting attention on the topic of technological development and, specifically, the ever-greater reliance we humans are all now placing on machine intelligence. What’s the effect on us humans qua humans? Does our increased reliance on technicity impact our humanity?

Early on, this line of inquiry led me to the work of Bernard Stiegler, a French philosopher, because … well … quite simply, he focused on this issue, and, although, sadly, he died in 2020, he has left us with some startling and beautiful thinking.

One element is this new word, dénoétisation, Stiegler’s coinage (generally Anglicised as denoetization) for the mechanical liquidation of human judgement when a dominant “technical system” takes over more and more of the thinking that we humans used to do for ourselves.

Then I discovered that, over in Australia, Dr Neville Buch, a historian who, quite independently, had found my Substack, because of a shared interest in the way things emerge in the world, not in a linear manner but rather in a spiral fashion, was way ahead of me in knowing about and admiring Stiegler’s work, and using the word.

At some point, too, I realized that a project with which I have been involved for several years, where Dr Olaf Hermans is providing startlingly original thinking about the subtle ways that humans interact en masse to contribute to society (Mass Relational Metacognition since you ask), was totally relevant to and connected with the denoetization concept.

As, also, is a project that I became interested in more recently where Neil Massa and colleagues are compiling a programme to help early-career professionals rebuild the relationship-building skills that used to develop spontaneously through human contact — in corridors, in queues, at conferences — but, in a screen-based world, increasingly don’t.

The fear, borne out by some research 2, is that the way the world of 2026 operates is leading to the loss of the capacity for human-to-human direct communality and the critical thought, judgement and discernment that goes with it, as society delegates its thinking to automated platforms and standardized procedure.

So, several sources and projects that all are concerned with the human qua human issue in a world where the primary driver is technology. “Attention is how our world comes into being for us.” How true!

So, what’s new?

Okay, so what came out of the 2001 versus 2026 exercise?

Let’s start with the 2001 findings. By and large, it all came down to where digital technology was taking business. Going back to it now, the thing that surprises me isn’t that it has aged — it’s inevitable that pieces like that always do — it was discovering how much smaller the changes of that era turn out to have been, compared with what’s happening now.

The headline items in 2001 were bandwidth, digitization, and the ability to reach any customer at any moment. Yes, sure, it was all real and transformative in its way. But looking back at it from now, all of that stuff — the fibre, the CRM systems, the personalization-at-scale — was still just a faster version of an established architecture that had held for five hundred years: a human deliberates, a tool executes.

All of which suggests that the inciting incident for the birth of the Western world that existed up until the early 21^st century was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable type – developed in the Rhineland city of Mainz in the early 1440s, and famously proved by the Bible he completed there around 1455. Why is that irrefutably true? Because the printing press did not decide what to print. And so far as everything thereafter was concerned for the next half millennium, across the West at least, the human was in the driving seat. Quite literally, if you think about automobile use. Huge progress was made but, however advanced the tool, the human stayed in charge of the judgement thereof.

What’s different now is that the judgement itself is migrating outward. An agent negotiates a flight re-booking with an airline’s agent while you sleep. A wearable flags an irregular heartbeat to an insurer’s agent before your own doctor knows about it. A vehicle reserves and pays for its own charging bay before the driver has decided where to stop for coffee. None of this requires you to approve the individual transaction — only, earlier, to have granted the standing permission that lets it happen without you.

Revisiting the 2001 material from the perspective of 2026, my initial instinct was to think that I should have seen further than I did. I underestimated the situation, didn’t I? Well, if I did, so did everybody else. The truth is, the outcomes that we are now experiencing never even occurred to me or, so far as I know, to any of the many experts that I talked to. It appears that it really, really is very, very hard to imagine the future before it has happened.

In this context, I can’t resist mentioning an evidence of this that has stayed with me since childhood. The front page of ‘Eagle’, one of the 1950s’ comics that I used to read, featured thrilling tales of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare was, of course, a daring hero, who, with his crew, flew across the galaxy, righting wrongs and protecting Earth from the dastardly intentions of the Treens, led by the evil Mekon. However, the interior and control surfaces of Dan’s space ship bore a far greater resemblance to a Second World War bomber than to anything post-1950.

That’s why going back to a view created just 25 years ago has now enabled me to more clearly see what is going on now. Even that’s not quite right. It’s not only to do with ‘seeing’ but also with ‘sensing’ or, even, ‘comprehending’ the change.

We’ve been here before … sort of

I say “sort of” deliberately, because I now see the importance of resisting the easy version of the parallel — that this is simply Gutenberg all over again. It isn’t, quite, and the difference is the crucial point.

Everything from movable type through electrification, mass production, and the digitization wave of 2001 was, in its way, one continuous stream: astonishing new tools, but tools we humans still directed. Even the printing press, which did more damage to settled authority than almost any invention before or since, only ever removed the need to remember things — it left the deciding to us.

There’s a wonderful, obscure figure in this story: Saint Augustine (354-430 AD) had a school friend, Simplicius, who was renowned for his perfect memory. He could, apparently, recite Virgil backwards on request! In a memorial culture, that gave him an elevated status. However, later, when Gutenberg’s press put a permanent, checkable copy of Virgil into broad circulation, it made that kind of knowing pointless and rendered the skill redundant. That’s the oldest instance I know of a technology producing exactly the anxiety we’re feeling now — a human capability rendered obsolete by a tool that does the remembering instead of you.

Which is the sense in which I’d revise my own instinct that this is a Gutenberg moment. It’s more than that – much more - because print didn’t touch the deciding, only the remembering.

Earlier, I mentioned that in addition to being a general copywriter, my colleague back in 2001, Ken, was a great advertising copywriter. No surprise, therefore, that one of Ken’s particular contributions to the 2001 drafts was an idea that had an advertising feel. Here it is:

We are standing on the welcome mat of a new era. A synchronicity of technological events is about to project us further and faster into a more radically different future than any we have known before. We are about to enter, correction, we are about to make a world in which object will communicate with object. A world in which the sales unit of a successful enterprise will be know-how. The wherewithal for customers to do and be and experience uncountable numbers of things, in ways that deliver against precise and innovative value propositions.

In this emerging Object-to-Object, One-to-One, Opportunity-to-Opportunity world (whichever title you choose conveniently cuts down to O-2-O), society and commerce are about to change as comprehensively as they did when universal electricity liberated us from, so to speak, the dark ages. 3

That was 2001 and it seems to me to be appropriate to reach for a 2026 update that mirrors the aplomb that Ken deployed to communicate a complex idea. So, now, for 2026, let’s move from O-2-O to A-2-A:

In this emerging Agent-to-Agent, Autonomy-to-Autonomy, Ambition-to-Ambition world (whichever title you choose conveniently cuts down to A-2-A), society and commerce are changing as comprehensively as they did when — to borrow Ken’s own turn of phrase, and mean it more literally this time — the printing press liberated us from the real Dark Ages … and this time, as Stiegler has pointed out, we really are actually having to confront the industrialization of memory. What all of this means, of course, is that this is not just technology helping us think, but technology itself doing some of the thinking, while we get on with something else.

A-2-A touches the deciding itself. And yet — and here’s the “and yet” I think spiral historiography would predict — the same underlying human question recurs at this new depth: who has the authority to decide, and do I still recognize myself in what happens as a result?

Mass printing asked that question of scriptural and priestly authority, and got Luther’s answer: the individual conscience, unmediated. Industrialization asked it of labour and dignity. This is asking it of judgement and selfhood. Same spiral. Different, and deeper, cut.

“Footfalls echo in the memory”

Have you noticed something? It’s all about memory. It always was.

For my money, no-one has captured the essence of memory as exquisitely as T.S. Eliot. Here’s just one fragment from his Four Quartets:

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. 4

Here, in these notes, trying to make some sense of the change to change in the past twenty five years, I’ve already found it necessary to refer back more than half a millennium to the time when a new technology, the printing press, caused a discombobulation in the human psyche. But that, of course, raises the question, what was going on before that?

I’ve touched on this with the thumbnail about Simplicius. So, yes, way back then, memory was far more highly prized than at any time since. But it was valued differently. In her wonderful explication of the topic, Mary Carruthers makes the point that, back in the Middle Ages:

They would not … have understood our separation of memory from learning. In their understanding of the matter, it was memory that made knowledge into useful experience, and memory that combined these pieces of information-become-experience into what we call ‘ideas,’ what they were more likely to call ‘judgments’. 5

Hmm, memory as a fundamental element of human flourishing, together with history as a progression in the way that the memory is collected, codified and deployed.

So what happens if we humans outsource that responsibility, or at least a significant part of it, to a non-human intelligence? And, again, who has the authority to decide, and do I still recognize myself in what happens as a result?

Stiegler’s own answer to what to do about this wasn’t technophobic — he thought exteriorizing memory and skill into tools was simply how humans have always been human, since the first flint axe. Artefacts as human prostheses.

What concerned him was the runaway version: proletarianization, as he called it, borrowing from Marx — losing the lived competence entirely once it’s fully offloaded, so that humans become no longer able to do the things the tool now does, only how to want its output. If your agent always wins the negotiation, do you still know how to make an argument? If it always tells you which candidate is right for the job, do you still trust your own read of a person sitting across the table?

Heidegger, with whom I’ve been living in the Four Quartets sense all year, has the other half of this. His worry wasn’t technology as such but Gestell — the stance that reduces everything, eventually including ourselves, to standing-reserve: resources to be optimized rather than things and people to be encountered.

An A-2-A world is Gestell at a new order of magnitude — a loss of agency with one’s own preferences, habits and history reduced to a profile to be continuously optimized. But the line Heidegger borrowed from a Friedrich Holderlin poem to elaborate the situation suggests that there is room for optimism about the outcomes:

Where danger is, grows the saving power also. 6

Staying exposed to the danger — rather than avoiding it — is what makes a freer relationship to the tool possible at all. Remember McGilchrist: “Attention is not just another cognitive function. Attention is how our world comes into being for us.” Heidegger called the resulting stance Gelassenheit: engaged releasement, neither refusal nor surrender.

Which is, I realize, exactly what Room 25 already does

So, what started out as a simple review and update of a past document has grown into much more, and I find it modestly reassuring if somewhat scary. We need to keep asking ourselves: confronted by accelerating denoetization, how best can we optimize the human side of things? And, determining that in any specific instance by asking: who has the authority to decide, and do I still recognize myself in what happens as a result?

This very exercise has brought a realization that we already have some ways and means to start tackling the issue, some potential ‘saving power’.

It’s already sitting inside the Concerns/Problems distinction Olaf Hermans has been developing with his Room 25 concept. A problem is something an organization is already built to solve. A concern is the thing underneath it — future-oriented, systemic, and, crucially, still undelegated: a judgement a person hasn’t yet handed over to a process, a policy, or an agent, and is still working through with their own head, heart and hands.

This isn’t nostalgia for a pre-digital world. It’s a discipline for this one: choosing, deliberately, which judgments to keep in the human realm — not because the machine couldn’t do them faster, but because the doing is where we remain the authors of our own lives. Room 25 exists because that kind of unformalized, partially-articulated knowing needs somewhere to go, and, counter-intuitively, strangers may well prove to be better custodians of it than colleagues. Why? Because strangers have no axe to grind.

Then there’s Neil Massa’s Elite Networker Blueprint, which is answering a version of the same question from the other end of a career: teaching the generation who grew up with the agents already installed how to build the kind of face-to-face, undelegated trust that older networks automatically and spontaneously enabled, before there was any alternative.

The overall realization of all of this is that, at some point in the past twenty five years, we moved into an entirely new era of human existence. An era that is as different as the electro-mechanical era was from the earlier far more formalised era of the Middle Ages. And this time, for the very first time, we have a new colleague alongside.But there’s one question this new colleague cannot answer for us. It’s the one thing left that’s still entirely ours to keep asking.

Who has the authority to decide, and do I still recognize myself in what happens as a result?

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It was about midday, summertime if I remember right, back in 1986 or ‘87, and I was calling on our newest client, a large insurance company, at their central London headquarters. I announced myself at Reception, and shortly afterwards a smiling, avuncular chap strode across the immaculately tiled expanse towards me with his right hand outstretched. “Hello there. Listen, it’s damn near lunchtime so let’s go straight to the Senior Mess and we can chat there.”

The Senior Mess. I’ve never forgotten that. Could there be any clearer indicator that the twentieth century enterprise organizationally based itself on the military model? Hardly surprising, I suppose: after all, throughout human history, there have always been armies, specially organized to express the optimum ‘large mass’ command methodology.

So, chain of command, where orders run from the top down, was the tried and tested methodology. Strategy is decided at the summit and executed at the base: instructions travel downwards in orders; information travels upwards in feedback, reports and … er … hoped-for results.

Here’s a snippet of tangible evidence. Date: Thursday 13th August 1942, a couple of months prior to the Second Battle of Alamein. Place: Cairo, Egypt. Event: General Bernard Montgomery addresses the British Eighth Army:

I want to tell you that I always work on the Chief of Staff system. I have nominated Brigadier de Guingand as Chief of Staff Eighth Army. I will issue orders through him. Whatever he says will be taken as coming from me and will be acted on at once.1

So, there you have it, chain of command in the business enterprise is not just a metaphor but, rather, a direct inheritance - interpreted faithfully in many of the founding textbooks of management theory.

Chain of command was a fairly obvious way to go as business enterprises grew in scale, particularly in the twentieth century, and for so long as business was fundamentally transactional. In that transactional world a company made something, and sold it to someone, and the relationship between company and customer ended at the till. You didn’t need the customer’s ongoing involvement to run the business. Rather, you needed obedient, well-drilled internal machinery. Hierarchy was an appropriate tool for that job.

However, from the 1970s and ‘80s, the logic started to dissolve, and by now has completely dissipated. Transactions do still exist but they are wrapped within, and are replaced by, relationships. And relationships demand something quite different: the centre of gravity in business has shifted from the transaction to the interaction.

Once upon a time, Value was considered to be intrinsically represented by a product, produced by a company and delivered to a customer. That is no longer true. Now, Value is created with the customer, continuously, often in real time, often in ways neither party fully anticipates in advance. Software that improves through use. Communities that co-create the product. Services that only exist as an ongoing relationship rather than a one-off exchange. All of which means that the customer has become the ultimate arbiter of Value in any particular instance. And that Value is entirely subjectively assessed by the Customer.

This all leads to a structural consequence that most organizations have not yet metabolized. Running an interaction-based business on a command-based structure is decidedly sub-optimal. A chain of command is built to execute a plan decided elsewhere. An interaction, by definition, cannot be fully planned elsewhere — it has to be met, in the moment, by someone close enough to the relationship to actually understand what’s happening in it. Push power down far enough, and you stop needing much of a chain at all.

Image at top is from Shutterstock.

Someone already saw this coming

None of this is quite as new as it may feel. In 1991, a British consultant and direct marketing pioneer named John Fraser-Robinson, made an argument2 that reads today as though it’s arriving from the wrong direction in time.

His baseline observation was that customers who had never been shown a better alternative would simply go on taking whatever was on offer, equating the limits of the catalogue with the limits of their own wants — but that once a company got genuinely close enough to a customer to dissolve that limitation, it would open up a scale of individual customization nobody currently expected. He didn’t have the language of “latent need” that Jobs-to-be-Done theory would later formalize, but he was describing exactly that. And he named the deeper shift in terms that still hold up: the move wasn’t about getting better at selling, but about learning, in his words, to “cultivate business” rather than simply transact it.

Where it gets really interesting is what he thought this would require organizationally. Because the only technology he had to imagine delivering truly individual treatment at scale was the direct-marketing database of the early 1990s, the structure he proposed was radical fragmentation: break the company down into tiny autonomous units, each behaving as though it served only one customer at a time, held together by what he called a two-way “banking” of information between company and client — a lovely, plain image of a relationship that only stays healthy as long as what’s put in doesn’t fall behind what’s taken out. He even posed, decades early, the exact organizational questions this essay is circling: are these units marketing teams or complete micro-businesses in their own right, how do they relate back to the whole, and how do you reward people for cultivating rather than closing?

He had the diagnosis right and reached for the only cure the 1990s could supply. What’s changed since isn’t the insight — it’s that we now have two things he didn’t: personalization delivered by digital infrastructure rather than by literally shrinking the company into a thousand pieces, and something closer to an actual answer to his leadership question, in orchestration rather than command. There’s no doubt, he saw this coming a very long time before the rest of us did.

Two different kinds of rationality

It’s tempting to treat this as an org-chart problem: Flatten the pyramid … Cut the middle layers … Done! But I don’t think that, at its root, it is really a structural problem at all. It’s a problem about what kind of reasoning the enterprise runs on.

The historian and founder member of the Management Institute for Contributory Economy (MICE) in Australia, Dr Neville Buch, in a short piece he shared with me recently, draws a distinction that I think names this precisely. He contrasts what he calls instrumental rationality — a “techné mindset” that treats people as quantifiable metrics, nodes in a network to be optimized for pecuniary profit — with communicative action, in which the other party is met as what he calls an “evaluating-willing being,” a participant in a shared reality rather than a target to be reached. Virtuous action in marketing, on this account, requires exactly this transition — from instrumental rationality to communicative action, away from a mindset that reduces people to nodes in a technical network to be manipulated for profit.

That’s a description of an ethical stance. But it’s also a description of two entirely different organizational physics. Instrumental rationality is what a hierarchy is for. Communicative action is what a hierarchy actively obstructs, because genuine two-way meaning-making doesn’t travel well through a chain of command — by the time an insight from the “front line” reaches someone with authority to act on it, it has usually been debased back into a metric.

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So what replaces the chain of command?

This is the part that we all tend to get stuck on, because “flatten the hierarchy” has been management-consultancy wallpaper for more than thirty years. Anybody else remember Hammer and Champy’s much lauded book, Reengineering the Corporation? That was 1993! Yet, still, little has changed.

The shortcoming, it seems to me, is that removing the hierarchy isn’t the same as replacing its function. Something still has to hold the space together — you just need a completely different kind of something.

In which context, it’s salutary to keep in mind the fact that the modern business organization evolved from the military model. Try this thought experiment: re-imagine the people you know who are CEOs or other senior corporate officers as, literally, military generals. Now then, what do you think would be the likely response if those generals were told to hand far greater autonomy and responsibility to the lower ranks? Which is to say, there are almost certainly aspects of the required “completely different kind of something” that will provoke a less than constructive response from many who are already in power.

Here’s the thing, though: those generals are not actually going to be asked.

Think, for a minute, about the change that digital technology has enabled in the past few years. Think about the fact that companies of any size, from a one-person operation to a global corporation, now have access to world-class functional resources. You want a world-class billing system? It’s just an app away. A world-class CRM system? It’s just an app away. A world-class anything? It’s just an app away.

The most consequential function of all, I guess, and the one that initially changed the world, was manufacturing. Not so long ago it was wildly variable, a mixed bag of outputs from superb (but expensive) down to trash (but cheap). Then, suddenly it seemed, that whole issue was resolved so that there really was no excuse for producing anything to less than a good standard. And the improved, high quality goods were often cheaper than the old trash.

And now, of course, AI has come on stage, able to deliver ‘best practice’ in all manner of roles. You’re never alone with a digital double.

None of that required a single general to hand over a single stripe. The old justification for hierarchy — that only a large, disciplined structure could reliably deliver world-class function — is simply being dismantled from underneath them, one commoditized app at a time. The autonomy isn’t being granted. It’s being made structurally unavoidable.

So, is this the answer?

It is part of it. But only a part. Keep in mind Dr Buch’s caution, mentioned earlier, about instrumental rationality, the “techné mindset” that treats people as quantifiable metrics, nodes in a network to be optimized for pecuniary profit.

The challenge, it seems to me, is how best we can complement the technics. Complement, note, not ‘offset’ or ‘minimize’, but ‘complement’, which is to say use the best of technics and the best of human skills to identify and enhance success. But how to do that?

Messrs Hammer and Champy, the authors of the previously mentioned Reengineering the Corporation, got close, I think, when they made the point that …

Most executives and managers know how to think deductively. That is, they are good at defining a problem or problems, then seeking and evaluating different solutions to it. But applying information technology to business reengineering demands inductive thinking—the ability to first recognize a powerful solution and then seek the problems it might solve, problems the company probably doesn’t even know that it has. 3

This mindset really does help identify other possibilities But it needs something else. And I’m pretty sure that I’m glimpsing that “something else” to help create the required “completely different kind of something” via some work I’ve been privileged to be involved with for several years now with Dr Olaf Hermans.

Dr Hermans’ thinking focuses not primarily on the specific situation of an individual, or a corporate department or function, or even of a whole company, but rather on the meta scenario - the society, world even, in which the individual, the department, the function, the company operates and of which it is a part.

In the Hammer and Champy extract they refer exclusively to ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. Dr Hermans tackles the issue of problem and solution identification by, first, making a clear distinction between problems and concerns, then tackling the concerns with groups that include people who have no direct attachment to the specific issues - indeed, they are complete strangers.

There are various ways this works. For example, a group may be brought together, not in a corporate setting but in a deliberately public one: bringing a large group of complete strangers into a room for a few hours to work not on their problems (which are local, resource-bound, and easily escalated up a chain) but on their concerns — the harder, more systemic sense that “if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re heading somewhere we don’t want to go.” What’s notable isn’t the content of what people discover about their own concerns. It’s the leadership model, and the technological assistance, required to hold two hundred strangers in that kind of open-ended, self-organizing work: a single person, doing something much closer to orchestration than management — holding a frame, protecting the conditions for people to think, without ever prescribing what they should think. No chain of command. No org chart. And yet the room doesn’t collapse into chaos; if anything, people report feeling more genuinely met than they do in their actual workplaces.

This, I suspect, is closer to what things look like inside an interaction-based enterprise: not command, but the deliberate cultivation of the conditions under which good interaction can happen — trust, attention, permission to actually respond rather than just execute.

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The fork in the road

Here I want to resist my own optimism for a moment, because there is an obvious and serious way this can go wrong, and Shoshana Zuboff has spent several hundred pages documenting exactly how 4. The shift from transaction to interaction is only possible because of the same digital infrastructure that makes continuous, fine-grained observation of people’s behaviour possible and cheap. That is not a coincidence, and it is not automatically good news.

“Interaction” can just as easily describe a company that watches your every click in order to predict and surreptitiously steer your behavior as it can describe a company that genuinely listens and responds. The former is arguably more instrumental than the old transactional model ever was — at least a transaction ended. Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism is essentially a warning that the tools of interaction can be captured entirely by instrumental rationality, dressed up in the language of personalization and engagement, with the customer reduced to a source of what she calls behavioral surplus rather than elevated to a participant in shared meaning.

So the axiom needs a corollary. Moving from transaction to interaction does not, by itself, imply a more humane enterprise. It only creates the possibility of one — the rest depends entirely on which rationality governs the interaction once you’re inside it. Flatten a hierarchy that’s still running on instrumental logic, and you don’t get flourishing. You get a flatter, faster extraction machine, with nobody left to blame.

What the enterprise of the future actually looks like

Put together, I think this gives a genuinely useful (if unfinished) sketch, rather than a vague gesture at “more agile organizations”:

- Power moves toward whoever is closest to the live interaction, because that’s where the judgment actually needs to be exercised.
- Leadership stops meaning command and starts meaning something closer to orchestration — holding the conditions for good interaction, not dictating its content.
- The test of whether any of this is virtuous, rather than just efficient, is which rationality is actually running underneath it: is the other party being met as a participant in shared meaning, or optimized as a source of value to be extracted?

None of us can say precisely what organizational form wins out. But I think we can say, with some confidence, what question every surviving enterprise will have had to answer honestly: NOT how do we flatten our structure?, BUT what is our structure actually for?

Thanks to Dr Neville Buch for sharing the piece that sparked some of this thinking, to my collaborator Dr Olaf Hermans, whose work on group orchestration is doing more to answer the leadership question here than most management theory I’ve read, and to John Fraser-Robinson, a friend of more than fifty years, whose 1991 book got there long before I did.

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We humans are not good at handling situations for which there is no precedent. How could we be? In the vast majority of cases, we learn, if at all, from experience, so, it follows that, if there is no prior experience either in the present or the recorded past, we are, for a time at least, all at sea. And that, I hope to demonstrate, is the situation at the moment.

American management consultant Gary Hamel sketched the backstory beautifully:

For countless millennia there was no progress, only cycles. Seasons turned. Generations came and went. Life didn’t get better, it simply repeated itself in an endlessly familiar pattern. There was no future, for the future was indistinguishable from the past. 1

Then came progress. In bursts. Something new appears? Assimilate it.

This is important, particularly when addressing technological change, because technology – or ‘technics’, a term that encompasses the development of machines and their relation and interplay with human life - is a powerful driver of social change: Where we live. How we live. How we interact with one another. As a wise man pointed out, and as is expanded on a little later, technics develops faster than culture.

We are in or around a progress-burst right now … and it is, as one might say, the mother and father of all such instances.

Once upon a time, progress-bursts were millennia apart, then the gap started to reduce. From the end of the 19^th century, across the West, the gap rapidly came down from hundreds of years to decades. And now? There is no gap.

So, now what?

When change all too quickly cranked itself up from ‘zero’ to ‘continuous’ there was no experience in the fund of human knowledge to guide how best to handle it. Which is why we now find ourselves with some unprecedented societal issues, many of which may be felt rather than properly understood, and which we therefore address, if at all, in a crude manner. Which is to say that, all too often, we instinctively resort to the ‘traditional’ human reaction to the unknown – fear-driven violence, in the forms of either outright warfare or the subtler but equally corrosive power play of bureaucracy.

The fact is, right now, we are in Continuous Change Kindergarten, with precious little understanding of how to respond and very, very few teachers to guide us.

(The image at top is from Shutterstock)

It’s helpful to look at a real example of what happens when we find ourselves confronted by the ultra-new. Come back with me, briefly, if you will, to a Financial Times New Media and Broadcasting Conference that took place in London in March 1999.

1999, an age ago, huh? Back then, Amazon was still four months away from its fifth birthday, and the iPhone wouldn’t appear until fully eight years later. But there were some new gizmos, the MP3 player, for example. The MP3 player was an early instance of a product that rendered redundant a lot of the physical media of the previous tech era, and interlinked technological capabilities across multiple channels.

One of the conference speakers, Adam Singer, who, at the time, was chairman of a major cable TV company, held an MP3 player up to the audience. He explained that he’d had to visit four shops to find one in stock. It had no moving parts, ran on flash cards, and could hold a CD’s worth of music downloaded legally for $8 — with none of the pre-digital paraphernalia of plastic box, sleeve notes, delivery costs or, even, a physical retailer. As Singer said:

For every record executive, it is the latest version of Pandora’s Box, where hope gets left on a flash card.2

Singer’s audience that day were senior executives from the broadcasting sector, and he referenced a recent gathering he had attended of European CEOs — managers of “leading billion dollar, household name, consumer companies” — who could all discuss governance and shareholder value fluently … but who regarded the internet as “some form of economic fluff.” They’d ticked that box by commissioning a website. Most of them had never heard of MP3. They considered connectivity, if at all, as “tomorrow’s issue.”

Singer’s point was that this is exactly what RCA, Zenith, and Philco, the incumbent leaders in the US home entertainment sector, had thought when they first heard about the transistor. He told that story too.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the valve — the thermionic tube — was the technical basis of radio, telephone relay, early television, and nascent computing. As so often in these situations, without even thinking about it, the continuance of a current dominance was assumed. Which perhaps explains why, when Bell Labs announced the transistor in 1948, it got only a tiny mention in the New York Times, buried on page 46. By 1954 it was still being treated as a laboratory curiosity, useful for hearing aids and military radios. But that same year, Texas Instruments put out the first transistor radio for $49.95 — and then, in Singer’s words …

inexplicably abandoned this market, only to see it cornered, not by the communications giants of the day — RCA, Zenith, Philco — but by an unknown Japanese company called Sony. 3

The upshot was that, by 1955, the valve’s entire commercial world had been quietly reduced to a hobbyist’s footnote.

None of the incumbents lacked resources. None of them lacked engineers. What they lacked was the capacity to see that the category they were operating in — “home entertainment equipment manufacturer,” “record label,” — had simply stopped describing the world. Singer’s summing up line was intriguing:

You can see it in Amazon’s seizure of a sector that should have been Barnes & Noble’s. 4

Barnes & Noble was market leader in US book sales, but it was having to confront a competitive challenge from a perspective that it could not, at that time, fathom. It was out-of-date in a way it couldn’t perceive from the inside, because the category “bookseller” was still fully intact right up until the moment it wasn’t. Singer had a phrase for the underlying mechanism:

cultural sclerosis makes it difficult for the dominant of the sector to adapt to new conditions. 5

And a great phrase for what happens next:

When grabbers become defenders, they all long for the comfort of the Maginot Line. 6

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A very old name for a very current problem

There’s a name for this, and it’s about 2,500 years older than Sony.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Zeus tells Prometheus and his twin brother Epimetheus to distribute qualities among all the newly-created mortal creatures before they’re released into the world — speed to the gazelle, strength to the lion, a shell to the turtle, and so on — each species getting what it needs to survive in balance with the others. Epimetheus — whose name means, roughly, “the one who understands afterward” — begs to do the distributing himself. Prometheus, fond of his simpler brother, lets him. Epimetheus works his way through every species, handing out gifts in careful ecological balance, and then discovers, basket empty, that he has forgotten to save anything for Man. There is nothing left. Man arrives in the world with no built-in equipment at all. To make up for the shortfall, Prometheus steals techne (the mechanical arts) and fire from Athene and Hephaestus’s workshop.

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler — who came to philosophy the hard way, largely self-taught while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery, and who sadly took his own life in 2020 — built an entire multi-volume project, Technics and Time, on this myth. His claim, mentioned earlier, is disarmingly simple: technics develops faster than culture. At first, the gap between one technical shift and the next was so wide — tens of thousands of years, then thousands, then hundreds — that culture had time to assimilate each change long before the next one arrived. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, that gap progressively collapsed. We are still, culturally and institutionally, operating with Epimetheus’s basket-logic: qualities and categories handed out for one ecology, worn like a settled inheritance, while the ecology itself has already moved on. Nobody notices the basket is empty until the ecology has already changed shape around them.

Singer did recognize this phenomenon. As he told the conference,

the internet means that the era of defining yourself by your method of distribution is over. That is, by tags such as ‘a print company’, ‘a radio or TV company’, or ‘a satellite programming company’... you cannot be a single sector revenue company anymore. 7

Substitute “party,” “parliament,” or “ministry” for “print company,” and you have the argument of the rest of this essay.

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Epimetheus’ basket – empty yet again! — and this time it’s in the institutions themselves

If a roomful of billion-dollar CEOs, fluent in shareholder value, couldn’t glimpse any of the implications of the transistor coming in their own industry — if RCA, Zenith and Philco, sitting on the deepest technical expertise in the sector, missed it entirely — there is surely no reason to expect that political institutions, built for an entirely different and much slower-moving ecology, should fare any better watching their own ground shift.

This is where Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void8 becomes useful, because Mair documents exactly this kind of discombobulation inside democratic politics itself. Party membership across the established Western democracies has collapsed by an order of magnitude since the mid-twentieth century. Mair’s argument isn’t that politicians got lazy, or that voters got cynical for no reason. It’s structural: parties built to aggregate mass membership, translate it into a mandate, and deliver on that mandate through parliamentary control, are still standing — the buildings, the rituals, the general elections — but the actual connective tissue between citizen and governing decision has been quietly evacuated. The Comparative Party Pledges Project’s manifesto-fulfillment data tells the same story from a different angle: parties still write manifestos, voters still read them (or don’t), elections still happen — but the machinery that used to make a manifesto a binding commitment has hollowed out underneath the ritual that survives it.

That’s Epimetheus’s basket all over again. The category “accountable representative democracy” is still worn like a settled inheritance. Trouble is, the world it was built to govern — where power could be meaningfully exercised inside a national parliament, answerable to a national electorate — has already moved on.

The same shape, at the scale of the whole economy

Dani Rodrik’s globalization trilemma deals with the same discombobulation, formalized and scaled up to the level of the entire international economy. You cannot simultaneously have deep global economic integration, the nation-state as the primary unit of government, and full democratic self-rule. Something has to give. Historically, what has given is the nation-state: as markets integrate, the rules they still need — contract enforcement, regulatory harmonization, dispute resolution — increasingly arrive from supranational bodies rather than from a national electorate. Rodrik’s own preference, stated plainly, is that democracy should take priority when the trilemma bites — but priority or not, his diagnosis is that Western democracies have, in practice, been living inside a version of the transistor problem for decades: institutions built for a world of shallower economic integration, still operating as though that world hasn’t changed, while the ecology around them has.

For more on this topic, you may be interested in this earlier piece that I wrote:

So where do we go from here?

Stiegler identified the *mechanism*, technics develops faster than culture, so it was inevitable that, at some point, the graph would ‘Go Vertical’, technics accelerating past the point where culture might have anything like the capacity to assimilate or metabolize it before it all changed yet again.

The ‘Go Vertical’ point, I suggest, coincided, more or less, with the start of the 21^st century. If you want a specific date, I’d suggest 9th January 2007, when the very first Apple iPhone went on sale. Whenever, we are now in a world that holds out the prospect of astounding progress – way beyond anything that has been experienced up until now – and, inevitably, equally astounding calamity if we cannot control our basic instincts to control … well … everything.

The point is, technics allied to ‘the market’ proved amazing. It gave us the power, across just two centuries, to make astonishing strides. A McKinsey Quarterly article summed it up rather nicely:

Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19^th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money. 9

Spot on. And, oh, another result of all this has been an increase in human population; an eightfold increase from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.3 billion now.

So, yes, Technics + Market = Prosperity is a magic formula. But will it continue so to be?

My response is, Yes … and No. Which, you might reasonably say is not terribly helpful. But to understand what I mean, we need to go back to the comment made back in that 1999 conference when Adam Singer said:

When grabbers become defenders, they all long for the comfort of the Maginot Line. 10

The Maginot Line, you may recall, was a line of supposedly impregnable fortifications built by the French in the 1930s along the French-German border. Subsequently, the Germans completely bypassed the problem by entering France via the Belgian Ardennes.

That’s a precise analogy for technics-driven progress from here on.

In the West, long since, technological developments can be protected via patents and other legal protections. It seems only fair: if someone invents something, their achievement should be protected so that they can earn the proper return from their efforts.

I recall, in the noughties, conversations about this topic almost always referenced China. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and was no respecter of patents – a fact that caused a great deal of huffing and puffing. As it happens, however, one might say “we’re all China now” – technics’ vertical trajectory really has changed the rules of the game.

The point is, patents represent defensiveness … and ‘defenders’ in a world where technical progress is continuous risk just put irritating potholes in the road. Anyway, it’s a lot easier, these days, to just build a new road. That’s why, in Singer’s terms, it’s now a ‘grabbers’ world.

If this sounds implausible, check out Elon Musk’s attitude towards patents. As he put it in a 2012 Wired interview:

We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China — if we published patents, it would be farcical, because [the Chinese] would just use them as a recipe book. 11

Admittedly, this logic may not hold up everywhere. SpaceX can afford to skip the patent office because a welding technique buried inside a rocket factory is genuinely hard to reverse-engineer from the outside. A molecule is not. Pharmaceuticals are the obvious counter-case: publish the structure of a drug and any competent chemist can reproduce it, which is exactly why patent protection still does real work there.

Even that ground is shifting, though. The Oxford group that built the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is now developing one for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola on the same underlying viral-vector platform — by some accounts, the real intellectual property increasingly sits in the reusable manufacturing process rather than in whichever genetic payload gets slotted into it this time. If that’s right, even pharma is drifting, a little, towards SpaceX’s logic: protect the process, not the ingredient.

So, not everything follows the pattern but we are definitely in an age of innovation. An unprecedented age. It holds out the prospect of absolute wonders. But, in my opinion, only if we back off from some of the activity that got sucked into the ‘market’ in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

When the Technics + Market combo started to deliver more and more breakthroughs it was understandable that the Market would get applied to more and more aspects of human life. “It works! It works! Let’s apply it to more and more areas of life!” But, Christopher Lasch’s (1932-1994) caution on the topic gives pause for thought:

[T]he market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle – the cardinal principle of liberalism – that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. 12

This point surely becomes even more relevant now that technics really is accelerating further and further beyond culture’s ability to assimilate it?

Don’t get me wrong. My own view is that capitalism is precisely the right answer to the basket problem — because it is, at root, a bottom-up system. That means it distributes the capacity to notice the empty basket and do something about it across the maximum possible number of brains, rather than concentrating that capacity in a handful of credentialed experts or a single planning ministry. Nobody assigned Sony the transistor-based home entertainment market. Early in the 20^th century, in pursuit of manned flight, nobody at the U.S. War Department picked the Wright brothers, who had no college education and a bicycle shop’s worth of capital, over Samuel Langley, who had $50,000 of government money and every institutional advantage a well-connected astronomer could ask for. Nobody at any bank designed PayPal and yet … well, here are the words of Heidi Miller who, back in 2004, was Treasury & Securities Services Executive, JP Morgan Chase & Co, addressing the audience at that year’s Sibos conference:

Let me tell you a story about a business acquaintance who runs a successful Silicon Valley e-commerce venture. In the late ‘90s, this company was experiencing explosive growth, and adding thousands of new customers every week. They desperately needed a secure and easy-to-use online payments solution, and they needed it fast.

Quite logically, they approached several banks and asked them to develop a solution. To make a long story short, the banks tried, but simply could not deliver a solution that met this company’s needs and customer requirements effectively. So the company was forced to turn to another e-commerce start-up that had already developed, piloted and rolled out exactly the solution they were looking for. This business acquaintance is Meg Whitman. The company is eBay. eBay paid over $1 billion to acquire that payments solution provider. It wasn’t a bank. It was PayPal.

That’s the market doing exactly what it’s for: letting insight arrive from wherever it actually is, rather than wherever the org chart says it should be.

The danger isn’t capitalism succeeding: it’s what may happen after it succeeds, and when it sucks in too many aspects of human life. Let me deal briefly with those two conditions.

One: Business, capital B, curdles at the point where innovators switch their energies to clinging on to what they have rather than continuing to advance. When, in Adam Singer’s terminology, ‘grabbers’ become ‘defenders’, and start using their power to protect the basket they were handed rather than keep noticing when it runs empty, that’s a problem.

Two: We should audit where, and where not, Business, capital B, should be allowed to govern operations. Specifically, we need to take note of Lasch’s caution about human happiness and well-being. So, to give just one example, maybe we stop commercializing education and re-introduce elements of learning simply for learning’s sake?

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Back to the room

A little earlier, I reference a Sibos conference. Every year since 1978, the banking sector has held this event. This year’s, in Miami Beach in late September, is themed …

Digital finance for AI-driven economies

… promising to …

unlock the power of collaboration, technology and innovation (as the industry) re-shapes digital finance for an AI-driven global economy.

It’s hard, reading that, not to think of a roomful of senior executives in 1999, fluent in shareholder value, filing past an MP3 player they’d never heard of, on their way to commission a website and call it done. Or, of course, thinking of an entire banking sector at the start of the 21st century struggling to fathom what a digital payments system might look like.

Somewhere, right now, there’s a version of that room. Somebody in it has already built the thing that will make the room’s entire premise obsolete. Nobody in the room can see it yet — not because they lack resources, or credentials, or goodwill, but because that is exactly what it feels like to be Epimetheus, mid-distribution, with a basket that looks full right up until the moment you check it and it isn’t.

The only real question worth asking of any institution — a party, a parliament, a bank, a broadcaster — is not whether it’s currently strong. The question is whether it still knows how to grab through innovation, or whether it has already, quietly, become an entity whose main occupation is defending and clinging on to what it was given.

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In January 1486, the very first censorship office was established in the Rhineland city of Mainz. The local Elector-Archbishop, one Berthold von Henneberg, was scared and worried by the threat of the “vulgarization of knowledge” made possible by the new technology of printing with movable type.

Half a millennium later, in July 2026, the British government is talking about requiring the algorithms of online media to be changed (a.k.a. censored) so as to favour the output of the mainstream media (MSM) rather than that of the hoi polloi - the common or vernacular voice.

It’s the same fear, isn’t it? A terror of the “vulgarization of knowledge” made possible, on this occasion, by the new digital technology.

Here’s a fragment from an online post when Liberal Democrat member of the British parliament, Max Wilkinson, addressed an audience with these words:

We obviously have social media, which is a massive problem at the moment for engagement. I’m tempted to say that how you make your voice heard as a citizen in 2025 in the UK: set up an X account and start writing some sort of nativist content and it will go round the world really, really quickly.

Oh well, since we’re talking about the “vulgarization of knowledge”, I can put my response to Mr Wilkinson’s comment in just three words - No shit, Sherlock!

(Image at top: Shutterstock)

Then there’s the inevitable Bureaucracy that goes hand in glove with this sort of technological change.

Bureaucracy – my Oxford English Dictionary defines it like this:

(Government by) a central administrative group, esp. one not accountable to the public etc.; officials of such a group collectively; excessive official routine.

Yeah, that’s it. They might have added, but maybe thought it too glaringly self-evident, that the purpose of this covert modus operandi is control. It’s that simple. Control.

Indeed, the focus on Control in a bureaucracy is so all-encompassing that everything else can go hang. Worryingly, that ‘everything else’ includes Truth, which seems often to be disposable or, at the very least, regarded as so subjective as to be just a matter of opinion. (With, of course, elite opinion supposedly being Right and hoi polloi opinion definitely Wrong!)

Which is why I thought I’d have a go at interrogating some aspects of this whole situation; specifically the feeling, which I think is widely shared, that democracy in the West has become – how shall we say? – both thinner and more restricted than it was a few decades ago. Today, it often seems, does it not, that a political party campaigns on a manifesto, wins power, and then shelves the pledges that mattered most while implementing things nobody voted for?

How do you feel about it all? Does parliamentary debate feel increasingly flimsy, evasive, pointless? Does it seem as though the actual decision makers are somewhere else: faceless bureaucrats - central bankers, regulators, judges, international bodies, NGOs and the like - rather than the local politicians who are supposedly elected so to do?

To AI or not to AI?

Thus far, I have shied away from using AI but, having formulated the challenge just stated above, I thought, “Yikes! It’s a Big Topic. Huge. Lots of facts and figures are required to get at anything like a reasonable assessment of the situation.” So, I decided to team up with Claude AI.

Claude turns out to be an astonishingly useful workmate. Not least, it was Claude that suggested that, in addition to global data, specific reference be made to the situations in both the UK and Australia because they are two places where Aargh! by David Pinder is particularly popular. I like that, too, because it provides a truly antipodean comparison.

I’ll add a few specific points about the experience at the end of this article but, first, here are some of the findings.

Manifesto mistrust — justified?

Do political parties in western democracies now put forward manifestos that, when they achieve power, they then ignore?

The Comparative Party Pledges Project — a political science project that coded over 20,000 individual manifesto pledges across 57 election campaigns in 12 countries — suggests that governing parties do fulfill, at least partially, a “clear majority” of what they promise. In several countries the figure was above 80 per cent. Single-party majority governments (the UK, Canada, Spain, Portugal, Sweden) do particularly well. Coalition governments do worse, for the perhaps obvious reason that coalition bargaining forces compromise.

So, the belief that “they never do what they say” is not true. But … an interesting truth does emerge. The pledges that get delivered reliably tend to be the routine, administratively straightforward ones.

Which means, of course, that the pledges that get watered down, delayed, or quietly dropped tend to be the ambitious, structurally difficult ones — the ones that would require actually confronting an entrenched institution, a treaty obligation, a regulatory framework, or a supranational rule. And those, of course, are disproportionately the pledges that made anyone vote for the party in the first place!

The UK’s own tracking bears this out. Both recent governments have been monitored pledge-by-pledge by independent trackers.

The Institute for Government’s audit of the 2019 Conservative manifesto found 55 per cent of pledges completed or on track at the parliament’s halfway point — but flagged that the number of pledges “at risk” of failure or abandonment had nearly doubled in the preceding period, and, yes, these latter were concentrated in the largest, most structurally demanding commitments.

Full Fact’s ongoing Government Tracker of Starmer’s 2024 Labour manifesto found, after its first year, roughly two-thirds of tracked pledges either achieved, on track, or showing progress. But Full Fact’s own commentary on its findings makes the more interesting point explicit: several of the government’s proudest claimed successes — a “2 million extra NHS appointments” pledge chief among them — turn out, on inspection, to have been designed from the outset in a way that made them nearly impossible to fail, using baselines or definitions vague enough to guarantee a favourable verdict regardless of underlying performance.

That’s a different, perhaps more corrosive problem than promise-breaking: not pledges quietly abandoned, but pledges quietly engineered to be unfalsifiable.

Australia’s own tracking, run jointly by RMIT University and the ABC, tells the same story with a similarly reassuring headline number. Using the same pledge-coding methodology as the international Comparative Pledges Project, RMIT ABC Fact Check tracked 66 major promises made by the Albanese Labor government at the 2022 election, and by the end of the term found at least 46 — roughly 70 per cent — delivered, a result the researchers noted put the government “on a fairly level footing” with comparable governments internationally, including its own Labor predecessor under Gillard. Voters, unprompted, tend to assume the true figure is far lower than this.

Why?

The hollowing-out, measured

The late political scientist Peter Mair spent his career answering a version of that question, and his book Ruling the Void (2013) remains the clearest empirical statement of it. Mair’s argument is built on three converging, decades-long datasets across Western Europe.

First, party membership has collapsed. Reasonably stable until 1980, it nearly halved through the 1980s and ‘90s; by the 2000s the average party membership across Western democracies was around 5 percent of the electorate, roughly a third of its 1960s level. Britain lost 1.2 million party members between 1980 and 2009; Italy lost 1.5 million; France a million; Germany half a million.

Australia’s version of the same collapse is, if anything, more stark: the Liberal Party is currently estimated at around 40,000 members, down from close to 200,000 in the 1950s, while Labor’s membership is around 60,000 — meaning several individual AFL football clubs now count more members than either of Australia’s major parties, and some count more than the two combined. Broader Australian Bureau of Statistics survey data shows participation in civic and political groups fell from 18.7 per cent of the adult population in 2010 to just 9.4 per cent in 2019 — a halving inside a single decade, not the multi-decade drift Mair traces in Europe, suggesting whatever is driving this is not a peculiarly European phenomenon tied to Brussels, but something closer to a general feature of mature Western democracies regardless of their constitutional architecture.

Second, turnout fell and volatility rose simultaneously — voters showing up less, and switching allegiance more wildly when they did. Eleven of fifteen long-established European democracies recorded their lowest-ever turnout since 1990 during this period.

Third — and this is Mair’s biggest contribution, not just the symptom but the mechanism — as parties lost their mass membership base, they lost both the incentive and the capacity to act as the two-way transmission belt they were built to be: channeling citizen preference upward, and government reasoning back down.

Deprived of that mooring, political elites reoriented themselves toward the state apparatus rather than the electorate as their main source of stability — a shift from party government to a more professionalized political class operating through, and increasingly indistinguishable from, permanent institutions: civil services, regulators, courts, central banks, and — in Europe’s case most starkly — Brussels.

Mair’s clearest example was the EU: in practice, a system of governance conducted at several removes from anything resembling direct electoral sanction. That’s what happens, institutionally, when the thing that used to connect voters to outcomes atrophies and nothing structurally equivalent replaces it.

The economist’s version of the same story

Here is where a debate normally conducted in politics departments and a debate normally conducted in economics departments turns out to be describing the same phenomenon from different angles.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik built his “trilemma of the world economy” by generalizing an old, well-established idea from international finance — the “impossible trinity,” the fact that no country can simultaneously have a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement, and independent monetary policy. Rodrik scaled the same logic up to the whole architecture of the global economy: you cannot simultaneously have deep economic integration (”hyperglobalization”), the nation-state as the primary unit of governance, and full democracy. Something has to give.

His reasoning: markets need rules to function — contract enforcement, dispute resolution, regulatory standards. Domestically, democratic nation-states supply those rules. But nothing plays that role at the global level — there is no global electorate, no global tax authority, no global demos to answer to. So when economic integration goes deep enough, the rules markets still need have to come from somewhere else: supranational bodies (the WTO, the EU, the IMF), or the harmonization of domestic law to what global markets require. If you want deep integration and to keep the nation-state as the governing unit, the rules imposed on that nation-state increasingly arrive from outside its own democratic process. Democracy is what has to give.

This is contested economics, not settled law — critics argue Rodrik overstates the tension and that democracies have in practice combined openness with self-government for decades without collapsing into his trilemma. But as a description of mechanism, it maps neatly onto Mair’s institutional account: both are describing how policy-making authority migrated outward from directly accountable bodies toward ones that are accountable in form but not in the way that actually constrains behaviour.

Where the NGOs fit — are they the disease, or just a symptom?

It’s tempting, once you notice this pattern, to fix on any instance of it and claim it as the cause. A recent conversation I listened to — an interview with the academic Gerald Steinberg, founder of NGO Monitor — makes exactly this case about the post-war growth of NGOs and their entanglement with UN institutions: bodies founded as civil-society checks on state power grew into large, generously-funded, politically active organizations wielding real influence at the UN and in the media, while remaining structurally accountable to donors and boards rather than to any electorate.

Whatever one makes of the specific claims in that conversation — and some of them, on checking, hold up better than others — the more defensible version of the underlying point isn’t that NGOs caused the hollowing-out of democratic politics. It’s that they’re one visible instance of a much broader pattern: as governments delegated functions — human rights monitoring, humanitarian response, environmental standard-setting, monetary policy, trade adjudication — to bodies structurally insulated from voters, the total space of things actually decided at the ballot box shrank, even as the formal machinery of elections and parliaments kept running as before. NGOs with UN consultative status are one thread in that fabric. Independent central banks, EU directives, WTO dispute panels, and the modern regulatory state are others, arguably more consequential ones.

Britain, in fact, has its own domestic version of this pattern, closer to home and easier to check than anything happening in Geneva: the quango, or in the more polite official language, the “arm’s-length body” (ALB). These are public bodies — Ofsted, Ofgem, the Arts Council, the Office for Budget Responsibility, Homes England, and hundreds more — established to carry out government functions at one remove from direct ministerial control, typically on the reasonable grounds that some kinds of decisions (interest rates, broadcasting standards, exam regulation) genuinely benefit from independence from day-to-day political pressure. Depending on definitional generosity, the UK now has between 300 and 600 of these bodies, employing between 390,000 and 500,000 staff, and together spending upward of £265 billion of public money a year.

Every Prime Minister who has held office for a full year since Anthony Eden in the 1950s has created at least one new quango; Tony Blair created 92, the most of any premier, and the current government added 27 in its first eight months alone. “Bonfire of the quangos” has been a stock promise of opposition politicians from David Cameron to Keir Starmer, but the quango state has grown larger, not smaller, under every successive government.

Parliament’s own Public Accounts Committee has repeatedly flagged the accountability problem this creates in almost exactly Mair’s terms: appointments to run these bodies are opaque, oversight is inconsistent, and — most tellingly — ministers have developed a habit of using ALBs as a shield, attributing failures in schools, healthcare, pandemic response, migration control, to the arm’s-length body responsible while distancing themselves from direct blame. It is, in miniature, the exact mechanism the rest of this article describes at the level of international institutions: a function that used to sit inside a directly accountable department is relocated to a body that is technically still “public” but is no longer directly answerable to the electorate through the normal chain of ministerial responsibility — and once relocated, tends to persist and grow regardless of which party is nominally in charge of reversing it.

Why nobody minded — Bobbitt’s market-state

If the institutional story explains how this happened, there’s a parallel ideological story explaining why it didn’t provoke more resistance at the time, and this is where the deindustrialization of the West comes into the story.

China’s 2001 accession to the WTO removed the political uncertainty that had previously surrounded China’s trade status, and coincided with an extraordinary surge in Chinese exports: the value of Chinese imports into the US rose over 1,150 per cent between 1991 and 2007. The most cited research on this, from MIT’s David Autor and colleagues, estimates that import competition from China explains up to a quarter of the contemporaneous decline in US manufacturing employment, and around 2.4 million American jobs lost by 2011 — concentrated in specific regions and specific industries, with effects that appear to have persisted rather than diminished over time.

That said, this finding has been contested by more recent research, which argues the original magnitude was overstated by roughly half, and that US manufacturing employment had already fallen more than 40 percent between 1977 and 2001 — before China’s WTO entry. The honest version of the claim is that China’s accession accelerated and geographically concentrated an already-underway structural shift, not that it single-handedly caused deindustrialization.

UK deindustrialization is both older and differently caused. Manufacturing’s share of UK GDP fell from around 32–33 per cent in 1970 to roughly 8–9 per cent today — one of the steepest declines of any advanced economy — but the steepest phase of that fall happened in the 1970s and 1980s, well before China’s 2001 WTO accession: manufacturing employment fell by a third (2.5 million jobs) between the 1964–73 and 1979–89 business cycles alone, compared with only 10–13 percent in France and Germany over the same span.

The causes most economic historians point to are largely home-grown and predate China entirely: strained industrial relations and strike activity through the 1970s, a sustained productivity gap against West Germany, and the strengthening of sterling driven by North Sea oil revenues in the early 1980s, which priced UK manufactured exports out of world markets just as Thatcher-era monetary policy tightened further. China’s later entry into world trade compounded an already largely completed structural shift rather than triggering it. The political and social consequences — hollowed-out industrial towns, a working class dislocated from the party that once represented it — parallel the American story.

The Australian situation was quite different. China wasn’t a competitive threat to Australian manufacturing so much as its largest customer: the “China boom” of the 2000s drove sustained demand for Australian iron ore, coal, and other commodities, lifting the country’s terms of trade and living standards for a generation, and mining’s share of Australian GDP roughly tripled, from around 4 per cent in 2004 to close to 14 per cent today. And yet Australian manufacturing declined anyway, from about 12 per cent of GDP in 1992 to around 6 per cent now — roughly halving over the very period China’s demand was enriching the country. The mechanism is a version of what economists call the “resource curse” or Dutch disease: the mining boom drove sustained appreciation of the Australian dollar, which — much like North Sea oil pricing British manufactured exports out of world markets in the 1980s — made Australian manufactured exports steadily less competitive even as the overall economy grew.

What this all suggests is that China, produced deindustrialization in the US and UK through import competition and in Australia through currency appreciation from resource-export success — different mechanisms, overlapping outcome. Whether the trigger is your industry losing to cheaper imports or your currency getting too strong to export anything else, the political result looks similar: a shrunken industrial base, a workforce that used to have a stable claim on national prosperity finding that claim harder to make, and an electorate more receptive to the argument that something has gone wrong with how decisions get made on their behalf.

What matters, here, is less the precise magnitude than what happened to the justification offered for accepting it. The constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt, writing at almost exactly this moment, argued that the Western nation-state was being superseded by what he called the “market-state” — a different bargain between government and governed. The twentieth-century nation-state’s legitimacy rested on a promise: “The State will better the welfare of the nation”. The market-state offers something else: “The State will maximize the opportunity of its citizens” — meaning choice, growth, and access to markets, rather than guaranteed provision or protection. Citizens, in that shift, become consumers: the measure of the state’s success becomes the range and price of what you can buy, not the security of what you’re owed.

This crucial distinction really does matter because it supplies the missing piece between the economic story and the institutional one. Deindustrialization created a real, unevenly distributed cost. The market-state’s framing offered a reason not to demand political accountability for that cost through the traditional channels — because the traditional channels (the nation-state’s promise of provision) were precisely what the new bargain had quietly retired.

If your relationship to government is now that of a customer rather than a citizen with a claim on collective provision, it stops mattering as much whether Parliament, the manifesto, or the ballot box is where the real decisions get made, so long as the shelves stay full and the prices stay low. Mair’s void and Bobbitt’s market-state are, I’d argue, the same phenomenon seen from the institutional side and the ideological side respectively.

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Debate itself — thinner and thinner

There’s a final, harder-to-measure piece of the popular complaint: that parliamentary debate itself has worsened — less substantial, more scripted, less genuinely deliberative than a generation or two ago.

Here the evidence is thinner, but not absent. A Swiss study tracking “cognitive complexity” — a measure of how much speakers actually engage with, differentiate between, and integrate opposing viewpoints — in parliamentary immigration debates from 1968 to 2014 found a measurable decline over that period. A recent large-scale analysis of seven million parliamentary speeches across eight countries cites earlier research finding that the linguistic complexity of political language has fallen steadily over roughly the last two centuries.

There’s also a specific, dateable UK institutional change that moves this from mood to mechanism. In 2000, the Commons Modernisation Committee introduced “programme motions” — timetabling agreements fixed in advance for how long each stage of a bill would be debated. The explicit purpose was to end filibustering and bring an end to the Commons’ long-standing culture of unpredictable, sometimes all-night sittings; before 2000, late sittings past 10pm were common, occasionally running until dawn on contested legislation. Since the reform, only around 10 per cent of sittings run past 10pm, and none past midnight. The efficiency case for this was reasonable — nobody seriously mourns debate-by-exhaustion as a legislative technique — but the trade-off is real: debate that once could expand to match the scale of genuine disagreement on a bill is now allocated a fixed slot decided in advance by the government business managers, which means the amount of scrutiny a piece of legislation receives is set administratively rather than emerging from how contested it actually turns out to be. It’s a concrete instance of the pattern the rest of this article describes: a chamber that looks the same, sits at the same address, follows the same procedures in form — but where an increasing share of what actually happens inside it has been pre-decided by a more bureaucratic managerial process situated behind the visible one.

More concrete still is the changing professional composition of legislatures. In the UK Labour Party, the share of “career politicians” — MPs with little occupational experience outside politics-adjacent roles (party staffer, special adviser, think-tank researcher) before entering Parliament — rose from around 10 per cent to around 30 per cent between the mid-1980s and 2015. By 2021, researchers found an “almost complete disappearance” of MPs with any adult experience of working-class life on the leadership teams of either major UK party. This isn’t just a compositional curiosity: one study tracking welfare-reform debates in the Commons from 1987 to 2007 found that career-background MPs were significantly more likely to shape their positions around strategic, swing-voter calculation, while MPs with working-class occupational backgrounds were more likely to argue from their communities’ material interests. A chamber increasingly staffed by people whose entire career has been made inside the same professionalized political-administrative class that Mair describes elsewhere is, unsurprisingly, a chamber that debates differently — more strategically managed, less anchored in outside experience, less willing to say the thing that might jeopardize the only career track its members have ever known.

So — what’s the answer to the malaise?

Difficult to say, isn’t it? There seem to be three broad positions:

One — the repatriation view argues the fix is to bring power back to national parliaments: leave or curtail supranational bodies, reassert legislative control over what agencies and courts are currently deciding, treat the manifesto and the ballot box as the only legitimate source of binding authority.

Two — the fine tune view regards the diagnosis as correct but the prescription as wrong: some depoliticization — independent central banks, scientific regulatory bodies, international human rights frameworks — was a deliberate and defensible trade against the short-termism of electoral cycles, not a democratic failure, and the fix is better accountability within that architecture rather than dismantling it.

Three — the more direct view looks past institutions entirely and argues for expanding the tools of direct democracy — referenda, citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting — as a way of restoring popular input without unwinding the technical and international machinery that modern economies plausibly need to function.

I’m not going to suggest a choice here. Originally, I leaned heavily towards the first of these options, particularly around the time of the Brexit referendum in the UK. I was, and remain, in favour of Brexit (for the reason given earlier under The hollowing-out, measured heading), but I’m now a lot less sure about the logic of trying to reconstitute the status quo ante (back to pure nation-state status, that is) as though nothing had changed. I believe that, in time, the period we are living through will emerge as one of the most dramatic and consequential in history – one of those axial moments when, so to speak, human nature recalibrates itself.

This exercise has helped clarify the issue for me by revealing that, post-Second World War and particularly over the past forty or so years, the machinery of Western democratic government has surreptitiously been reengineered so that manifestos, parliamentary debate and even elections themselves sit atop the new machinery but with precious little power to redirect it.

I don’t doubt that there are many ways for civilizations to fail: the path that, surely, most certainly mirrors and mimics the conditions of natural entropy is the one that features ever more bureaucracy. Control. Control. Perhaps the main element of human behaviour for which there is an infinite capacity?

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And what of Claude?

Let’s go briefly back to where I started this article - with the printing press.

Gutenberg’s new printing press with movable type was amazingly successful; it stormed its way across Europe … Mainz, 1450 … Basle, 1466 … Rome, 1467 … Pilzno in Bohemia, 1468 … Paris, 1470 … Buda, 1473 … Cracow, 1474 … London, 1476 … Cetinje in Montenegro, 1493 … Moscow, 1555?

That was hyper-progression in 15th and 16th century Europe. The dates, by the way, come from British historian, Norman Davies (1939-). The point is, Gutenberg’s press …

… possessed the inestimable facility for the text of a book to be set up, edited, and corrected before being reproduced in thousands of identical copies. 1

The impact in society was immediate and substantial:

The power of the printed word inevitably aroused the fears of the religious authorities. Hence, Mainz, the cradle of the press, also became the cradle of censorship. 2

The supposed mis-information and dis-information enabled by the printing press would be a threat to everyone, particularly damaging to the … ahem … saintly elites who ruled the roost.

Which is why, as stated earlier, a British member of parliament can claim:

We obviously have social media, which is a massive problem at the moment for engagement.

So, yes, today, we get comparable posturing concerning the vastly greater amount of information shipped incessantly out to a vastly greater number of people. No surprise, then, that the digital revolution heightens the instinct for bureaucratic control and is regarded with such suspicion in some areas: “Only trust information from the mainstream media”; “Don’t let children under 16 years of age access online sources …”

Oh, how fruitless. As Richard, Duke of York, declares on the battlefield in King Henry VI, Part 3, printed in 1623, in the First Folio of Shakespeare:

We bodg’d again, as I have seen a swan
With bootless labour swim against the tide,
And spend her strength with over-matching waves.

To reject AI would be equivalent, would it not, to the mood of the European elites back in the 15th and 16th centuries when they tried to ban and control the distribution of books? So far as I am concerned, Claude is a welcome member of the team.

One final question … is Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (subsequently X), completed on 27th October 2022, the spiral historiographical equivalent of Martin Luther’s hammering of the 95 Theses on to the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg on 31st October 1517?

Oh, please say that it is!

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Sources:

Thomson et al. 2017 AJPS; Institute for Government 2019-manifesto tracker; Full Fact Government Tracker; RMIT ABC Fact Check Election Promise Tracker; Mair, Ruling the Void (Verso, 2013); ABS General Social Survey (civic participation data); Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox (2011); Autor/Dorn/Hanson “China Syndrome” (2013) and follow-ups; Crafts/Kitson-Michie on UK deindustrialization; Tyers and Golley et al. on the Australia-China terms-of-trade relationship; Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles (2002); Wyss et al. 2015 Swiss Political Science Review; Commons Modernisation Committee 2000 reforms; O’Grady (UCL) on career politicians; Reform UK / IfG / TaxPayers’ Alliance on quangos.

These days, more and more, it seems to me, pondering the simplest goings-on leads pretty damn quickly into far more complex territory: the switch from micro to macro issues, from identified problems to systemic concerns that our world all too often purposefully ignores or, if it can’t do that, tries to brush aside.

Consider, for example, the incident, nearly two years ago, when a youth took a taxi to a children’s yoga and dance class in Southport, Lancashire, in the north of England. There, in a frenzied knife attack, the youth killed three young girls, physically injured ten more and, no doubt, gave everyone present mental trauma that will remain with them for the rest of their days.

It was an event so far out of the normal that the shock felt by the general public was palpable. Actually, it was more than just shock – there was shock, certainly, but also, inevitably, both fear and anger.

Strong emotion tends to give rise to strong reaction, and so it did in the aftermath of these murders. There were riots, property damage, and threats to life, particularly directed at immigrants, an increasing number of whom have been shipped, and continue to be shipped, into the UK, with many of those who have entered the country by – how shall we say? – stealth, housed in hotels and hostels around the country.

And the reaction of our lords and masters? It was pointed out that the young murderer was not an immigrant but had been born in the UK. But the style and tone of the rebuff that was meted out wasn’t a balanced one that recognized the context but, rather, an uncompromising statement that, in a nutshell, came across as a message to the indigenous population that: “You are trash if you question the official line and we will crush you.”

As it happens, the UK Prime Minister who delivered, if not those precise words, that sentiment, was, of course, Sir Keir Starmer who was, this week, dragged off to Philippi and there forced by his own troops to fall on his sword.

Please, God, may the next one in the hot seat have at least some sense of context, of Big Picture, of the actual complexity of it all. With the UK’s recent track record in mind, I’m not holding my breath.

(Image at top is from Shutterstock)

This post all started, for me, with a recollection of some work that a colleague and I did back in the 1980s with London’s Metropolitan Police when we wrote some materials to try to get some yoofs to, er, modify their behaviour … and swiftly led to my pondering our entire civilization, or, should I say, civilizations, including the horrible incident referred to above.

So, now, hop back with me, if you will, to the mid-1980s and our liaison with the Metropolitan Police.

In 1985, I teamed up with a business partner and we founded a company in London that was among the very first providers of ‘long copy’. We called ourselves Write Solutions. I wrote about it in one of my autobiographical ‘fragments’, Fragment 36, where I described our goal as follows:

So, there we were, ready to set the world alight writing great brochures and scripts and white papers and thinkpieces and future-scenarios and any other long-form literature that client companies might require.

My business partner, John Doff, an experienced advertising executive and filmmaker, had a family home out of town but, during the week, lived in the Notting Hill area of London in a studio apartment in Bedford Gardens that, he told me, had once been home to Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) who, from 1968 until his death, was the UK’s Poet Laureate.

When we started the company, John told me that he knew some of the senior police officers in Notting Hill and said they would like some help. Would I mind, he asked, if we gave them some assistance, pro bono?

Intrigued, I enquired what the problem was. Turned out it was the behaviour of Afro-Caribbean youths - gangs whose antisocial activities included street crime, theft, drug dealing, and more, sometimes accompanied by violence. The point was, the amount of police time and resource consumed by these lads was out of all proportion to the percentage of the population that they represented.

The police did their best to try to get the kids to modify their behaviour but it was an uphill battle: offering them help to improve their lives, helping them to get work for example, often met with derision and outright hostility.

The police were not nasty or unreasonable towards these kids; quite the contrary, in fact, because they tried to initiate schemes to help them. That said, I don’t doubt that, on occasion, tempers did get frayed, possibly resulting in some heavy-handed treatment.

Overall, so far as we were concerned, the question was, could our writing skills help in the battle to make life – dare I use this phrase? – more civilized for everyone? John did most of the work for this account, but enlisted my support to discuss topics and check various items. Numerous initiatives were tried.

But, change the behaviour? Who were we kidding?

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, is surely one of the all-time great analyses of the concept of ‘civilization’ - what it means, what’s potentially good about it, what’s potentially evil about it, and the apparent ease with which these states can be or become confused.

The story starts out on a cruising yawl on the sea-reaches of the River Thames. To start their journey, the small group of friends who are on board have to wait for the tide to turn. In the dusk, Charles Marlow looks around him to the shores …

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” 1

Conrad posits the London of his own time as “the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth” and describes the River Thames as a luminous source and channel of light that leads out to the world. (I know, I know, the mood has subsequently flipped on that particular belief system!) But he starts with the reminder that it was not always so …

“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here … think of a decent young citizen in a toga … Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him, - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. 2

Fast forward to the UK now.

June 2023, Nottingham, England - a young woman, a young man and an older man are stabbed to death by a complete stranger who then steals a vehicle and drives into and seriously injures three more people.

July 2024, Southport, England – as already detailed above, three young girls are stabbed to death, ten more physically injured, and all present, no doubt, seriously mentally disturbed, when a young man purposefully sets out to inflict carnage at a children’s yoga and dance class.

December 2025, Southampton, England - a young chap returning home after an evening out is stabbed multiple times by a complete stranger. When the police arrive his assailant claims that the figure lying bleeding to death in front of them was racist towards him. The police handcuff the victim and read him his rights as his life ebbs away.

June 2026, Belfast, Northern Ireland - a man, savagely stabbed in the head and neck, loses one eye and suffers other major injuries.

June 2026, UK-wide - certainly the most expansive example of all the malfeasance of the recent past in that it spans the entire period from the 1950s onwards, involves towns and cities the length and breadth of the UK, and still has not been properly dealt with. Yes, it’s the so-called grooming gangs or rape gangs scandal. Last week, an independent report - the initiative of Rupert Lowe MP - titled The Rape Gangs Inquiry Report has provided information on this matter. It reveals the truly horrific nature of these crimes. To quote from the Report’s Executive Summary:

The scale of the crimes committed is staggering. It has been previously established that, at the very least, 250,000 young white girls have been subjected to repeated rape, gang rape, trafficking, torture, pregnancy, forced Islamic conversion, and lifelong trauma. The true number is probably higher. The perpetrators bear primary responsibility, yet the institutional failures that enabled them for decades must also be confronted.

The report contains details that are truly horrific.

One really cannot help but wonder, has the dark returned? Is the UK, after a long period of successfully building a liberal, democratic, high-trust society, reverting to “one of the dark places of the earth”?

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A counter to any claim that the crimes listed above, the majority of which have been committed by people who are immigrants to the UK, or of relatively recent immigrant heritage, has anything to do with immigration is that native, white Brits also commit horrible crimes. And, of course, they do.

Just a week or so ago, as it happens, a man called John Varley was jailed for life for the murder of his adopted 13-month old son, and Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, has been locked up for 25 years.

Which is to say, yes, some native Brits commit awful crimes. So, why, when many of these crimes are committed, is there an increasing tendency for social unrest, demonstrations or riots directed at reducing or even reversing immigration?

After all, the government and a lot of mainstream media promote a “Don’t look back in anger” response. The evil-doers, it is pointed out, are a tiny minority. “So long as you remain law-abiding”, we are told, “all will be well and we will harvest the manifold benefits of an increasingly diverse society.”

All of which completely misses the point!

The point is what might be termed The Bigger Picture - something that is often felt quite some time before it clarifies and is properly understood. Try this question, for example: “As a society, do you think we are moving forward?”

We’re back in the territory that I wrote about here just a couple of months ago, which is to say, in the realm of concerns rather than problems.

My earlier post set out to explain the difference between a Problem and a Concern, and their different ramifications, in the context of Business, but the issue relates also to Society and Politics … and, come to that, Life, the Universe and Everything.

In a nutshell, the organizations that we humans build, be they Businesses or Societal or Political groupings of any kind, are almost exclusively imagined and operated as problem-solving machines. Not only that: they are problem-solving machines that have now become almost entirely concern-avoidant.

Does it all hark back to the astonishing success, particularly from the Industrial Revolution onwards, of the market? I think it might. The market mechanism proved to be a revolutionary and outstanding success but, as Christopher Lasch wrote:

The market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle - the cardinal principle of liberalism - that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speak for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except those of the market. 3

So alluring and successful was it that market thinking and mechanisms came to be applied across the board. And, most recently, digital technology has supplied the means to raise the level of mechanization of market thinking to new heights. It’s all so appealing! All so apparently beneficial for all concerned! But it’s also de-humanizing!

Post-1990, business function quality standards soared. It became possible to automate more and more manufacturing processes. And the ‘app’, first applied to large enterprises in the form of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, subsequently became available to enterprises of all sizes, thus enabling the more or less universal application of ‘best practice’ across functions of all kinds.

It was an ultimate expression of a trend that had spanned the 19th and 20th centuries as the West changed itself and, subsequently, the rest of the world, out of all recognition. It was all thanks to technology. In 1800, the vast majority of humans were living at or near a basic subsistence level. The Industrial Revolution then changed everything. Mechanization worked! Boy, did it work! So, what could be more logical than to spread ‘mechanical-thinking’ to the broader reaches of human organization - society and politics?

The Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization or Quango is surely the perfect expression of the ‘marketization’ process. Here is Wikipedia’s definition of the term:

A quango is a corporation, authority or other organisation, formed outside of government-proper, to which a government has devolved power over certain public functions; the organisation has some independence but still partly or ultimately controlled or financed by ministers or other government officers.

A quango is created to enable and oversee a particular function. So, just taking as one example, in the UK, education, there are:

• The Office for Students (OfS) which regulates higher education in England

• LocatED which is a property consultancy that acquires and manages land and sites for educational establishments

• Student Loans Company (SLC) which does what it says on the tin and administers loans and tuition fee payments.

Plus many more: in fact, according to a Google search there are more than 400 quangos in the UK.

“Well,” you might say, “What’s wrong with that? Specialist units for specific tasks. Sounds sensible to me.”

Well, yes and no. There are several potential problems ( I use that word intentionally), key among which is the fact that, by being separated out, specific functions run the risk of becoming de-contextualized. Which is to say, they can easily lose sight of the end goal of the overall function and become obsessive about the success and growth of their own elements.

Nonetheless, there is a significant part of our psyche that loves these functional units because we know where we stand with them. The goals can be clearly identified and stated. The whole issue then comes down to matters of resource: “Do we have enough?”, “Are we able to get enough?”, “What’s the time-scale?”, and so on and on.

Which is to say, it’s all a matter of opportunity and problem identification and resolution. In other words, in any instance, the unit and its project is a problem-solving exercise.

However, another important function always, always runs parallel with problem-solving - the vital element of concern-awareness. To clarify the point, let’s compare the two items, the Problem and the Concern.

PROBLEM

A problem is something that stands in the way of a specific, often near term, objective. It typically:

• Exists here and now

• Is framed in terms of deficits (not enough time, not enough budget, not enough staff)

• Invites a technical or managerial fix

• Fits within the existing organizational logic

In the dominant organizational narrative, problems are what justify the existence of structures, hierarchies and processes. Organizations say, in effect: “People have problems, and we are here to solve them.”

This is ‘the Matrix’: a world that defines itself as a problem-solving apparatus, measured by how efficiently (and, often, profitably) it can fix what it itself has helped to create.

CONCERN

A concern is not just a bigger or more emotional problem. A concern is about where current trajectories lead if we keep doing what we are doing. It is future-oriented and systemic: “If we keep doing things the way we do them now, we’re going to run into difficulties.”

Key features of concerns encompass everything that is going on, the complete context:

• Future orientation: Focused on what will happen if current patterns continue

• Systemic: About wholes, not isolated incidents

• Shared, but often unspoken: Many people feel them; few have words for them

• Rooted in humanness: They emerge from our sense of what is meaningful, fair, sustainable

A concern links today’s behaviour with tomorrow’s consequences. It is less about fixing a symptom and more about interrogating a trajectory. Organizations solve problems. Concerns are about why those problems keep appearing in the first place.

Here’s a brief diversion that, I hope, might help illumine this point.

Two of the greatest works to have appeared thus far in the 21st century come from the pen of Dr Iain McGilchrist. They are: The Master and His Emissary (2009) and the two-volume The Matter With Things (2021).

In these volumes, McGilchrist undertakes a comprehensive review and analysis of what it is to be human, taking as his starting reference point the hemispheric structure of our brains.

The brains of humans, and nearly all major animal groups, have asymmetric brain hemispheres. Why?

The brain is, importantly, divided into two hemispheres: you could say, to sum up a vastly complex matter in a phrase, that the brain’s left hemisphere is designed to help us ap-prehend - and thus manipulate - the world; the right hemisphere to com-prehend it - see it all for what it is. 4

McGilchrist shows how we humans have progressively favoured left-brain thinking (a mechanistic, two-dimensional, separated-out representation of reality) and relegated right-brain thinking (the more holistic, joined-up, integrated view).

The fact is, long-term success requires both hemispheres working in tandem, with the right-brain as the ‘master’ and the left-brain as it’s ‘emissary’. McGilchrist clarifies this point by reference to the need for any creature to find food. For example, a small bird spots some seeds on the ground. Doing that, and going to the seeds, requires sharp focus and attention. However, what if a larger, predatory bird is overhead? All the while, the small bird needs to maintain awareness of the ‘bigger picture’, the bigger context, otherwise it might well, itself, end up as lunch. And that’s where the right hemisphere comes in.

However, ‘mechanical thinking’, the kind of thinking that our technological prowess favours, promotes the left hemisphere.

This, surely, is congruent with the Problem-Concern dichotomy. The Problem view, used more and more universally to grasp hold of (apprehend) advantages is more and more favoured over the Concern view that seeks to make sense of (comprehend) things. But both are required, and its the Concern view that needs to take precedence.

(One final note on this: Dr McGilchrist’s works are absolutely wonderful, awe-inspiring!)

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To wrap this up, let’s just hark back to Notting Hill in the mid-1980s, and the problem of the naughty youths.

My Notting Hill recollections were prompted by recent events here in the UK that drew attention to the behaviour of the British police. Specifically, do they apply the law of the land equably, without fear or favour, and, most specific of all, without reference to skin colour?

Going back to another of the list of crimes earlier in this piece, it was the treatment of 18-year old Henry Nowak, stabbed multiple times but handcuffed and accused of racism as he lay dying, that caused a surge in anger, and some public disorder, and re-prompted the question.

When that particular row exploded one of the things that came to be discussed was a document titled the Police Race Action Plan: Improving policing for Black people. Published in 2022, and updated in 2025, this report, produced jointly by the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, makes it clear that, yes, there is a two-tier approach and it was consciously introduced and adopted as a ‘positive’ choice.

So the answer to the question, ‘Do the British police apply the law of the land equably, without fear or favour, and without reference to skin colour?’ is …

No, they do not.

The rationale is spelled out in the report’s foreword by Chief Constable Sir David Thompson and Chief Constable Andy Marsh. It starts as follows:

In the summer of 2020, nations across the globe were rocked by the outpouring of emotion following the murder of George Floyd. It provided a catalyst for the expression of deep concerns about the social injustice experienced by Black people. 5

This is interesting in and of itself because it suggests that a trigger to maintain unequal treatment may have been an event that occurred in a different country, although it does then go on to address the 1993 murder, in London, of Stephen Lawrence, and the subsequent McPherson Report that raised the issue of ‘institutional racism’ within the police service, defined as …

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping. 6

Hang on, this all raises some tricky questions, doesn’t it? It suggests, does it not, that, a key societal service should differentiate its responses for different audiences?

The report then sets out a case for change (“Our vision is for a police service that is anti-racist and trusted by Black people.”) and identifies ‘corrective action’ under four workstreams:

Workstream 1: Black people and communities are properly represented within policing, with an internal culture that promotes inclusivity and supports their development and progression.

Workstream 2: Black people and communities are respected and treated in a fair and equitable way.

Workstream 3: Black people and communities are routinely involved in the governance of policing.

Workstream 4: Black people are not ‘under-protected’ and are properly supported as victims of crime and as vulnerable groups. 7

Well, okay, there are some reasonable points in there but it was one sentence in the strand to ensure that Black people (gosh, I spontaneously continued the convention of capitalising Black) were not under-protected that struck a particular chord. The sentence was …

Reducing Black victimisation, especially of hate crime and serious youth violence. 8

Which, of course, leads inevitably to asking several questions. Are or were Black people routinely victimized? Are or were they subjected to hate crime, however that is defined? And, of course, what is the situation regarding Black youth in relation to violence?

Whatever the answers to these questions, a key point, it seems to me, is whether they were victimized or not, they behaved differently from the ‘native’ population. Their instinctual behaviours were different. This is definitely a cultural difference and might even be termed a civilizational difference.

The whole point about Write Solutions’ involvement with the Metropolitan Police in the 1980s was the police’s confusion over how to respond to people from a different culture, people who played by different rules and exhibited what was effectively ‘alien’ behaviour.

It was, in fact, a demonstration of the famed multiculturalism that, now, we are more and more assured is a jolly good thing.

To give all of this greater context, I find the following definition of culture helpful:

A unitary complex of interacting assumptions, modes of thought, habits, and styles, which are connected in secret as well as overt ways with the practical arrangements of a society and which, because they are not brought to consciousness, are unopposed in their influence over men’s minds. 9

So, there we have it: the police found themselves trying to negotiate between different modes of thinking about some of the fundamentals of life. And that, as one might say, ain’t easy.

It went far farther, too, as evidenced by the Notting Hill community. In the 1960s the Afro-Caribbean community had brought the idea of masquerade to their new, London community. It was the origin of the Notting Hill Carnival – long since an annual event held every summer. The early carnivals, it seems, confused the police who, when they applied basic ‘English / British’ policing standards, were accused of being heavy-handed.

“Cool it, man! Relax! It’s just a spliff! Hang loose!” went out the call.

And they did. Indeed, there was a conscious decision by the police to modify their behaviour to more closely align with the different culture.

Inter alia, this points to the fact that the issue has absolutely nothing to do with skin colour. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Black people, per se, or people of any other skin pigmentation. It has to do with cultural differences or, one might say, civilizational differences.

This is demonstrated by, for instance, the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, there were substantial influxes of Polish people into the UK. However, they assimilated into the culture quite equitably and without fuss, as have many other nationalities.

The problems occur when the incomers are from cultures that substantially differ from the host culture. And the altering of standards in law and order seems to signal this fact. As listed earlier, there have been numerous instances of major crimes committed by recent incomers to the UK, but there are also significant changes in lower order crimes.

Shoplifting, for example. Recorded shoplifting in England and Wales is at or near all-time highs - around 530,000 cases. This, I presume, is a fairly substantial understatement of the true figure because there seems to be quite widespread awareness that this crime is under-reported. Another shock to the UK system and tradition of fairness happened when an employee of 17 years standing at supermarket chain, Waitrose, was fired for trying to stop a shoplifter from leaving a store.

Then there is fare dodging. So gratuitously prolific that UK shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick MP, is conducting a one-man campaign to draw attention to the extensive amount of fare-dodging that happens on London’s Underground.

And, to the best of my knowledge, we never before needed to paint sidewalks with alerts warning people to hang on tight to their property for fear of theft.

The image, from Shutterstock, is of a pavement in central London.

I am not suggesting that all of this crime is committed exclusively by incomers, but rather that there is the CONCERN that the overall situation is leading to a weakening of British police efficiency and efficacy … and that all of this is part of a trend whereby British culture is being weakened, if not lost.

In pursuit of, inter alia, equity we are losing our famed equitability. If you try to accommodate Culture A and Culture B and Culture C how can you equitably adjudicate matters when conflicts arise, as they inevitably will?

Things change. Of course they do. We cannot stand still and the present is almost certainly going to turn out to be one of history’s great turning points. But are we handling the transition in the best way? To many of us it does not feel like it. There is the sense that the UK and much of the West is going downhill, that increased savagery and lawlessness are causing the country to revert to “one of the dark places of the earth”.

That’s a shame.

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Nearly 65 years ago, in November 1961, I played the part of Shylock in my school’s production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and I’m just now seeing Shylock’s role in a possible new light ,,, the poor so-and-so as a victim of wokeness.

Let’s think about it. Specifically, let’s think about it in relation to this question ..

What does the current mega-shift in human social organization imply for human well-being and, particularly, the way we govern ourselves?

I know, I know, there’s at least one assumption underneath the question I’ve posed - a hell of a sight more than one, probably - but there’s definitely the assumption that human social organization is undergoing some sort of mega-change. So, first, is that true? And, if it is, how might we understand it?

[The image at top is of Shylock After the Trial, an engraving by Sir John Gilbert (1817-1897).]

It’s easiest to access the topic of human social organizational change by first putting attention on technology. Why? Because new technology is always influential in the human social change dynamic, and new communications technology particularly so. New communications technologies are often welcomed with squeals of joy from many of us, but what we tend not to think about, until it’s too late, is the fact that it’s all at the cost of re-ordering the way we conduct our lives.

When, in 1851, the gutta-percha insulated telegraph cable, the Channel Cable, was laid under the sea from England to France, from Dover to Sangatte, it marked a giant step forward for business and commerce, and, consequently, for everyone in terms of work and opportunity. And it made London the place to be.

It’s why, for instance, Julius Reuter (1816-1899) moved to London in 1851, from Aachen in Germany. He had already built a reputation for keeping at the forefront of communications technology, initially using pigeons as his messengers to fill the gap in the telegraph network. But with the cable gap closed …

… Reuter’s pigeons took early retirement and the entrepreneur relocated to London in time for the opening of the Channel Cable. Reuter’s Submarine Telegraph Office at the Royal Exchange Buildings offered his clients in the City and throughout the Continent as far as Russia up-to-the-minute information from the European financial and commodity markets. 1

See? Communications technology leading directly to changed human social behaviours.

Later, along came the radio, or wireless as it was christened. In 1927, a chap called H.V. Morton toured England and wrote a book about his journey. At the far-south-west tip of England, at St Anthony-in-Roseland, Morton was invited into a home where they had one of the new-fangled radios, a particularly fine specimen by the sound of it (pun intended):

‘The wireless has made a rare difference to us,’ said the farmer, as he sat in his muddy boots and leggings, turning knobs and switching valves off and on. …

‘He’s a beauty, he is!’ said the old man, pointing with his pipe stem to the valve set. ‘During that bit of a strike you had up in Lonnun we could heaar ‘zactly all that wor passing as clear as I can see you, sor.’

‘Aye.’ said the old lady, ‘we liked that Mr Baldwin, for he wor as plain as if he wor in this room, but Mr Churchill hemmed and hawed till you felt like wishing to get up behind him and give ‘un a shove.’2

Morton’s comment when leaving the house is poignant:

As I walked down the little path I turned and saw, framed in the yellow window, the new picture of rural England: old heads bent over the wireless set in the light of a paraffin light. London coming to them out of space … 3

Then, of course, came television and further societal shock: after all, never before had millions of people made it their priority to sit down at exactly the same time to peer at small screens. And, of course, from quite early on, these new media became channels for commercial advertising, which added a further layer of social impact.

But the effect of all of these media - telegraph, radio, television and, of course, cinema, which had burgeoned from early in the 20th century - did not compare with the impact that the introduction of the printing press had had when it first spread across Europe in the late-15th and early-16th centuries. Rather, the telegraph, the newspaper, the radio, the cinema, and television were all extensions of the principle established by the printing press. That is, an ever-wider, faster distribution of centrally-distributed, them-to-you, information and entertainment.

It had been the arrival of printing with movable type that had been the actual game-changer, initiating the fundamental shift to start with. Before printing with movable type, the only means of duplicating information was by hand and, with precious few copies of any document available, the burden of distribution fell upon those who could faithfully remember and recite the texts. Memorizing was a highly valued skill.

Even then, for many people, a rendition might not be regarded as a ‘faithful’ copy. For more than two centuries, for example, Muslim authorities refused to allow printing, believing that a written text was not truly authentic unless one heard it being recited by the original author.

The changes wrought by the printing press and subsequent iterations of them-to-you information were huge, including, even, a change in human nature. Does that sound incredible? Well, maybe, but here’s American literary critic, Lionel Trilling (1905-1975), on the topic:

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place. 4

Printing with movable type was the initiator of this shift.

So, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and a mutation in human nature, huh? Sort of around 1564 to 1616, maybe? Well, guess what, those are the dates that book-end the life of one William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare was in his early thirties when he wrote The Merchant of Venice and he was tackling a big topic, the distinction between the Old World and the New World as indicated by the Old Law and the New Law.

The societal changes triggered by the availability of the printed word marked what we would now recognize as the start of the Modern Era in the Western world, a period that ran from the late fifteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

Before that time, in the Old World, the accident of birth defined your place in the scheme of things and dictated what was permissible. From royalty down to the peasantry, you were what you were, without the option. And the measure of your success was the degree of ‘Sincerity’ that you applied to your allotted role.

But the New World, which became the Modern Era that unfolded ever-more amazingly across the next five centuries, had different rules. No longer were you necessarily so restricted as previously by the accident of birth. You could choose to do such things as your capabilities enabled, and progress as far as those capabilities and a portion of good fortune might take you. You could also function in multiple roles, and the measure of all of it was ‘Authenticity’ …

“This above all: to thine own self be true …” (Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet)

At the start of this change, back at the end of the 15th century, it meant there was a vacancy for some bright spark who happened to have extraordinary perception and skill to come along and sketch a few ideas about this … ahem … “brave new world” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). And, sure as fate, there he was: William Shakespeare Esquire, of whom Ben Jonson wrote …

He was not of an age, but for all time.

In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare took on, as his core topic, the law: the Old Law, with an emphasis on Justice, exemplified by Jewish philosophy, counterpointed with a New Law for the new era that put a greater emphasis on Mercy, supposedly exemplified by Christian philosophy.

So, in The Merchant, when matters come to a head in an impressive court scene, we find the heroine, Portia (a male actor, playing the part of a female who is playing the part of a male lawyer!), declaiming:

The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes;

Which, of course, is where Jesus Christ comes into it all. Jew, he may have been, but he put forward a very un-Jewish idea. Remember those scribes and Pharisees who tried to catch him out? “We’ve caught this woman in the act of committing adultery,” they declared. “Actually in the act! No doubt about it. No question. So the punishment’s obvious. Adultery! No question! Get the pile of stones together, lads.” It’s the Old Law every time, isn’t it, until that oh-so-clever Jesus comes along and spoils the fun by saying …

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. (Bible: John 8.7)

… and the guys end up all having to shuffle off with their tails, so to speak, between their legs.

It’s the same for poor old Shylock; he’s prevented from exercising his agreed charge against the merchant, Antonio. And, among the other penalties placed on him, he not only loses all his money but, indignity of indignities, he is ordered to convert to Christianity!

The pattern was set: failure to countenance the level of Mercy decreed by the New Age would itself be harshly punished. It is Shylock, the representative and upholder of the Old Order, who himself is humiliated.

And so it continued throughout the Modern Era. As the years, decades, centuries went by, Mercy ensured the abandonment of many old behaviors. In the UK, time was when you could be hung for stealing a sheep, right up until 1832, in fact. And capital punishment for murder wasn’t completely abolished until 1969.

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Where are we now?

So, the Pre-Modern Age gave us the Old Law, the Mosaic Law, a fierce, uncompromising set of rules, some of which we might well regard as extreme or cruel.

The Modern Age then tempered the rules, using Christian precepts to progressively work towards a new balance between Justice and Mercy and bring the New Law into being.

And now we have entered the Post-Modern Age, so what does the New-New Law look like?

Well, something very intriguing is going on. The world is somehow managing to rearrange itself so as to pit a Max Mercy model against a Max Justice alternative. Which is to say, a liberal version of Virtue is pitting itself against an illiberal version. The fight involves much of the world but the specific site chosen as the stage, stadium, or ring where the fight actually occurs is ‘the West’.

In the Mercy corner - Postmodernism.
In the Justice corner - Islamism.
And it’s interesting to note that, to all intents and purposes, Christianity seems to have limped off hurt, pretty much out of the tussle.

Weirdest of all, perhaps, is the fact that the two active protagonists, Postmodernism for Max-Mercy (of a sort) and Islamism for Max-Justice (of a sort), are, to an extent, actually cooperating with one another … which, I suppose, makes sense because both wish to expedite the situation and, presumably, both parties feel confident that they can emerge as the victor. And, crucially, I’m sure that both recognize that the existing political world across swathes of the West, exemplified by increasingly undemocratic, Kafkaesque, managerial bureaucracy, makes it relatively easier for a wholesale replacement system to grab power.

So, let’s briefly consider the two parties who are both trying to enforce change.

On Postmodernism …

A few years ago, when I first became aware that the term Postmodernism had entered public discourse, I sought out a source of illumination about it and chose the helpfully titled Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks. Turns out it’s an absolutely great book. Here’s a snippet:

Postmodernism … becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power. Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” The task of postmodern professors is to help students “spot, confront, and work against the political horrors of one’s time.”

Those horrors, according to postmodernism, are most prominent in the West, Western civilization being where reason and power have been the most developed. But the pain of those horrors is neither inflicted or suffered equally. Males, whites, and the rich have their hands on the whip of power, and they use it cruelly at the expense of women, racial minorities, and the poor. 5

So far as postmodernism is concerned, there is no objective truth. Which explains, for example, the claim that sexual organs do not indicate gender. But, apparently, one can say that there should be equality … whatever that means, and however you choose to define it.

Hicks’ analysis appears to be spot on: postmodernism truly is “an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power”. Heaven help us!

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On Islamism …

Both alongside (temporarily, at least) and in contestation with Postmodernism is Islamism. Brought to us direct and, some exponents insist, entirely unchanged, from the 7th century, this is one version of the Old Law brought directly into the 21st century. We see it in extreme (or should that read ‘pure’?) form in Afghanistan where women are particularly conspicuously mistreated as chattels and second-class citizens.

My use of the term Islamism will, I know, meet with some criticism. Writing on this topic, former Muslim Danny Burmawi opines:

No serious Islamic scholar teaches that there is a separate category of Muslims called an Islamist. There is only the Muslim who obeys Allah and His Messenger and the Muslim who fails to do so. In other words, the so-called Islamist is simply the Muslim who takes the religion seriously - who doesn’t pick and choose, who applies Islam to every part of life. 6

Well, okay, I take the point and maybe Burmawi is right because there is a track record of Islam going along with left-wing systems when it believes they can help prepare the ground for their own takeover.

For example, in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran came into being, some of the initial groundwork in the early 1970s had been carried out by Dr Ali Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated Iranian who was a convinced socialist:

He crafted a vision of Islamic modernism that rejected what he called ‘Westoxification’ and sought a basis for progressive socialism in Islamic tradition. Shariati said, for example, that Islam’s insistence on the unity of God expressed the need for human unity on Earth. 7

Shariati died in 1977 in Southampton, England, apparently of a heart attack, so did not live to see the eventual takeover in Iran. It is interesting to conjecture what might have happened had he lived long enough to see it because, as I have written here, when the new Islamic rulers gained power, they dealt aggressively with anyone who didn’t share their specific Shi’i beliefs.

Anyway, for the time being at least, those who most fanatically aim to fulfill their dream of Islam right across the West currently seem to find the common cause with members of the far-left to be somewhat convenient.

2+2=5

A couple of months ago a man was fired from his job with UK food store chain, Waitrose. The reason? He intervened to try to prevent a shoplifting incident. The gentleman in question, one Walker Smith, had worked for Waitrose for 17 years.

And it is far from the only horror of this type. For example, in towns across the UK, a huge number of young girls have been sexually groomed and assaulted by predominantly Pakistani-heritage men - the majority of whom have not been brought to account.

And, recently, three teenage boys found guilty of raping two teenage girls avoided jail because the judge expressed a desire not to ‘criminalize’ them from such a young age.

And yet, and yet, when, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of three young girls at a dance class, a woman posted an aggressive social media comment for a short time before thinking better of it and taking it down, was quickly and publicly convicted and given a 27 month jail sentence.

So, what’s going on here?

At the end of the trial in The Merchant, the tide having been turned against Shylock, the Duke of Venice says:

That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit,
I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it;

Well, whoopee! Shylock’s life had never been at risk in the first place. He was, theoretically at least, the injured party. But, suddenly, he’s the one under attack! Do you see the parallels with some of today’s goings-on? And isn’t that bit about “the difference of our spirit” distinctly sanctimonious? The Duke goes on to say …

For half thy wealth, it is Antonio’s,
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive into a fine.

Then, as the final indignity, Antonio pleads for, and gains approval to, the step whereby …

He presently becomes a Christian.

Little did Shylock know, he’d been convicted in The Ministry of Love. Mind you, this particular location did not specifically turn up until George Orwell created it in 1984. It’s where the protagonist, Winston Smith, is interrogated.

Winston’s inquisitor, O’Brien, explains the logic of it all: the problem of the past, he says, was the creation of martyrs - the mistreatment and torture meted out to them is remembered and attracts sympathy. So the need is to get rid of the past. Literally. But how to do that? Well, the problem always arose because, for those from whom confessions were extracted …

… the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up again. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.

Followed by the inevitable conclusion:

We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him, we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.

No matter how many times I read that, I find it chilling. But isn’t something like it going on now? The re-writing of history. The demonization of groups? The imposition of New-New Law that ‘inverts’ the past?

Not least, it leads to the legal contortions listed earlier - a sort of brain-spinning reinvention of history and reality. The most egregious current example is that of the death of Henry Nowak.

On 3rd December 2025, Henry, an 18-year old student at the University of Southampton, was stabbed multiple times as he headed home. When the police arrived the assailant declared that Nowak had racially abused him. This accusation over-rode all else, all rational thinking, in what passed for the minds of the attending police officers. “I’ve been stabbed,” says Henry. “I don’t think you have, mate” responds a police officer. Screech “Racism!” and whoever is accused deserves, it seems, nothing but contempt. So, rather than trying to help Henry as he lay dying, the police handcuffed him. He died shortly afterwards. Eventually, on 1st June 2026, the assailant was jailed for life but nothing can alter the fact that, on that fateful evening, the police committed a terrible wrong.

People prattle on about what makes Britain Britain. Well, I can tell you that two of the rules that were drilled into me and my peers when we were growing up were:

1. Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, everyone is treated the same.

2. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

It is surely hard to see how some of the things going on at the moment are anything other than attempts to turn these and other operating rules of the Old Order on their head “to exercise power for the purpose of social change”.

In a variety of ways, the undermining of reality is succeeding. Even to the extent that, so far as some are concerned, the Jewish people, the original possessors and proponents of the Old Law, who successfully evolved their activities to accommodate the very best of liberal democracy, are now viewed by many of the woke as villains.

We live in confusing and dangerous times.

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It’s not every morning that one wakes to find that something one has written has attracted a truly extraordinary response - not just ‘a comment’ but a paper. But this is exactly what happened in the past few days.

If you haven’t seen it, my piece that triggered the reaction is here.

I am enormously grateful to Dr Neville Buch for his thoughtful and inspiring response to it. Dr Buch, based in Queensland, Australia, writes in his capacity as a key member of the Management Institute for Contributory Economy. The response is reproduced below as a guest post.

Reply from the Centre: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”

Dr Neville Buch

The Architecture of Hope: Reclaiming Agency Against Civilizational Entropy

Abstract

This essay serves as a formal reply from the sustaining Centre (Management Institute for Contributory Economy) to David Pinder’s May 13, 2026, reflections on Western entropy. While Pinder identifies the deindustrialization of the West and the rise of a “therapy culture” as evidence that “the centre cannot hold,” this response argues that the perceived collapse is a byproduct of “denoetization”—the mechanical liquidation of human judgment by a dominant “techné mindset”. By operationalizing the Dynamic of Cognition (DoC) and a Synoptic Vision, the Centre proposes that the remedy for civilizational entropy lies not in nostalgic regression but in reclaiming human authorship. Through the conversion of technics and the practice of panser (thinking as caring), the West can transition from a state of “symbolic misery” toward a Contributory Economy grounded in substantial fairness and Aristotelian flourishing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Architecture of Hope: Reclaiming the Centre in the Age of Entropy

David, your recent reflections on the beach at Redcar serve as a poignant “epistemological provocation”. The red glow of the steelworks you remember from the 1970s was more than an industrial landmark; it represented a material anchor for human agency—a time when the “Who” of the worker was not yet entirely subsumed by the “What” of the global metric. Your observation that “things fall apart” correctly identifies the current “Entropocene”, a geological and cognitive epoch characterized by a massive increase in informational and social disorder.

1. The Pathology of Outsourced Anticipation

The deindustrialization you describe is what our framework identifies as the “displacement of anticipation”. When manufacturing and innovation were outsourced for the sake of “market efficiency,” the process of decision-making—once a properly human concern (Besorgen)—was surrendered to a technological “Gestell” (framework) of calculation. This created an “immense regression” where technical evolution outpaced cultural evolution, leaving society intellectually disarmed against the “widely-believed falsehoods” of the New World Order. In this state, the citizen is reduced to a “passive conduit” for external stimuli, and the capacity for individual authorship is eroded by the coldness of pure calculation.

2. From Therapy Culture to Denoetization

You rightly note the rise of a “therapy culture” and a bureaucratic management approach that has replaced genuine political action. From the perspective of the Matrix of Sociology, this shift represents a form of “denoetization”—the systemic liquidation of the human capacity for discernment. When institutions prioritize “performance standards” and “results-oriented” evaluations over the depth of human experience, they foster a state of “symbolic misery”. The resulting “bureaucratic duty” excludes the foundational Socratic question of how one should live, substituting a “hidden curriculum” of docile compliance for the vibrant, “oppositional democratic public spheres” required for a functioning republic.

3. Reclaiming the Centre through Synoptic Vision

To ensure the centre does hold, we must move beyond “Historical Forgetfulness”—the tendency to repeat past errors because the historical origins of our concepts have been discarded. This requires a Synoptic Vision that reintegrates the Five Intentions (Self, Mind, Reason, Utility, and Love). We must re-learn the art of panser: reinventing thinking (penser) as caring and tending to the wounds of the lifeworld.

This is not a call for a return to the 1970s, but a mandate for Digital Humanism. We must design our technical and economic systems so that the “Who” of the person remains the master of the “What”. By applying the POLICE model (Philosophically Ontology Logic Intersect Compatibility Education) to our institutional narratives, we can filter out the “institutional bullshit” and manufactured myths that mask the current crisis.

Conclusion: Toward a Contributory Future

The West is not inevitably doomed to entropy; it is suffering from a crisis of authorship. The “real economy” that President Xi Jinping identifies is indeed the basis of everything, but in our framework, the real economy is a Contributory Economy where satisfaction is found in collective flourishing rather than the maximization of private possessions.

By adopting Spiral Historiography, we can “uncoil” the circles of stagnation and emerge as the proactive creators of our shared reality. The “centre” is not a static point to be defended, but a “site of conscience” to be perpetually reconstructed through Communicative Action and substantial fairness. Only then can we reach a meaningful shore where every person has the “elbowroom” to truly breathe and contribute.

The following bibliography and endnotes provide the scholarly apparatus for the essay “The Architecture of Hope: Reclaiming Agency Against Civilizational Entropy,” drawing on the educational and sociological frameworks of Dr. Neville Buch and his core theoretical sources.

Endnotes

1. Techné Mindset and Denoetization: The “techné mindset” refers to a cognitive failure that prioritizes measurable, shallow data over the depth of human experience, leading to “denoetization”—the mechanical liquidation of human judgment.

2. Displacement of Anticipation: Bernard Stiegler describes the loss of human agency when decision-making and “care” (Besorgen) are outsourced to technical systems and algorithmic frameworks, resulting in an “immense regression”.

3. Symbolic Misery: A state where individual and collective agency is eroded by hegemonic stimuli and the “coldness of pure calculation,” often masked by a bureaucratic “therapy culture”.

4. Synoptic Vision: An interdisciplinary framework integrating history, sociology, and philosophy to transcend narrow intellectual silos and perceive the “big picture” of social reality.

5. Panser (Thinking as Caring): The practice of reinventing thinking (penser) as a form of tending to the wounds of the social lifeworld, balancing technical efficiency with empathetic human values.

6. The POLICE Model: A procedural mechanism (Philosophically Ontology Logic Intersect Compatibility Education) used as an “intellectual immune system” to filter out “institutional bullshit” and manufactured myths.

7. Digital Humanism: A movement to ensure that technical evolution remains under the mastership of human authorship, directing innovation toward sustainable human goals.

8. Spiral Historiography: A methodology for “uncoiling” repetitive historical errors by critically re-evaluating the past to inform future agency and social accountability.

9. Contributory Economy and Flourishing: An economic and social model where value is measured by Aristotelian flourishing (eudaimonia) and the restoration of the proactive “Who” of the person over the “What” of the technical system.

Bibliography

Buch, Neville. (2015). The Dynamic of Cognition. Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642.

Buch, Neville. (2024). The Techné Mindset: Queensland Education and Intellectual Forgetfulness. Management Institute for Contributory Economy.

Buch, Neville. (2026). A Matrix of Sociology. Management Institute for Contributory Economy.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1979). Communication and the Evolution of Society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action: The Critique of Functionalist Reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Polity Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. (1998). Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (R. Beardsworth & G. Collins, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. (2014). Symbolic Misery, 1: The Hyperindustrial Epoch (B. Norman, Trans.). Polity Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. (2025). The Immense Regression (D. Ross, Trans.). K. Verlag.

Werthner, H., Nuseibeh, B., Prem, E., & Stanger, A. (Eds.). (2024). Introduction to Digital Humanism. Springer International Publishing.

Williams, Bernard. (1985). Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Fontana.

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Hello, Aargh! and DP back again …

I had a conversation this week with another academic, Dr Olaf Hermans, and he came out with this gem:

You know, all the good things are invented at different places in the world at the same moment by people who don’t know each other.

That struck me as unquestionably true and, as it happens, an entirely relevant response to Dr Buch’s essay. There is hope.

In her excellent book, The Extinction of Experience (2024), author Christine Rosen leads with this quote from Max Frisch’s 1957 novel, Homo Faber:

Technology … the knack of so arranging the world so that we need not experience it.

There we have it - denoetization, a word that, I confess, I had never previously come across. As Dr Buch describes it in his essay …

the mechanical liquidation of human judgment by a dominant “techné mindset”

That’s what we’re up against, aren’t we?

It’s a question of getting our relative roles sorted out. But we do need to be proactive about it.

We must design our technical and economic systems so that the “Who” of the person remains the master of the “What”. (Dr. Buch in the above essay.)

I like that.

There will undoubtedly be more on this topic in the near future. I’m already looking into the spiral historiography that Dr Buch refers to, not least because, interestingly enough, Dr Hermans sometimes refers to time and space as a corkscrew.

All of which is more than enough excuse for me to finish with a few lines from Little Gidding, one of the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot:

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

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Redcar Steelworks at Night by Stuart Kerr - Corus Steel Works, RedcarUploaded by Computerjoe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6737823

Early evening, A beach in north-east England. Looking landward one’s gaze is drawn towards a red glow. You can sense the force of it all, even from half a mile away. The heat. The energy. The raw power.

That was my experience over half a century ago, at the start of the 1970s, when I stood on the beach at Redcar, Teesside, in the north-east of England. The steelworks dominated the scene.

At that time I was working for Hertz Rent a Car where, for a while, I was District Manager for the Tyneside region in north-east England, working closely with my Teesside counterpart. It was an illuminating experience.

Business customers were (still are, I’m sure) crucially important for car rental firms and I learned a great deal about their needs and preferences. In the process, I got to meet a lot of them and visited the places where they worked. It’s how I learned about the Teesside steelworks. I learned, too, about the nearby ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) plants at Wilton and Billingham which, at their peak in the 1960s and 1970s, employed around 40,000 people. And, being based in Newcastle on Tyne, I learned about the shipbuilding that had been in continuous existence there for centuries, and, of course, the local coal mining, together with other manufacturing sectors and all of the support functions that served everyone.

All of which is to say that my time in the north-east happened to coincide with a peak period of industrial activity. But twenty or so years later, things changed and virtually all of the industrial activity disappeared. What the hell happened?

Like anything else, the business world is subject to fashion. Which is to say, specific topics or practices come to the fore, dominate for a while, then drop back into the general background. And a practice that came out of nowhere to parade itself as ‘the shiny new thing’, in the 1990s and 2000s, was Outsourcing. There was an Outsourcing Boom.

Up until then, outsourcing had generally been applied only to peripheral services - cleaning, catering and the like. Indeed, the idea that one might outsource business-critical services was unthinkable.

It was, of course, the technology that did it - changed the ground rules, that is. Digital could provide and support all manner of services, and do so with such precision that, the advantages outgunned any conservative, inhibitory instincts.

Suddenly, it became possible to redistribute any and all functions of a business anywhere. As a consequence, the seductive question, “What if it can be done cheaper a few thousand miles away?” almost universally met with an enthusiastic, “Yes!”

It was all managed super-efficiently by management consultancies who, far from being dispassionate advisers, actually had strongly vested interests in the outcomes. The result? In the metaphorical twinkle of an eye, the effective deindustrialization of the West happened.

And the response to anyone who questioned it all …

• “What about our long history of doing this kind of work here?” Silence.

• “What about the livelihoods of the people who, for generations, have done this work here?” Tumbleweed.

A couple of key questions did however get answers that proved to be outright lies:

• “What about the innovation potential in these sectors?” Answer: “Oh yes, that’ll stay here. We get to keep the high value knowledge work.”

• “Might there not be some issues here regarding national security?” Answer: “No need to worry. This is a new, wonderful age for the world.” The idea that was put about was that, with the end of the Cold War (1989/1991), liberal democracy had become the dominant system for everyone: Francis Fukuyama’s “The end of history” and all that.

In the event, of course, it became clear that innovation tends to cuddle up close to where the manufacturing takes place and the post-1990 New World Order, despite being propped up with exaggerated claims of human-caused climate change and sustainability risks, was something of a chimera.

Image source: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter4/transportation-and-energy/world-energy-consumption/

So everything got outsourced. Energy included. Which means, not least, that many of the claims to great virtue by Western countries are outright lies. The energy use goes on and remains 80% to 85% fossil fuel based.

This is not to suggest that using renewables is anything other than a good thing, but let’s not fool ourselves that, yet-a-while anyway, they have become the major source of power. Specifically, let’s not fool ourselves by claiming that we have yet reduced fossil fuel usage at all.

Go to Teesside today and the air may smell sweeter than it did half a century ago but I think many would love to get a little of the old industrial energy back.

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We are left, of course, with the legacy of the Outsourcing Boom.

It’s a topical issue here in the UK because, less than a week ago, in local elections, the governing Labour Party received a hammering. This, arguably, is one consequence of the Outsourcing Boom because the deindustrialization meant that, in very short order, a huge chunk of the Labour Party’s traditional membership of working persons - the very constituency that the party was originally created to serve - was unceremoniously dumped.

Subsequently, the Labour Party, in its run-up-to-the-millennium guise as ‘New Labour’, initiated the mass uncontrolled immigration that has surged, under both Labour and Conservative administrations, in recent years. (One factor in a set of outcomes that has led to these two political parties being labelled - not unfairly, I think - the Uniparty).

The idea seemed to be that the newcomers would act as a replacement for the old working class. But that never really made any sense to me. You outsource millions of jobs, rendering the incumbent workers redundant and throwing them onto the scrap heap, then ship loads more people in to … er … work. But at what?

That said, the incomers did supply a ready-made constituency who might be persuaded to replace the old working class in their capacity as voters, for a time anyway. And, indeed, some new work was created because it is surely no coincidence that, at the same time that ‘traditional work’ was dispatched from this cradle of the Industrial Revolution to anywhere else on Earth, the society left behind restyled itself into a fully-fledged ‘therapy culture’. As Frank Furedi points out:

What distinguishes circumstances today from past therapeutic regimes is that the system of therapy is not confined to a distinct and functionally specific role, it has merged with wider cultural institutions and has an impact on all institutions of society. 1

This has given rise to a hugely increased need for carers and therapeutic specialists of all kinds - particularly of the mental health variety. And it has all fitted hand in glove with a new bureaucratic management approach that has been a wholesale replacement for the political approach that had, not long before, made the West the factory of the world that had enabled and overseen the most astonishing improvements ever in human existence.

When it becomes possible for a majority of people to attain a living standard that until recently was available only to the very wealthiest is society, what do they do? Well, it appears that they complain bitterly that everything is unfair and inequitable, and that the conditions created by their good fortune cause unprecedentedly high anxiety levels.

Which is to say, when the positive energy was withdrawn from the industrial sector (which, insofar as human experience is concerned, surely represented an ordered, low probability state?) it’s as though it was transmuted into negative energy in the resulting society (the corresponding disordered, high-probability condition?).

I find the upshot of the post-Cold War ‘re-organizations’ fascinating. Here’s President Bill Clinton putting the case for China to be granted membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The speech was delivered at Johns Hopkins University on 8th March 2000:

By joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people – their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.

China joined the WTO in December 2001 and the rest, as they say, is history. A history that hasn’t exactly worked out as President Clinton predicted. Thinking of just one Chinese company, a Google search today shows:

Foxconn employs roughly 1.2 to 1.4 million workers across its various sites in China, making it one of the largest private employers in the country. Its largest manufacturing campus, the “iPhone City” in Zhengzhou, employs roughly 200,000–350,000 workers, with staff counts increasing significantly during peak iPhone production season.

… but I don’t think China will be embracing liberal capitalism any time soon.

As we know, President Trump is trying to get American enterprises to pull their manufacturing out of China and, preferably, back into the U.S. - a sensible notion. But a difficult task:

The process of extricating manufacturing production from China will be prolonged and halting. International companies continue to tell me that they are still reluctant to completely pull up their roots from what remains an extraordinary production hub and a very big market. Apple is making immense efforts to cultivate production sites in Vietnam and India. But it is going to be gradual … 2

Meanwhile, it is surely questionable whether other parts of the West are doing enough to re-industrialize. In which context, note that Chinese president Xi Jinping is on record as saying:

The real economy is the basis of everything . . . we must never deindustrialize. 3

Would that the UK might re-learn this lesson!

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The headline to this piece, as you probably already know, is from W,B.Yeats’ poem The Second Coming which includes.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed up the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 4

For a Western audience that looks rather too familiar, don’t you think?

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What I’m about to try to unpick, here, is a result of thinking about Value, primarily in business situations. Not the crude expressions of Value that are only ever thought about in terms of dollar signs in quarterly results but, rather, the expressions of Value that arise from and enrich Customer-Supplier interactions, and people’s interactions generally.

For this specific untangling, I started with a question: “What changed when digital technology started its apparently inexorable reconfiguration of our world?

Duh! I know, I know, I sound like some kind of idiot. The changes were there for all to see: conspicuous, obvious, in front of your face (quite literally). Swathes of science fiction became science fact in such a short period of time that it was head-spinning. Suddenly we could do all manner of things that had been unimaginable just a short time before.

So, all good, huh? Well, er, maybe … maybe not.

That uncertainty is fair, isn’t it? It is surely not controversial to say that along with the wondrous capabilities that digitalization has gifted us we may have imported some not-so-good outcomes? And it’s reasonable to suggest, isn’t it, that concern around this topic has risen a notch or two with the arrival of all those undeniably amazing AIs?

So what are we to make of it all?

It’s a matter of concern …

What does that even mean? “It’s a matter of concern”

If you think about it, the organizations that we humans build and pride ourselves on are problem‑solving machines. We identify needs and opportunities, and create, structure and manage businesses to respond to them, all the while watching out for and dealing with problems along the way.

From this perspective, the world is a never‑ending sequence of issues to fix: delays, cost overruns, insufficient and/or unhappy customers, low productivity, technical defects, broken processes, and so on.

Yet, when you listen carefully to how people talk about their lives and work, you notice that something deeper runs underneath this problem language: Concerns. Concerns are not just bigger or more dramatic problems. They are a different category of human experience, operating at a different level of abstraction and on a different timescale.

The danger, therefore, is that if we treat concerns as if they were just a special subset of problems, we risk missing the real drivers of change, the real sources of resistance, and the real possibilities for mutually beneficial value creation. All of which might well limit our ability to make the most of what, to paraphrase the Bard, might be framed as: “O brave new world that has such AIs in’t!”

That’s why, here, setting out a working distinction between problems and concerns, I want to explore how organizations over-focus on problems, and show why concern-centricity is a necessary companion track.

So, first and foremost, let’s define the two entities, the PROBLEM and the CONCERN?

What is a Problem?

A problem is something that stands in the way of a specific, often near-term, objective. Typically …

• It exists here and now

• It is framed in terms of deficits (not enough time, not enough budget, not enough staff)

• It invites a technical or managerial fix

• It fits within the existing organizational logic

So, for example, we might hear these sorts of claims:

• “We don’t have enough time or resources to finish this project.”

• “The system keeps crashing on peak days.”

• “We’re not going to make the quarterly target.”

In the dominant organizational narrative, problems are what justify the existence of structures, hierarchies and processes. Companies say, in effect: “People have problems, and we exist to solve them and generate a profit by so doing.”

This is ‘the Matrix’: a world that defines itself as a problem-solving apparatus, measured by how efficiently and profitably it can fix what it itself has helped to create.

What is a Concern?

A concern is quite different, not just a bigger or more emotional problem. A concern is about where current trajectories lead if we keep doing what we are doing. It is future-oriented and systemic: “If we keep doing things the way we do them now, we’re going to run into difficulties.”

Concerns are …

• Future oriented: focused on what will happen if current patterns continue.

• Systemic: about wholes, not isolated elements.

• Shared, but frequently unspoken: everybody feels them but few choose, or are even able, to put them into words.

• Rooted in humanness: emerging from our sense of what is meaningful, fair, sustainable

Here are some examples:

• “If we carry on managing this way, I really do worry that we’re going to go badly astray.”

• “The way we treat people here can sometimes undermine motivation and trust.”

• And, as a ‘topic specific’ example, perhaps this: “My concern is that the more we treat education as entertainment, the more we risk hollowing out learning.”

Notice the pattern: a concern links today’s behaviour with tomorrow’s consequences. It is less about fixing a symptom and more about interrogating a trajectory.

To sum the difference up, we might say: organizations solve Problems; Concerns are about why those Problems keep appearing in the first place.

The key point to note, therefore, is that Problems and Concerns are related, but not interchangeable.

From Problem to Concern

Consider this interaction:

Stated problem: “I don’t have enough time or resources to complete my tasks.”
Typical response: “Ask your boss for more resources.”

Simple, huh? Well, no, because this exchange takes the situation at face value. But if the response was a different question a very different answer might well reveal itself:

Real question: “What is your concern?”
Illuminating response: “My boss doesn't listen to me. The way we operate, I just know that my concerns will be ignored.”

And, at that moment, something new comes out into the open. The problem is the immediate pain (not enough time/resources) BUT, the concern is about the systemic pattern that keeps generating the pain (a culture or structure that makes it impossible for such problems to be addressed).

Meet the Awkward Squad

It’s probably true to say that reticence about airing concerns has grown at the same time that Business itself has grown in scale and complexity. Why? Because the larger enterprises have become, the more reliant they are on uniformity. It’s what drove the implicit assumption, from very early on, that a business organization creates value via a disciplined top-down approach. Something along these lines:

1. The CEO and executive team set aspirations for their business, based on market, shareholder and analyst expectations, competitive demands, and based on what they personally want the business to achieve.

2. The aspirations are then articulated as results the business must achieve in the short- and long-term.

3. Organizational structures and business and management tools are then put in place to help the organization achieve the articulated results.

4. The leadership mandate, and the structures and tools, will lead to decisions being taken in the organization that are aligned with the aspirations.

5. These decisions, along with the tools, structures, and aspirations, will then lead to behaviours of people throughout the organization, aligned with achieving results on the road to realizing the aspirations.

6. Then, ultimately, the results will be achieved, and the organization will have learned and been motivated in the process.

There’s only one problem with all this. The entire construct always was utterly invalid!

BUT … in pre-digital times there was an informal system that did actually compensate to some extent for it. Although they sometimes got labelled ‘the awkward squad’, those who, via a mixture of chat, gossip, and other feedback, both inside the organization, and in social situations outside it, did provide checks and balances and, occasionally, brilliant insights.

Many’s the time one’s heard a senior executive mutter the immortal line: “Well, I hate to say it, but he does have a point.”

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“Are you really sure about that?”

So, to sum up, organizations are comfortable with Problems because they do not, in and of themselves, raise questions about whatever course of action has been decided by top management:

• Problems reinforce existing strategies: “The strategy’s right, it’s the way you’re executing it that we need to fix.”

• Problems justify existing technological requirements: “The new enterprise management system means you must input XYZ.”

• Problems justify existing power structures: “Potential problems are inevitable, which is why you need leaders like us to be on hand to solve them.”

• Problems invite blackmail by fear: “If we don’t execute Strategy X quickly, we’ll all fail.”

Concerns, by contrast, undermine all that certainty:

• Concerns ask: “What if the strategy itself is misaligned?”

• Concerns spotlight the side effects and costs of the matrix.

• Concerns demand that we look not just at what is planned, but at what the current pattern of behaviour is doing to people and systems.

• Concerns challenge those at the top: “Are you really sure about that?”

So, it’s unsurprising that the matrix has every interest in pushing Concerns aside if it possibly can. However, attending to people’s Concerns means tapping into intrinsic change energy - the kind of energy that is more and more essential in today’s world, and which does not need to be threatened or bribed into motion. That is a massive potential bonus.

There is, of course, a very important question …

How to do it?

I’m hoping that, in the near future, there will be a mechanism, presumably supported by digital technology, to re-enable the airing of Concerns in a better, more consistent and more overt way than ever previously. It’s a vital requirement among all manner of groups of people if we are to keep and leverage our humanity while the machines take on more and more of the workload.

As indicated earlier, most people do not walk around with a neat written list of “My concerns.” Ask a random group to write their concerns down, unguided, on a blank sheet of paper and my guess is that you’ll end up with a lot of blank sheets of paper.

It’s not that Concerns aren’t there but, rather, that they’re pre-verbal: felt but not yet put into words. They often sit in the subconscious, embedded in experience. If they are to be brought to the surface they need a structure and language to use in the process.

Digitalization has solved a vast number of production and quality problems. Good. And let’s face it, we’re only just at the beginning of this ‘new world’. But, already, the Value dynamic that people intuit and apply in all manner of business and life situations has changed, and is continuing to change, radically.

The reintegration of our ‘individual’ and ‘group’ associations is a necessary step to respond to the changes. It will happen. It must happen. Not least because the over-mechanization of our world is creating a vacuum and, as the old saying has it, Nature abhors such a thing.

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The irony would be a rich one if we allowed the very technologies driving this transformation to become just another layer of the matrix - optimizing for problems while remaining blind to concerns.

The opportunity is the opposite: to use these tools to do what the "awkward squad" once did informally, but better, more consistently, and at scale. Not to replace human judgement, but to create the conditions in which it can finally be heard. That is not a technical challenge. It is, at its heart, a concern — and it is one we would do well not to ignore.

Image at top is from Shutterstock.

Thanks for reading

The year is 1582. The place, Pisa cathedral. An 18-year-old lad has just fathomed the fact that the lamp hanging above the priest’s head and swinging in the summer breeze, however much the swing varies, always takes the same amount of time to return to its start point.

The young chap is Galileo Galilei whose discovery will not long afterwards be applied in a practical application with the invention of the pendulum clock.

(The image above of Pisa Cathedral is from Shutterstock.)

Reading about this incident1 got me thinking about equity. A huge number of people had witnessed the same thing that Galileo observed. But they did not see what he saw.

And, of course, there are oodles of examples of this ‘super-insight’ phenomenon: another obvious one is Isaac Newton and the falling apple, leading to the insight that he inferred regarding gravity.

But, in and of itself, this tells us something about the discoveries. They are rare. Rare in number and definitely not equally distributed. Far from it, in fact. They are not a common phenomenon. If they were, we would be able statistically to identify that a reasonably large percentage of people make at least x super-insights in their lifetime. But they don’t.

The vast majority of us do not make any fundamental discoveries of this kind in our lifetime. And yet a tiny minority make lots. Intelligence and insight are not equally distributed. The problem is that, in modern parlance, this acknowledgement seems to amount to much the same thing as a childish screech of “It’s not fair.”

Indeed, it’s the other way round, which is to say many of those who do make super-insights make several of them. Galileo and Newton among them. Although it was surely a tad ironical that what got Galileo into real danger with the Roman Inquisition in his final years was his support for someone else’s super-insight, Copernicus’s work on planetary motion - “Eppur si muove” (“It still moves”).

We can, of course, expand this idea to encompass anything and everything rather than just scientific developments. And none of it has anything necessarily to do with being born into privilege. Dive into any area.

To give just one example, what about a girl, fourth in a total of twelve children in her family, born in a one-room cabin in Tennessee in 1946? Dolly Parton. Great songwriter. Great singer. Great person.

The point is that talent is not ‘equally’ distributed among us. I’m not a soccer fan and it is far from obvious to me why a gentleman called Erling Haaland at Manchester City Football Club is worth the £500,000 per week that he earns … but I’m quite prepared to accept that Mr Haaland delivers some truly impressive footwork that helps win a lot of games and thrills a lot of fans. I’m genuinely very pleased for him. But, you know, ultimately, the kind of insights that I’m talking about have nothing, per se, to do with money.

This point was nicely demonstrated at the start of the twentieth century by the challenge at that time to achieve machine-powered, manned flight. The U.S. War Department, precursor of the Department of Defense, gave a chap called Samuel Pierpoint Langley the princely sum of $50,000 - equivalent to at least $5 million today - to tackle the task. Consequently, Langley, who had a scientific track record as an astronomer and was extremely well connected, had plenty of funds to get going.

But, as we all know, he didn’t win the race. That prize went to Orville and Wilbur Wright. They did not have a chunk of money, just what they earned from their bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Neither they nor any member of their team had a college education. They just went out at weekends and whenever they could building and testing machines. Build. Test. Crash, Learn. Repeat. (Remind you of anybody today?)

Then it happened - on 17 December 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a powered flight lasting just shy of one minute changed the world. 2

Every year since 1978 an event called Sibos has taken place. The name is an acronym, short for SWIFT International Banking Operations Seminar. SWIFT is itself an acronym, shorthand for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. (You never know, this knowledge might, one day, help you win that tricky pub quiz!)

Anyway, this year’s event will happen in Miami Beach, Florida, over the four days from 28 September to 01 October inclusive. The theme is “Digital finance for AI-driven economies”, introduced online like this:

As AI creates new forms of value all around us, the financial ecosystem is being constantly re-defined to deliver more connectivity, global interoperability and improved resilience. This is a world in which innovation becomes mission-critical, not only to enabling growth but securing financial access for all and protecting against ever-more sophisticated threats.

Sibos 2026 steps into this future to unlock the power of collaboration, technology and innovation as we re-shape digital finance for an AI-driven global economy.

Well, good luck with that, chaps, but I just hope that everyone concerned has raised their level of insight in the last twenty or so years. Back at Sibos 2004, which took place in Atlanta, Georgia, Heidi Miller, then Treasury & Securities Services Executive at JP Morgan Chase & Co., told the conference this:

Let me tell you a story about a business acquaintance who runs a successful Silicon Valley e-commerce venture. In the late ‘90s, this company was experiencing explosive growth, and adding thousands of new customers every week. They desperately needed a secure and easy-to-use online payments solution, and they needed it fast.

Quite logically, they approached several banks and asked them to develop a solution. To make a long story short, the banks tried, but simply could not deliver a solution that met this company’s needs and customer requirements effectively. So the company was forced to turn to another e-commerce start-up that had already developed, piloted and rolled out exactly the solution they were looking for. This business acquaintance is Meg Whitman. The company is eBay. eBay paid over $1 billion to acquire that payments solution provider. It wasn’t a bank. It was PayPal. (A start-up concern where some smart programmers created value based on servicing eBay’s existing customers.)

Wouldn’t you think that banks should be facilitating payments transactions for eBay? We have the customer relationships. We have the accounts. We have the clearing and settlement systems. In fact, PayPal transactions ride on the very same systems we banks have spent billions of dollars building. And yet the banks lost the deal, despite our natural advantages. … How often do we come together purely to create new value for our customers?

Good question at the end there, “How often do we come together purely to create new value for our customers?”, because, historically, the banking sector had a pretty poor record in this respect.

Anyway, my point here is that, back then, the mighty banking sector was impotent when it came to fathoming the insight necessary to come up with a viable digitally-based transaction payments system. Hence PayPal. And the PayPal team included a name that has since became more and more familiar to all of us.

Elon Musk.

Of all the living candidates who might go into the panoply that includes Galileo and Isaac Newton, I reckon Elon’s inclusion is a certainty.

He has already demonstrated his ability to reveal stunning insights on multiple occasions, always using first principles thinking, and tackling the challenges nose on with tremendous conscientiousness.

Many might have rested on their laurels after the PayPal success. Not Elon. His current list of activities encompasses Tesla, SpaceX, X Corp, xAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and Starlink (which is a division of SpaceX).

Interestingly, all of it is based upon a concept of human flourishing rather than ‘money making’.

So, yes, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk and, of course, thousands of others, will figure in the history books as people who possessed the gift of ‘super-insight’ allied with the conscientiousness necessary to turn those insights into real-world outcomes. And, for the most part, they will likely make a great deal of money along the way.

That all makes sense. Good luck to ‘em.

And yet, there is a constituency that seems to disagree with the financial part of the deal. Take, for example, the comment by Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York City, during his mayoral campaign:

I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.

This might make sense if the financial pie was finite, but it isn’t. Rather, it is infinitely growable. Therefore, Mamdani’s comment, as it stands, makes no sense whatsoever.

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What underpins and gives glorious complexity to the human condition is the not-so-simple fact that we humans are, at one and the same time, all the same and all different.

Our ‘sameness’, it seems to me, is what might be termed the basic state, the universality of which was wonderfully expressed by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock says:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

Yup, that’s all of us. It’s not just relevant to Jews and Christians but to every human with any belief system, whatever it may be, anywhere. And I guess that’s what gives rise to the concept of ‘human rights’: if we are all the same, then it follows, does it not, that we must share a set of common ‘rights’?

Hmm, not sure about that.

The fact is that the ‘basic’ human condition, the one from which we all arose, was the ‘survival state’ where success meant just surviving and reproducing. That was it: that was what success looked like.

The ‘Survive & Reproduce’ goal means getting ticks against the bottom three layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - Physiological, Safety and Social Belonging needs. These three are sometimes labelled Deficiency Needs … that is, absent these, one’s very survival is in question.

The higher layers, Esteem and Self-Actualization, are different. They are Growth Needs. You’ve won the battle for survival - now how far can you go?

And this is where we seem to come up against some sort of political brick wall insofar as many people are concerned.

The socialists of this world (and that includes Mamdani) are very concerned that everyone has enough to survive, that no-one is left in dire straits, that the basics of survival and thrival are catered for. And, whether one fully agrees with it or not, that’s a perfectly reasonable, some would say noble, proposition.

But, at the top end of the scale, these jolly nice people often become … less nice. “Stop!” they say. “There’s such a thing as enough, a point beyond which acquisition is sinful.” All of which leads, inevitably to Mamdani’s “I don’t think we should have billionaires” statement. How silly.

All of which brings me back to that living exemplar of the super-insightful & highly conscientious person - Elon.

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It occurs to me, by the way, that Elon is already established among the list of names that are immediately identifiable by just a first name. Like Galileo. And Elon is currently expressing the view that AI may well be about to usher in an age of unprecedented abundance for us all.

Will AI take over all cognitive tasks in the next ten or twenty years? Will it make ‘human work’ unnecessary and turn what we currently call ‘work’ into a hobby? And will it all mean that everyone receives a more-than-adequate income?

Or is the future darker? My mind goes to a much earlier sketch of a possible future - the one drafted by H.G. Wells in his 1895 story, The Time Machine. In it, the human race has evolved into two different species, the dark, aggressive Morlocks and the fair, childlike Eloi. In a way, the Morlocks fulfil the AI role, providing the means for the Eloi to sit around without having to work or expend energy on anything in particular. Looking at the Eloi, the Time Traveller says:

I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence … For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all of its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions. Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. 3

Equality of opportunity is one thing but, please, please, let’s avoid any sort of universal equity that goes beyond that. Why? Because universal equity risks being an inhuman concept … a drones’ game.

Elon talks of making the human race a multi-planet species. Maybe that’s the sort of challenge humanity needs to bring out the best of what we can be?

Thanks for reading.

It’s the morning after the night before when President Trump’s ultimatum to the Islamic Republic of Iran resulted in a climb-down: Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. agreed not to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age”.

Presumably, the oil will start flowing again … but the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran will still be in place.

As we all know, there was a hot war going on. The U.S. and Israel went into battle with the avowed intent of destroying the Islamic Republic of Iran’s navy and security infrastructure, preventing its acquisition of nuclear weaponry, and inhibiting any further development and build up of its stock of offensive missiles.

Many other Western countries sat uncomfortably astride the fence, offering only ‘defensive support’ and, in many instances, permitting public protests against the U.S.-Israel campaign and in favour of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

So, what are we to make of all this? Is it a victory? If so, for whom? What are we to make of the situation?

As my valued subscribers know, my usual approach is to try to espy historical parallels. I’ll start with a personal insight …

Image at top is from Shutterstock,

In 1954 my Mum and Dad and I moved into a tiny terraced house in the city of Leicester in the English East Midlands. I was nine years old. Shortly thereafter, my Dad, George, took me to the local cinema to see a movie titled Invaders from Mars. The story follows a young lad called David who, one night, sees a flying saucer land behind the family home. He tells his Dad, who is called George …

The association in my mind, enhanced by the coincidence of the names, was quite extraordinary. I became that boy. I experienced what he experienced. I became totally absorbed in the situation.

You might just say that I was highly impressionable. Well, maybe, because a similar association spontaneously arose a year or so later when a new book appeared on our one and only bookshelf.

There must have been only around a dozen books in total on that shelf: a couple of Neville Shute novels and some religious stuff, both fact (for example, one titled Easter at Epworth 1 which describes a pilgrimage to the place where John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, was born) and fiction (including a novel titled The Robe 2 about the crucifixion of Jesus).

Then, in 1955, along came a new book. This might not have interested me one bit except that George went to the trouble of actually advising me not to look at it. “It’s not a children’s book,” he said, “It won’t interest you.”

Well, that did it - he never was any good at psychology. At the earliest opportunity, when nobody else was around, I took the book down to take a peek.

There it was: The Scourge of the Swastika, subtitled A Short History of Nazi War Crimes, by Lord Russell of Liverpool.

Now, I knew about the war, as did everybody. It was still relatively fresh in everyone’s memory, and there was still the physical evidence in the politics and the landscape and the people. And here was the chap who had been Deputy Judge Advocate General, British Army of the Rhine, writing about it. He was an expert witness of it all and, from the book, I learned about some of the most appalling crimes in human history.

But it was a photograph that did it - made it personal, that is. There are numerous photos in the book, many of which are hideous as you might gather from the printed descriptors. For example …

A waggon-load of corpses from Buchenwald.
Charred bodies found in the church at Oradour.
The slaughter at Autun. 3

A catalogue of horror, but, again, what captured my imagination at the time was something with which I could directly relate - this image:

It’s from the Warsaw Ghetto, created in November 1940 in German-occupied Poland to corral four hundred thousand Jews who were crammed together in appalling conditions. In 1943, they rose up but it did not end well for them.

I became that boy in the forefront of the photograph. I felt that I could experience what he was experiencing, I became totally absorbed in the situation.

So yes, I get why, today, the Gaza situation elicits so much sympathy from a great number of people. If I was still the young lad I was, my reaction would almost certainly be one of deep association with those who are suffering - especially the children.

Today, however, although I do, indeed, find the suffering awful, I am more cautious about jumping to conclusions regarding the situation - how it may have come about and what is currently being done by the parties on both sides. One learns that things are not always what they seem.

The whole situation that has prevailed since the founding of the State of Israel has been somewhat bizarre. After millennia being, so to speak, the world’s outcasts, the Jewish people were given rights over a tiny sliver of land in what was once Judea. First Nation claims surely don’t come any more clear-cut and valid than this one?

The new state, founded in 1948, chose democracy as its operating principle and did not exclude as full citizens Arabs or others who might not be Jewish. So, surely, all would be sweetness and light, wouldn’t it?

Well, as we all know, the answer to that is a big “NO!”

Wham! - straight away the new State of Israel was attacked by several neighboring countries. But it prevailed. Thereafter, there were several further attacks. Again, it prevailed.

Along the timeline, in 1979, Iran changed, courtesy of a revolution that banished The Imperial State of Iran, headed by a Shah (King), and replaced it with the Islamic Republic of Iran, headed by an Islamic cleric. And the strangest thing, to my mind, about all of this? The mass demonstrations that cheered the change on were an alliance of Shia Muslims and left-wing secularists. And that same alliance continues to this day in protests around the world. Which, in and of itself, is odd because, in Iran itself, the regime expunged the lefties.

As far as the Shi’is were concerned, the revolution was successful. Shi’ism won, and tyranny disappeared. The shah, the Yazid made incarnate, fled in shame and died in exile, in indignity. All the enemies of the Twelve Infallible Imams fled in disgrace, died in infamy. The Shi’is were happy; their religious leaders were now in charge, and everything would now be fine. Justice would finally prevail. But would it? Soon Shi’ism had to rule. And it began to rule with a vengeance. First it had to eliminate all other claimants to the revolution. The nationalists, the socialists, even the alternative Islamists, they all had to conform to the official Shi’ism or be made silent. The intellectuals, the literati, filmmakers, dramatists, anyone who did not agree with the official version of Shi’ism had to be silenced, put under house arrest, imprisoned, forced into exile, or killed. 4

And this hard-line regime continues to this day. So, what is going on? For a start, why are we seeing, in protests around the world, an apparent alignment of devout Muslims and socialist left wingers? Surely, they hate one another, don’t they? What the … ? Why is all of this happening? Are we able to figure it out?

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I want, here, to test a hypothesis, which goes along the following lines:

The current situation as it affects the world, but particularly the United States and Israel versus The Islamic Republic of Iran (and I keep using that title to distinguish it from what we might term Persia with its entirely different cultural history) bears some similarities with the state of affairs that led, first, Britain and France, and then the rest of the West, to go to war with Nazi Germany.

Is there any truth in that idea? Well, let’s first briefly consider the issue of ‘truth’, particularly in a time of war.

It was, I find, U.S. attorney and politician Senator Hiram Jackson (1866-1945) who said:

The first casualty of war is the truth.

However, previously, way back in 1758, in his publication The Idler, Dr Samuel Johnson had written something that may have been less pithy but was certainly more explanatory:

Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

“The falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” Yes.

Theoretically at least, everybody, everywhere, now has far greater access to ‘facts’ about current affairs than ever before in human history. The reality is somewhat different. The truth is, no doubt, no more elusive than it has ever been but it surely feels like that because the ‘background noise’ is now so great, and the manipulation of the ‘background noise’ so sophisticated that it has all become targeted at everyone and broadcast unremittingly across the globe.

Eighty years ago, at the end of the Second World War, there was far less free-flowing information, so it took time to uncover many of the details about what had gone on. Perhaps that helps explain why The Scourge of the Swastika wasn’t published until nearly a decade after hostilities had ceased. It takes time. For example, it was only in March 1947, when staff of the American prosecution team were collecting information for the Nuremberg Trials, which continued right through into 1949, that they discovered a copy of the minutes of a meeting that had taken place on 20th January 1942 at the Villa Wannsee, Berlin. This was the Wannsee Protocol, a document that clearly articulated the planning and intent to deliver ‘the final solution’.

The first casualty of war is the truth. Yes, and not least because one side or the other’s interest may be supported by causing people to believe falsehoods. Which is, of course, where propaganda enters the fray.

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda. 5

Arguably, this may be particularly so during asymmetric warfare where propaganda can be a key weapon in an ‘underdog’s’ armoury. And, even if the truth does prevail, things may still be unclear because, as Franz Kafka observed:

It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it has a live and changing face.

So, now, in 2026, when missiles, drones, bombs, oil prices and propaganda have all been flying around, are we able to draw any conclusions about the animated face of truth?

As mentioned, earlier, I like to use historical comparisons to try to inform current situations. Of course, no two situations are ever the same but there’s often sufficient alignment to throw light on something that is happening.

In this instance, the comparisons I’ll use are Israel & the U.S. versus the Islamic Republic of Iran with, as the historical comparison, the Allied nations versus Nazi Germany. Might any similarities and differences regarding their beliefs and operations inform the current situation?

Well, let’s see, starting with Nazi Germany and events leading up to the the start of the Second World War …

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30th January 1933 - five years before he actively pursued any territorial claims. He was a disgruntled bugger. His political philosophy, National Socialism (Nazism), was founded on an idea of ‘racial purity’. The Germanic people were, supposedly, intrinsically superior to others and the purity of this ‘Aryan master race’ was to be promoted and protected at all costs. This involved strict racial separation and elimination of those with disabilities, with particular exterminatory zeal meted out to Jews.

Hitler was not shy about these beliefs, they were all set out in his 1925 publication, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). He had what I suppose today would be termed Judeophobia. And it would be an accurate term in his case because, quite simply, Hitler’s hatred was built on irrational fear. As one writer puts it:

Hitler remained wedded to the idea that ‘Juda’ was ‘the plague of the world’ and that Germany’s future health depended on eradicating it. Hitler’s language is extraordinarily violent and bloodthirsty, filled with metaphors of plague and parasite. The Jew was variously a maggot, a bloodsucking spider, a rat, a harmful bacillus or a vampire. In Mein Kampf and in his speeches Hitler talks of ‘extermination’ (Vernichtung) and even of gassing Jews; the outcome of the First World War might well have been different, he says, if, instead of the men at the front, ten to fifteen thousand leading ‘Hebrews’ had been exposed to poison gas. 6

No uncertainty. No equivocation. Just irrational fear and hate.

It is particularly instructive, I suggest, to look at the regime that Hitler imposed upon Germany. What did he do after he came to power early in 1933? Here, Lord Russell provides a useful summary …

From the very moment Hitler came to power he and the party began to put into execution the common plan or conspiracy whose aims had already been set out in Mein Kampf and which included the commission of crimes against peace, war crimes, and other crimes against humanity. The framework of this conspiracy was the Nazi Party … 7

The Party was organized from top to bottom, from the Führer down through each administrative region, Gau, to the counties, urban and rural districts, cells and blocks.

The Nazi official thus touched life at every turn, but it was the smallest Caesar - the Blockwart - who was the biggest tyrant of them all. It was he who spied on every household. 8

You get the idea?

From 1933 to 1938 Hitler focused his energies, quite successfully as it happens, on rebuilding German infrastructure and the economy, and on propagandizing his ideas. It was all preparatory to his implementing his plan to reconstitute and revivify ‘the German world’, a far more expansive Germany than actually existed at the time.

Then Lebensraum, the expansion of the German living space, began. This meant, first, in March 1938, the Anschluss, when Germany took Austria into its fold.

The rest of the world was worried. They watched with concern but decided that it was appropriate, for the time being at least, to go along with Hitler.

Then, in late-September 1938, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border region of Czechoslovakia. The rest of the world still avoided confrontation. “He’ll stop soon, won’t he?” Short term appeasement seemed like the best approach.

On 30 September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain arrived back at Heston Aerodrome (now long since Heathrow Airport) from a meeting with Hitler and, waving a signed document, announced that he thought it was “peace for our time”.

On 9-10 November 1938, came Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass): this German internal campaign was Hitler’s violent declaration of war against German and Austrian Jews. The level of worry in other European nations again rose.

Then, in September 1939 Hitler took the ‘step-too-far-that-could-no-longer-be-tolerated’ when he invaded Poland … the act that was to lead to the Warsaw Ghetto issue pictured earlier.

Enough! Enough! Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War Two had begun.

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So, are there similarities between the Iranian situation in the run-up to 1980 and the German situation of the 1930s? Arguably, I suggest, Yes.

In 1918, after the end of World War One, the Weimar Republic was formed in Germany. It amounted to an experiment in democracy but proved to be highly unstable. The economic problems, in particular, provided the opportunity for the Nazi party to get started. Hitler promised to sort out the chaos. It meant an end to democracy and a great deal of authoritarian rule but …

… many Germans went along with the full range of Hitler’s policies, convinced that they would ultimately be advantageous for the country. 9

As mentioned earlier, The Islamic Republic of Iran came into being in 1979. At the time, the takeover was enthusiastically supported by a coalition of Shia Muslims and left-wing secularists who believed it would lead to a better, more equitable situation than existed under the Shah. Until, that is, the clerics enforced their rigid view of how the world should work.

So, in both situations, the new arrivals were administrations that, in the short-term, gained power with the promise to stop the perceived disorder and shortcomings of an existing regimen. Only subsequently were the true amounts and precise directions of the incoming authoritarians fully revealed.

And each had an extreme belief that, presumably, my not have been held by a majority in each case:

• The Nazis fanatically pursued expansionism driven by the extreme theory of ‘racial purity’outlined earlier.

• For the Shi’ites, the passion is for expansionism driven by an extreme theory of Shia Islam that includes obliteration of Israel and, ultimately, the West.

In fact, this last point was the part of it all that, for a long time, seemed hardest to make any sense of …

Why the Left-Right hook-up? Why and how did that come about? The most plausible explanation that I have come across has to do with the activities of one Ali Shariati (1933-1977).

I’ll not go into great detail about the life and times of Shariati: not least because it has already been brilliantly done, here on Substack, by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour at

Suffice to say that Shariati was intellectually fascinated by existentialist (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980), anti-colonialist (Frantz Fanon, 1925-1961) and other left-wing thinkers who all might be considered foundational minds of what has today become ‘woke thinking’. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour’s piece on Shariati includes this:

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which has drawn upon itself the consequences of a half-century of revolutionary ideology, was the unintended offspring of such a literary mind made even more dangerous by systematic philosophical education; a single, extraordinary and almost entirely misunderstood intellectual who translated Martin Heidegger’s work into Farsi, called Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon his idols, spent his formative years in Paris, and proceeded to reconstruct the whole arc of Islamic sacred history as a mystified version of a Marxian theory of history, in which all events point towards an Islamicised, socialist ending. 10

A separate explication, this one by Hamid Dabashi, makes clear that although Shariati was a central player in evolving this “Islamicised, socialist ending”, he was not alone in the task, and hooks in the Shia element:

In three thematic moves, Farrokhzad [Forugh Farrokhzad (1934-1967)], Shari’ati, and Makhmalbaf [Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1957 - )] - an iconoclastic poet, a firebrand revolutionary, and a rebellious film maker - at once defied and yet in their defiance paradoxically reaffirmed the hidden and obviated Shi’i that was in all of them, in their bodies and souls, the distant echoes of foregone conclusions, dimmed memories of ancient convictions, a superlative vision of a common faith solidly reflected in three broken pieces f an honest mirror. 11

To my mind, this all makes some sort of sense of an otherwise inexplicable situation. If this was the longed-for outcome … what happened in the real world?

As mentioned earlier, one of the Nazis’ first actions when they assumed power was the creation of an internal ‘spy network’ with thousands of Blockwarts.

In Iran, as already stated, the clerics enforced their rigid view of how the world should work. From Day One, this required the creation of an organization comparable to that which was woven into German society in the 1930s, right down to the Blockwart. The Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FARAJA) includes the morality police and special anti-riot units. These use intensified surveillance, including drones and facial recognition, alongside physical patrols that enforce strict dress codes.

Also, in both situations, an external terror force was created: in Nazi Germany the Einsatzgruppen; in the Islamic Republic of Iran the Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC).

The records of Einsatzgruppen activities clearly show that they committed some of the worst crimes in history.

Nazi Germany expanded by taking territory by force. The Islamic Republic of Iran expanded by making alliances - hence the arrangements with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza - where it provided finance, training and sheer encouragement.

Then, some of the worst of the activities - equivalent to those of the Einsatzgruppen - were initiated by these partners. The comparison does actually appear in a 2024 report in the New Yorker about the Hamas leader Yahya Al-Sinwar (1962-2024). Writing about the hideous pogrom of 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched an unpremeditated attack on Israeli civilian and military targets, the article author, David Remnick, includes:

Shortly after arriving, I encountered Barak Hiram, an I.D.F. brigadier general. He told me that he had been at home in Tekoa, a West Bank settlement, when he heard the news of the Hamas incursion. He headed south, and eventually led troops in Be’eri. When the fighting was over, he said, he and his men came across corpses everywhere—in the houses, under trees. Later, Hiram and other commanders would be investigated for their actions in Be’eri, including ordering a tank to fire on a house where hostages were being held; they were cleared of any violations.

“They were armed to their teeth,” Hiram said of the Hamas fighters. “They had rocket launchers, R.P.G.s, a lot of Russian equipment, AK-47s, antihuman mines, claymores. They tried to booby-trap a lot of civilian bodies with hand grenades, taking out the safety pins and putting them under the body. They knew that someone would come and try to evacuate them. While we were fighting, digging into the kibbutz, trying to get to more civilians, we heard more and more shooting all around. It was a bloodbath. It was a massacre. They went from one house to another, murdering everyone.”

Then the general paused and said a single word that has stayed with me: “Einsatzgruppen.” 12

It’s midday, now, here in the UK on this first day of a ceasefire. Only time will tell whether or not the ceasefire holds. Only time will tell if this is anything like the beginning of some sort of sustainable peace. Only time will tell if the attack dogs of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi - cease their violence against Israel.

But, whatever the outcomes, it seems to me that some of the basic issues have NOT been tackled. To be fair, they were even more glossed over by every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter. The different points of view and incipient violence ain’t going to just vanish!

It was around 70 years ago that I sat glued to Invaders from Mars. What I did not discover until many, many years later was that there were two versions of the movie. The version that I saw in the UK ended with the departure of the Martians and the return to normality of the humans who had been ‘changed’ by Martian mind-control technology.

However, in the original U.S. version, apparently, the arrival of the Martians was posited as a repeating nightmare.

I wonder what the outcome will be, particularly for those in Iran who long for a life free from the mind-control attempts of the Islamist zealots, and for the people of Israel who I’m sure would like nothing more than to be able to live in peace with their neighbours?

Thanks for reading.

Playtime! Remember? Those occasions when you ran around like a mad thing or, maybe, just stood stock still and stared intently at a slithering snail. And at the heart of it all there was the puddle, preferably one set in a nice muddy hollow, the archetypal feature of the all-engaging world of childhood playtime. (The puddle-jumper photo at the top is from Shutterstock.)

Hold that thought, then consider this …

When you throw a rock, catch a ball, or jump just hard enough to clear a hurdle, the older, unconscious part of the brain, the cerebellum, reveals an effortless grasp of the fundamental laws of motion. 1

The quote is from a book that describes a selection of the world’s greatest scientific experiments - in this instance, referencing Galileo Galilei’s (1564-1642) work on fathoming the basic rules of motion.

So, you see, playtime had a deeper purpose than you could have imagined at the time. An immensely practical purpose. You were learning survival skills. In far greater detail, in fact, than you might imagine even now because, until recently, the cerebellum, the ancient brain, referenced in the quote as being “unconscious”, was thought to be exclusively concerned with matters of motion. But this turns out not to be the whole story. Far from it. It’s now established that the cerebellum plays a crucial role in emotional and social interaction.

“And”, you may ask, “your point is?”

We humans are not machines. Simple as that. At least, not in the way that we routinely think of a machine. We are not designed and created to fulfill a specific purpose. And, when not in use, we can’t just be switched off.

That’s not how we operate. The way we function is far more complex. Not least, we are a species that is actually aware of its own existence, its own Being [Dasein as German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) coined it] and, if Heidegger is right, that existence is inseparable from the world in which we live. Being, in this full sense, is a vanishingly rare and special condition:

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. 2

Maybe in the future AI will become self-aware - Autonomous Artificial Intelligence, AAI. But it ain’t there yet. And, even when and if it does happen, it’s hard to conceive how the ‘thinking mode’ might in some respects emulate the human modus operandi. If it does, arguably, we’re screwed anyway.

In the meantime, just thank your lucky stars that you were able to learn to jump into and over puddles without needing to even know about, let alone understand, the inverse square law.

Sci-fi to Sci-fact. (What a wonderful world!)

In the past two hundred years a cascade of technological advances has gifted us new capabilities that have transformed our world.

Has this, however, led us to one particular view of progress? Have we unthinkingly locked on to a single approach that might be somewhat limiting? Specifically, does the fact that the extraordinary advances have given rise to a sharp focusing of our Business attention on to one particular methodology, generally labeled Systems Thinking, mean that we risk limiting our future potential?

It seems to me that this may be a legitimate concern.

Systems Thinking has contributed hugely to our progress to date and, no doubt, will continue to do so in the future. (Note: within this regimen “a system is a set of interrelated entities, things, or people, that work together to produce a result.”3)

However, the other side of the Systems Thinking coin, so to speak, is one of conformity. Because, in pursuit of what becomes ‘best practice’, and the ways and means that have generally been found to deliver the holy grail of ‘best practice’, Systems Thinking may inhibit our thinking, effectively closing down some choices.

You don’t have to reach far back in time to see business methods that were very different from those of today. Before digitalization things were far more varied, right across the board. Organization. Manufacturing. Procurement. Accounting. These activities, and more, all varied a great deal from enterprise to enterprise. There was - dare I say it? - far more diversity in this respect. It led to two outcomes that it is useful to recall:

• Enterprises tended to have more individual, discrete cultures than they now do. Those cultures resulted from: A) geographical factors because companies were literally more ‘geographically contained’ and integrated than they now are; B) human factors in the sense that, across almost all task areas, the direct human inputs were greater than they now are; all of which led to C) a broad range of behavioral factors across all areas of activity and functions that amounted to a culture, “The way we do things round here”.

• For all manner of goods and services this resulted in a far greater range in terms of quality, efficiency, availability, price and so on. Which is to say, the ‘spectrum’ of products/services in any particular category was generally broadly distributed. Think about this in terms of an axis where the two extremes are:
  > “This product/service is unique and consequently there are no competing options”
  versus
  > “This product/service is substitutable and consequently there are many competing options.”
  Most products/services were situated somewhere between those two extremes.

But things changed out of all recognition. You’d probably recognize the change via two factors in particular ...

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Outsourcing and Apps (What an improved quality world!)

Actually, it was more than that. Outsourcing and apps were two of the key means that were deployed but the core issue was summed up in 1993, as follows:

For two hundred years people have founded and built companies around Adam Smith’s brilliant discovery that industrial work should be broken down into its simplest and most basic tasks. In the postindustrial business age we are now entering, corporations will be founded and built around the idea of reunifying those tasks into coherent business processes. 4

In the 1990s, enterprises were flipped over, from vertical, hierarchically-organized task-machines to horizontally-distributed process-machines. So, where once all functions had to be physically close together they could now be distributed across the globe.

The average level of the quality of everything soared. Where, once, when functions such as Information Technology (IT), Customer Service and Procurement were organized and managed entirely by one’s own internal team, the quality range was immense, from absolutely superb to shockingly appalling. But when management consulting and accounting firms and a new breed of outsourcing specialists started offering to take over processes, often taking over a company’s existing staff, the quality baseline moved up.

This gave rise, at the time, to an interesting conundrum. Enterprises used to pride themselves on the way they did things and regarded any idiosyncrasies almost as cultural artifacts (“The way we do things round here.”) But, when functions were outsourced, these, inevitably, started to be ‘ironed out’. What mattered was ‘best practice’.

Here’s something that I wrote in the noughties when writing stuff for an outsourcing provider:

At the core of outsourcing is an apparent contradiction: the more a client company outsources to an outsourcing provider, the more necessary it becomes for the outsourcing provider to behave as an integral part of the client company.

So, where an enterprise outsources multiple functions across multiple geographies, there is the necessity for the outsourcing provider to align with the strategy, values and culture of the client company. Only then is the outsourcing provider able to assess and respond to technological, economic and market factors that may impact the client company’s strategic goals, as if it were an internal part of the client organization. This dynamic affects account management generally, but has profound implications for human capital strategy (including such core issues as vision and values) in both camps. 5

It took a while to latch on to the fact that worrying about this was … er … not the key issue. We were not just dealing with a ‘normal’ readjustment of business practice: rather this was a complete reinvention of it which, inter alia, included a major change to the roles of Marketing and Sales.

As mentioned earlier, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith identified the power of breaking down work into tasks. This gave rise to a Product Focus which, in turn, led to the specific organizational outcomes that prevailed until very recently - a military-style organizational approach with ‘chain of command’ management and reporting.

(In the mid-1980s, I was invited by a client to join him for lunch. It was an insurance company and I turned up at their central London premises. When I announced my arrival at the ground-floor reception I was directed to … wait for it … The Senior Mess. The military model ran deep!)

Marketing and Sales evolved as part of this organizational set-up, their role being to communicate to potential customers the value in the particular products that an enterprise offered for sale. But, with the dawn of the digital age, that proposition was, so to speak, blown out of the water.

The point was that, overall, the level of quality of goods and services of all kinds had improved … BUT, at first, that tended to distract attention from the fact that the core rationale of Business had changed!

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Conform OR die? Conform AND die? (What a bloody confusing world!)

We’re at an inflection point in human history, aren’t we? The interaction between our social and technological evolutionary paths has brought us, for the very first time, to a point where we really do have to consider matters on a truly global scale, and even to ponder whether or not we might not have reached a point where humanity may have met, or is about to meet, an intelligence far greater than our own.

Axiomatically, none of us can know the answers to the issues this challenge presents. So what are we to do?

The thing that seems, to my mind, to be most important of all is that, while benefiting from any advances that AI may now deliver, we take great care to nurture and protect our own humanity. So, the thing we need most to do now is think deeply about our own strengths and weaknesses, and the extraordinary powers (including puddle jumping!) that our own, inbuilt operating wetware gifts us.

In this regard, I suggest we think most assiduously about our unique human capacity for bottom-up thinking. This is not to deny that there is a place for top-down thinking but it’s those bottom-up connections, both intentional and happenstance, that emerge that hold the key to the most exciting developments.

Which is to say, keep your own netwotk very much in mind. And work on it. Think of it as your own personal playground. Who do you already enjoy playing with? Who might you enjoy playing with? Go for it.

You are not a machine (What a wonderful world, redux!)

New technologically enabled methods, including the Outsourcing and Apps mentioned earlier, have transformed business standards the world over. But, so far as technological developments are concerned, there’s a danger, isn’t there, that we now fetishize ‘machine thinking’? It evidences itself in terms of a set of beliefs based upon assumed ‘machine magic’.

Earlier, I discussed the pre-digital era performance of enterprises in terms of this axis …

> “This product/service is unique and consequently there are no competing options”
versus
> “This product/service is substitutable and consequently there are many competing options.”

… and mentioned that most products/services were situated somewhere between those two extremes.

This is where the Big Change happened. Now, thanks to the great tech advances, almost all products/services are situated at the extremes, leaving very, very little in the middle. And because it is hard to be sharply differentiated, this means that most offerings are pushed into the ‘substitutable’ category - the crowded, shark-infested part of the business ocean!

So, sure, machines can do ever more things: they are astonishingly precise; they are remarkably reliable; their performance is measurable in terms of a vast array of metrics. And, yes, with digital tech it seems we can measure everything - which is why, it seems to me, one of the things we do much more of these days is “watch the dials”.

But keep in mind, not everything that can be measured is important, and some things that are important cannot be measured.

So, okay, by all means watch the dials but … also devote time to both hear the background buzz and communicate productively with individuals within your network.

And, finally, just to say, the playground analogy is useful to communicate this idea because I believe that what I’m talking about is something that holds out the prospect of helping us all work out some truly valuable contributions to whatever challenges we face, while at the same time having some fun. Let’s face it, there tends not to be enough fun around a lot of the time.

Writing this, I’ve realized that it actually has to be Part One of a series! Oh well, there’ll be more to follow. More puddle-jumping soon :-)

Thanks for reading.

Can the Western world and the Islamic world co-exist in the same space and remain stable and on good terms with one another?

You see, that sentence alone indicates the problem, doesn’t it? The Western world. The Islamic world. Two different worlds. Two completely different perspectives on … well … life, the universe and everything. And yet, all too often, we can’t even state the key differences properly.

A pretty young woman walks down the street. (The image above is from Shutterstock.) Her hair flows free, her clothing - and there’s not a lot of it - doesn’t seek to hide her body shape, and she’s conspicuously un-self-conscious about it all. The Islamic world is horrified and sees this behaviour as utterly decadent. The Western world thinks it’s great and regards it as part of the freedom that individuals, both male and female, share. And all we do is talk past one another.

Meanwhile, a lot of Western politicians glibly side-step the issue altogether by lazily and repeatedly spouting the meaningless mantra, “Diversity is our greatest strength”.

I came quite late to the work of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). Suddenly, there was this store of wonderful thinking and analysis about how the world works, how we humans work, and the nature of good and evil. Arendt’s beautiful mind was widely recognized within her own lifetime: as evidenced, for example, by her receiving the Lessing Prize, a literary award, from the city of Hamburg.

The Lessing Prize? Yes, the Lessing in question being Gottholt Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781). He was an 18th century philosopher, dramatist and critic. In her 1959 award acceptance address one of the points Arendt made about Lessing was his unwillingness to judge a work of art “in itself”. Rather, he judged it in the context of its effect in the world, and he also applied this principle to other things, including religion. One outcome, as Arendt explained it, was:

Thus even in the dispute over Christianity he did not take up a fixed position. Rather, as he once said with magnificent self-knowledge, he instinctively became dubious of Christianity “the more cogently some tried to prove it to me,” and instinctively tried “to preserve it in [his] heart” the more wantonly and triumphantly others sought to trample it underfoot.” 1

That had me nearly in tears. Why? Because I realized that I share that view but have for a very long time suppressed it for fear of appearing inconsistent or, even, stupid.

As with most of the ethical challenges that confront us, it is not a question simply of whether they are one hundred percent right or one hundred percent wrong, but more along the lines of “What is the truth in there?”

And this, of course, is not the kind of thinking that our communications resources force us towards. Rather, the 21st century technologies that now give us 24/7 access to all manner of information tend to push us to become ever more dogmatic about … well … everything.

Perhaps we need more subtlety, more shades of grey?

With that thought in mind, let’s go back to look a little more closely at the Islamic world. And I’m going to preface my comments with my usual qualification that I am neither an academic nor a theologian.

The key issue with Islam, it seems to me, is that it is dogmatic. In fact it appears to take dogmatism to the nth degree. And it starts with the concept of the belief system itself - ‘Islam’, religion as a ‘submission’ or a ‘surrender’:

What appears to have particularly impressed Muhammad is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son in the supreme test set by Yahweh. Abraham’s submission, or aslama in Arabic, provided the word for the new religion. 2

The ultimate focal point of the dogmatism is submission to ‘the one true God’; based upon recognition of ‘the one true God’, and Prophet Mohammed’s role in bringing the world’s attention to said claimed divinity.

I’d guess that most people in the Western world (and the rest of the world, come to that) don’t bother their heads about this topic. Which is not the same as saying that they do not care, at some level at least, about the range of fundamental issues (e.g. Where do we come from?, Is there a reason for our existence? etc., etc.) that give rise to such a conundrum.

As comedian Ricky Gervais so trenchantly put it, in an online post:

There have been nearly 3000 Gods so far but only yours actually exists. The others are silly made up nonsense. But not yours. Yours is real. 3

Anyway, Islamic dogmatism is then carried through into every aspect of life - religious practice, legal matters, clothing, diet, hygiene, sexuality and on and on. This is the challenge: Islam operates on the basis that Islam is the only ‘proper’ way to live. Not only that, Islam’s documents, history and practices impress the idea that this modus operandi is mandatory. So much so that the world is divided into Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam/Peace) and Dar al-Harb (Abode of War).

Now then, you might say, the nominally Judaeo-Christian Western world is just as dogmatic … and maybe it is. Perhaps I can’t easily see the extent of the Western dogmatism because I am, myself, immersed in it. I was born into it, brought up in it, and have lived in it ever since.

Mind you, along life’s way I have visited parts of the Islamic world. And you know what, I’ve enjoyed those excursions. And while in those parts of the Islamic world I automatically accepted that it was appropriate for me to behave in ways that would not offend the people for whom those countries were home.

That’s the mindset that, in my opinion, supports real diversity.

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For a very long time I was unaware of the ins and outs of Islam. It just didn’t enter the conversation. I knew of it but not about it, if that makes sense. And more or less the only stuff I knew of it came from school history lessons and entertainment - movies that featured Robin Hood, or other stories about ye knights of olde and the Crusades.

Then I became aware of a 1941 photograph where Adolf Hitler is sitting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini (see below).

Image: Heinrich Hoffmann Collection/Wikipedia

They met in Berlin. It was during World War 2 and the Arabs and the Germans declared their mutual friendship and support, and expressed their mutual hatred of the English, the Jews and the Communists. This hardly endeared them to the Western world. And do keep in mind, this was several years before the formation of Israel.

Mention of the antipathy that some Muslims feel towards Jews highlights a further significant difference between the Islamic world and the Western world: the two worlds think differently about time.

Here in the Western world, I think it fair to say, we live very much in the Now, in the current time period. Yes, we may put things into a temporal context but that normally involves a fairly short, recent span. And, based on our ‘lived experience’ we expect material things to progress.

By contrast, the Islamic world takes a much longer view, and takes as a focal point the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad, and the period shortly thereafter.

I repeat, I am no academic or theologian, but, so far as I can fathom it, it has a lot to do with the set of events that followed the Prophet’s death - Who should succeed him? Who actually did? This involved, inter alia, the Battle of Karbala in 680, where Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn ibn Ali, was killed by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid I. Ever since, the Sunni-Shi’a divide has figured large in the Islamic story:

The entire Karbala syndrome is quintessentially narrated around the trauma of infanticide and the guilt that is incumbent upon it. How could Muslim’s kill their beloved Prophet’s own grandson so coldbloodedly so soon after the death of the Prophet? 4

It goes very deep: throughout the Iranian dispensation, now under attack from Israeli and US forces, the Shi’a trauma of the Karbala killing has been relived each and every year at the Hosseini Infants Ceremony, a mass gathering where mothers symbolically present their infants as potential martyrs to be sacrificed for their faith.

Hamid Dabashi, Iranian-American professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, who wrote the ‘Karbala syndrome’ quote above, has poetically summed up the Shi’a enigma as he sees it, as follows:

Shi’ism, in the end, is a paradox. It thrives and is triumphant when it is combative and wages an uphill battle; it loses its moral authority and defiant voice the instant it succeeds and is in power. It is, paradoxically, only in power when it is not in power - when in power it lacks legitimacy, authority, audacity. 5

It surely makes one wonder what on earth will be the ultimate resolution of the current hostilities? But, it seems to me, those hostilities are justified if for no other reason than the Iranian regime’s demonstrated animus against Israel, and the possible insanity, if Iran were to get a nuclear capability, of it carrying out a preemptive strike.

The term ‘genocide’ is used so loosely and applied so incorrectly these days that we surely need to be aware that a real genocidal risk does exist, but it has to do with Iran’s demented attitude towards Israel. And such is the conviction of the Shi’a elites that one surely has to at least concern oneself about it? Why? Because it is a central concept in Shi’ism, a central pillar of faith, that, at some point in time, the Mahdi will return.

The concept of the Imam Mahdi—literally “the Guided One”—represents one of the most significant and enduring elements in Islamic eschatology, particularly within Twelver Shiʿism. Traditionally envisioned as a divinely appointed leader who will emerge before the end of time to establish justice, eradicate tyranny, and restore the true message of Islam, the Mahdi is not merely a theological construct but a figure whose anticipated arrival has profoundly shaped both religious thought and sociopolitical movements across Islamic history. While Sunni traditions often depict the Mahdi as a righteous leader descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s lineage, Shiʿi theology imbues this figure with additional layers of doctrinal significance, including notions of occultation and infallible guidance. 6

This sort of stuff, from all directions and applied to all belief systems, bothers me: it can be great when deployed in fiction (check out, for example, the eponymous Greenmantle in John Buchan’s 1916 story, or Frank Herbert’s Dune novels) but it is extremely worrying and scary when applied to real-world situations.

The enmity between Muslims and Jews stems from earlier conflicts during the Prophet’s lifetime - for example, the Battle of Khaybar (628). The Western world can hardly claim always to have been fair and kind to the Jews, far from it, but some parts of the Islamic world really have perpetuated hatred.

Consider, for example, the items that headed the Hamas Covenant 1988, the original Covenant of the so-called Islamic Resistance Movement. This is among the introductory quotes:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory). 7

Hamas is Sunni, but has been heavily financed and supported by Shi’a Iran. Hezbollah is Shi’a. And Article 5 of the Hamas Covenant 1988 declares:

Time extent of the Islamic Resistance Movement: By adopting Islam as its way of life, the Movement goes back to the time of the birth of the Islamic message, of the righteous ancestor, for Allah is its target, the Prophet is its example and the Koran is its constitution. 8

So, matters are considered and followed across eons of time, continually referencing and reinforcing the thread that connects the life and inspiration of the Prophet to the present.

From the perspective of the Western world, some of the potential outcomes are, to say the least, worrying!

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I started out with a few thoughts about that pretty young woman and the way, it seems to me, the Western world and the Islamic world talk past one another. And just a few paragraphs ago there’s that awful anti-Israel statement by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, who was assassinated in 1949.

Into Hassan al-Banna’s place stepped Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). Qutb, an Egyptian, spent two years in Greeley, Colorado, studying U.S. educational practices. Referring to this, Tamin Ansary writes:

The materialism Qutb saw in America repelled him, the individualism disturbed him, the social freedoms unnerved him, and the sexual mores shocked him - the sight, for example, of young men and women square dancing together at a church social!

The fact that, to a Western sensitivity, this may appear comical, is instructive, isn’t it? It really does illumine the gulf that separates the two worlds.

Individualism versus tribalism. Social freedoms versus social constraints. Liberal sexual mores versus strictly controlled sexual mores. And, not actually stated in Ansary’s list, but surely of huge importance … equality of the sexes versus inequality of the sexes.

So, now, in 2026, where do things stand?

On the world stage the war against Iran continues. With missiles flying, bombs exploding, people dying, fuel prices rocketing, protests occurring, and more besides, there are huge challenges. And, here in the UK, within the past few days, a draft copy of a document titled Protecting What Matters has been leaked. It outlines the British government’s new ‘cohesion strategy’.

The report states clearly that Islamists are responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counter-terror workload and 94 per cent of all terror-related deaths in the past 25 years. 9

Hmm, not much doubt about the focus of the issue, then?!? Or is there? Bizarrely, some might say, the report also states an intention to appoint an “anti-Muslim hostility” tsar with powers to bear down on instances of “Islamophobia”, whatever that is.

Confronted with the above facts, you’d perhaps expect that followers of Islam who would like to live peacefully alongside their Western neighbours would be telling their more extreme counterparts to desist … and doing so quite forcibly. But they appear not to be.

Why?

The obvious answer, I suggest, is simply that the two worlds are diametrically opposed. As I understand it, those who submit to Islam are commanded to buy into the unreconstructed philosophy and teaching of the Prophet Muhammad. Literally. And that includes, for example, this injunction:

Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends. They are friends with one another. Whoever of you seeks their friendship shall become one of their number. God does not guide the wrongdoers. (Quran 5:51) 10

Now, I know that there are Muslims - the Ahmadiyya for instance - who believe this only applied to the period when the Prophet was literally at war with the Jews but, on the other hand … the Prophet did claim that the Quran was the infallible, inerrant, and final word of God, revealed to him directly via the angel Gabriel. It was, he insisted, a divine, protected, and complete revelation, free from any contradiction. So what is one to believe?

All of which leads, I assume, to the fact that a large number of Muslims fear being castigated by their ‘purer’ co-civilizationists if they appear to even ‘go along with’ any of the more liberal views that may be in evidence around them.

It really is a civilizational divide.

So, one option, if the two civilizations are to survive, may be that they each stay in their own back yard, so to speak? Ironically, staying separate must surely offer the best chance for the survival of both options … and the rule would have to be that visitors from one world to the other simply accept and respect the differences? But if they try to come together, it seems to me, the likelihood of isolation and/or violence from one side or the other, or both, will surely ratchet up? Which is to say, in the UK and other parts of the West, we would experience more of the kind of balkanization that is already occurring.

Alternatively, you may say that we have reached a point in time when all energies should be devoted to synthesizing a single world civilization. But, to my mind, that is still a way off. Not least, large parts of the world simply do not buy into that idea at the moment. It’s interesting to note, for example, that the official Chinese attitude towards Islam is to treat it more or less like a mental illness.

Anyway, personally, I like the fact that there are the differences that there currently are. It’s the form of diversity that makes most sense to me.

To conclude, I want briefly to hark back to the idea that Hannah Arendt helped bring to light: the point about Gottholt Lessing’s unwillingness to take a fixed position on Christianity. And how it mirrors my sense of it all.

I’m not a ‘believer’ in the religion but I do love and have faith in much of what it stands for. And, right at its core, it seems to me, is the Sermon on the Mount. And right at the core of the Sermon on the Mount are the Beatitudes. And here they are, as they appear in a version of the Bible designed to be read as literature.

Blessed are the poor in spirit:
For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn:
For they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek:
For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
For they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful:
For they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart:
For they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers:
For they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake:
For theirs is the kingdom f heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. 11

Thanks for reading.

This is not the ‘Part 3’ of this series that I originally intended, but I realized that, in order to make sense of the situation - not least, to myself - I needed to take a step back and look at the environment within which Sales & Marketing, and everything else for that matter, now has to function.

For a start, I realized that I got the title of this series wrong. I called it The Subversion of Sales & Marketing. Period. Missed out the ‘20th century’ qualifier. That was a mistake. But, with hindsight, it may prove to be an instructive error.

It highlights the fact that it is all too human for us to assume that something that has existed for a period of time will continue so to do, in the same way. Particularly, perhaps, if that something has enjoyed great success, and 20th century Sales & Marketing certainly did that.

We expect change to happen, but within limits. Well, I think that’s how most of us see the situation. I’ll come back to this topic a little later but, for now, let’s just say that most of the time, most of us think of ‘normal’ change as happening within prescribed limits. And, for periods of time, that is what occurs. Changes of emphasis. Changes of methodology. Changes of style. But all within a framework that is so familiar that we probably never even think about it.

The trouble is, if, one day, one wakes up and the paradigm has flipped and everything has changed out of all recognition. Well, not everything. On the surface, the world may look the same, but you just sense that something deep in the core has changed. Something fundamental. Some aspects of the change are visible but, for the most part, it’s more a matter of feeling the difference. What then?

The fact that ‘Business-as-usual-with-a-few-tweaks’ holds good across a span of several lifetimes means that the majority of people are born into, and live and die within, a single paradigm. For them, that is life. They know nothing other. Which does not mean that they experience zero change but rather that the change they inevitably do experience stays within the framework of the familiar paradigm.

But every so often - say, every few hundred years - those alive at the time experience an extraordinarily discombobulating jolt whereby they find that the world they knew really has apparently changed out of all recognition. The mental maps and guide rails that, from birth, helped these people orientate themselves to and maneuver their way around their world have vanished: they have literally become residents of an unfamiliar - alien, even - world.

Has this just happened? Or, if not that, is some constituency at least attempting to make it happen? As a result, are we half in and half out of conflicting paradigms?

One’s level of recognition of, or alignment with, this proposition must depend to some extent upon one’s age. You need to have been around for a while in order to have what is today called ‘lived experience’ of sufficient duration to recognize significant shifts. The younger one is, the fewer the points of ‘lived’ reference. But the advantage for us oldies is, perhaps, that, courtesy of our longer periods of sentience, we are more readily able to recognize the extent of any changes. That said, there then is the need to be able accurately to distinguish between a normal “It was different when I was young” response and the more bewildered “What the … ?” screech that a changed paradigm generates.

So, are we currently experiencing a paradigm shift? That is to say, a societal upheaval that is far greater than ‘normal normal’?

Extraordinarily, if that is indeed the case it is arguably the first such occasion for two and a half millennia (there’s more detail about this later in this piece).

If you read my posts you may recall that I have used these quotes on more than one occasion.

Here’s 20th century management guru Peter Drucker from his book Post-Capitalist Society (1993):

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. ... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation.

And note this comment from 1838 when a historian of rural customs wrote the following, as quoted in The Making of Victorian Values (2007) by historian Ben Wilson:

We are become a sober people. England is no longer Merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty – extravagance and care.

This particular ‘new world’ was, in fact, the modern era that we may now have just left; the one that included the nation states, social mores and business formats that grew to dominate the 20^th century.

The sentiment can, of course, be expressed in the reverse order, as so memorably done by L.P. Hartley for the opening line of the Prologue to his 1953 novel, The Go-Between:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Foreign countries! New worlds! Where am I? What’s happening? Which way is up? Confusion! Disorientation! Madness!

The above snippets all relate to changes that were within the single paradigm of what we term ‘the Modern World’, which was supposedly built upon Reason, Truth and Knowledge. Yet people now refer to the Postmodern world and, as Professor Stephen Hicks writes …

The term “post-modern” situates the movement historically and philosophically against modernism. 1

… and goes on to say …

Postmodernism then becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power. Postmodernism, Frank Lentricchia explains, “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” 2

An activist strategy that opposes the old virtues of Reason, Truth and Knowledge?!? Really? Is it any wonder, then, that there is discontent and discord? I don’t think so. Sounds to me as though some vigorous resistance is a quite rational response and the overall situation might even be labelled ‘normal’. Highly divisive, maybe, but really quite normal. Can I express this phenomenon as a general theory? Let’s have a go …

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The Aargh! Societal Disorientation Phenomenon (ASDP)

The basic premise is that, periodically (broadly, every few hundred years), events conspire, apparently spontaneously, within and around a society, to ‘reset’ its modus operandi. This triggers such a level of confusion within and around the affected society as to disorient it, causing dramatic reactions including rage.

For a period of years, while one portion of the affected society attempts to impose a new order, the level of criticism of the status quo ante reaches the point where it becomes censorious and quasi-religious in nature. Those who question the proposed new order are treated as heretics and responded to with censorship that threatens, and may well result in, actual violence.

A potent trigger for initiating these situations is the emergence of new technology, particularly technology that directly or indirectly impacts communication.

In any instance, there are three possible outcomes:

1. The status quo ante fights back and wins.

2. The New Order wins, entirely replacing the status quo ante.

3. Some compromise between 1. and 2. is reached.

In most instances, the outcome is some compromise. However, less frequently, the New Order will completely replace the status quo ante.

An example of New Order outcome (which happens so infrequently that, so far as I know, this is the only example thus far identified within our accessible history) was identified by German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) as what he termed The Axial Age.3 The term covers the period from 750 to 350 BCE, at which time, as Jaspers perceived it, we humans became ‘more human’ by refocusing our attention inwards rather than outwards. The newly emergent proposition was that …

man’s relation to God is as an individual seeking an ‘inner’ goal rather than having a relationship with a number of gods ‘out there’, in the skies, in the landscape around, or among our ancestors. 4

The extraordinary thing about this is that the concept seemed spontaneously to emerge across a range of civilizations - Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Jewish and Greek. And so things continued, with ensuing developments continually refining the idea.

Mind you, an influential thinker who lived during the Axial Age, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides, argued that our perception of change is an illusion and that true reality is an unchanging condition of ‘Being’. Today, American legal scholar Philip Bobbitt refers to this as Parmenides’ Fallacy.

Anyway, for most of us, throughout most of recorded time, the ongoing contest, so to speak, has been around the duality of group dominance versus individual dominance … ‘out there’ versus ‘in here’ thinking so far as origins and obligations are concerned… the ‘engine’ of which must be either top-down or bottom-up driven.

Technological superiority enabled the West to more and more drive the ‘individual’, ‘in here’, ‘bottom-up’ focus, emphasizing and promoting the potential of the individual to achieve ever more … to discover … to create … to build … to prosper. The success of this approach has been spectacular. Particularly latterly. Particularly in the past 200 years.

Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. 5

But then, lo and behold, at the very point where one might imagine people could, metaphorically at least, sit back for a while and enjoy the fruits of these successes, something quite extraordinary happened.

The West started pulling itself apart. Initially driven from the academy, the campaign to move from Modern to Postmodern was underway.

The power of new technology to drive societies out of their minds

Let’s just take a step back to position things before again going forward. Political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) put the mechanism succinctly:

Mankind owes its existence not to the dreams of the humanists nor to the reasoning of the philosophers and not even, at least not primarily, to political events, but almost exclusively to the technical development of the Western world. 6

And, as already mentioned, new communications technologies seem to be the most potent of all the technological grenades for achieving population discombobulation. There is something so scary, so threatening, about a significant communications technology update that it seems invariably to trigger a societal crisis.

The question of who is permitted to know what, and the channels available to get to know it, and the level of power that that knowledge may confer … these factors are, it seems, so fundamental to our being that uncertainty about them drives whole groups of us to distraction.

Let’s just look back to try to espy the pattern.

The above image is from a tenth-century English manuscript, The Benedictional of Saint Æthelwold (or, rather, a facsimile version7 thereof). It is a beautiful example of the technology of the 900s.

This particular spread relates to Trinity Sunday, the time in the Christian calendar when the Church celebrates the doctrine of the Trinity, and includes:

May the Omnipotent Trinity, the one and true God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, allow you to desire him faithfully, to recognise him truly, and to love him sincerely. Amen.

Note, particularly, the historiated ‘O’ (Yes, I had to look that one up, too! It’s the illuminated initial letter representing scenes from the text). I learn, from Mary Carruthers’ superb The Book of Memory8, that this was all part of a visual system designed to help people commit messages to memory - which was how the technology and the human operating system of the time functioned.

In fact, it struck me that, when Mary Carruthers quotes Augustine (354-430 CE) describing a school friend called Simplicius, she is drawing attention to what we might now term a very human AI equivalent from more than a millennium ago. Does that sound far-fetched? Well, meet Simplicius …

an excellent man of remarkable memory, who when he might be asked by us for all the next-to-last verses in each book of Virgil, responded in order quickly and from memory. If we then asked him to recite the verse before each of those, he did. And we believed that he could recite Virgil backwards. If we desired a commonplace concerning any topic, we asked him to make one and he did. 9

Somebody surely has to come up with an AI called Simplicius, don’t you think?

Anyway, it seems that a key factor, back then, for assessing the value of a person, was their ability accurately to recall information. By contrast, imagination really did not cut it. In a memorial society the kudos went to those who excelled at remembering and recalling stuff.

Which might help explain the trauma felt by humans in the mid-15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg presented to the world his mechanical movable-type printing press.

It wasn’t just the fact that the printed word created a problem for those in the Catholic Church who, across Europe at the time, controlled the content (as we would today term it) and, therefore, ‘the truth’ that ‘ordinary people’ were allowed to access. As or perhaps even more important, the massively increased access to printed texts meant that it wasn’t even necessary to commit any of the content to memory! Consequently, the new technology devalued and made redundant the skills of people who had hitherto been held in high esteem.

And, from 1486, joining the battle on the side of the status quo on this occasion, the world witnessed the setting up of the very first recorded censorship office, operated jointly by the electorate of Mainz and the city of Frankfurt.

This not only upset the societal apple-cart from one direction (that of redundancy) but, from the opposite direction, made it easier than otherwise might have been the case, in the ensuing decades, for Martin Luther (1483-1546) to aggressively promote his view that salvation was not necessarily dependent upon the Roman Catholic church:

For the pope is not above but under the word of God.10

Sacre bleu! Such heresy! But it won the day and, thereafter, as time passed, the amounts of individual freedom increased and capitalism prospered. As a result, those inquisitive, acquisitive Westerners just kept on turning out the goodies, as listed earlier in the quote from the McKinsey Quarterly. That quote concludes, in fact, with this statement:

The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money. 11

Ah, there we have it. Capitalism works. It made the modern world. Great, huh? Well, not so far as some people see it. As far as they are concerned, yes, this ‘Reason, Truth and Knowledge’ approach may have produced a brightly-lit shop front window, but that was simply to distract attention from the mass of human inequality, indignity and mistreatment that the West cruelly ruled over and dominated.

There were two perceived problem areas in particular:

One: two of the biggest Technology Winners are Communications and Weaponry, and, overall, specific technological developments may not know when to stop for the good of all concerned. Which is to say, we may now have the power for everyone on the planet to communicate with one another but we also have the power for everyone on the planet to destroy one another, and some ‘developments’ create other issues that may limit or damage the sustainability or even survival of our environment.

Two: capitalism per se is no respecter of equity. It really does not care if one person has billions while another is destitute. This upsets a lot of people: this inequity, we are told, is awful because, “Hey, we’re all human.”

The “Hey, we’re all human” sentiment came to the fore in the aftermath of the Second World War: understandably, because there had been so much death and destruction. An important element of the feeling, as I recall it, was the sense that everyone, of high and low estate, had contributed to the defeat of Nazism and no-one should be excluded. But that’s surely not the same thing as worrying whether Person A has more than Person B?

Anyway, that’s the Big Picture! It results in a drive for some form of socialism. I’ll come back to it in future pieces but, for now, let me try to draw the threads back towards Sales & Marketing.

Globalize? … Personalize? How can the Business circle be squared?

Post-WW2, many members of the Western Business community enthusiastically jumped aboard the globalism bandwagon … many, I suspect, for reasons of personal gain: “New business opportunities that promise to contribute to the betterment of humanity and make a profit! What’s not to like?”

And the technology - digital, that is - came into being as if to order. The new tech meant that progressively over the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s business enterprises were relieved of the necessity to have all of their functions in close proximity. This changed everything, not least spawning an outsourcing gold rush that de-industrialized the West.

During that time, and later, the technology introduced apps to, theoretically at least, universalize ‘best practice’ across all business functions.

The ultimate victory for Western free-market liberalism was signaled when, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall started to come down. “The end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama declared it. The Soviet Union didn’t officially collapse until two years later but Western Business didn’t need to hang around that long to start leveraging the opportunities. McDonald’s, for example, opened its first Russian branch in Pushkin Square, Moscow, in January 1990.

Subsequently, in December 2001, when China was welcomed into the World Trade Organization, we were, as one might say, off to the global races.

It was akin to a marathon, but with a surreal difference: in this race, many of the contestants had different rules in mind … heading in different directions … leading to different destinations … and with different long-term goals. A bizarre race.

I’ll come back to this topic in a separate piece but, for this discussion, I want to make the point that although globalization did make some progress, ultimately it stalled … and what is of equal or greater importance and interest is that, while attention was diverted on to the globalization agenda … surreptitiously, the Postmodern deep-function-system change was able to gain traction.

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What the Business deep-function-system did next.

While enterprises were distracted, scrabbling for globalization’s promised pot of gold, and no doubt helped by the push for Postmodernism through the academy (although the latter may literally be a part of the deep current in the Business ocean), the Business world changed course.

Right up to and through the twentieth century businesses saw it as their purpose to create products and services to sell to customers. Which is to say, the customers were regarded as entirely external to the businesses they bought from. In fact, up until the final decades of the 20th century, businesses were even able to operate as though all of the value on offer was actually vested in the products and services themselves. Which is to say the value was objectively situated in the products. The money paid by a Customer was in exchange for the value vested in the product - a Value in Exchange (ViX) arrangement.

Then, as digital technology gained in terms of availability and enhanced functionality, there was a shift whereby the value in a product or service moved to become some outcome in the life of the Customer - literally a Value in Outcome (ViO) arrangement.

Now, the value realignment has gone yet further. Businesses are now challenged to align with their Customers in order to help identify and satisfy those Customers’ needs. Which is to say, in a Value in Alignment (ViA) world the value in a product or service is an entirely subjective decision by the Customer.

Image above: A fragment from a new model that sets out to communicate the extent of the shift that has taken place as ‘classic’ 20th century Sales & Marketing is replaced by something quite different. The blue rows relate to: (top blue row) Customer Value Mode; (middle blue row) Customer Behavioral Mode; and (bottom blue row) Customer Cognitive Mode.

This is exciting but potentially also quite scary. Why? Because it means that many enterprises will now only thrive over the longer term if they are able to fathom and respond to Customer needs in a very different way and at a deeper level than ever previously. Fortunately, AI has happened along at just the right time. It really is a tremendous help in this regard … but the new operating scenario requires real humans, too.

Quite simply, the new paradigm calls for significantly enhanced connectedness between the individuals in an enterprise and the individuals it serves.

And, a final point, I personally take great pleasure in anticipating that the new AI augmented environments in which Business is now operating will lead, in the not too distant future, to the emergence of the very first One-Person, Billion-Dollar business. Which is to say, it seems to me that, as trillion-dollar enterprises start to proliferate, the postmodern drive for universal equity at all costs will be countered by the arrival of supercharged individuals. Mind you, I guess the socialists will still go on plugging away at their bizarrely inhuman version of things.

(The image at the top is from Shutterstock.)

Thanks for reading.

It is a strange sensation: you spend years doing something (in my case, writing stuff for business clients) and, in your later years (I’m now in my eighth decade), feel impelled to try to investigate a meaty topic (What dynamics now govern the Customer-Supplier Interface in the new dispensation of the 21st century?) only to realize that maybe, just maybe, you came close to at least some part of the answer umpteen years ago!

Back in the 2000s, working on a client project, I wrote:

The space each of us occupies in this vast universe is infinitesimally small. And yet, each of us is at the centre of a personal universe that is the biggest, most important thing we know. 1

Well, you may say that it’s a pretty obvious statement. And I’d agree. But maybe it’s one that we too infrequently ponder? What nudged it to the front of my mind a few days ago was reading an article in The Spectator 2 titled The guilty men: the ideologues who undermine Britain, written by the magazine’s editor, Michael Gove.

Gove’s article outlines the beliefs of several of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s key influencers: Jonathan Powell (Starmer’s National Security Adviser), Lord Richard Hermer (Attorney General for England & Wales), and Philippe Sands (Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at the Faculty of Laws, University College London). A coterie of éminences grises as one might say.

In the article, Gove quotes from a 2017 article written by Philippe Sands that was published in the Guardian newspaper. Here is the quote:

Bedazzled by the power of statehood – that most artificial and fake of constructs – are we not also citizens of our home, our street, our borough, our city, our Europe and our world? The reform is clear: to recognise that our essential rights flow not from the happenstance of nationality – and certainly not just from our national passport – but from our essence as individual human beings. That’s what the 1945 moment said, that we are citizens of the world. We should have, beyond our national passports, a global passport. Over time, the withering of the monopoly power of the nation state, and the oppressive, absurd, monopoly power of the national passport – that would be my reformation. (Philippe Sands, 2017)

Well, yes, but … just starting at the most basic level of Sands’ citizenship declension, I suspect that most of us who are “citizens of our home” do not fancy leaving the doors wide open so that all and sundry can just walk in and take up residence there!

Indeed, in my opinion, Sands’ assertion …

That’s what the 1945 moment said, that we are citizens of the world.

… is wrong, at least in the form that he states it. As it happens, I recently set out my understanding of “the 1945 moment” in rather more guarded terms here, like this:

I popped into the world just after the end of the Second World War and grew up in the UK at a time when the conflict’s scars were still clearly in evidence in the landscape (for example, I can confirm from first-hand experience that bomb craters make great children’s playgrounds), in the economy (Britain was beyond flat broke), and in the people (where there was ample evidence of both pride and pain).

But we’d done it! Well, I hadn’t, obviously. But my parents’ generation had. They’d ensured the continuance of democracy in the West and the freedoms that accompany it. In fact I think it fair to say that they were even more determined than before to promote those ideals. Why? Because nearly everyone, of high or low estate, rich or poor, had played their part and surely, therefore, deserved to share in the resulting opportunities? 3

Anyway, Michael Gove’s article is a real eye-opener and goes some way to explaining why many of the often inexplicable convulsions of current British policy may be occurring. There had to be some reason why the lunacies of the present were let loose upon the world, and I think the article provides a foundational key to that conundrum.

One way to look at it all is via a whole bunch of dualities and resulting dichotomies:

• How do the so-called elites exercise OVERALL CONTROL … Global versus Local?

• What is the dominant OPERATIONAL METHODOLOGY … Command & Control versus Encourage & Enable?

• What is the DOMINANT VALUE VECTOR - Top-Down versus Bottom-Up?

Yes, we are, as ever, in a world of dualities, the logic of which is beautifully represented by the taijitu.

The taijitu

You’re almost certainly familiar with the taijitu. It’s the Yin and Yang symbol, as shown (Image copyright © Shutterstock) at the top of this article. Here’s Google’s summary of the concept:

Yin and Yang are fundamental concepts in Chinese philosophy, representing complementary, opposing forces that make up all aspects of life and the universe, constantly interacting and balancing each other, like dark/light, feminine/masculine, or stillness/movement. The famous symbol (Taijitu) illustrates this duality with black (Yin) and white (Yang) halves, each containing a dot of the opposite color, signifying that each force contains the seed of the other and they are inseparable parts of a whole. (Google)

It is a brilliantly elegant and deceptively simple concept that has been around for at least two millennia. And what do we do? Most of the time we just ignore it.

The key point, of course, is that each contrasting influence contains the seed of its opposite so that, as the above quote states, “they are inseparable parts of the whole”.

Which is to say, the forces are complementary: they do not just oppose, but rather they oppose and inform one another. There is a point of balance somewhere between the two extremes, but that point will move depending upon circumstances.

The problem is that we humans often have an overriding tendency to want to be ‘right’. Not only that, far too often we have an overriding tendency to want to impose our ‘rightness’ on everyone else.

In any particular instance, the sense of ‘rightness’ will stem from yet another duality: on the one hand, some supposedly high-minded, broad-spectrum ideal (as, I’m guessing, the aforementioned Mr Sands would claim for his “citizens of the world” assertion) versus, on the other hand, some rather more basic, narrow-cast, personal advantage (for example, money and/or sex).

We have systems in place to try to keep both of these responses in check. For broad-spectrum ideological issues we have diplomacy, intended to negotiate in the areas where dualities and dichotomies rub up against one another. And for any attempted ‘greedy grabs’ we have the law which, in a Western tradition that took many centuries to refine, is meant to treat everyone impartially and equally.

By these means we reach for utopia … but we do well to keep in mind that the literal meaning of ‘utopia’ is ‘no place’. (Whoops, that’s yet another dichotomy, isn’t it?)

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The diversity of diversity

All of which brings me back to what I admit is something of a personal obsession - the issue of diversity. How does diversity figure in today’s world?

Well, as we know, here in the UK and across swathes of the West it is posited as a desirable outcome, perhaps the most desirable outcome, of moving large numbers of people into the West from other parts of the world.

But is it as desirable as its adherents claim?

Traditionally, migration happened at a far lower rate than now and the assumption was that, generally, migrants would assimilate with a host nation’s culture.

At times there might be an increased level of movement, as, for example, when the Huguenots fled France for Britain, Holland and Germany to avoid religious persecution. But those who fled already favoured the Protestant version of Christianity that was practiced in the destination countries and, by and large, they were also jolly hard-working craftspeople who would positively contribute to the destination economies.

But what happens when you ship people in by the bucketload - almost literally! - particularly from cultures that are significantly different from the host group?

Well, let’s think it through a little in terms of taijitu.

First, a new duality must inevitably come to the fore. The primary duality, I suppose, is along the lines of …

• Those who favour mass immigration versus those who are against it.

But that’s just the start. There then follow a multitude of subordinate duality possibilities. For example …

• Those who support all immigration versus those who support immigration only for people who are fleeing war or some other circumstance that is putting their lives at risk …

• … and/or, those who support all immigration versus those who support only legal immigration.

Plus, it’s necessary to consider the activity in relation to a host’s history and resulting culture:

• Those who support immigration regardless of cultural attitude and intent (multiculturalism) versus those who support immigration only from those who agree to assimilate with the host culture or, at a minimum, are not antipathetic towards it.

And for ‘general’ (i.e. non-refugee) migration the cost angle needs to be considered:

• Those who support immigration of those who have a reasonable prospect of providing skills that are required in the host country versus those who have little or no prospect of making any positive economic impact.

… and on and on.

My point here - and, yes, I know that it is stating the bleeding obvious! - is that these issues are not simple. Shrieking “Racist!” at anyone who questions any of what is going on is far from helpful. Not least, illegal migration is a major source of income for organized crime and it can present the countries from which migrants depart with development problems: Albania, for example, has complained about this.

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The elephant in the room

Then, there is the proverbial elephant. And, yes, I do mean the one about ‘civilizational compatibility’. Can different societies harmoniously mix in the same living spaces?

Well, quite coincidentally, here in the UK, this topic rose up the news agenda this very week when it was announced that white English culture is somehow too dominant in the English countryside (English culture is too dominant in England! Really?) and that action needs to be taken to make rural areas more welcoming for non-whites.

Hmm, now what’s that all about do you suppose? Because, as someone who actually does live in the English countryside I can confirm, beyond a peradventure, that it is not a segregated area. There are no signs saying “Whites Only”. People of any shade of colour or opinion can go wherever they like.

So what’s all the fuss about? I thought I’d do a little investigating …

… which is how I discovered the Natural England Action Plan!

“Natural England? What’s that when it’s at home?”, I hear you enquire. Good question.

It is, we are informed, “a non-departmental public body (NDPB)” which is led by a governing board “appointed by the Secretary of State for Defra”.

Defra? That stands for The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, which Google informs me is …

the UK government department responsible for safeguarding the natural environment, supporting the food and farming industry, and sustaining rural economies, primarily in England.

Okay, so this means that Natural England is a quango - a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation …

(NDPB! Defra! Quango! Don’t you just love these unwieldy initialisms and acronyms!)

… and I have a theory about quangos which is that they are Bureaucratic Offshoots for the Legal Leverage & Obfuscation of Common Knowledge & Systems (Gosh, I do believe that spells out yet another acronym!).

Natural England’s basic premise seems to be pretty simple and, to my mind, somewhat cock-eyed. Interestingly, everything is presented as a duality and a dichotomy whereas one might argue that, for once, there isn’t any.

The duality/dichotomy that Natural England uses as its raison d’être is People versus Nature. Which is to say, we Humans are viewed as somehow separate from Nature, separate from ‘the Environment’ whereas, in reality, of course, we are very much a part of it.

Nonetheless, we know what they mean: we Humans affect our common environment and we do so in both supportive and damaging ways. So. let’s minimize the damaging effects.

In the literature there are various references to …

… the delivery of Nature recovery led or convened by Natural England, to realise the benefits for Nature and people.

Hmm, “Nature recovery”? Being an awkward so-and-so this gives me pause for thought. Nature recovery of what and from when? ‘Recovery’ surely implies that there supposedly was, at some earlier point, a state of affairs when all might have been well or, at least, acceptable? So when was that? What might the core reference date be?

In an earlier post, “2026 and the kids are not alright. Especially the boys. Might a really old idea help put things right?”, I referenced Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe, which tells a story set in the year 1194 CE. The novel opens with these words:

In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster. The remains of this extensive wood are still to be seen at the noble seats of Wentworth, of Warncliffe Park, and around Rotherham. Here haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley; here were fought many of the most desperate battles during the Civil Wars of the Roses; and here also flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.

Okay, so, at that time, there clearly was a lot more of what Natural England calls ‘Nature’ around. Indeed, by the sound of it, the country was one big swathe of Nature. There was more Nature than you could shake a stick at. But the population of England at that time was only an estimated 1.5 to 2.5 million. And according to contemporary accounts, the Dragon of Wantley kept reducing that number still further by gobbling up a few more poor souls until the villagers of Wantley got their act together with the support of a brave knight called Morecraft.

Subsequently, over the centuries, the population of the country rose, then stabilized for quite a while at around 10 million. Until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in fact, when, with Britain at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, giant advances in knowledge, manufacturing, medical science and more enabled population growth to accelerate. So much so that, by 1990, the UK population topped 55 million.

And yet, and yet, that was precisely the point - the late-1990s, that is - when our so-called elites initiated and imposed two massive changes on the UK (and other Western societies):

1. They actively pursued deindustrialization, outsourcing millions of jobs to other parts of the world while, at the same time …

2. … initiating continuous mass immigration.

Well, that sounds like a brilliant idea, doesn’t it? Er, maybe not!

Thus it was that, in the 35-year period from 1990 to 2025, the UK population increased by around 14 million souls - a number that exceeded the total number of immigrants throughout the entire previous one thousand years.

Hmm, thinking of Natural England’s People versus Nature dichotomy, you might logically conclude, might you not, that the more People there are the less space there is for ‘Nature’? I mean, more people presumably translates into more infrastructure, more services, more homes, and all the other paraphernalia needed by us ravenous humans, potentially gobbling up more and more of any lovely green spaces?

So, might at least part of the solution be to stop encouraging a never-ending high level of new arrivals?

Rather than doing this, however, Natural England seems far more concerned that every single member of the ever-expanding population should have access to the reduced amount of space left for ‘Nature’.

This is to be done, apparently, by ensuring that everyone should be able to access a green (land) or blue (sea) environment within a 15-minute walk from their home (as per Natural England’s ‘Green Infrastructure’ initiative, launched in 2023).

Dear me, they don’t half make this People versus Nature thing complex!

One of the levers used to promote this complexity is guilt. We’re all supposed to feel guilty. Why? Lots of reasons, one of which is that the climate is changing. The climate has always changed and will always change but we are now told that it’s us humans that are causing it and we must therefore ensure that we use only renewable, sustainable energy sources, stop flying around in airplanes, and under no circumstances light a log-burning stove.

It’s presumably why we are covering up hectares of lovely English meadows (formerly known as Nature) with solar panels and filling great wide open spaces, onshore and offshore, with massive wind turbines that slice their way through any birds that happen not to have read the warning signs.

Trouble is, there is confusion, even among the great and the good, about the underpinnings of the People versus Nature conundrum. For example, member of the British Parliament, Zarah Sultana, strenuously opposes expansion of London Heathrow Airport because of air travel’s supposed contribution to climate change. Zarah has said that she thinks that extending Heathrow would be “reckless, short-sighted and indefensible”. However, at the same time, she loudly canvasses (along with 20 or so other members of the UK parliament) for the building of a new airport at Mirpur in Pakistan, just 120 kilometers away from the already existing Islamabad International Airport.

I guess it all depends where the People and Nature happen to be?

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That mention of Pakistan brings me back to the elephant in the room. Because, yes, based upon media reporting in the UK this week, when it comes to the apparently overwhelming, blinding whiteness of the UK rural scene, it does seem negatively to affect one constituency in particular.

We know this because there has been specific discussion about:

• the British love of their dogs and the apparently problematic presence of a lot of these quadrupeds in the countryside;

• the fact that public houses serve alcohol (really!!!) and food that may not be halal;

• the fact that the English countryside does not feature prayer rooms and the washing facilities necessary for the accompanying ritual cleansing. (Defra plan)

• more generally, the white rural population tends, apparently, to go about its business quite quietly and often in solitary mode, whereas some others are more group-minded.

Here, it seems, we are nudging up against that potentially most insistent group of incomers, those of the Islamic persuasion. Which raises the question, is it possible for Muslims to live harmoniously alongside non-Muslims?

I’m not sure of the answer to that question, but my instinct tells me that, for some of them, at least, it may well be ‘No’.

As it happens, Richard Dawkins wrote a piece that fairly comprehensively addresses this issue from the ‘Islamophobia’ perspective …

The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

On being accused of Islamophobia

If your belief is indefensible, your ignominious last resort is to accuse your critics of “-phobia”. I have long criticised all religions as irrational, and faiths as dangerous. Most of my attacks have been against Christianity, because I know it best. In spite of this I have never been accused of Christophobia. But I am regularly berated for Islamophob…

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3 years ago · 665 likes · 94 comments · Richard Dawkins

… but, here, let’s just think about it from the perspective of the biggest duality of them all … the Macro versus Micro, Global versus Local, Top-down versus Bottom-up Super-Duality.

I’m not an academic, or a theologian, or a politician, so it is with some trepidation that I tip-toe into these areas, but here goes …

It’s all down to our history. Earlier, I mentioned Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in which the action is set in and around the year 1194 CE.

CE … Common Era … that’s interesting in and of itself. You see, when I was younger, and right up to just a few years ago, I would unquestionably have referred to the year as 1194 AD. Not just me, we all would have referred to 1194 AD. Not CE.

AD stands for Anno Domini, a medieval Latin phrase meaning “the year of the Lord.” In turn, that is a shortened version derived from “Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi”, which translates as "In the year of our Lord Jesus Christ".

However, at some point, AD was replaced by CE. So far as I know, there were no official notifications. No Breaking News announcement. No “From next Saturday thou shalt not refer to year numerals as AD but as CE” memorandum. No debate or discussion in the media. No nothing. For the general public, anyway, it just happened.

Christianity, or Judeo-Christianity, which had underpinned and motivated Western civilization had been, first, side-lined, then just allowed to fade away.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. 4

Maybe, we should ponder that a little. Why? Because …

… the political organisation of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. 5

We seem to have decided that we could dispense with the idea of “God, or some notion of ultimate reality” (My emphasis). I think this is profoundly important and we ignore it at our peril.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not being pious - I am an atheist. I just couldn’t go along with Iron Age, or later, ideas of God that clearly, it seems to me, are just mirrors of the human societies of their time.

But it then took me an awfully long time to realize the risks of throwing the baby out with the bathwater: which is to say, altogether casting aside the sense of “some notion of ultimate reality”. Because to do so, it seems to me, means our running the risk of elevating ourselves into ‘the God spot’. At which point, all manner of daft and, often, dangerous ideas can come to the fore. Gosh, you might even start to pretend that men can magically turn into women and vice versa!

Anyway, there’s another God that I have a sneaking admiration for, and, living in the English Chiltern Hills, I love the fact that I have ready access to him. Here’s an introduction:

In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of Streatley Hill, “annihilating all that's made to a green thought in a green shade”; or better yet, pushing an explorer's prow up the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester's stately roof broods over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping. 6

“In solitudes such as these Pan sits …” Yes.
Solitudes. Yes.
Anyone is welcome to come and enjoy Pan’s music.
By so doing, they can experience the deep connection that we each have with “some notion of ultimate reality”.
There is no separation between People and Nature: “We do not ‘come into’ this world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.” 7
It is, at one and the same time, the simplest and most complex thing in the universe.

Now, that sounds like a duality worth pondering.

Thanks for reading.

Recently, I posted a piece about the incessant blather that we are subjected to about ‘Diversity’, and the glib way that the topic gets thrown around. Not least, it is promoted - proselytized, even - by the UK prime minister, the mayor of London, and swathes of other ‘elites’. These people promote Diversity as an unalloyed good and imply that to disagree with, or even question, the assertion that “Diversity is our strength” is sacrilegious.

My earlier post focused particularly on the impacts of this heresy (it seems impossible to write about this topic without recourse to religious language!) on the UK - and, more generally, Western - political and social scenes, with particular emphasis on the heavy-handed and, to my mind, entirely unreasonable, denigration of white males, leading to a supposed concomitant requirement to teach young white chaps about proper behaviour towards women and girls.

Pondering this topic led to a number of thoughts and subsequent mental-meanderings: so, here, I thought I’d go a little way further …

The human male

Amidst our astounding ignorance as a human collective there was, until a metaphorical moment ago, at least one certainty: the human race had two sexes. Males and females. Men and women. Boys and girls. End of.

To an old fogey like me that remains the case. After all, the difference twixt the two sexes is determined from the cellular level upwards and the results emerge not just in terms of the sexual organs and gametes that present themselves, but also the myriad physical and mental differences that add to the … er … diversity of our world. Sure, there are effeminate men and masculine women, but that doesn’t flip their sex. A man may choose to dress in female attire, or vice versa, but that does not make him a her, or her a him. And it doesn’t make any of them a bloody ‘they’. There are many hermaphrodite species but, in the mammalian kingdom, the total is nil, zero, zilch.

Which makes the topic really quite confusing: one moment we seem unable even to distinguish between boys and girls (“It’s a matter of personal choice, you know”) and the next we are assured with absolute certainty that boys - especially white boys - are specifically identifiable as the upcoming battalions of the dark side of humanity. It brings to mind the old rhyme:

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snips, snails
And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all things nice
That's what little girls are made of.

This, I learn, was written by the English poet - a Poet Laureate, no less - Robert Southey (1774-1843) and was published in 1820. But the date that I’m going to ask you to keep in mind is one year earlier …

1819! Keep that date in mind! We’ll come back to it later. But, first, let’s consider the central issue.

Now! … a moment in time when the human male has, supposedly, gone rogue.

So, for many of a leftish persuasion, Men, and thence, potentially, Boys, are Evil. Particularly the White Heterosexual variant thereof. I know, I know, this is a bit like saying that automobiles are evil because they can be used as lethal battering rams when driven into crowds at Christmas markets. Indeed, this was the point that led me to write my previous post which dealt with the UK government’s new plans to counter VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls). Here, however, I want to investigate the situation more broadly, in the process specifically involving the impact of the phenomenon of time. Here, for instance, is a fragment of a poem from 1920:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats 1

Does that feel to you to be a fair reflection of what the world feels like now? Perhaps it is true that there is nothing new under the Sun?

Here’s another thought - this one from 1942:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

T.S. Eliot 2

So, now, in the impossible-to-pin-down ‘Now!’, as we hop out of the first quarter and into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, accompany me if you will as I reflect on a story published early in the nineteenth century that refers to events imagined near the end of the twelfth century. That’s a lot of dates and a big span of years - in total, the best part of a millennium.

Walter of Ivanhoe

The story is Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, first published in, you guessed it, 1819 but with the story set way back in 1194. The eponymous hero, Walter of Ivanhoe, is a Saxon who goes on crusade with the Norman-French King Richard I.

I first became aware of this tale when we studied it at school: it was the early-1960s and I was in my mid-teens. As I recall, some of my classmates found it rather heavy-going (a Google search response makes the point that Scott’s prose is so dense and full of asides that “the noun and the verb are often left waving to each other from a distance”) but I loved the book.

So, an old tale … and yet, it now occurs to me, one that is, to an extraordinary extent, of the moment, of Now. “What, pray”, you may enquire, “do you mean by that?”

Well, the Ivanhoe tale deals with MIGRATION … including discussion of DIVERSITY in a multicultural society. MALE BEHAVIOR towards women is a key feature … as is CHRISTIANITY vs. ISLAM … the conduct of RANSOM in war … the relationships with and treatment of JEWISH people … including a threat of WOKE-STYLE CANCELLATION (or, rather, in this instance, TERMINATION) … and a bit of light relief on the socialist attributes of EQUITY & INCLUSION via the introduction of Friar Tuck and Robin Hood.

Is that all up-to-date-enough for you? Let me just thumbnail three of those thematic points:

• Migration & Diversity

• Christianity & Islam

• Jewry & Wokeness

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Migration & Diversity

As already mentioned, the story is set primarily in the year 1194 which, you will note, is just 128 years after that most memorable of English history dates, 1066, when the Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson was defeated at the Battle of Hastings by the Norman-French William the Conqueror. So, back in 1194, the fact that Ye Saxons of Olde England were having to get used to being bossed around by the Norman-French was still relatively fresh.

Attention is drawn to it right up front in the Ivanhoe story. Gurth, a swineherd, is trying to manage a herd of pigs. Wamba, a jester, is with him.

“Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba.

“Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.”

“And swine is good Saxon,” said the Jester; “but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?”

“Pork,” answered the swine-herd.

“I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?”

“It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.”

“Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; “there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment.” 3

Today, of course, we have moved a lot further with this sort of culinary and linguistic assimilation. Google even suggests that chicken tikka masala …

… is widely considered the unofficial national dish of England (and the UK) famously dubbed so by former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001 as a symbol of multicultural Britain. (Google search)

Christianity vs Islam

At this point, let’s introduce King Richard I, a.k.a. Richard the Lionheart or Richard Couer de Lion. Born in England in 1157, a son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, he spent his childhood in England, but precious little of the rest of his life.

Richard, it seems, was a natural soldier. So much so, in fact, that, he was just 16 years old when he took command of his own army: he was in Poitou, south-west France, at that time, putting down rebellions against his father.

Later, in 1187, he ‘took the cross’ - which is to say he made a sacred vow to go on Crusade after Saladin, the Muslim military commander, conquered Jerusalem.

What’s so special about Jerusalem?

Well, you may recall that, according to the Christian story, and recorded in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, just 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) from Jerusalem, and the city has a hugely important place in all of Christian history. At that time, the city was already an important landmark and …

‘Easily the most outstanding city of the east,’ according to Pliny the Elder. By the time Herod the Great (73-4 BCE) had rebuilt it, one can see why it became one of the great tourist attractions of the Mediterranean world and why Gentiles poured in to it to see its hippodrome, its aqueducts, its palaces. There was an amphitheatre just outside the city where the shows rivalled those of Rome itself, with athletic contests and gladiatorial combats. Foreign visitors were excited ad delighted by naked wrestling, the races and the fights between men and beasts, even though they offended the sensibilities of some Jews. 4

Leap forward six centuries and we come to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. In 621, he claimed to have made a miraculous night journey to Heaven, with an en route stop-over in Jerusalem. A few year’s later, shortly after Prophet Muhammad’s death, an army led by Caliph Umar conquered the city (637 or 638 CE).

Fast forward a further four and a half centuries and the Christians finally got their act together and launched the First Crusade, in 1099, to reclaim Jerusalem.

And so it went.

Eventually, in 1187, Saladin, leader of the Ayyubid dynasty, a Sunni Muslim Kurdish dynasty, re-conquered Jerusalem, and, in 1189, the year that Richard I was crowned king of England, a European consortium (the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, together with King Phillip II of France and King Richard I of England) launched the Third Crusade to try to recover it.

The Europeans did not succeed but did establish a new base at Acre, just 169 kilometers (105 miles) away.

After a real Boy’s Own adventure trying to get back home, Richard was grabbed by Leopold of Austria who Richard had offended by removing his standard from the walls of Acre. Even after escaping Leopold’s clutches he was in trouble and, with enemies seemingly coming at him from all directions, remained incarcerated until February 1194.

The upshot of all these shenanigans was that, during his ten-year reign (1189 up until his death in 1199) as king of England, Richard spent just six months in the country: four months in 1189 for his coronation and preparation for the crusade, and two months in 1194 for a second coronation and … er … prepping for yet more war. This latter two-month period is when the Ivanhoe story unfolds.

Jewry and Wokeness

Scott conjures a fairly comprehensive sense of twelfth century life in England, including a virulent antisemitic attitude … or did he perhaps just have to copy the mood at the time of his writing in the nineteenth century? Whatever, when a Jewish chap turns up at the hall of Cedric the Saxon (Ivanhoe’s father), the ‘welcome’ is less than wholesome:

Oswald, returning, whispered into the ear of his master, “It is a Jew, who calls himself Isaac of York; is it fit I should marshall him into the hall?”

“Let Gurth do thine office, Oswald,” said Wamba with his usual effrontery; “the swineherd will be a fit usher to the Jew.”

“St Mary,” said the Abbot, crossing himself, “an unbelieving Jew, and admitted into this presence!”

“A dog Jew,” echoed the Templar, “to approach a defender of the Holy Sepulchre?”

“By my faith,” said Wamba, “it would seem the Templars love the Jews’ inheritance better than they do their company.”

“Peace, my worthy guests,” said Cedric; “my hospitality must not be bounded by your dislikes. If Heaven bore with the whole nation of stiff-necked unbelievers for more years than a layman can number, we may endure the presence of one Jew for a few hours. But I constrain no man to converse or to feed with him.—Let him have a board and a morsel apart,—unless,” he said smiling, “these turban’d strangers will admit his society.”

“Sir Franklin,” answered the Templar, “my Saracen slaves are true Moslems, and scorn as much as any Christian to hold intercourse with a Jew.” 5

Nothing new under the Sun, eh?

But Scott does something rather wonderful: he introduces into the story Rebecca, who is Isaac of York’s daughter. She is beautiful and, to a teenage boy as I was when I first read the book, sexy. I fancied her much more than the ‘English rose’, Rowena, who ends up as Ivanhoe’s choice.

But when Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert - Ya boo sucks!, nasty Norman knight - fails in his attempts to seduce Rebecca, he accuses her of witchcraft. The cad! Cue potential cancellation in its most extreme form …

“Rebecca, a Jewess, daughter of Isaac of York, being attainted of sorcery, seduction, and other damnable practices, practised on a Knight of the most Holy Order of the Temple of Zion, doth deny the same; and saith, that the testimony delivered against her this day is false, wicked, and disloyal; and that by lawful ‘essoine’ of her body as being unable to combat in her own behalf, she doth offer, by a champion instead thereof, to avouch her case, he performing his loyal ‘devoir’ in all knightly sort, with such arms as to gage of battle do fully appertain, and that at her peril and cost. And therewith she proffered her gage. And the gage having been delivered to the noble Lord and Knight, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, of the Holy Order of the Temple of Zion, he was appointed to do this battle, in behalf of his Order and himself, as injured and impaired by the practices of the appellant. Wherefore the most reverend Father and puissant Lord, Lucas Marquis of Beaumanoir, did allow of the said challenge, and of the said ‘essoine’ of the appellant’s body, and assigned the third day for the said combat, the place being the enclosure called the lists of Saint George, near to the Preceptory of Templestowe. And the Grand Master appoints the appellant to appear there by her champion, on pain of doom, as a person convicted of sorcery or seduction; and also the defendant so to appear, under the penalty of being held and adjudged recreant in case of default; and the noble Lord and most reverend Father aforesaid appointed the battle to be done in his own presence, and according to all that is commendable and profitable in such a case. And may God aid the just cause!” 6

Ivanhoe, of course, comes to her defence and sees off the ghastly Sir Brian.

What’s the point of this example? It’s twofold.

One: to point up the continuing obscenity of antisemitism, the Two Millennia (and Ongoing) Hate that seems, oh so easily, to be refreshed and renewed …

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed onto the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. 7

The above quote introduces, of course, another key date, this time deployed as the title of a novel - 1984.

Two: as mentioned earlier, to point up the seeming impossibility of avoiding the comparison of many of today’s goings-on to religiously-inspired extremes. Blasphemy! Heresy! Apostasy! And, of course, for all of this to operate with maximum force, it’s really helpful if people can be convinced that black is white (1984 again) …

‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!’
‘How many fingers, Winston?’
‘Five! Five! Five!’
‘No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?’
‘Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!’ 8

… and that if a man decides he/she is a woman, he actually becomes a woman … and that a child that ‘feels’ it is in the wrong body, truly is in the wrong body … and, perhaps most egregious of all, that if the above variations are so, we are actually all the same in the sense that variations in everything from skin colour, to nationality, to culture, to merit, and so on, are all irrelevant!

It’s a bit like going to a restaurant that proudly proclaims that it serves, say, Chinese, Indian and Thai dishes … but they all come out of the same kitchen and all taste suspiciously like chicken tikka masala! Which is to say, ‘compressed diversity’, if I can call it that, must ultimately lead to reduced diversity.

The ultimate outcome, in fact, is vividly described by French author Renaud Camus, as Undifferentiated Human Matter (UHM). Sacre bleu! Maybe this is why Camus is refused admission into the UK? Perhaps he has transgressed the unwritten law (thanks, Monty Python) that seems now to prohibit free speech in the UK? Why, as recently as 13 January 2026, Dutch commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek also had her Electronic Travel Authorisation to the UK revoked on the grounds that her presence here would be “not conducive to the public good.”

And yet, just a few weeks earlier, British citizenship was expedited for an Egyptian chap, Alaa Abdel Fattah, whose former social media posts expressed extraordinarily violent opinions towards the British state.

Diversity, it seems, is a one-way street.

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1819

Anyway, let’s hop back to the year that Ivanhoe was published. Was it a time of pastoral joy, peace and love for all? Er, no. Not for everyone, apparently. Here’s a poem titled, handily, England in 1819.

An old, mad, blind, despis’d, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv’d and stabb’d in the untill’d field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg’d sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless – a book seal’d,
A Senate – Time’s worst statute unrepeal’d,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

This was the view of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was 26 years old at the time of writing, and would die by drowning in 1822 before reaching his 30th birthday.

The old, mad, blind, despis’d and dying king, King George III, shuffled off the mortal coil early in 1820 at the more advanced age of 81.

But, there we have it - a ruling class that “neither see, nor feel, nor know” what hardships their people are going through, and a generally run-down society that has completely lost its way.

Ring any bells?

And yet, and yet, as the final two lines of Shelley’s sonnet declare, he was hopeful - optimistic, even - that things would change for the better.

And so it proved, not that he was around to see it. Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 and, later, the writer Thomas Hardy could write of the year 1851 that it was:

… an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in time. As is a geological fault, we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact. 9

This all had a great deal to do with technological advances - for example, the laying of a copper telegraph wire that connected Dover, on England’s south coast, with Sangatte in France - and culminated in The Great Exhibition in a Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park.

We can but hope that the middle of our current century will bring greater happiness and peace than is currently in evidence. But it will be very different from the world that came into being in the mid-nineteenth century and, itself, drove amazing advances in human longevity, prosperity and happiness … until it didn’t! The challenge is, I guess, to confront the very human factors that inevitably flex and respond to the changes wrought by technology.

And finally …

Having tried to glimpse persistent trends in the very human factors across a millennium or so, it seems appropriate to conclude by referring back to a genuinely old text. Walter Scott may have made a good fist of writing about a time hundreds of years earlier than his own, but perhaps it is illuminating to go to a text that, itself, comes from an early date?

Let’s test that idea with a peek at The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the period 1387 to 1400 … but, for the sake of clarity, quoting from the Nevill Coghill translation into modern English.

Two of the pilgrims are the Knight and his son, the Squire. Here is how they are introduced:

There was a Knight, a most distinguished man,
Who from the day on which he first began
To ride abroad had followed chivalry,
Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy. 10

This chap, Chaucer goes on to explain, truly is a paragon of virtue:

He was of sovereign value in all eyes,
And though so much distinguished, he was wise
And in his bearing modest as a maid.
He never yet a boorish thing had said
In all his life to any, come what might;
He was a true, a perfect gentle-knight.

Then, there is his son …

He had his son with him, a fine young Squire,
A lover and cadet, a lad of fire
With locks as curly as if they had been pressed,
He was some twenty years of age, I guessed. 11

…

He was embroidered like a meadow bright
And full of freshest flowers, red and white.
Singing he was, or fluting all the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his gown, the sleeves were long and wide;
He knew the way to sit a horse and ride.
He could make songs and poems and recite,
Knew how to joust and dance, to draw and write.
He loved so hotly that till dawn grew pale
He slept as little as a nightingale.

Again, nothing new under the Sun, eh?

My conclusion?

It surely comes as no surprise that there is nothing new about the actual behaviours of men? Young men will sing and dance and woo. Of course they will. After all, the survival of our species depends upon it.

And young women will encourage or discourage any advances that are made, indeed they may well take the initiative. Of course this is so because, again, the survival of our species depends upon it.

These survival instincts are the very core of our existence. But beyond these procreative activities, which must only be deployed on a voluntary basis, men and women can participate in all aspects of life.

And, yes, I think a return to some form of chivalric code would be a good thing. The Chivalric Code of the Middle Ages according to Google was …

…. a moral system which combined a warrior ethos, knightly piety, and courtly manners, all combining to establish a notion of honour and nobility.

And Merriam-Webster describes chivalric behaviour as the proper way for a man to behave towards a woman, by ...

… showing respect, kindness, and courtesy through thoughtful actions, emphasizing her comfort, safety and value.

That doesn’t sound like a bad system, does it? In fact, it could work both ways to include female-to-male behaviour as well? Surely a potentially better system to update and apply than either, on the one hand, the gender-fluid and or otherkin/therian concepts (i.e. those who identify as partially or entirely non-human in mind, spirit, or emotional capacity) that are favoured by left-leaning liberals and, on the other hand, the separation of the public and private realms which is a core tenet of the Islamic system:

[W]hat the Muslim world has reified over the course of history is the idea that society should be divided into a men’s and a women’s realm and that the point of connection between the two should only be in the private arena, so that sexuality can be eliminated as a factor in the public life of the community. 12

I guess this goes some way to explain a key problem that arises when the West and Islam attempt their multicultural “Diversity is our strength” experiment!

Thanks for reading.

Over the Christmas period I found myself pondering the state of affairs in the world and, in particular, the state of the UK. Nothing too challenging, then! What follows is a bit of that thread.

There’s a sense of incipient collapse, the end of an era. The most perplexing thing about it all, it seems to me, is that everything feels, at one and the same time, to be both extraordinarily fragile and stubbornly opaque.

It’s a dichotomy that has occurred before. This is from The Times newspaper of 29th January 1828:

We desire to be delivered from any suspicion of a wish to check the “march of improvement”; but the “march of quackery” seems to be running just now very strongly side by side with it. 1

That period, 200 years ago, was, in fact, the genesis of what was to become the morally rigid but commercially productive Victorian period, infused with the Protestant work ethic. It resulted in ‘a new world’, expressed ten years after The Times comment, in the year of Queen Victoria’s coronation, by a historian of rural customs:

We are become a sober people. England is no longer Merry England, but busy England; England full of wealth and poverty – extravagance and care. 2

It was the start of the modern era, including the nation states and social mores and business formats that grew to dominate the 20^th century. Which is to say, in this instance, the period of discombobulation was a precursor to a period of great success.

Then, on 24th April 1933, nearly a century after the above Times quote was written, Winston Churchill (then in his “wilderness years” as a member of parliament but not holding any government office) delivered a speech during a dinner for the Royal Society of St George at London’s Savoy Hotel. Titled “What England Means To Me”. It included:

There are a few things I will venture to mention about England. They are spoken in no invidious sense. Here it would hardly occur to anyone that the banks would close their doors against their depositors. Here no one questions the fairness of the courts of law and justice. Here no one thinks of persecuting a man on account of his religion or his race. Here everyone, except the criminals, looks on the policeman as a friend and servant of the public. Here we provide for poverty and misfortune with more compassion, in spite of all our burdens, than any other country. Here we can assert the rights of the citizen against the State, or criticize the Government of the day, without failing in our duty to the Crown or in our loyalty to the King.

And, ultimately, nearly a further century on, we arrive at 4th January 2026, when the United Kingdom’s current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, was interviewed on BBC Television. He said:

I believe to be British is to be compassionate, reasonable, live and let live and diverse. And I’m proud to serve our diverse country and all of its parts. It is British to be diverse. (My emphases)

It is interesting, is it not, to compare and contrast the statements of Churchill and Starmer?

Churchill thinks in terms of rights and responsibilities - a form of value proposition. Starmer just makes an assertion - zero expression of any implied value in the contract.

And, oh boy, this word Diverse! What a word! A few decades ago it meant just ‘mixed’ or ‘varied’ but in the post-modern world it has taken on an import and prominence all its own.

‘Diverse’ and ‘Diversity’ now feature everywhere. Here in the UK we seem constantly to be informed by politicians that ‘Diversity is our strength’. And businesses are concerned to demonstrate their commitment to Diversity and its supposed companions Equity and Inclusion. That’s DEI!

In fact, a Google search informs me that, in the UK, there are an estimated 10,000 Diversity & Inclusion jobs in the public sector alone (which must surely amount to a sizable bill to be paid by the taxpayers of this great land!). The UK apparently employs nearly double the D&I staff per capita compared to other nations.

So, there you have it - the UK loves Diversity. And our current great cuddly and consistent political leader (apologies, sometimes the sarcasm just slips out) is unequivocal when he claims that “It is British to be diverse”.

Now, putting aside the fact that it’s a tad hard for an individual to be diverse because … well … each of us an individual unit and it’s kinda tricky for an individual to be diverse, what does the term even mean?

Try it. Walk up to someone, anyone, and ask them, “Excuse me, are you diverse?” If they look quizzical or confused, or just say “No” are we then to assume that they are not British?

I know, I know, I’m being awkward: diversity is a group feature. Here’s how Google defines it …

In simple words, diversity means having a wide variety of different things or people, embracing differences like race, gender, age, background, and beliefs, and recognizing that these unique qualities make a group stronger and more creative, like a toolbox with many tools instead of just one. It’s about valuing everyone’s unique contribution, not just tolerating differences, but appreciating them.

However, a bunch of people of mixed race, gender, age, background and beliefs is surely just that … a bunch of people. Which is to say, it is illogical to declare that “That diverse bunch of people over there are British”, or any other nationality or label come to that.

And, anyway, isn’t the concept of diversity itself selective? We seem only to like and tolerate diversity that is congruent with our refined opinions of ourselves as ‘intelligent’, ‘mature’, ‘civilized’ and ‘advanced’ people. But is that truly diverse? And is that all there is to diversity?

By contrast, consider the few tens or hundreds of inhabitants of North Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal, in the northeastern Indian Ocean. The Sentinelese people are, to this very day, primitive hunter-gatherers. Self-evidently, they present us with an example of human diversity. But how best can we protect this diverse strand of humanity. The Indian government worked it out long-since. In order to protect the islanders from the rest of us (the most potent threat is probably from the disease-causing microbes that we all permanently carry around) the Indian government maintains a three-nautical mile exclusion zone around the island.

Now here’s the point: if someone from the outside breaks through the defensive ring and gets killed by the natives, no charges are brought against the islanders. The islanders are exempt from ‘modern’ laws. These are primitive hunter-gatherers and if you barge in to their territory you’re asking for whatever trouble may come your way. That’s real ‘live and let live’ thinking, real diversity, isn’t it? That is, allowing and evidencing real respect for the islanders and their history and traditions.

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Keir’s Christmas present to British kids with penises

Now, with the above in mind, come back with me, if you will, to the United Kingdom where, just prior to Christmas 2025, the Great British government introduced new initiatives that will particularly affect young males.

It’s all about about a topic that gives rise to the tortured initialism V-A-W-G.

VAWG?

It stands for Violence Against Women and Girls. To be fair, the initialism long predates the currently announced strategy but it was nice of the UK government to offer it up as a Christmas 2025 present to any of the people who just happen to find themselves in the open-bordered space over which it nominally holds jurisdiction.

Here’s how the UK government website broke the news on 18th December 2025:

VAWG strategy to better protect children from misogyny and abuse

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy will focus on healthy relationships and consent, and tackle relationship abuse through a new helpline.

… The next generation of girls will be better protected from violence and young boys steered away from harmful misogynistic influences, under sweeping new measures announced by the Prime Minister.

The plans unveiled today will focus on prevention and tackling the root causes of abuse, and come as the latest stats show that nearly 40% of teenagers in relationships are a victim of relationship abuse and over 40% of young men hold a positive view of Andrew Tate.

Under the £20 million package, teachers and families will be empowered to address these harmful attitudes and behaviours head on, with young people taught to identify positive role models and challenge unhealthy myths about women and relationships.

This is just one part of the government’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls, deploying the full power of the state in the largest crackdown on violence against women and girls in British history. 3

Wow! “[D]eploying the full power of the state in the largest crackdown on violence against women and girls in British history.” That’s quite something, huh? Mind you, could it be perhaps that there was no need, in the past, for such a crack down? At the very least, we might check to see if any recent events might have exacerbated the issue.

Presumably, for example, it must mean that those bastards who have for decades routinely and in coordinated fashion abused thousands of young girls in numerous UK towns will not only be brought to justice but also, where appropriate, ejected from this open-bordered space that once upon a time could be referred to as …

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men 4

Mind you. when the Bard wrote the above lines it was in the context of things going, then as now, to the dogs. John of Gaunt, into whose mouth the words are put, is on his deathbed and bemoaning the rule of King Richard II who sat on the English throne from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399.

Meantime, did you note that direct reference in the government statement to one Andrew Tate? I don’t know much about Mr Tate (octogenarians like me do not, I suspect, figure high in his market segment choices) but one thing I do know from my time in the marketing and advertising world is that, by specifically mentioning the gentleman’s name in the way that it has, the UK government has provided priceless publicity for him and, potentially, his cause and opinions. You know how it works … “You want to defy the rules your teachers keep pushing at you? Sick of all this goody-goody VAWG stuff? Check out Brand Kemp now.”

Don’t get me wrong: I am definitely NOT in favour of violence towards women and girls, or violence towards anybody else for that matter. In fact, I’m very much against it. But something about the language used in the VAWG announcement gave me pause for thought.

It includes assertions like this one from Jess Phillips, a Member of Parliament who appears actually to have the bizarre title, Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls:

For too long the scale of violence against women and girls has been treated as a fact of life in our country. …

Put together, from today, we will deploy the full power of the state to introduce the largest crackdown to stop violence perpetrated against women and girls in British history. 5

Gosh, this is serious stuff, huh? It must be, because here’s a quote from another woman with a never-before-dreamed-up title, Alex Davies-Jones MP, Victims and Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Minister:

This historic strategy is about stopping harm before it starts, brought by a government which is finally standing on the side of every victim in our country. 6

What, then, is the extent of this problem? The same government announcement informs us that …

Over the last year alone, 1 in every 8 women was a victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking. For the first time, this government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency, with a pledge to halve it in a decade. 7

One in eight women! 12.5% of the total! That is a lot.

What’s going on?

At the bottom of the UK government web page from which the above quotes are taken there’s a helpful link: one is invited to “Explore the topic. Violence against women and girls.” So I did.

The page that one is taken to provides a great deal of information across a range of types of abuse but I was particularly struck by that which came top of the list, the lead-in content, where, under the heading Services, are listed three things all of which relate to the issue of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

Hmm, when thinking of male versus female violence, we know that men may use physical violence against women because, as well as being persons with penises, they are also persons with, on average, greater muscle mass, so if they are feeling randy and pathetic they may be tempted to try physically to dominate persons with vaginas.

But FGM is a whole other matter: yes, it is, of course, violence, but of a different kind to domestic violence, rape or other common or garden thuggery. Rather, in many places it is a sanctioned activity. Revered, even. And, so far as I know, it has never been a part of Western culture.

The writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has first-hand experience of this barbaric practice explains …

In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made “pure” by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. 8

Indeed, given the practice’s ubiquity and longevity in those areas, it surely comes as no surprise that the acculturation is so complete that women frequently support and, even, champion, its continuance:

Grandma swung her hand from side to side and said, “Once this long kintir [clitoris] is removed you and your sister will be pure. … She caught hold of me and gripped my upper body … Two other women held my legs apart.

Note how, in the above quotes, FGM has become reframed. God (whoever or whatever that is), apparently, got the design of human bodies a bit wrong. Silly entity! So, of course, we humans have to provide a bit of corrective surgery.

Aha, time to explain my admittedly rather lurid headline for this post.

There is a splendid British advertising executive called Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. He is intelligent and invariably witty. One of his observations concerns a marketing intervention that was attached to espresso coffee when it first arrived on the scene.

The delicious cup of espresso coffee that you drink is produced by forcing hot water at very high pressure through finely ground coffee. Atop the resulting small dose of perfection is a layer of what is termed ‘crema’. As Rory Sutherland has pointed out …

Crema is an interesting case of an ingenious reframing performed by the Gaggia company. It was originally considered scum, and an unwanted by-product of espresso-making. By calling it “crema” it became a desired feature of real coffee. 9

‘Reframing’ - it’s a neat device. Similarly, FGM was long-since ‘reframed’ across tranches of the world from being a barbarous act, presumably intended to increase control over the women so violated by reducing their sexual pleasure, to a means of ensuring their “purity”.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains …

Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

What a wicked world, huh? It has permitted the practice of female circumcision to persist for thousands of years. But, dammit, it was not here in the West until very recently. We imported it!

Lest you conclude that I might support this barbaric practice let me restate that I deplore it and believe it should be banned. However, what bothers me is the way that any campaign to put an end to the practice is carried out.

It presents the elites with a problem: after all, FGM is an example of the diversity of human behavior. The problem is, how to ban a non-Western practice without appearing overtly to criticize the non-Western constituency that is actually responsible for it. After all, to do so would be colonialist!

From the perspective of the elites, the best outcome would be to lay the blame entirely on the West and on white males. However, where that is not credibly possible, an acceptable fallback position is to lay the blame at least equitably on all males. “It’s men that do it, your honour - the filthy beasts!”

You see, you can demonize the West as much as you like - the more the better, in fact - but under no circumstances is it permissible to appear to criticize non-Western norms and history. And, what we might term the Borderless-West Project, which was initiated without so much as a democratic by-your-leave has been propagandized on the basis that “It is British to be diverse” and “Diversity is our strength”.

So, what’s to be done when a piece of diversity comes along that is demonstrably … ahem … not contributing to better outcomes, societal resilience, richer cultures or stronger teams?

The answer? Generalize the issue, broaden it from FGM to all behaviour towards women and girls, so that it can be attributed and applied across the board to everyone, especially all white males. As the British government puts it …

Building on changes already announced to arm children against disinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories on social media, all secondary schools in England will be required to have a strong offer to educate students about healthy and respectful relationships, with every child getting access to this by the end of this Parliament.

Tackling the most worrying attitudes as early as possible, schools will also send high-risk individuals to get the extra care and support they need, focused on challenging deep-rooted misogynist influences. We will move quickly to deliver what works – a specific pot of money will be used to look specifically at how to prevent the most harmful sexual behaviours. 10

Once upon a time, we took far more direct and robust approaches towards diverse practices with which we did not agree. One has only to think of the response of British General Sir Charles Napier, in the 1840s, in the Sindh region of what is now Pakistan, when he put a stop to sati (the practice of widow burning). Local priests explained that widow-burning was their custom. Napier replied:

Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom, but my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them. Let us all enjoy our national customs!

Oh, how shockingly ‘colonialist’!

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To sum up …

I suppose the matter I’m trying to think through, overall, is, if we assume that human diversity is a beneficial thing, how best can we inculcate and manage it?

For starters, we surely need to agree what is and what is not beneficial? How best to do that? And what if some of us think that something is patently not beneficial but, for others, it is a long-standing part of their culture? And what are the implications of all this for human organization on a planetary scale?

It occurs to me, too, that we need to have some basic rules in place about the ‘promotion’ of specific concepts. For example, what about practices that are accompanied by proselytization?

That is, what if the adherents to a particular belief system believe that it should be universally applied and that violence is permissible in order to aid that expansion? Logically, this should not be allowed, should it, because it must inevitably lead to homogenization rather than maintaining diversity? Or, at the very least, it must be somehow contained? Perhaps ‘kettled’, rather like the Sentinelese people whose particular contribution to diversity can only be maintained by keeping them separate from other cultures.

It’s all a bit complicated, isn’t it?

In pursuit of some answers or, at least, ideas, I hope I’ve succeeded, here, in providing a reminder that not all diversity is benign. Some of it, in fact, is downright awful.

To conclude

Finally, let’s just revisit that extract from Winston Churchill’s 1933 speech. In it, he suggested that early-20th century style ‘Englishness’ explicitly meant the following for individual citizens:

• Certainty of financial probity on the part of banks.

• Assured confidence in the fairness of the courts of law and justice.

• Freedom from persecution, regardless of religion or race.

• Confidence in the police force as an unbiased defender and public servant.

• A fair and humane welfare system.

• Freedom to criticize the Government of the day.

And, note, the conclusion to his list … the acknowledgement that rights come with responsibilities:

• Loyalty and duty to the Crown (as representative of the State).

How many of those freedoms would pass muster today? And, perhaps most important, how many people would or could own the responsibilities that accompany them?

Precious few, I suspect.

I cannot resist ending with a poem: a poem written by a young man who died at the age of 27 from septicemia while en route to fight in the First World War’s Gallipoli campaign.

The Soldier by Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Well, that’s a piece of diversity that has long since been cast aside. But should it have been?

Thanks for reading.

Recently, I have been rather neglecting you, my hugely valued readers of Aargh! by David Pinder. I apologize. It has not been because of laziness but more because of diversion on to other issues. Anyway, that’s no excuse: normal service will be resumed!

As part of that process it occurred to me that because Christmas is nigh, and because so many of the goings-on in what we used to call ‘the real world’ seem nowadays to be anything but real, we might try to leaven the situation with a bit of common sense and old wisdom.

So, what follows are a few thoughts from some of the wonderful ghosts from my past.

Where to begin?

Well, if you follow my scribblings you may recall that, this time last year, three great friends died, all during November and December 2024. I don’t draw attention to this in any sad sense but, rather, to remember just how talented and remarkable they all were. Here and now let me just recall Paul Bagshawe.

Paul was a typographer and graphic designer - a towering talent. And one of the things that he did in 2023 - thank goodness! - was publish a volume titled xSymmetry, which is an autobiography and explication of his philosophy - the two strands inextricably entwined.

To give a taste of it, here is Paul talking about one of his own teachers, the typographer and designer, Anthony Froshaug (1920-1984):

To try and summarise my time with Froshaug, more than anything he taught the value of reduction, taking away everything that isn’t required, and working on what was important, and should be emphasised, and how everything within my own work should be inter-related.

I sometimes look back to my time with Froshaug - trying to comprehend how he did it - how he taught so well, seemingly without teaching. The conclusion I keep coming back to is that Froshaug made us look at ourselves … 1

Yes! and, on the larger canvas, this principle surely applies to everything? Here, Paul used it to illumine a Paul Klee poem …

“In the beginning was the Word.” The older I get, the more I realize how profound that insight is.

Another of Paul’s passions was music. His musical tastes were fairly eclectic, including a love of jazz. He was an excellent pianist and it was a joy to watch him play some of Keith Jarrett’s compositions.

As it happens, Jarrett and I share the same birth year, 1945. We’re both of the generation that was directly influenced by, among others, Jack Kerouac and his On The Road (published 1957). And there, for me, is that extraordinary encapsulation of jazz history up to that point, up to the bebop era:

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning to it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world. Then had come Charlie Parker, a kid in his mother’s woodshed in Kansas City, blowing his taped-up alto among the logs, practicing on rainy days, coming out to watch the old swinging Basie and Benny Moten band that had Hot Lips Page and the rest - Charlie Parker leaving home and coming to Harlem, and meeting mad Thelonious Monk and madder Gillespie - Charlie Parker in his early days when he was flipped and walked around in a circle while playing. Somewhat younger than Lester Young, also from KC, that gloomy, saintly goof in whom the history of jazz was wrapped; for when he held his horn high and horizontal from his mouth he blew the greatest; and as his hair grew longer and he got lazier and stretched-out, his horn came down halfway; till it finally fell all the way and today as he wears his thick-soled shoes so that he can’t feel the sidewalks of life his horn is held weakly against his chest, and he blows cool and easy getout phrases. Here were the children of the American bop night. 2

“Mad Thelonius Monk and madder Gillespie.” I like that. So who was this madder-than-mad madman, Gillespie? Whitney Balliett explains …

Gillespie was born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, the youngest of nine children of James and Lottie (Powe) Gillespie. He was a devilish kid, who fought a lot and was whipped a lot. When he was nine, his father, a discontented man, died; when he was twelve he took up the trombone and the trumpet; and when he was eighteen he was in Frank Fairfax’s band and was nicknamed Dizzy. He went to Europe with Teddy Hill’s band in 1937, and two years later he joined Cab Calloway, who fired him after they got into a fracas over a spitball that Calloway mistakenly thought Gillespie had shot at him. He married a dancer named Lorraine Willis in 1940 in Boston (“Dizzy didn’t fool around with that other stuff,” she once said. “He just asked me to get married, and I said, ‘O.K’”), and she has long been his guide and his ballast. He discovered Charlie Parker around the same time, and Parker changed his life. By 1945, he had the first bebop band on Fifty-Second Street … 3

I once saw Dizzy at Ronnie Scott’s in London. I love serendipity. Another occasion when that happened was when, to my infinite joy, Val and I (Val, a good friend of mine, and formerly a barmaid at the Smugglers Tavern in London’s Warren Street) sat, in Ronnies, with the great drummer Elvin Jones (1927-2004) after one of his sets, while he just mused on his life. John Coltrane figured high in those reminiscences and, lo and behold, he got the great man’s son, Ravi, who played saxophone in Elvin’s own band, The Jazz Machine, to come and say hello to us.

It reminds me of another out-of-the-blue encounter. This one was at London’s Chelsea Arts Club, sometime in the late-1980s. I was there courtesy of my friends Lesley Jones and Albany Wiseman, both of whom were members of Chelsea Arts and both of whom are now sadly deceased. We were doing what we invariably did on these occasions which was to drink to excess.

At some point someone turns to the bar and says, “Ooh, look who’s there.” So we do. And, there, perched on a bar stool, with a drink and a newspaper, is the poet and novelist Laurie Lee.

I’m not normally one to leap forward in this kind of circumstance but on this occasion I must have taken on board enough sauce to have lowered my inhibitions. I go over and mutter something about it being an honour to actually meet the author of Cider With Rosie.

Well, he doesn’t tell me to get lost. In fact, he’s really friendly and drinks are bought and we chat about the book and life in general.

It so happens that, at around the same time, another couple of friends, Cliff Prichard and Pat Russell - the ghosts, the ghosts - were working on an anthology volume about food in literature.

As part of the researches for this foodie project, Cliff, Pat and I had been discussing Cider With Rosie so it was quite front of mind. Here’s a sample of what made it into the food book:

The scullery was water, where the old pump stood. And it had everything else that was related to water: thick steam of Mondays edgy with starch; soapsuds boiling, bellying and popping, creaking and whispering, rainbowed with light and winking with a million windows. Bubble bubble toil and grumble, rinsing and slapping of sheets and shirts, and panting Mother rowing her red arms like oars in the steaming waves. Then the linen came up on a stick out of the pot, like pastry, or woven suds, or sheets of moulded snow.

Here, too, was the scrubbing of floors and boots, of arms and necks, of red and white vegetables. Walk in to the morning disorder of this room and all the garden was laid out dripping on the table. Chopped carrots like copper pennies, radishes and chives, potatoes dipped and stripped clean from their coats of mud, the snapping of tight pea-pods, long shells of green pearls, and the tearing of glutinous beans from their nests of wool.

Grown stealthy, marauding among these preparations, one nibbled one’s way like a rat through roots and leaves. Peas rolled under the tongue, fresh cold, like solid water; teeth chewed green peel of apples, acid sharp, and the sweet white starch of swedes. Beaten away by wet hands gloved with flour, one returned in a morose and speechless lust. Slivers of raw pastry, moulded, warm, went down in the shapes of men and women - heads and arms of unsalted flesh seasoned with nothing but a dream of cannibalism.

Large meals were prepared in this room, cauldrons of stew for the insatiate hunger of eight. Stews of all that grew on these rich banks, flavoured with sage, coloured with Oxo, and laced with a few bones of lamb. There was, it is true, little meat at those times; sometimes a pound of bare ribs for boiling, or an occasional rabbit dumped at the door by a neighbour. But there was green food of great weight in season, and lentils and bread for ballast. Eight to ten loaves came to the house every day, and they never grew dry. We tore them to pieces with their crusts still warm, and their monotony was brightened by the objects we found in them - string, nails, paper, and once a mouse; for those were days of happy-go-lucky baking. The lentils were cooked in a great pot which also heated the water for the Saturday night baths. Our small wood fire could heat sufficient water to fill one bath only, and this we shared in turn. 4

Having been brought up in the immediate post-war period in a poor household, I could relate to this description. Bread and butter, sometimes with added home-made jam, was a staple and the small, homemade currant bun an especial delight.

Anyway, having mentioned the food book I hope you agree that it is appropriate for me to conclude this shameless stringing together of reminiscences and snippets with the concluding inclusion from the food book, originally titled God Help The Wicked: An Antholorgy, introduced by Cliff Prichard as follows:

THERE IS ONLY ONE passage with which to end this collection.

After the Last Supper itself, it must be the most famous meal in print, so there is no need to identify either story or Author.

In fact, it is so well known that you might think it is a cliché. But, remember, clichés are only clichés because they are true.

THERE NEVER WAS SUCH A GOOSE.

“Why, where’s our Martha?” cried Bob Cratchit, looking round.

“Not coming,” said Mrs. Cratchit..

“Not coming!” said Bob, with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim’s blood horse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. “Not coming upon Christmas Day!”

Martha didn’t like to see him disappointed, if it were only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.........and while Bob, turning up his cuffs - as if, poor fellow they were capable of being made more shabby - compounded some hot mixture in a jug with some gin and lemons and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course - and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone - too nervous to bear witnesses - to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose - a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered - flushed, but smiling proudly - with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess that she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought that it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

“A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!” Which all the family re-echoed.

“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last of all. 5

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Thanks for reading.

The above image1 is of an actual VW Beetle press advertisement from 1960s America. It helps explain how and why Sales & Marketing have changed … radically. It is an exemplary sample of the advertising of a former age and a stepping stone that helps show the pathway to the present day.

Towards the end of Part 1 of this series I wrote: “The traditional, pre-Digital, purpose of Sales was to communicate value. The new environment means that the sales process must now create value.”

Keeping that thought in mind, let’s first go back to that traditional, pre-Digital time. The above ad, and the campaign of which it was a part, are examples of the very best of 1960s advertising: it’s all about drawing attention to the features and benefits of a product/brand - in this instance the VW Beetle.

Here’s the body copy from the left-hand page of the pictured ad:

1. Look at the car.

2. Look harder. You’ll find enough advantages to fill a lot of ads. Like the air-cooled engine, the economy, the design that never goes out of date.

3. Don’t exaggerate. For instance, some people have gotten 50 m.p.g. and more from a VW. But others have only managed 28. Average: 32. Don’t promise more.

4. Call a spade a spade. And a suspension a suspension. Not something like “orbital cushioning.”

5. Speak to the reader. Don’t shout. He can hear you. Especially if you talk sense.

6. Pencil sharp? You’re on your own.

(Copyright © Doyle Dane Bernbach, 1949)

This is sooo clever. The campaign, by ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) was promoting the VW Beetle, a German product, at a time when the American domestic automobile market was dominated by some of the largest, flashiest machines imaginable - think Bruce Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch:

Eldorado fins, whitewalls, and skirts
Rides just like a bit of heaven here on earth
Well, buddy, when I die, throw my body in the back
And drive me to the junkyard in my Cadillac. 2

“Once upon a time” … the start of the modern era

Okay, now let’s go back further; all the way, in fact, to 1776 when Adam Smith (1723-1790), variously labelled ‘the father of economics’ and ‘the father of capitalism’, published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In it he wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages. 3

What, you may ask, has an 18th century reference got to do with now? Its relevance is as a foundational rule of modern business: the primacy of the producer and product was the accepted norm. Hence the “if a man build a better mousetrap” idea, known the world over, attributed to 19th century American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, I learn from a web search that Emerson actually wrote:

If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods. 4

In whatever form Emerson expressed it the point is that, from the Industrial Revolution onwards and right through until the late 20^th century, ‘Product’ was the only game in town. And it remains a powerful force to this day. This first business generation of the modern era was built on a straightforward foundation: A supplying company sold Product. Customers bought its Production. Period. We bought lawn mowers because they cut grass; detergents because they cleaned clothes; mousetraps because they caught mice.

All of which is to say, the value of a product was regarded as embedded. The product itself represented the value that was delivered, and that value was identifiable by ‘interrogating’ the product to reveal its features and benefits. (Take another look at the copy from the VW ad - it’s a great example of the features & benefits approach.)

All of which is to say, product value was regarded as objectively assessable.

What, then, about the marketer and salesperson for this scenario? How and by whom could products best be marketed and sold?

This, in and of itself, is a massive topic and I won’t go into great detail here. Suffice to point out that, at the start of the modern era, Sales saw its role more as one of trying to persuade customers to buy what an enterprise wanted to sell to them, often whether or not those customers would truly benefit from whatever was being pushed in their direction, and to do so how and when and where the company wanted the sale to happen.

This led, inevitably, to two stereotypes of the salesman (almost always a man back then). The successful salesman was a ‘wolf’ … Greedy. Aggressive. Confident (on the outside, at least). The unsuccessful salesman was a ‘sad wimp’, beautifully sketched by playwright Arthur Miller:

He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake ... A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory. 5

When Production reigned supreme it logically followed that the measure of success was the number of units sold. Shifting production was the goal. Sell! Sell! Sell! A-B-C: Always Be Closing!

Alongside this, in the 20th century, as the sophistication and volume of offerings increased, the Marketing function emerged and grew. It’s role was to provide a matching process between a company’s capabilities and the wants of its customers. Which meant, of course, that it really was rather important for an enterprise to identify its actual and potential customers! And not to blithely confuse Marketing with Sales … or, for that matter, with Product Management, or Advertising, or Customer Service!

Just thinking about those basic points it is easy to see that the relation and ‘fit’ between Sales and Marketing was almost certain to be ambivalent. And things were about to become yet more complicated!

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The vertical enterprise goes horizontal

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it fair to say that we tend now to regard the real start date of the 21st century world as being 29 June 2007. That’s when the iPhone was launched. It may be true in the sense that it marked the start of a period of very different human behavior from that which had gone before, but the digital world had already been building for half a century or more.

Digital technologies started to make their presence felt after the Second World War. In 1950, for instance, the man who had kickstarted the computer age with a $1 million personal donation to the U.S. Navy, IBM’s chief Thomas J. Watson, estimated that his company, which was then really the only game in town, might be able to sell two or even three computers a year. His thinking, atypically, was bounded by the 55-feet (16.7 metres) long, 8-feet (2.4 metres) wide Harvard Mark I computer he had funded in 1943 and its attendant army of acolytes. But, also in the 1940s, the all-electronic computers spawned by ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) were a thousand times faster and down to a mere two-car garage size. By the mid-1950s IBM was selling computers that would actually fit inside a room to scores of American companies and Watson was wiping egg off his face all the way to the bank.

Meantime, the connectivity challenge was being tackled. In August 1962, American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider (1915-1990), working at M.I.T., wrote a series of memos about his idea of a ‘Galactic Network’, a vision of a globally interconnected set of computers. You can see where that was headed … although it took until the early 1990s for everything to be in place to enable a nascent public internet.

In the meantime, more and more business enterprises invested in the air-conditioned cathedrals required to house those big computers and their accompanying armies of acolytes. And, of course, software visionaries were more than happy to create more and more practical reasons to justify those sales.

From all of this activity there eventually emerged the realization that the business enterprise could itself be reshaped, in the sense that it was no longer necessary to have all of a company’s functions in close proximity. In fact, quite the converse, they could be spread around everywhere!

And then, in the late-1980s and early-1990s, when the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union appeared to signal a slam dunk victory for the universal application of Western liberalism, it was taken as a sort of political and social confirmation that the ‘distributed enterprise’ could take off on a massive scale. The method for so doing was, of course, Outsourcing.

Thus was the business enterprise tipped from a vertical, ‘all-in-one-place-with-the-CEO-in-the-penthouse-and-the-janitor-in-the-basement’ structure to a horizontal, ‘all-over-the-world-because-the-tech-means-it-doesn’t-matter-a-damn-and-we-can-exploit-cheap-labour’ structure. This was the dream of globalization coming true, wasn’t it?

Well … er … let’s leave that strand for another day. Here, let’s stick with the question, How did it all affect Sales and Marketing?

In a short period of time, and conclusively after the internet went public from 1993, it became obvious that all this digital stuff made it possible to augment customer offerings. More consistent and better communication with customers. And the ability to maintain ongoing relationships with them and to sell supplementary products and services - for example, training to help customers get the most out of their investments in particular products. And more.

There’ll be more detail about this in Part 3 of this series but, for now, let me just point out that the technological developments and resulting business structure changes were combining to create an entirely new order of things … crucially focused on an entirely new expression of Customer Value.

Customer Value was shifting from something that was intrinsic to a product or service to being extrinsic. Value was shifting to mean something related wholly to the Customer and that Customer’s life.

This change was being forced, not just because marketplaces were less crowded in the past than they now are, but also because manufacturing was far more variable than it now is. Sure, digital technology was the key change agent but it was in its infancy compared to now. This meant that, back then, product quality depended to a far greater extent on ‘local conditions and practices’. As a consequence, products of all kinds were produced across a much greater quality range than is now the case.

Today, so far as manufacturing quality and service quality are concerned, companies tend to be either very good or, er, not very good at all. The pre-digital era was quite different: products were available that covered the full range of quality outputs accompanied by a full range of service support that went from superb to derisory.

So, the product was the thing, and the majority of products were scattered right across the quality range. Now, it is all far more standardized.

I’ll pick up on this in Part 3 of this series but, for now, let’s just complete the set of transitions so that we have a broad overview of the shifts:

• Stage 1 (up to 1975): Customer buys Product. Supplier sells Production.

• Stage 2 (1975 to 2010): Customer buys Product + Added Value. Supplier sells Productivity

• Stage 3 (from 2010): Customer buys Possibility. Supplier sells Possibility.

As I say, more in Part 3, but, here, let’s consider one of the key enabling mechanisms of Stage 3 …

“Open Sesame!” The magical world of apps.

In the final decades of the 20th century, digitalization started to transform manufacturing, enabling far more stabilized and assured manufacturing and service quality than had existed in the electro-mechanical era. And it got better and better. Think about that.

A key contributor to this progress, as time went on, was “the app”. And, of course, now, any enterprise, however large or small, has access to a myriad array of apps that enable world-class capabilities, a.k.a. ‘best practice’.

This means that large and small enterprises now have access not only to gold standard manufacturing, but also to gold standard HR management, gold standard Customer Relationship Management, gold standard Accounting systems and on and on.

The result? Where, in pre-digital times, the range of products available to meet a specific need covered the entire range from highly differentiated (in terms of quality, functionality, aesthetics, cost and, even, availability) to run of the mill, there is now far greater conformity.

A factor that therefore comes into play in any instance is … ‘Where does this supplier/product situate on a spectrum ranging from ‘unique’ to ‘substitutable’?’

The market pressure inevitably was and is towards the ‘substitutable’ end of the scale … and substitutable products have to exist in crowded market sectors alongside a number - often a large number - of competing offerings. To avoid these shark-infested waters of the commercial world where the margins are thin and the dangers of commoditization are particularly high, there was, therefore, a challenge for enterprises to introduce new elements of differentiation to attempt to move the needle further towards the calmer, more controllable, ‘unique’ end of the scale.

Is this not a likely reason that the range of factors now used to differentiate offerings has increased? If it is harder to differentiate your offering solely on the basis of its intrinsic quality, offering qua offering, then you must find other factors to boost its attraction, must you not?.

For example, very few customers in the past would have considered it the business of a business to declare preferences for customers with particular political or social views. And provided that, so far as the customers knew, their suppliers were operating within the law, they were just happy to limit their attention to the products on offer.

What we might term hygiene factors were more likely to be regarded as important in B2B (Business to Business) deals ,,, For instance, “If we’re going to outsource some of our HR processes to a third party, we want to be sure that the chosen supplier maintains certain standards.” … but were far less likely to be considered relevant to B2C (Business to Consumer) dealings.

But, now, interviews that I have carried out with customers of client companies, to help those companies define and articulate their value propositions, indicate that social and political considerations do matter to more and more people even in B2C transactions.

So, it now works both ways. Some customers, when making a buying decision, will seek assurances about the way the supplying company runs its business: for example, “Is Company X suitably concerned with sustainability in its sourcing and processes?” And some companies declare their concern regarding particular social or political issues. A famous example of the latter happened in mid 2023 when, at a conference, the then-COO of UK DIY chain, Wickes, declared that if someone did not agree with a liberal interpretation of sex and gender issues, “they’re not welcome in our stores anyway.” 6

The changes that have taken place inevitably mean that Sales & Marketing have evolved. In the process, the roles have become more broadly defined and more intertwined. And, as we will see in Part 3 of this series, there are areas where the roles have actually switched!

For now, however, I’ll conclude this time by just introducing my own coinage for what I have come to think is something of a problem child of the new era. Introducing …

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App-oplexy: the dark side of the app revolution

As you’re probably aware, there is a medical condition called apoplexy. It goes back a very long way. An online search reveals that …

From the late 14th to the late 19th century, the diagnosis apoplexy referred to any sudden death that began with abrupt loss of consciousness, especially when the victim died within seconds after losing consciousness.

It refers to bleeding into an organ or loss of blood flow to an organ, as happens with a sudden haemorrhage or stroke.

And, informally, it refers to a bout of red-faced, incoherent rage, as in “He became apoplectic!” and “He had an apoplectic fit!”

Well, I couldn’t resist the opportunity for a new coinage, app-oplexy, to describe both the loss of human consciousness and the incoherent rage caused by a total reliance upon apps.

App-oplexy recognizes that, for all the efficiencies that they may enable, over-reliance on and misuse of apps can lead to a denial of humanness. App-oplexy may result in a silent withdrawal (analogous to losing consciousness) resulting from distraction in the online world, and/or app-oplectic fits as a result of living too much in the simulacrum of the online world.

All of this asks the questions Why and How do apps cause such upheaval? More coming up in Part 3.

Thanks for reading.