The hero in all of us

One of the reasons that I studied (if that's the right word for going to a few lectures) physics at university is that it has a very simple view of creation. General relativity, quantum electrodynamics and statistical mechanics might get quite complicated, but they never try to address the question: "Why?"

The question is probably unanswerable, but it is part of our nature to ask it. Having wondered why, we also seem to find it impossible to accept that things might just be the way they are for no reason at all, so we attach meaning where none already existed.

This is part of the premise for The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces). And since we share the same psyche, the meanings we tend to attach to our reality share similar themes, conforming to what Campbell labelled the "monomyth".

The Hero was first published in 1949, but gained noteriety when cited by George Lucas as an influence in writing Star Wars. Ever since, Hollywood producers have sought scripts with similar elements and structure.

The hero, the quest, the journey through the underworld, the tests, etc., have become de riguer and, as a result, movies have become depressingly predictable. You can see the pattern in everything from Dodgeball to Die Hard, but The Matrix is its ultimate update. Or should that be upgrade?

What Hollywood missed, or discarded, are Cambell's final thoughts on what the monomyth did for the ordinary individual when the myths were developed, and what they tell the modern individual. It's all very well knowing why the deeds of Beowulf and Odysseus appeal to the human brain, but how did that help the ploughman and what can it do for the telesales operator, other than provide a distraction from drudgery?

Cambell's view is that historically myths provided an analogy for everyone's life. We are all the hero on a quest. The quest is probably not what we think it is but we will learn and grow as a result. What we learn is to accept our changing role within family and community.

These lessons are still relevant in the modern world, although the rise of nations and corporate globalisation make it even more difficult to feel connected to community. Contentment can still come fom being the ordinary hero.

If nothing else, Campbell's words amused me when they came back to mind in John Lewis, while buying a vacuum cleaner. I reluctantly answered the hero's call, journeyed far (on the Overground and Underground), was assisted in my quest (by my wife), faced my ordeal (finding the toilets), passed through the underworld (the Waitrose food hall) to the reward (a Dyson, waiting to be picked up from Customer Orders) before returning home to share my treasure (with an unappreciative cat).

Myths are full of the extra-ordinary, so we know what is expected when we hear the call. And the call to extra-ordinary or difficult tasks is more common than you might think. There is always a need to speak up for the voiceless, stand up to bullies, take up the minority cause. Myths reassure us that there is something magical in simply doing the thing we believe is right.

Further, the line between ordinary and extra-ordinary is impossible to draw. Disease and disability, childbirth and child rearing, devotion to parents and siblings, are ordinary challenges that often require extra-ordinary character.

What is usually lost in the Hollywood version of the monomyth is the analogy to the everyday. As a result, we are allowed to long for a life like Luke Skywalker or Neo without any hope of fulfilment.

But the Jedi Order and the Matrix are both real and unreal, now that they have become rooted in our psyche. They provide us with another set of analogies and sometimes a touchstone for modern life.

A question of strategy

It's Blog Action Day, with an estimated 8,000 bloggers and 11 million readers focusing their efforts on combating climate change. Well, here's one more blog and maybe two more readers.


The focus on climate change is, by necessity, on the now and the near future. It has been asked whether dealing with this crisis will leave us any wiser, assuming we survive. One would hope so, but any victory will be claimed by authoritarians, capitalists and chauvenists as much as localists, anti-capitalists and progressives. So, while everyone (OK, nearly everyone ) is listening, we have to make our case for a fairer, more caring society, as a long-term method of avoiding future crises as well as a form of common sense.


Yet this is not nearly the only opportunity to evangelise about sustainability. The direct political approach makes most sense to me: seeking election at local level with a manifesto of responsible community control over community resources. But there are "ins" of all sorts, including the standards I work on in my day job.


Perhaps it's a sign of gathering momentum, but radical ideas are showing up in surprising places. Strategy for Sustainability by Adam Werbach (http://www.strategyforsustainability.com/) is one example, and currently a bestseller among business books in the United States. What's really surprising about Werbach's book is that, although it contains a lot of radical thinking, it is based upon work with some of the largest corporations in America, and should appeal to many others.


It attempts to bridge the gap between reactive, arse-covering attitudes to social and environmental issues, and genuine commitment to improving corporate culture. The book, and Adam's activity as a sustainability consultant (now for Saatchi and Saatchi S; saatchis.com), chimes well with advanced sustainable development thinking, including the thinking behind recent British Standards and a lot of my own beliefs.

If I had one serious reservation, it was that Adam doesn't emphasise the need for balance between different aspects of sustainability or the desirability of trying to be objective about which issues are most critical for an organisation. One particular case study, WalMart, is portrayed as a surprising success, which it is in mainly environmental terms, although most critics of WalMart are more concerned about its social impacts, particularly how it treats its employees.


Having mulled over the contents of the book for longer than it took to read it, my residual feeling is one of hope. If the megacorps of America are even taking Adam's advice in a lop-sided way, it will begin the embedding process and a mixture of improved management and stakeholder engagement will push them towards a more balanced approach.


Around the time that I was reaching these conclusions, I attended a seminar organised by London PR and branding (https://twitter.com/lonpr) and led by my friend Erica Grigg (http://www.carbonoutreach.com/) on social media PR 2.0 for sustainability. Although the time was taken mostly with using social media (blogs, facebook, twitter, etc.) for public relations, it did make me think about PR and its role in sustainable development.


Judging by what some people have said, the connections aren't obvious to them either, but PR is a perfect part of an organisation's strategy for sustainability. And sustainable development is where the distinction between marketing and PR is most obvious. Marketing is about communicating and selling to customers, but public relations is about communicating with a user community, and therefore building relationships with stakeholders. In other words, stakeholder engagement. When building transparency and inclusivity, the goal is to get the communications right for the stakeholders involved, and publicists should be the people who have the tools and knowledge to get it right.


New social media should be in the publicisist's tool kit because they allow the creation of virtual communities of concerned and interested individuals. They provide a way of getting the two-way communication that can seem impossible for an old-fashioned outfit. Even better, although it might be seen as a problem by some, a real community spirit will only grow under an open and honest approach. Which brings us back to the principles of sustainability.

Lessons in democratic intellect

I must admit a simple motive: I was persuaded to read a book, I found it to be a satisfying mountain to climb, and now I want to reflect on what I learned. The book is The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and Her Universities in the Nineteenth Century by George Elder Davie. The subject could hardly be less intriguing but the subtext is profound. So, even though I would want to write about The Democratic Intellect anyway, I would argue that it does have relevance in a blog about Gandhist politics. Just bear with me.

In the Act of Union of 1707, Scotland retained independence in law, religion and education, which it retained to a great extent to the creation of the new Scottish Parliament in 1999 and on to today. However, the Nineteenth Century saw a challenge to Scotland's independent education system and, by the end of the century, its universities were more closely aligned with England's. But it is not merely nationalist pride that was dented by the change: Scotland had nurtured an educational system that was beneficial in ways that could not be reproduced in the English system.

In particular, Scotland had a preference for teaching philosophy to all students and any subject from first principles. What it lacked in detail, it more than made up for in rigour. The traces of this method can still be found today, but it is continually diluted and political pressure is always towards vocational training and away from strength in generalism.

This has immediate and pragmatic effects. The ability of science graduates to think around a problem or to come to terms with a new subject area is very poor. I remember a tv documentary (but can't find it archived) where engineering graduates were asked to explain where the mass of a tree branch came from--many of the answers were non-sensical. We're becoming increasingly dependent on computer software that makes complex calculations for us without having to understand the maths. It would simply be good sense to teach some problem solving to scientists, some Latin and Greek to English students, and some history and philosophy to everyone.

Davie also made it clear that an internationally respected school of philosophy, whose techniques were powerful and useful, was essentially lost in the political turmoil of the 1800s. With every Scottish student learning philosophy, academic philosophers were hugely influential, which meant that a dynamic community of philosophers was an obstacle to alignment with England. The obstacle was removed, as the result of both in-fighting and political machinations, by the appointment of less erudite men.

Even before I read The Democratic Intellect, I wondered about how we learn. Not so much as individuals, important though that is, but more as a culture or a species. Areas of knowledge grow and evolve with time: science becomes more coherent and universal while the arts explore different ways of seeing and thinking. Some progress is haphazard, like noticing the behaviour of penicillin, and some is planned, like mapping a new island.

Yet knowledge is only part of learning in the same way that training is only part of education. It is an enrichment of our intellect that has raised us from smart animals to cultured and sophisticated people. How did that happen, and how do we keep it happening? We have a good idea how to reproduce our values and our intelligence in the next generation, but how do we encourage them to build on what we have achieved?

I would argue that only people with a grasp of the fundamentals of why we believe what we believe and how we know what we know can question those facts and beliefs in any meaningful and productive way. Such an education is not cheap, but what we would be buying is immeasurable.

Of course, I have an ideology in development, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe that a progressive education system would lead everyone to the same conclusions as me. Self-determination means accepting the will of the community, after all. But surely a progressive education system would nurture a progressive society, locally if not more widely influential?

There is one last aspect of The Democratic Intellect that I have to mention. Historically, the alignment of Scotland's universities with England's meant a loss of identity. Not knowledge of its differences or knowledge of its heredity, which is all that seems to justify narrow nationalism, but genuine cultural distinctiveness. And it is depth and diversity of culture that provide comparisons for future development. Not all aspects of a culture are worth preserving but something good was undoubtedly lost in this instance.

Given the freedom to develop independently, perhaps we can build a culture that regains its democratic intellect.

Didn't vote and don't feel sorry

Britain has fascists elected to the European Parliament. It's sickening and sad. The racism is inexcusable. For whatever reason, nearly one million people put a cross in the box in favour of the neo-Nazis.

But I didn't vote for them. I didn't vote at all, and even if I lived in the North West or Yorkshire and the Humber constituencies, I wouldn't feel guilty.

I don't and won't feel guilty because I didn't vote out of principle and conviction. The election of BNP representatives is incidental in sticking to my principles. That doesn't make it any less sad but it doesn't make it more my concern.

The principle is that devolution should be maximised and my belief is that achieving such devolution cannot be achieved via overcentralised governance bodies. I've stated these principles, why I believe them and why they matter in previous blog entries, but some things are worth re-stating.

For one thing, it is a fallacy that the way to deal with globalising corporations is to globalise democracy. If anything, local communities being able to keep posession of its own resources and set conditions for external businesses is the only way that they can keep control of their lives. Even more importantly, a fragmented economy can only be more stable than a globalised one: like leaves of grass are more resilient in a storm than a single exposed tree.

In recent times there have been positive changes and initiatives, supported by central government, such as Agenda 21 and the Sustainable Communities Act, but the overwhelming tendency has been to liberalise markets and agree to more consolidated power and decision-making. How else could it be when power comes with money, and corporations and corporate lobby groups continually stay richer than elected governments?

I assert that the ideal distribution of power is a pyramid, with local communities at the bottom and the United Nations at the top. The current power distribution, with nations of various sizes wielding most power and a mish-mash of supra- and sub-national bodies taking a lesser share, is therefore wrong, but also impossible to dismantle from within.

In practical terms, I can't see how voting will lead to signficiant devolution. What's more, without the ability to change power distribution, the large regional, national and supra-national bodies are illegitimate. If a body, elected or not, is illegitimate, it doesn't matter how it is populated, or by whom.

As I've admitted before, the most difficult historic situation to face as a pacificist and anarchist would have been the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. So what happens when Nazis or neo-Nazis gain control of national parliament? The parliament is no less legitimate and the right to disobey becomes even clearer.

If anything, my conviction will only get stronger if the BNP continues to gain ground. I will not be intimidated by the politics of hatred, but neither will I be scared into voting against them.

Whatever happened to the leisure society?

Obviously, Schumacher's projections of resource depletion have not come true just yet, but many still believe that peak oil is just around the corner, with all the scary consequences it will bring. The fundamental message, that we have to live within our planetary means, still holds true.

Other projections of the future have not aged so well, particularly the predicted leisure society, where automation would mean fewer working hours and more, cheap-to-participate activities for our own time. Few people are content to work less than a full week and no-one would call the theatre, cinema or going to a football match "cheap".

So, what went wrong?

Socialists will say, no doubt, that market forces have kept wages low through competition (both in the same region and against poorer regions of the world). And they would be right. Incomes have grown when compared to some basic commodities like bread or beer, but other living expenses have kept disposable income in check. Most notably, the price of property, which homeowners were so overjoyed about until recently, has meant that the cost of accommodation is now over half of many people's income.

Social pressure has multiplied "ordinary" living expenses too. We expect to be able to buy take-away food, eat out, buy new clothes, and go out to bars, the cinema and clubs more often than we did 20, 30 or 40 years ago. In the last 40 years, the home telephone, television, video, games console, home computer, personal music player and mobile phone have all become considered as possessions for all. No wonder we need to work every hour our new-found legal limits will allow.

None of the above is exactly insighful. Yet, where would we be if we abandoned the luxuries we have grown used to? If we did the same job, lived in a modest flat, travelled infrequently, bought clothes out of necessity alone, and got our entertainment from books and the radio. We might be able to save money more effectively (or give more to charity), but what else would we achieve? Would we be any happier, or would our anachronistic lifestyle just feel like being deprived?

Perhaps this is looking at things the wrong way. The leisure society was supposed to make us happier: perhaps it's the fact that we aren't significantly more contented that is more important and interesting.

Like incomes, my guess is that people are generally more happy with what live brings than they were in, say the 50s. More room, better clothes and furniture, tastier food, and a broad choice of types of entertainment all make life more enjoyable. But like incomes, it feels like the gains are marginal and are somewhat eroded by other changes.

Most notably, couples find it increasingly difficult to live, let alone raise children, on a single income. It feels as if the cost of getting women into the workplace was a hike in the cost of child-rearing to make taking those jobs almost compulsary.

Now, bear with me if I return to the limits to working hours that I mentioned earlier. These were introduced, in the parlance of the day, to guarantee some kind of "work-life balance". Certainly, anyone who has worked a 12-hour shift pattern (worse if it alternates between days and nights), will tell you that there is no room left for a life. But way work drains you is not simply a matter of the number of hours worked. Miners and mill workers would find it hard to contemplate running or cycling in their spare time, but many read extensively and were deeply involved with trade unions and politics. After a day of intensive editing, I find it hard to choose a book or writing over the tv.

What I'm trying to say is: the same market forces that keep wages in check have also optimised the effort demanded by employees. Legendarily relaxed workplaces such as newspapers have gone. That was time and, therefore, effort that was going to waste.

We are left mentally exhausted at the end of the week, if not every day, with little appetite for leisure activities that take mental or physical effort. Even if we do sport in our spare time, or write, of join a political party, there are few of us who can get involved with running clubs, developing and promoting our writing or standing in elections.

The expression "things that are worth doing are difficult" has been in my mind lately (perhaps because Andrew Motion said something similar about poetry), but the way we have organised ourselves makes everything harder than it has to be. We're not lazy: we're just tired.

Ecology of ideology

Google any combination of words and it’s likely that the combination has been used before. Originality was a scarce commodity before the internet, but the internet can prove to you just how scarce it is.

I had an idea for a Third Testament: The Book of the Spirit. It seemed like the natural progression from The Old (Father) and New (Son). I thought I might write the book as a work of fiction (sort of) or as a fictitious element in something else. But I did a web search first and discovered several Third Testaments, and most of them centred around the Holy Spirit. Oh well.

So I should have known that the concept of an “ecology of ideology” would not be a new one. It’s not, although there aren’t many ideological ecologists out there. And what I can glean from their abstracts is that it’s at proof-of-concept stage at this point.

Well, if the good professors at Carnegie Mellon have proved the principle (by studying moshav and kibbutz) then let the concept take flight—what does it mean to have an ecology of ideology/ies?

Ecology is the study of interaction between entities and between entities and their environment. When biological ecology is extended to human culture, the environment is usually understood by its conventional definition: trees, rivers, bunnies and stuff. Hence the “green” movement, and its focus on how we exist within the world.

But sometimes the dominant interactions aren’t with the planet, but with similar human entities and the environment they create. That’s not to forget the bunnies and their effect on us, but it is possible to extend ecological thinking into areas that are not specifically green.

So it is with ideology. An ideology is a comprehensive set of ideas to encapsulate a particular world view. Usually, an ideology forms from the sum of the beliefs and actions of a group of people. It can then be codified and used as a reference against potential progress or against other ideologies.

Species classification, from what little I know, isn’t easy, but the principles are quite clear. Ideology classification is similarly easy in principle but very difficult in practice. The process is made more difficult by the human tendency to bend the definition of what they say they agree with to what they believe in.

That said, it is possible to classify ideologies, and the most straightforward way to do so is by their proponent’s principles. A survey of a large number of self-described Marxists, anarchists, socialists, conservatives, liberals, neo-liberals, fascists, neo-fascists, etc., etc., could provide a map of priorities.

What I picked up from the abstracts of the Carnegie Mellon group is that ideologies can affect one another in their evolution, but principles are immutable. That’s not to say that individual’s principles and priorities cannot change, but that ideologies never die.

That is a great source of hope for me—clinging to principles that are commonly seen as subservient to pragmatic powerplay—hope that a kernel of writing and activism that places non-violence, self-determination and sustainability at or near the top of the priority list will always survive. And, more faintly, that it will be in ascendancy some day.

Inclusion

“This land is your land, this land is my land.”

Make no mistake: ownership is the ultimate form of inclusiveness. By which, I mean we all, collectively, own our world. Arguably, I own the bit I’m in more than any other bit, but that’s finesse to the principle.

What that most definitely does not mean is that we should be able to buy shares or property. Money inevitably separates us from our responsibilities.

As usual, the question is how we get from the present situation where people believe they own next to nothing and are responsible for even less, which is hardly surprising when the economic system considers every community as ripe for investment from half way round the globe, to the communitarian utopia outlined above?

This is mostly a matter of perception. Repeat the mantra: “This land is your land, this land is my land.” We already own it. Having said that, changing people’s perceptions is also the hardest thing to do.

The present situation does present a few opportunities to move things along the road of inclusiveness. Devolution is happening in small but encouraging ways: from the elected bodies for Scotland and Wales to the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2007/ukpga_20070028_en_1). More obviously inclusiveness-related initiatives are happening: encouraging companies, organisations and governing bodies to be open in everything they do and involve those they effect (stakeholders) in planning future activities.

There is a chasm between stakeholder engagement and meaningful community ownership, but small steps add up (as Lao-Tzu kinda said).

Integrity

When I started this blog, it was to counter the idea that a Gandhist solution is impractical because human nature will undermine it. Essentially, I thought that if it came down to whether we are inherently good enough or not then we had better be good enough or we might as well give up and go home.

But what if we can make integrity a must-have element of the way things are organised? Like sustainable development and stewardship, integrity could become an aspiration or buzzword that becomes embedded in how we do things.

So what does that mean?

Law is the bedrock of a harmonious society, but it alone does not foster gentility. If anything, the cold, hard surface of legislation can cause resentment. Laws are seen as something to be grudgingly accepted, worked around, bent or slyly broken. In other words, law alone does not promote integrity.

People of faith might argue that the shortcomings of rigid structures of statehood can be overcome by a moral outlook, based on religious teaching. And they would have an essential truth in saying so: while laws are often based on moral principles, their operation and adoption often does not. It is soft, moral values that have to be implemented too.

Whether morals require faith or not, or as I would argue, they are a facet of human nature, the challenge is to effectively join two very different materials. To stretch the metaphor of law as bedrock, integrity must lie on top and in the crevices, providing fertile soil.

Already, the line between compulsory laws and voluntary standards is blurred, both where standards become de rigeur and where management systems standards require a commitment to obeying relevant laws. But this doesn’t encourage a mindset that sees personal, organisational, corporate and societal behaviour as interconnected.

Such a mindset is critical to a sustainable community because any disharmony between the levels of and elements of society makes it harder to keep together.

Integrity will be seen as an essential part of how the elements of society operate in the same way that many individuals in desperate need of positive thinking operate. They “fake it to make it”, smiling until smiling becomes second nature and they feel a genuine warmth for others.

Organizations can and should claim integrity as an aspiration until that is exactly how they behave. At that point, no-one is being conned, trust is earned and “light-touch regulation” can become a reality.

Transparency

Why is transparency a principle of sustainable development? Surely I can be sustainable in my actions and keep myself to myself?

Maybe so, but how do we know what is sustainable? Surely sustainability is also a matter of interdependence? And isn’t secrecy an extra burden that detracts from our (mainly social) sustainability?

The Carbon Disclosure Project (http://www.cdproject.net/) was established for many reasons, but the most straightforward one was to find out how much carbon we’re releasing into the atmosphere and how. With hundreds of companies taking part, in every sector of industry, the data gathering gets more accurate and simultaneously more straightforward every year. Once we know where we’re going wrong, and how badly, we can put it right.

The project has some interesting secondary effects, however. Having disclosed their carbon footprint, companies are immediately under pressure to reduce their emissions, despite there being no-such pledge in participating. What’s more, the exercise highlights the reporting culture and amount of transparency these companies are comfortable with: very few companies will disclose their carbon targets to the outside world. At very least, that makes it very difficult to predict overall reductions in carbon emissions.

Like BS 8900, the CDP’s quiet insistence that transparency in past, present and future activities puts pressure on the establishment to fundamentally change the way it works.

So we know how much each community, organization and average individual has to change to make our species sustainable. What’s more, most of us don’t live in isolation, so the calculations of carbon footprint, resource use, permissible pollution levels, etc. often have to be made in collaboration, making estimates of the interplay of different substances and activities. So we need to communicate about our needs as well as ‘fessing up to our messes.

In asking for transparency, we also hear objections on grounds of practicality—particularly how transparency removes commercial advantage. Disclosing your carbon targets might affect your share price or make you liable in some way, but being open about everything you do would let your competitors know your next unique selling point, and very quickly it wouldn’t be unique any more.

Although lots of time, money and effort is wasted in hiding new products, services and ad campaigns from the opposition, for very little long-term gain, I’m not going to go so far (today) as to claim that all companies and organizations should have “glass walls”. But I do believe that the best way to retain customers, clients, employees and friends is to let them feel part of what you’re doing. “Valued”, in other words.

Stewardship

At first glance, stewardship seems like the most obvious principle of sustainable behaviour. But look closer and it brings a much richer meaning.

As many have said in many ways, including Gerard Winstanley, the earth is not ours to own. We are simply its inhabitants and caretakers. This is the principle of stewardship.

What this means for any organisation or individual that intends to improve itself against the principles of sustainable development is that, not only must the future of their “property” and share of the commons be ensured, but that property must be restored to the community in some meaningful way.

If sustainable development becomes embedded throughout society, the process can only accelerate. Companies will create permanent shareholdings for their neighbours, employees and other dependants. Governments will enact stewardship legislation, which will codify the responsibility of property owners to conserve the ecological, as well as functional, value of what they own, and perhaps will go further to remove the status of property ownership altogether.

This is meaningful responsibility. And it should be reciprocated by society.

For example, stewardship of a council property should be available at little cost. In itself, the responsibility that comes with the property, to maintain it for future inhabitants, will bring enough costs, but the story shouldn’t end there. Although decorating and maintaining a house is cheaper if you do it yourself, it would be in the interests of the council to run a communal tool bank and to source bulk supplies. Similarly, providing free training in practical skills would benefit everyone.

Through a gentle push towards a benign principle, society becomes a simpler, more responsible, more far-sighted and self-supporting. Before you know it, the progress gets rooted in too deep to be dragged out easily.

Taking them on at their own game

The most daunting facet of capitalism is its ability to adapt. Essentially, the system we have created is self-sustaining because, having established a means of isolating and accumulating power, the motivation (conscious or unconscious) is also established to consolidate and defend any advantage. In other words, the world’s elites are now wealthy and will use their power (influence/authority/etc.) to shore up the system to maintain that advantage.

This does not preclude a certain amount of progress in the treatment of the under-privileged and the environment, but the fundamental flaws will remain: the division of wealth, the impossibility of full employment, and the inherent unsustainability of economic growth.

Nothing new in that observation. But I recently realised that progress is being made in bringing fundamental change to what Orwell called our “smelly little orthodoxies”. It might not be enough, in itself, to topple the dominance of neo-cons and post-modernists (or any of the rag bag of what amounts to stasis), but seeds of radical thought are being left in unexpected places.

The established order is maintained because those with power can afford to populate the committees, councils and parliaments that set the detailed rules for how we run society. The interests of the wealthy are reflected in the skew of our criminal justice system towards harsh punishment for “poor people’s crimes” like drug dealing and robbery and little or no penalty for large-scale financial mis-management or fraud. The difference doesn’t end at the sentence imposed: if you are considered dangerous or likely to escape, then you go to a prison where, sure, you are less likely to escape, but you are also more likely to be a victim of violence, including rape.

As times change and questions are asked of the ethics of our system, those acting on behalf of the powerful ensure that new legislation, policies and procedures to not make a material change to the balance of power. So, for every political movement there is an approximately equal and opposite counter-movement. They might not be labelled as such—very few of these jabs and blocks, feints and counter-feints are ever categorized—but they happen nonetheless.

What I realised recently is that the counter-culture is also becoming more effective at evolving. The system has evolved to consolidate power but its harshest critics are learning how to infiltrate it effectively. Western democracy, in the first order, gravitates to the centre-right, which impedes any progress, but that doesn’t stop radicals from getting in.

I’m not talking about the so-called Marxists who have made a fool of themselves in cosying up to ultra-conservatives and big business. Neither am I too concerned with former radicals that have mellowed with age and found a comfortable place in the post-modern centre-left (such as Danny Cohn-Bendit and Joan Ruddock), although I’m glad to have them inside their respective parliaments.

In fact, many of those making a difference were never fire-brand protestors or politicians. What has evolved is the way progressive ideas get implemented: crudely speaking, it is not protest that pushes change by reluctant conservatives, it is infiltration of motivated people and ideas that make the changes directly.

There are several examples of the old way of making progress, including the Reform Act of 1832, reluctantly supported by the Duke of Wellington, and the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, reluctantly supported by Lyndon Johnson (I’m short of evidence on the latter, I admit). But protest has to be overwhelming to make a difference on its own; it has to be perceived as the manifestation of a majority viewpoint to influence government, and even then, the legislative process will water any new requirements down.

Protest is not dead, but capitol cities see protests almost every week, which makes media coverage and the attention of parliamentarians unlikely. Hundreds of thousands protested the Iraq War in London, New York and several other cities, and it made no difference whatsoever.

But here is a prime example of counter-subversion: having had “sustainability” co-opted and de-fanged to become “sustainable development”, which includes economic growth as one of its pillars, radical ideas have begun to permeate the implementation of sustainable development.

So, the British Standard guide to implementing sustainable development, BS 8900, insists that maturity against “principles of sustainable development” is measured and continual progress made. Those principles are to include: stewardship, transparency, integrity and inclusivity.

This is more powerful than it seems at first glance. Any organisation that claims to comply with a UK sustainable development standard must not only behave more sustainably (by environmental, social and economic measures) year-on-year, but it must demonstrate better performance against principles that will embed sustainable thinking and change its way of operating for the better.

I intend to say why each of these principles matters next.