Thinking differently...

As a courtesy warning, this is quite a long blog.

It's hard to be original...
The title 'Thinking differently' is a little vague, but this is mostly because I am trying to disguise the crux topic of this blog. It is my hope that the suitably vague title will help you keep an open mind regarding a subject that commonly provokes preconditioned reactions. Having said this, the core concept that I would like you to consider is indeed that of 'thinking differently' - vague or otherwise...  

Thinking differently is a really really hard thing to do. It requires a considerable, concerted and conscious effort. An original thought has many obstacles to overcome and history shows us that it takes a very long time for original thought to become mainstream. Why?

Collective or Societal Paradigms...
Like most other mammals, human beings are sociable creatures who like to be part of a wider collective. It is in this 'collective' that we find security and a sense of belonging. Perhaps this is an animalistic survival instinct that has endured the rigours of evolution, or perhaps it is part of a more complex, spiritual and exoteric need to believe in something greater than the 'self?

Whatever you choose to believe, being part of a collective will inevitably affect the way in which you perceive the world. Experiences and interactions with your environment, along with the people you share it with, will influence the type of paradigms you form about the world. Strong and popular paradigms eventually develop into shared views held by society as a whole and help define our informal sense of social normality. When a paradigm transcends the individual and embeds itself into society's psychological fabric it can live in our collective consciousness for an extremely long time and wield a huge amount of influence over how we think. So what? 

I am not here to debate whether or not collective or societal paradigms are a good or bad thing necessarily, but I would like to put to you that perhaps we, society and the human race as a whole, need to be more comfortable with the process of challenging our individual and collective paradigms more frequently. Why?

Collective Paradigms hinder progress...
Collective paradigms constrain original thought and hinder societal progress. In order to think differently, an individual has to overcome a great deal of conditioning at a personal and the societal level. Collective paradigms are incredibly powerful and difficult to overcome. History provides us with plenty of examples which demonstrate both the longevity but also the extent to which very well established societal paradigms can drive people to think and act very illogically (putting it mildly). Is that so?

Some Examples from History... 

Many many moons ago, we used to believe the Earth to be flat. Sailors were frightened to travel too far into the Atlantic Ocean for fear of falling off the 'edge' of existence. It wasn't until Aristotle (384-322 BC) provided empirical data to support a spherical earth theory that this very old paradigm was overcome. However, it was those same Greek Scientist that then put the Earth at the centre of the universe with everything else dutifully orbiting us. Screw gravity then? Oh right, that wasn't really discovered and proven until Newton got around to it in the 1600s.

Up until the late 1700's, it was legal to hunt 'witches' and murder them. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 people (usually women) across Europe and North America lost their lives to this ridiculous notion. In the field of medicine, we believed it necessary to drill holes in peoples heads to cure them of migraines, epilepsy and mental disorders. Bloodletting, and in particular the use of leeches, was also standard practice and the de-facto treatment for pretty much every illness that didn't already have a documented cure. These practices continued right up into the early 1900s. 

It gets worse...

Slavery, Racism, Sexism, Organised war, Religious Crusades and Imperialism are all further examples of divisive, dangerous, controlling and long-lasting societal paradigms that have ultimately held us back for hundreds -if not thousands- of years and still affect us today.

For instance, there are still vulnerable people, around the world, being exploited for slave labour. Even some of the so-called socially responsible corporations with brands that we would recognise as household names have been caught out using factories in countries with terrible human rights issues. You may even be wearing an item of clothing, using an electronic device, eating some food or drinking your coffee completely unaware that slave or unfair labour produced those goods.

Racism, even in supposedly well-educated and ‘developed’ countries, still exists. It seems completely unreal to me that until the late 1960's and early 70's the USA still enforced -by law- racial segregation and in South Africa their abominable apartheid wasn't truly abolished until Nelson Mandala took office in 1994. Moreover, women in the UK had to wait until 1928 to gain voting equality with their male counterparts and it wasn't until 1970 that the UK passed a bill to prevent employers from paying women less money for doing the same job as a man -just because they were female! In other countries, women are still hugely oppressed, sometimes because of a lack of development in culture but mostly because of some very poor interpretations of 'religious doctrine'. In fact, religion is arguably one of the most divisive paradigms of them all as many of the world's troubles today are fuelled by religious friction. Billions of lives have been lost, past and present, in the names of various gods. The very fact that people would organise -formally- to meet in large numbers, in open fields, to kill each other over territory or religious indifference strikes me as mad. These are not paradigms anyone alive today can reasonably justify subscribing too.

Imperialism & The British Empire...

The final one to discuss is that of Imperialism. Imperialism is an odd subject which people strangely romanticise about today. There isn't anything romantic about Imperialism. Imperialists expand their empires and territories through war, the projection of force and occupation. Yet, we all know that 'chap' down the pub who claims Britain would be better off re-establishing her Empire and bringing back the 'good olde days'. Old days, Old ways of thinking...


Before I continue though, I would like to state -for the record- that I am proud to be British. I am particularly proud of what our tiny island nation has achieved through the annals of history - all the way from Shakespeare, to Darwin, to Newton, to industrialisation, the British Navy, defeating Napoleon, defeating Hitler and inventing the world wide web. Arguably no country has affected history as substantially as this great little country. 

While the Empire, at its height controlling a third of the world’s population, had many and often ruthless failings but it did also have some positive effects which are still observable today. The British with their incredible navy and industry connected the undiscovered world with the known world through trade and the common tongue that is now English. The Empire built railways, schools, purveyed the notion of science, industry, mechanised agriculture and, last but no means least, Britain introduced the world to English law - the basis for any economy or civilised society. Moreover, Britain was even able to create entirely new nations by unifying territories and factions that had previously been killing each other for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. Once such instance, which is well documented, is that of India. Regardless of whether or not the British made mistakes in India (they did), India is nonetheless India because the British were there. 

The 'end' never justifies the 'means' -Imperialism is not a good thing. There will always be people who will justify how Imperialists went about their business by emphasising the respective positives that I have written about above, but I am not one of them. However, I will admit that my British conditioning does make it easier for me to forgive Imperialism. The world was a very different place in those days of discovery and exploration where most people didn't speak the same language and everyone carried a gun, spear or sword as their fallback language.

Thankfully though, Imperialism has mostly disappeared. The British incidentally disbanded their empire voluntarily (transforming into the Commonwealth) and were also largely responsible for abolishing the slave trade. The United States in their infancy, born out of the Empire's failings, were quick adversaries of Imperialism also and -by the same token- global advocates of their own federal democracy. Today, we live in a very different world. The world has been discovered. We are able to travel and communicate effectively with one another (usually in English), but more importantly, we understand that we don't have to invade and control other land masses in order to collaborate with its people, create wealth or progress our understanding of the world. 

Perhaps someone should mention this to Mr Putin? 

Nationalism is the illegitimate love child of Imperialism...
So, Imperialism is MOSTLY gone. I say 'mostly' because it has unfortunately left us with its legacy... Nationalism. This is the topical crux of my blog. Hopefully, you still have an open mind at this point and everything we just journeyed through has earned your trust. I want to discuss whether or not Nationalism -as a collective paradigm- is still relevant in our now global, digital and information age. 

Nations are arbitrary, culture is palpable...

In our era, where it is often unclear what even constitutes a ‘nation’, or why a nation should be the only legitimate unit of political rule, why should it play such an important role in our lives? A nation does not translate into a cultural entity, and neither is it necessarily a political association nor is it necessarily linked to a particular territorial area. The simple fact is; there is not a single country on earth, which is now home to more than one, different but usually coexisting, culture. 

Cultural heritage is not the same thing as a national identity because the culture is incredibly palpable. The only thing that is not arbitrary about what defines a Nation is the borders it probably carved out through bloodshed. Nationalism is inherently divisive because it highlights perceived differences between people, emphasising an individual's identification with their own nation. The idea is also potentially oppressive because it submerges individual identity within a national whole, and gives elites or political leaders potential opportunities to manipulate or control the masses. 

In a classic essay, George Orwell distinguishes nationalism from patriotism, which he defines as devotion to a particular place. Nationalism, more abstractly, is "power-hunger tempered by self-deception." For Orwell, the nationalist is more likely than not dominated by irrational negative impulses: Russia’s behaviour with Ukraine being a classic case in point. 

Nationalists operate on a 'scarcity mentality' which encourages people to believe that resources are scarce and that the nation will ensure that its people get enough of them to prosper -even if it is at the expense of other nations. It is my belief that we need to operate more on the 'abundance mentality' which works on the basis that there are enough resources for everyone and it encourages people to collaborate, innovate, share and generate additional value over and above what already exists. 

We live in global and digital times...
I am not suggesting that Nations disappear. This is ludicrous. What I am trying to make a case for is that whilst Nations will always be a part of our history and of our culture, they shouldn’t continue to be significant in terms of how we progress and channel our resources as a collective human race. We will always care significantly for the direct environment that we live in and the people that we share it with but the reality is that we all share this planet together –it isn’t divided up by nations. Global warming, the impending energy crisis, famine, freak viral outbreaks and declining animal populations are problems that affect us all –not individual nations. Your jobs, our livelihoods are globally interconnected like never before in human history, yet we still cling to these outdated notions of national sovereignty. 

Even if we just started by unifying the worlds research capability, all of our brightest minds genuinely collaborating together to find solutions to global problems. Imagine if we could find a scalable, clean and renewable alternative to fossil fuels. This would slow down global warming and remove the political problems surrounding the regions providing the world with fossil fuels. There are still plenty of life-threatening diseases and viruses that need curing -Ebola being a topical example. There are 805 million (1 in 9) people who are being starved of food and clean water with millions more going without any form of formal education. These are all fundamental problems that need to be addressed and now that we have the means and infrastructure to work together on a global scale, I believe that we should focus all of our considerable energies on doing so. 

Globalisation is a good thing...
Global mindsets may not have an overall majority (yet) but the benefits of globalisation are there for everyone to see. Globalisation has increased market competition (which improves the quality of goods and services sold on the open market whilst also lowering price), improved employment levels, freed up investment and capital flows, improved trade, spread technical know-how, purveyed culture and entertainment, spread education and brought legal and ethical systems to more people than ever. The poster child for Globalisation is the Internet. The Internet shows little or no respect for the concept of nations. Some oppressive and controlling nations try to sensor the traffic coming in and out of their geographic borders but there is no way to do this entirely. The Internet is a truly global invention and would not have come about from a nationalistic mindset. Tim Berners-Lee was operating on an abundance mentality when he decided to give his software away for free.

We are all in it together... 

Regardless of where you are from, I encourage you to be proud of who you are, the values you choose to live your life by, your family, your friends and your home. By all means; identify with your village, your town and even your county or country but don't let this be at the expense of global progress. We need togetherness, not divisiveness. The United Kingdom is a good thing, a United Europe is a good thing. A united world would be even better... 

We need to dare to think differently; think progressively, share your ideas and help others develop their's…. 

Thanks for reading,

Chancey