Are we Educating Citizens or Consumers? A Conversation with Jon Alexander

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's happening in local government around the world, in national governments around the world, in businesses, in, in community organizations, in these emerging concepts of bioregions. And it is true that the consumer story has infused everything. It is also true that the citizen story is emerging in everything.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this week's episode.

My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As we try to reorient ourselves around why we're educating and what kinds of institutions we might need, it's worth asking the question whether we're educating young people as consumers and have educational institutions simply become service providers in the consumer economy of educational product, or are we educating young people as citizens? Of their local communities, nations, or of the planet? And if so, what does that mean for how we engage them in the processes of living and working together, make meaningful contributions, and learn important things as they do so? I'm not sure that that looks much like what we're currently doing in most schools around the world. So this week, it's my huge pleasure to be able to speak with John Alexander, who is on a mission to help a new story emerge about how people all over the world are getting involved in citizening. That is, thinking of citizen as a verb, and a local participatory responsibility, not just citizen as a noun that you might claim the rights to. Jon began his career with success in advertising, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year award before making a dramatic change. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy that aims to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from consumer to citizen. Jon is the author of the best-selling book, Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us. And he's also recently teamed up with Bharatunde Thurston, the co-creator of the How to Citizen podcast. Together they're telling the stories of the new democracy with the people already practicing it at a time when we could not need it more.

Do check out the links in the show notes to all of Jon's amazing work, and I really do hope you enjoy this conversation and get involved. Brilliant. No, thanks. Let's dive in. I mean, maybe we can start, start light, just gently with the fact that we're all trapped in a species-level self-hatred construct.

Yeah, I always like to, well, look, the word consumerism for me has a capital C and a hyphen between the R and the ism. And it's a story about who we are. And it's a story that tells us that we're not good enough to face the challenges of our times, I think. And that's what I mean when I talk about a species-level self-hatred construct. I believe we are telling ourselves as a species a story, and we're telling it to ourselves thousands of times a day. I began my career working in the advertising industry, and my first boss said to me, what you've got to remember is the average consumer sees something like 3,000 commercial messages a day, and you have to cut through that. You have to make yours the best. And over time, coming to reflect, like, for a while I was happy with the make mine the best part. Not for very long, though, because I started asking these questions. What are we doing to ourselves when we tell ourselves we're consumers 3,000 times a day. What's that doing to ourselves and what we believe we're capable of, how we relate to one another? If that's the sort of background noise of our lives, sometimes I think of it even as an incredibly insistent, almost religion. There's this thing.

Yeah.

To be a heretic, you must first be a priest. Right. And like working in the advertising industry, I was essentially a sort of priest of consumerism. And I think, yeah, ultimately, I think it's a story that says that the right thing to do is to pursue self-interest, to maximize, to choose the best option for you from those that are offered on the basis that, that if everyone does that, that that will add up to the best outcomes for society as a whole. And it's like, you know, the Milton Friedman logic that the social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits is a statement of consumer logic. It is a morality of a kind.

Right.

And it has been the dominant story for 80 years or so. And from within it, we simply can't face the challenges of our times. And most deeply— and I like the fact that you start by latching on to this phrase, the species-level self-hatred construct— most deeply and fundamentally, it's not just prioritizing self-interest. It's not just putting self-interest at the heart. It's telling us that we are capable of nothing else.

Yeah.

And that is the most deeply damaging thing, because the thing I find most frightening— and I know, like, your audience is education and teachers and so on— like, young people I'm speaking to are starting to hate humanity, right? And lose faith in humanity. And that is when we have nowhere to go because you have to be able to stand on, on faith in humanity. You have to be able to stand on a belief that we are, we are needed. I love the way I think you said you've had Tyson Yunkaporta on this pod as well. And I love the way Tyson opens his book Sand Talk by sort of saying like, what if humans remembered how to be the custodian species. And it's this idea, this thing that actually we do have an important role in the natural world. We have a place, we are needed. And the consumer story doesn't just manifest in these, in excessive consumption, in damage to nature. It most deeply manifests in, in this self-hatred, in this telling ourselves that we are inevitably damaging and that the best we can aspire to is to minimize that damage.

Yeah, but you, I mean, the thing I think that you powerfully articulate with the three, you know, with the subject consumer citizen is that they are all in their way founded on a concept of the good life, the good society, right? And as you say, the right thing to do in a consumer logic is to maximize self-interest because that will lead to a good society. So in the architects of, you know, this whole story, in a way there was, could say there was some good faith in the fact that they thought this was a way to maximize. And then if you listen to people like Steven Pinker and you know, and the, the maybe the high priests of modernity, they're still saying that this is, this was a really good thing, right? It brought many, many, many millions of people out of poverty and in all sorts of ways capitalism. I know you, consumerism is a better frame than capitalism, but that it has brought phenomenal benefits for this idea of what, of a good society. So, I mean, moving from the subject, you know, as the previous part of the story, which maybe we don't need to get into fully, but Yeah. How do you hold that tension around this idea of what the good society is and what some of the benefits that consumerism has brought?

I mean, I think this is why offering three stories, like many of the, the sort of the tables that we see in the world today have two columns. Humans are great at thinking in binaries, in not this, but that, from this to that. And my work is rooted in these three stories: subject, consumer, and citizen, as you say. And I think what that allows you to do is say, no, no, from what came immediately before, from the subject story, the consumer story was a liberating shift. The subject story says, keep your head down, do as you're told, get what you're given on the basis that a God-given few know best and they will lead us to the best outcomes for society as a whole. It's the subject story, as in subject to the king or the queen. Victoria's case was that is the story of empire and colonialism and and extraction and oppression, paternalism. And from that logic, consumerism, the consumer story is a liberating shift. The subject story says that people aren't— most of us aren't good enough to know anything, really, to know what's good in any way. We just need to be told. And we're not— we don't have the sort of creative agency to do anything other than get what we're given. The consumer story says we have the moral agency to understand our own self-interest. At least, and we have the creative agency to choose between the options that are created. So from subject to consumer is liberating. But what I'm putting forward and what I think actually is really a much older, deeper story, actually, that we could step into fully in this moment is what I call the citizen story, which is a logic that says, no, no, no, the right thing to do isn't keep your head down, do as you're told, because the God-given few don't know best and they're not going to lead us to the best outcomes. Despite what the strongman leaders of this moment in time might say. Nor is the right thing to do to pursue self-interest on the basis that will add up to collective interest. For all that, for a while, and I'd love to talk about the year 1984 and how Apple launched the Macintosh and seemed to be unleashing this creative agency and Body Shop floated on the stock exchange and seemed to be telling us that we could buy things to save the planet. And Band-Aid was that year as well and seemed to be telling us we could buy stuff to solve global poverty. But it wasn't true, right? Like, ultimately, the idea that self-interest will add up to collective interest fails. Selfishness isn't selflessness. And all we get is a situation where we're trying to solve the challenges of loneliness and mental health, of inequality and of ecological disaster from within the story that actually created them.

Yeah.

And in that moment, this third story, the citizen story that is rising and that is deep in us, and I believe is deepest truth of humanity is a logic that says actually the right thing to do is to get involved, to contribute your ideas, energy, and resources, and critically to reimagine our institutions, reimagine our schools, reimagine our governments, reimagine our businesses even as vehicles for collective intelligence, collective wisdom, collective resource, things that can tap into that. And if we do that, at some level, the logic of this is almost impenetrable, right? Like it just has to be true that all of us are smarter than any of us. It just must be if we can find the ways to tap into that.

Yeah, absolutely. And that I'd love to get onto that because I think how we find the ways to tap into that is so much part of the work. Like telling a different story is what you are doing in amazing ways and many people in your network. And I just think it's so important. And how do we actually find or build, co-create the social technologies to enable that? Yeah, but, but I think just to dwell slightly on the consumer thing, you know, just this idea of the self Century of the Self, Adam Curtis, amazing documentary if people haven't seen it, is like it was all a construction, right? As you say, your role was to, as an individual, through the mechanism of the market and through your consumer choices, you could become who you wanted to become. You could be liberated in all sorts of ways.

Well, and be a good person. Trade and self-interest were the roots to peace. This is the idea. It's not just a neoliberal idea. It's not just a 1980s idea. It's in the conception of the European Union originating as the European Coal and Steel Community. It's in the conception of the Bretton Woods institutions, the idea that through the market, the best outcomes for society will be born. It's even in the National Health Service, right? The idea that we can create something that will serve us because by serving us, we will create the best outcomes. Doing things for people is the right thing to do. Like the— I have a table of concepts, subject, consumer, citizen, and the first line is subjects have stuff done to them, consumers have stuff done for them. And citizens do stuff together with and through organizations. This idea of the best society will result from self-interest was born out of an idealism, but an idealism with cynicism also in it.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly. That's the self-hatred part, right? Is this mistrust of humans, right? They will make self-interested choices. And so it is a choice. It's a framing choice about people. The reason I wanted to bring it back up was just because of the way that it has then infiltrated everything relevant here being education. And so this idea that our young people and older people as they go into higher education are now consumers of education, I think is a really pervasive, really damaging myth. And therefore we are service providers, right? As educators, as schools, as universities, we are then service providers, as you say, doing something for. And so there's this, just this transactional landscape. Of deliverables going back and forth in an educational world based on the logic of consumerism, which I think is fundamentally damaging to what many people would believe is the essence of a kind of generative relational educational process, which is something about being human.

Well, I mean, most fundamentally, you just will never educate anyone like that, right? The concept of education that like when you take it back to its roots, like drawing something out of people, educo, right? It's in us already. And the idea that you can reduce education to a transaction, that you can sort of put things into people's heads or deliver a great course for them is just fundamentally nonsense. It has to be, it has to be a relational kind of participatory thing. That's why, like, to your sort of hint at social technologies, I'm a huge fan in particular of something called Smart School Councils, which is this thing where like in a sort of 15 to 20 minute class meeting every week, every class in a primary school even can be discussing the same question in parallel with one another. And those meetings are run by two of the kids in each class.

Amazing.

And you just have— and the reason I love it so much is because it's— this can exist in anything and be a kind of— be a window into an idea of humanity as deliberative and participatory and of us as a kind of an interdependent collective species in essence, with it that can fit even within the boundaries of a horrendously overstructured compliance-driven measurement target outcome-based culture.

Totally. And I mean, look at, yeah, like Polis and Audrey Tang, and which I'd love to get onto what they did in a, you know, massive government context. But if just— sorry to do it again, but just, just go back to your point about the drawing out of education. I actually do think there are tensions in that because it's not self-evidently obvious that that is, and certainly it's not broadly agreed. And I think Latin roots of the education word are actually like two-way, like there's the putting in and the drawing out, which are both in. So the reason I say that, not to just be a pedant, but also to say that one of the things I've been wondering is how is this story not an ideological diatribe, right? So by that I mean sometimes in education people will say, well, this, you know, of course everybody wants this meaningful generative relational experience. Well, everybody wants that progressive education, has the answer, Rousseau, Dewey, et cetera. That's always been self-evidently obvious. Why are we not doing it? You know, and there's a kind of a dichotomy again with the kind of traditional, almost borderline evil, you know, grad grindians who are just doing this mean thing to our young people. And I think that's an oversimplification, a radical oversimplification of the complexities of the stories going on there. How do you think about the citizen story as post-ideological or, you know, how is it not just a kind of a left-wing, traditional left-wing pipe dream that of course it's self-evidently obvious that we want everyone to be active and communing in collectives. You know, not everybody agrees with that clearly, right? Because Some people will see that as an ideological argument. So I don't know how do you—

not everyone on the left would agree with that either, right? So, so I would argue from a political perspective, I would argue that this, this idea of people as citizens, as opposed to consumers or as subjects has firm ground across the conventional political spectrum, like the, but also has enemies across the political spectrum. So let's take the left to start with. There is a part of the conventional left that is very much participatory that, and arguably that, that's where its easiest home seems to be at the moment. But there is also a part of the left that is very much kind of big state. The state should do things for people, but is not, that hates the idea of kind of distributed power because it's suspicious of, of what would happen in that case and thinks that it's best to have a central control over those sorts of things. And so the left has, has a participatory, deliberative, distributive side, but also a centralized Similarly, like, moving towards centrism, liberalism, if we like, using oversimplistic versions. But there is a— my original kind of political affiliation is, I would say, liberal. But Paddy Ashdown, my political hero, actually wrote a book called Citizens Britain in 1989 and had this lovely phrase of the thing that had kept him in politics for so long was seeing people who are taught they're subject to another's power rising to meet the power of the challenge of power in their own hands and being unbelieving at what they're able to do. And what Paddy was writing to was a conception of liberalism that is fundamentally opposed to overconcentrations of power and therefore is about decentralization and distribution and agency. But there is economic liberalism as well, which is like the idea that the market knows best. And that said, which is also counter to this notion of deliberative possible. And then on the, on the sort of conventional right, on the strands of conservatism, there are traditions there that are about community and family and deep ideals that matter. I love the fact that Audrey Tang, who you've mentioned already in Taiwan, refers to herself as a conservative anarchist because the traditions matter. And so I think that really is important. But there is also clearly a strand of the right that is authoritarian and believes that people need to be controlled. And so that's the way I'd see it. I think this is— the citizen story is something that I think can and must become for any positive outcomes for our humanity right now, must become a shared ground within which we can have conventional political debates. And what worries me at the moment most deeply is, is I see as a sort of authoritarian right becomes the default right, we're actually seeing the left becoming more authoritarian in its tendencies as well, and more dogmatic and more centralized. And that becomes a kind of duality that accelerates each other's extremism.

Yeah.

And not just extremism in the conventional sense, but dogmatism and lack of trust in people. And I think what we need to move to is— and I think the processes are vital to this— we need to move to an approach which is a whole space of conversation and debate, which is how do we do this deliberation and participation and why? And rather than whether.

Yeah, I love that because there's something about creating the spaces for the things that are difficult, that deliberation that is difficult within and amongst people who really don't agree. And I think the slightly purist narrative of just finding your tribe, and as Ginny Servamiklos, a good friend of mine, says, we've got to create imperfect solidarity. So that's part of the work. So for me, the question is how, what is education's role then in helping to bring that about? Because as I said to you off air, I trained as a citizenship teacher in the UK in the early 2000s, and that itself was a whole political football going back and forth about, you know, as New Labour came in in '97, then it was this kind of more active citizenship teaching for democracy kind of idea, whereas previously it had been a much more compliant personal responsibility kind of narrative about just be a good citizen, right? Almost like a subject in a way, right? Be a good citizen, do as you're told, take your personal responsibility and don't question too much. Right. And then with Blair and Gricke in the 2000s, it became a little bit more deliberative, let's say, and comfortable with critical perspectives. But even that's quite a challenging thing to do. I mean, I don't know, I was thinking about it this morning. Somehow fundamentally we just are very uncomfortable with disagreement and we try and get rid of it. So it's like, how do we get really comfortable with the dissonance of people really disagreeing in spaces? And how do we hold those spaces? That feels to me like educational work rather than about teaching someone how to be a citizen.

Right. Which is where I think the core of this, I mean, I'm not an educator. Well, not, maybe I am, but—

I would say definitely are in lots of ways.

But I think the core of it is more about the process, the how than the what. Right. And this is why I latch on to the Smart School Councils as such a powerful example of what's needed. Because I'll give you one of the stories that a teacher who works extensively with this in Gateshead in northeast England told me was that in the aftermath of the riots in the UK last summer, in 2024, the headmistress decided that they would do the class debate that week in a primary school with a nursery group, age 4. They would put every class in the school— she would do a weekly assembly at the beginning of the week on the Monday after the riots had happened on the Saturday and the cleanup in Southport had happened on the Sunday. She would do the whole school assembly on the Monday morning about the riots and the cleanup and what had happened. And then on the Thursday, they would do a class meeting. Now, what you might remember is that the Wednesday night, a list of places that the far right were going to attack all over the country was leaked on social media.

Yeah.

And people turned up in those places almost spontaneously. There was obviously, there's some organization to it, but hundreds and thousands in some places turned out to protect every single one of those sites. And in the class debate the next morning, including with two 4-year-olds running their nursery discussion, the discussion they had was about like, whose responsibility is it to, to clean up after these things and to, and to make our society work? And there were options that were put up that were like, well, our parents pay our council tax and our taxes, so the state should do it. And it's everyone's responsibility. And actually right through to it's not the state, it's all of us. We have to do it. And the kids leaned very far to like, we all need to get involved. And I think there was a story of like one 6-year-old or something was like, I don't want to tick any of the boxes because I just want to make an other statement that I'm just so sad that it takes something like this for us to see the best of ourselves. Oh my God, like a 6-year-old. But the, the point about this, the reason why I tell that story, is you're like, that happened in a primary school in Gateshead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That did not happen in the country, right?

Yeah.

What happened on that Thursday morning in the country, probably while these kids were in their class meeting was that Keir Starmer went out and said, "Police and a firm hand has fixed this." Utter disrespect, utter disrespect to all of the communities that had come together and come out to protect those places. And I find that just such a powerful expression of what education, both in its narrowest in-school sense and in its broadest, what is the story that our leaders tell us about who we are sense. That contrast speaks so powerfully to what the role of education is in this time. The role of education in this time has to be at both of those levels and everything in between, has to be to help us see the best of ourselves and the contribution that we are all capable of making in the face of these extreme challenges. If education/leadership is not doing that, it is complicit in collapse.

Exactly. I mean, could not agree more. I think it's beautifully, beautifully put. And it makes me think of you quoting Stephen Green, that citizenship is a muscle that you build, not a cup that you empty, right? And it's, again, it's just back to this idea of education in a formal sense captures often a lot of really like strong and beautiful intentions and captures them and puts them into a set of outcomes that we're trying to produce. And it doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you've taught citizenship or as long as you've As long as you've achieved that, and this is something I, you know, it's a bit of a pet hate, I talk about it all the time, but it really does capture and situate our attention into the product of the process, right? But actually the thing that I think you are really powerfully talking about, and I just believe deeply in, is the power of the process, right? You're building the muscle of citizenship by doing it, by having those young people having that conversation together and understanding How do I feel when someone says something I don't agree with? Like, how do I feel in my body when that happens? How do I respond? How do I facilitate this space if I'm the person charged with the role of moderating this discussion or whatever? And it, and then how do we get into action as well? It's not just about talking about the thing and the issues. It's also about learning from being in a space where we're just actually doing and getting out onto the streets and cleaning up. And then what happens? And then how do we feel? And then what, You know, how do people respond to us, et cetera. But it's all about the process. It's not about when did you arrive at this understanding of what being a good citizen is, or having ticked off the list of the skills that you have achieved to be a good citizen. That's the capture that education, formal education does all the time. And I think I would say actually broadly in a kind of new public management idea, leadership and businesses, et cetera, it's all about the KPIs and the deliverables and have we got there?

There's a way to think about this that I really like that comes originally from family therapy and a guy called Barry Mason. He wrote a paper called Towards Positions of Safe Uncertainty in the 1970s. And in this, Mason makes the distinction between safety and certainty and says they're different things. And he draws a 2x2 matrix with sort of unsafety below the line, below the horizontal, and uncertainty actually to the right of the vertical. And he says anyone who comes for therapy tends to be in one of two positions. They're either unsafe, uncertain in the bottom right. I'm— ah, I don't know what to do. A loss of coordinates. Or they're unsafe, certain on the bottom left, like I'm bad and I know I am. And he says— and the fascinating thing he says is that what they think they want and what our society kind of tells them to want and demand is safe certainty. Tell me what to do to fix it. What's the checklist? What's the product? And he says solutions— his line is solutions are only dilemmas that are less of a dilemma than the one we had before. There is no such thing as a solution. The only safe certainty is death, basically. Right?

Exactly.

And then he goes, and then he goes, what we can do and what we must do is create safe uncertainty. Like, that's where you stand beside someone, you say, I don't know how this is going to turn out. But what we do know is that I'll be here and we'll explore it together. And I think this is such a profound thing. Like we mentioned a couple of times Taiwan and Audrey, and I want to bring in the Taiwanese COVID response here because it's such— you put this into the context of safe uncertainty and safe certainty and you see just how profoundly different what Taiwan did was like. Their approach was they announced 3 design principles for their approach: fast, fun, and fair. The president gave a speech which said, we don't know how to get through this, but we do know that we'll get through it best if we get everyone involved. An absolute, like, perfect articulation of safe uncertainty. And they crowdsourced, they set challenge prizes for people, for the tech community to create apps that track face mask availability in case outbreaks and these kinds of things. They even set up a phone line where anyone could ring in with ideas for how the country's response could be better. Like the perfect match for that logic of we don't know how to do this. We do know we'll do it best with everyone. And my favorite story within the story that speaks directly to the question of education is that a little boy rang up and said, the boys in my class don't want to wear their face masks. They're pink and they think they're girly. So you need to do something to make pink face masks cool. And I think you should work with the baseball team.

Amazing.

3 days later, they had— this is fully true— they had half the Taiwanese baseball team, the little boy and the president on the national televised press conference in pink face masks. And that was the right thing to do. Right. Like, that was the best way. 'Who knows better how little boys' brains work in this context than another little boy?' And contrast that with where we were, right? Because the same instincts were going on in our population. Remember the street WhatsApp groups and the mutual aid groups and those viral kindness postcards that went through everyone's doors saying, 'Do you need anything?' And the NHS First Responder Scheme, which got so oversubscribed that the website crashed. Like we were leaning in, we were doing it, and then safe certainty became the strategy. And I think that again, this is leadership rather than education specifically, but this core mindset in these times we face unprecedented challenges, right? Like this is, this is getting serious now and we're in it and everyone knows it at some level. And by pretending or trying to occupy that kind of hero complex of we are the ones who have risen to the top of the meritocracy— that's another thing I hate, by the way— we are the ones who will fix it for you, and that is what you want us to do, isn't it? Is such a horrendous withholding of agency, and it is what is— it's invalidating the experience and the intelligence of young people who are looking at the world and who understand what is going on and understand that things need to be different and really only want an opportunity to contribute. And by trying to create that safe certainty, by trying to respond to the sort of cultural norm that that is what is needed, we are actually saying, 'Shush, little people, just go shopping,' and suppressing them.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I, we see this in our work all the time that the young people, they are so ready to take this on. But to your point, it's the safety. How do we hold and think about that idea of safety? Because we can't do anything about the uncertainty, right? Let's all just agree to that. But we can do something about the safety. And that can mean obviously lots of different things in different contexts. But as you said, standing with them and saying, like thinking, what's our role as adults in this space, right? So as we co-create events with young people, it's like there is a role for the adults. It's not that they all disappear and just leave the kids to it. There is a real role for when they need something, they, you know, can they find you? Can, do they know how to ask you for the thing? Are you there? Are you ready to provide some support, some mentoring, coaching when they're struggling at a particular moment?

The first barrier to safety is dishonesty. By not acknowledging and pretending that these challenges aren't here, by not naming them, we are— and I'm speaking about our leaders— they are making us unsafe. And I mean psychologically, not just— I'm not just talking about the outcome and the physical. They are breeding panic. Paradoxically, because what they think they're doing is saying, don't worry about that, we're on it, we'll make you safe. But precisely by doing that, they're— because only when we face something, and it's the James Baldwin line, right? Only when we— only things that can be faced can be changed. And only when we are— when we are allowed to acknowledge the scale of a challenge can we start to find agency in relation to it. So by pretending that these things aren't happening, we're breeding panic and fear. One of the— one of the other things I did in research for the book was I went a little way into the QAnon conspiracy theory world. Because this isn't just about our kids, right? This isn't just about young people. And that world begins with an invitation to agency. The conspiracy theory is just a horrendous space, but it begins by offering people who have been told for a long time that they are— they're beneficiaries, they need to be provided for. It's the only thing that has asked them to do something and told them that they're right, that everything is screwed.

What a travesty. It's incredible, isn't it? Like, what a travesty that it takes that to invite people in to recognize their reality, their felt reality. It takes this complete fantasy that somehow connects with their felt reality that, you know, draws them in.

This thing, this sort of rising fascism is the only thing that is acknowledging people's lived experience of crisis.

So on that, for example, I spent a rather horrendous evening watching the videos, not horrendous, that's too polarizing, but the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship had this big, big event, right? Jordan Peterson and the whole crew, right? I got lost in a rabbit hole of videos watching, and the reason it was so compelling was because so many of the people speaking in that space were speaking directly to the lived experience and the stories that people were feeling, right, of polarization, of challenge of not feeling like they belong in their community. All these, like, what does it mean to be a parent? What does it mean to be a spiritual person and, you know, to have religious beliefs? So many deep grammars of what it means to be human were being spoken to then. And then I watched, you know, the Indi Johar, the Dark Matter Labs, the Planetary Civics convening that they did with RMIT and a whole bunch of like really amazing organizations. And I was, and I hate to say it, I was totally switched off by that. It didn't speak to one ounce of my lived experience as a as a father, as a, almost as a human, right? It was like, it was speaking in intellectual ways to what does it mean to be a planetary citizen? And again, sometimes it's not about what's going on in my clever thinking brain. It's about how am I feeling in my life? And are you speaking to that? And that's what populism and fascism and all those things, QAnon, do incredibly well. But it's like, how do we do that, you know, in honest ways that are not like deeply ideologically driven strategic move to kind of try and persuade people into a particular tribe?

I mean, I think, I think by moving into doing. There's two projects that I'm involved in at the moment. One is called Actionism and the other is called How to Citizen. And both of them fundamentally are about verbs, right? And building. And they're also actually about celebrating what people are already doing. It makes me think of the wisdom of Cormac Russell with his phrase, start with what's strong, not with what's wrong, and then use what's strong to fix what's wrong. Like people everywhere are actually building community. They are actually. There are so many stories to tell, not just Taiwan and smart school councils. We could talk about Grimsby or Kibera, the slum of Nairobi, or we could talk about the the self-organized learning environments in Colombia with Sanjay Fernandez, or we could like, we could go anywhere and just talk about what people are doing and celebrate that. And that's what we're trying to do with both of these projects. We're trying to say, look, actually, we're all right. And it comes back to the self-hatred complex. It's about saying, no, no, no, we're all right. We're good. Humans are cool when we give ourselves the chance to be. So if the world we are trying to create is one where many more people have more agency, have more of a stake. I think we get there by celebrating what they're already doing and saying yes and. Another example I love is Yasmany Arboleda, this beautiful, beautiful human being, Colombian-American. He is the artist in residence for the New York City Civic Engagement Commission. When I first met Yas, I walked into a conference room. I had no idea who he was. I walked into the wrong room than the one I was intending. And the first words I heard Yas say were, Democracy should be sticky and sweet like honey. And I was instantly in love with the man. And Yaz did this project during COVID where the city asked the Civic Engagement Commission— they found that some of the poorest neighborhoods in New York, which they had seen as hard to reach— you've heard that language before— were the most engaged in mutual aid. And they said, can you do something to get them more involved? Go and teach them about their rights so that they use them. And Yaz was like, oh no, no, no, no, no. And instead what he did was he got hold of an old decommissioned prison bus, Rikers Island bus, worked with a couple of artists in those communities to kit it out as a roving street party bus, branded it the People's Bus, and stuck an ice cream truck on the back that he called the Ice Cream Truck of Rights. And the flavors were named after different civil rights. And he drove it around, then he held thank you parties, street parties, to celebrate the mutual aid that had been going on That is how you get people being citizens, by acknowledging that they actually already are and inviting them into that as a party, not a protest.

Yeah. Amazing. Well, I mean, it's like, that makes me think of Audrey with the demonstrating, not protesting thing as well. Right. It's like, yeah, what are we demonstrating of different ways to be and be together? The thing I would say is, again, we haven't quite got to it, but the social technologies piece, like the idea of the boring revolution. It's like, yes, a bus and an ice cream van and all that stuff is brilliant. And people spend a lot of their time in institutional structures that were built for a different time. And that's what a lot of what my work is about and the podcast is about is what are the different kinds of spaces we, we all could co-create to try and enable different kinds of possibilities in different kinds of spaces and a classroom being one example or a way you do a school council being another, right? Or as you talk about the to citizens' assemblies or participatory budgeting, all these different ways that you can actually do differently. But it takes a little bit of imagination or drawing from learning from other communities to say, actually, we want to come together around this particular issue or problem or whatever. How are we going to do that? And sometimes we might default if left without some kind of This is where the safety, I think, comes in with a protocol or a framework or a way of working that actually holds the space safe in the uncertainty and allows multiple voices to be heard, et cetera. Because I think without that, sometimes we, in the unsafety of like, oh, how do we do this? We default to old scripts of like, oh, well maybe it's the, the loud white man who's wanting to speak up and take the lead. Oh, maybe we should just all just let him do that cuz he seems like he wants to. And then you end up in all these old like hierarchical different scripts of that are actually not generative and not participatory. And sorry, long-winded, but I think there's something about how you hold that space with these kinds of technologies that Indy with The Boring Revolution is talking about.

Yeah, I, I agree completely. And, and I guess though that where I'm coming from in my work most fundamentally is trying to name that the shift in mindset and say maybe the easiest access point, the thing that I would love your listeners to kind of cling on to, if anything, is the idea of shifting from answers to questions. The role of the institution as a question holder rather than an answer provider, because as you say, there is still a role. Yeah, it's not, it's not stop providing answers and vacate the scene. It's stop providing answers and hold questions because it's manifestly clear that the answers we have right now are not the only ones and not the right ones.

Yeah.

And then once you move into a frame of going, okay, my role as a teacher, as a leader, as a politician, as a CEO, as a— is not to provide the answers but to hold the questions. Then you have the desire for the social technologies. Then you have the need. Until you have that conception of yourself as a questioner with people rather than an answerer for people, you can, we can create all the social technologies we want. No one's going to use them.

Yeah, no, I think that's so wise. I really agree because again, it's you're pushing things you're doing for again, right? If you're saying, I've figured out this social technology, I'm going to deliver it to you and this is going to make a difference in your life. It's like you're back in the same script, right?

Any number of councils right now are procuring citizens' assemblies as if you can sort of By attaching a one-off citizens' assembly, you can transform the culture and shape and space of your organization. Citizens' assemblies are, I believe, a deeply essential social technology, part of the shift we're going to make. But if you're procuring them in absentia of all of the kind of deep culture— like I was talking to someone about the— I'm not going to name the council in question, but I was talking to someone who'd commissioned a citizens' assembly and I was like, oh, remind me your job title. And they said they were head of democratic services. And I was like, what? Democracy is not a service, dude. And this is the stuff we've got to— it's all of this evolution.

But it's the capture, right? It's the capture we were talking about at the beginning of like everything's been captured by the consumerist mindset.

Everything.

Even me suggesting social technologies are a useful thing. It's like even that's been captured by the— because it's like it's easy to fall back into to the default of like doing for. But you are so right. How do we—

but what, but what I would say is like, it's— yes, it's true that everything has been captured, but it's also true that everything is already changing and emerging. Like, yeah, yeah, in every— in local government around the world, in national governments around the world, in businesses, in, in community organizations, in these emerging concepts of bioregions. And like, it's happening. The citizen story. It is true that the consumer story has infused everything. It is also true that the citizen story is emerging in everything.

Yes.

And I suppose where I would want to kind of— what I want to leave people with in that sense is like back to that Cormac Russell thing of start with what's strong, not with what's wrong. Let's not spend too much of our time. And another bit of wisdom that I think is probably by Okomolafe or Adrienne-Marie Brown or one of these other total geniuses that I'm not going to claim as my own, but this there's this, this phrase that what you pay attention to grows. Like, if we only stare at the extent of the co-option by the consumer story, we kill ourselves.

Yeah.

And it is happening, and we can stare at it. And when we feed— this is what Baratunde Thurston and I are trying to do with the How to Citizen thing— is just focus attention to the greatest extent we can on what people are already doing, on where this is emerging, because that is the most powerful way to feed it and make it happen Beautiful.

Yeah, it makes me think of Attention is a Moral Act, Iain McGilchrist, right? It's the same thing. It's like, exactly. And so let's do that. Let's do more of that. 100%. Amazing. Thanks, John. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog, or on social media, or within your own networks.