However, as Cornel West so eloquently put it — ‘Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.’ Indeed, never forget. Because we are a forgetful society and often end up valuing symbols we think represent love more than Love itself or the Justice which is its public face.

So, perhaps we are cynical about love, having been disappointed multiple times in our own personal lives and deceived in its name by those who have used the word to manipulate us. We are embarrassed by displays of love and affection and pride ourselves on our ‘objective’, ‘non-sentimental’ view of life.

But what if it is the case that our human systems will not produce results that work for everyone unless love is consciously placed at the core? Unless love is baked in to the code from day one, as it were? If justice is what love looks like in public, then our public systems of governance must be based on justice. Another aspect of love must be mercy — we see precious little justice or mercy in the systems we have created, do we? Refugees are left to drown because it’s judged too costly or inconvenient to save them. Abstract numbers on spreadsheets are valued higher than human lives, which are themselves reduced to mere statistics. Our systems of organisation and governance are rotten to the core, as I’m sure the reader is aware. Love has left the building, ladies and gentlemen. We are left in a barren wasteland where everyone fights for themselves until there is literally nothing left to fight for. It’s every man for himself and the weakest will just be crushed under foot. When there is no love, no justice and no mercy, then what we see is the world we have today, and the worse one we will have tomorrow.

I am not a doom-monger however, at least I don’t think so. Some people are all too aware of this situation, and are fighting to create new systems which attempt not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Many technological solutions are proposed, and as we see with the internet, technological solutions can do a great deal. We have never been so connected to each other — in the sense of the speed at which information moves — in human history. The banking system is seen to be corrupt and on its last legs, so a genius or group of geniuses, creates Bitcoin. It has become apparent that Bitcoin has its own serious problems of course, but it is a mould-breaking solution from which others are now growing. We are attempting to build a new system ‘in the shell of the old’, despite the massive odds apparently stacked against us.

We must remember though that, as per Lawrence Lessig, ‘code is law’, and digital tech allows us to see this very clearly. In the old analogue model, people took actions and hoped for results. They were not able to model systems with the precision with which we are able to today in the digital world. Now we make rules and get results based on those rules, then are able to analyse the results in great detail in order to refine and update the rules. The fruit will reflect the seed much more clearly now. However, one mistake or omission can have terrible consequences, and the hyper-accelerated nature of digital means that the error will be replicated rapidly throughout the system.

If the current capitalist model had been designed by a programmer as a proposal for a system on which to run the world, we could take a look at the code and see that injustice is part of its very fabric. A system based on perpetual growth, as is the case with capitalism, obviously needs endless territory to conquer, otherwise, like a shark which stops swimming, it will sink to the bottom. Now we are running out of easily territory which can be colonised we can see this happening. There was a vague thought that we would leave this planet and conquer the stars and other worlds, but that project seems to have been put on hold for now, at least until we discover oil on one of the moons of Jupiter and it suddenly becomes profitable. Instead, we see the system cannibalising itself and the resultant disappearance of the middle class. The rules set up at the outset, albeit mostly unconsciously, determined that one day this would happen. There are indeed ‘limits to growth’ and these are being reached.

So in this way we can see how we need to be very clear from the outset when designing systems, that all rules are code, and all code is by default law. Given this great responsibility, how do we proceed? By baking in love, justice and mercy into the very structures of the systems we create. Just reading back that sentence makes a part of me cringe. But I realise it is that part which has been inculcated into me by the very capitalist paradigm in which I have grown up, where such ‘idealism’ is dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, or some such. For me now ‘compassionate capitalism’ is the very definition of an oxymoron. There can of course be no such thing. The fundamental rules of capitalism preclude that just as the evolution of a Great White shark precludes it suddenly ‘pivoting’ into eating plankton.

Monolithic state-based systems such as the varieties of communism (more accurately totalitarian socialism) which have been tried have fared no better. We need new governance systems, this much is abundantly clear, and systems which favour cooperation over competition. They could include competition, sure, but not as a primary objective. That world view, a misinterpretation of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory has brought the planet we live on to the brink of no longer being able to support human life. I have no fear for life itself, or even for the Earth, but our race’s survival is based on a much more fragile balance than that needed by bacteria for example. No clean air or water, and we are history, and damn quickly.

It’s time to take down the corrupt systems which no longer function for the vast majority of humanity, and replace them with new ones with love at their core. Confused about what love is by all the overuse and abuse of the word by the corporate media? It’s that feeling you get when you see a boatload of refugees arriving at some foreign shore. It’s the knowledge, long buried but nevertheless still alive, that everything I do has consequences for all humanity. It’s the pain you feel when you see they’ve cut down the trees you remember from your childhood. It’s whatever stops you continuing the argument with your beloved and makes you reach out to them. It’s the smile you find yourself smiling when you see a friend you haven’t seen in ages. You can think of your own examples. Evidently it is not necessarily the same thing that it is depicted as in the television advertisements.

How do we create new systems based on love? We need less theory and more practice, less judgement and more mercy, and to see things from the perspective of those who have nothing. Then we will know how to proceed. If we ignore the warnings we will be joining those who have nothing, and will have to proceed from there. I usually think of it as a choice between the Path of Wisdom and the Path of Woe. In my opinion we are in the very last chance saloon for taking the Path of Wisdom and well on the way to the Path of Woe being our only option.

Not to tackle this problem and just leave it to chance would be a mistake — we need to face up to the problem of governance — to avoid it would lead to a rule by default of those who currently have the most power in our societies. This means those who are already rich, and those who work for them, those who literally write the code of our laws and social operating systems — the politicians, and in the corporate world, lawyers, lobbyists and programmers. The more we let corporations decide how things work, the more we will be ruled by a tech elite by default. These people are inherently specialists, and specialists are not qualified to rule as they generally have no overview of the processes at work on a large scale. Please note that I am not joining the ‘we are sick of experts’ crew; experts and specialists are certainly needed, however we also need generalists and what were traditionally known as ‘wise’ people to help us navigate our way. I notice that ‘wisdom’ has more or less been consigned to the dustbin of ‘not realistic’ along with ‘love’, ‘justice’, and ‘mercy’. However, ultimately ‘realistic’ in this context is what we decide it is.

In our organisations, at a smaller scale, to not face up to how we govern ourselves means we fall into the trap of replicating legacy hierarchical systems, or prey to the ‘tyranny of structurelessnesss’. We have to get things straight — our systems must be based on justice first then tech later, anything less will only serve to prolong the current disaster. Getting over our squeamishness about the word — and the fundamental concept of — love, whether it be in the form of justice, solidarity, or compassion, must be our priority. We need to talk about how we can structure our organisations from a seed vision of justice. Then we will create structures which not only do no harm, but actually start to regenerate our social contract and both personal and professional relationships.

by stalker_d90 on flickr

I am sure everyone has found themselves, as I have, looking at images of the carnage in Gaza – a father cradling his dead son in his arms, his face just starting to register a tidal wave of shock and grief, and there have been many others even more graphic and horrifying. We ask ourselves ‘How did we get here, how can this sort of thing still happen, after all the progress we’ve made? How can humanity do this to itself?’ I don’t plan to go into the political and religious underpinning of this conflict right now and I’m not sure I’m qualified to do so anyway, but tragedy this obvious, injustice and cruelty this blatant, simply stops us in our tracks.

Every day we read that more species are becoming extinct… we scroll down, turn the page, switch the channel, knowing there’s nothing we can do. Water and air are poisoned; every time we fill up the car with fuel we are subsidising corporations which have only profit as their aim – they are apparently utterly indifferent to the effects they are having on the biosphere, you know, the only one we have to live within and as part of… and to get the rent or mortgage paid at the end of the month, we have to go to work, have to fill the car up, have to support a system we know in our heart of hearts, even if we don’t admit it even to ourselves, is broken, is a lie, is literally killing our children and their children, is supporting colonialism, whether it be in Israel, Saudi Arabia,  Brazil or wherever … and again, on some level we know it is wrong, but there seems to be no choice. All of this affects us – the falseness of almost everything we look at in a city, the fake smile plastered over everyone on tv telling us everything is fine, the self-help books promoting ‘positive thinking’, just so you can go on for one more day, tolerating what should not be tolerated… but again, there seems to be no choice.

We have reached the end of the line – we have tried capitalism, communism, atheism, religions of all varieties, technology, monstrous wars of conquest, non-violent resistance, colonial expansion,  grand utopian ‘ends justify the means’ projects too numerous to mention, every healing modality possible, every spiritual technology, every form of intellectualism and complicated theories-of-everything… and yet all the knowledge in all universities, all the history we should have learned from, all the scientific progress and discoveries, have not prevented the utterly cruel exploitation of our planet and the most vulnerable beings upon it, which is still going on right now, as you are reading this, in ways too barbaric for us to even imagine. And we know we are in some sense complicit, or at least powerless to stop it. All of this makes a difference, forms the psychic background to our oh-so-humdrum everyday lives. We probably don’t like our job, but even if we do we probably feel we could be doing more to help, and the reality is that most jobs in the industrialised parts of the world are probably not doing anyone any good; many of them only existing so that we can claim that employment has been created. Think of the jobs lost if we scrapped Trident! Think of the employment opportunities lost to our country if the multinational banks decide somewhere else is cheaper and leave us! How will we survive in today’s competitive marketplace if we don’t give corporations the tax breaks they are demanding?!

So far, so depressing, right? We are stuck on an endless hamster wheel, and not only that, the energy of the wheel is destroying the very ground we stand on, the very air we breathe. Ok so I get all that, so what?

About four years ago I spilt up with my girlfriend and subsequently became rather ill – I was eventually hospitalised and on admission the first nurse who saw me in a hospital gown assumed I had been burnt in a house fire, so badly destroyed was the weeping, bleeding skin all over my body. I took the drugs they gave me and the skin got better quickly. The drugs eventually weakened my teeth to the point that I broke three in just a couple of weeks so I stopped taking them. Within about a week the skin was really bad again. I tried every therapy, alternative or otherwise I could find, changed my diet completely. Nothing really worked.  One night, unable to sleep for the pain, I was reading Caroline Myss’ book ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. She said something about ‘surrender completely and stop trying to fix things’ (this is what I understood her to have said, although you might not find that exact phrase in the book). Having tried everything and nothing had worked, I just gave up. This was the equivalent of the alcoholic hitting ‘rock bottom’, I think. I completely gave up, not in a defeatist or nihilistic way, not in a way that has any kind of identity attached to it, not in a way which hopes that if I give up things will be better in the future… I gave up the idea of ‘me’ as someone who could do something about this, I gave up the idea of a future where I might get better, I gave up any belief or faith I might have had in anything. It was a big relief, actually.

Somehow soon after I found a therapy which required a much greater sacrifice than the ones I had previously tried, one where I had to put myself on the line, come right out of my comfort zone, face some stuff which I had assumed could never be faced, let go of who I thought I was – of course this was the therapy which actually made a real difference. From there on I have made a full recovery, and learned a hell of a lot in the process, much of it about hell itself in fact, but that’s another story.

I feel that humanity has reached, or is now at least well on the way to reaching, rock bottom. We have tried everything our clever and self-righteous minds could come up with, and nothing has worked, the dead children still pile up, the multitudes of oil-covered sea birds are a regular sight, the tar sands, the coral reefs destroyed, ancient forests cut down, the pointless land grabs or resource wars, all cleverly justified with professional infographics, slogans and ‘laws’.

So there is nothing to do but give up… give up our idea of ourselves as the ones who know –  yes, sure we know the precise distance to Jupiter or the exact chemical composition of our bodies, but obviously I don’t mean go back to some Stone Age utopia where we all shit in the woods again. I mean give up our idea of ourselves as the ones in charge, the ones who can manage all this – I for one have seen enough evidence that we can’t – we are clever but not intelligent, powerful but not humble, capable of doing everything under the Sun but incapable of leaving well alone.

And do you know what?  Things may roll along just fine without subscribing to some grand theory and then trying to persuade everyone else to believe it. They may not, but the important thing is just for once, to get over ourselves, to accept that WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. That there are limits to our technology and our knowledge, that we are not in charge. This is not to say that some external supreme being is in charge, or that aliens or the Lords of Light are going to swoop in and save the day – they may do, I actually wouldn’t bet on it, but the point is, I don’t know and I rejoice in being able to say that. I don’t know and all I do know is we need to let go of our self-importance… not let go of our feeling of empowerment within spheres where we actually can make a difference and know we can, not wallow in misery and victimhood, but just look at ourselves, as in some cosmic mirror, and admit things have got out of hand and we are not as all-powerful as we thought we were. God may be dead but I really don’t think we need to try and take his place, or put our technological dreams of salvation in his place, or create a Big Brother spy-state in his stead.

Paradoxically, on giving up these inflated delusions of grandeur, we may find ourselves more able to get along with each other and more able to solve problems that formerly seemed intractable. I don’t know. I do know we shouldn’t ‘give up’ in order to get something in return, as that’s just more of the same old same old that got us here among the growing piles of rubble in the first place. Just give up, and feel the relief of finally, after millennia, reaching rock bottom. Let our hearts break, allow ourselves to finally feel something and stop running away. Then maybe the insane momentum of going in to work every day, or searching for that elusive job or relationship that will solve all our problems, will begin to relax and the spring that drives our little clockwork-soldier world may lose some of its tension.  We may, individually and collectively, start to really make new decisions, to not just repeat the same mistakes in lieu of having any other idea of what to do. We may finally start to wake from (as Joyce famously called it), the nightmare of history.