This is the third and final installment in a three-part series that ran over the last two weeks.

GDP Growth – Progress or Madness?

If there is one idea that has gained the status of true hegemony – dominant and unquestioned around the world – it is the idea that we need to perpetually grow our economies, and every part of them, in order to improve the quality of human life. This idea is so prevalent that we take it almost completely for granted, as though it is a law of nature. But in reality, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measure was first developed in the 1930s by American and British economists. During WWII, it came into official use by governments keen to know the extent of wealth and resources available for their war efforts.

It is this war-time history that explains why GDP is so single-minded – almost violent. It counts money-based activity, but it doesn’t care whether that activity is useful or destructive. If you cut down a forest and sell the timber, GDP goes up; if you fish the seas to extinction, or start a war, GDP goes up. GDP doesn’t care about the costs associated with these activities, so long as money is made. What is more, GDP doesn’t count useful activities that are not monetized. If you grow your own food, clean your own house, or take care of your aging parents, GDP says nothing.

GDP exemplifies the logic of wetiko by emphasizing material acquisition and encouraging a self-serving pattern of increasing consumption for every society that uses it as a principal measure of progress. GDP, then, is an instruction to power. In defining progress, it directs power to dedicate itself to more of the same, indefinitely and, if left unchallenged, without limits.

The problem is that this hegemonic theory of human progress is rapidly undermining the very conditions of our existence on this planet. Having pursued GDP growth with single-minded recklessness for the past few generations, we’re now overshooting our planet’s biocapacity by more than 60% each year – vastly outstripping the ability of the natural world to absorb our waste and replenish the resources we’re using. There are no longer any frontiers where new growth doesn’t directly harm someone else, by, say, degrading the soils, polluting the water, poisoning the air, and exploiting human beings. GDP growth is creating more misery than it eliminates – more ‘illth’ than ‘wealth’, as Herman Daly put it.

And all of this is just at our existing levels of economic activity. Now think about what happens when we start to factor in the prospect of exponential growth. If the global economy is to expand by 3% next year, that means adding US$ 2 trillion to this year’s GDP. To put that in perspective, this amount is more than the entire global GDP in 1970. Imagine all the cars, all the televisions, all the houses, all the factories, all the barrels of oil, and everything else that was produced in 1970 – not only in Britain and the US, but also in France, Germany, Japan, and every country in the whole world. Everything. Keep that mountain of stuff in your mind. That’s how much we have to add next year on top of replicating the amount we produced this year. And because growth is exponential – not linear – we have to add even more than that the year after, and so on ad infinitum.

But these policy-level parameters are really only the surface of the problem. The deeper force is the imperative of ever-increasing production and consumption, and this is what lies at the very heart of our culture – less as an addiction than as an unexamined assumption, an unquestioned ideological force.

The point here is that although there appears to have been all this change in the past year or even in the past 200 years, the deep wetiko logic of the system has not been questioned. People have turned to the likes of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage and Narenda Modi in hope of change, but the irony is that, of the political choices before us, these are the ones who are the most wetiko-ized in their belief system. Donald Trump, for example, is practically wetiko personified – Jack Forbes would no doubt have called him a Big Wetiko. His conceptions of wealth and virtue and power, his complete comfort with the idea of profiting from the destruction of the natural environment, are all the stuff of pure wetiko. Not that there are any truly non-wetiko politicians out there, in any national mainstream space we know of. Even Leftist populists, like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, stop far short of questioning the deep wetiko logic of the system. Their agendas, though far more progressive than their right-wing counterparts, still adhere to the basic economic orthodoxy of perpetual material growth.

When seen through the wetiko lens, then, it becomes apparent that all of the political warfare and upheaval of 2016 was mostly about surface-level differences in ideology. If changing the deep wetiko nature of our global political economy is what is needed – as we believe it is – we must acknowledge the limitations of electoral politics, and then work to overcome those limitations by changing the cultural environment and assumptions that define them.

Culture Hacking: A New Approach to Change

In light of the above, we advocate for an approach to social change that we call culture design or culture hacking. Addressing the systemic threats for humanity in the 21st century will require an intentional, open, and collaborative ‘design science’ for social change. The elements of this approach include a variety of perspectives that will need to be integrated in both theory and practice. We’re not saying every group needs every perspective on this list, but a selection, ideally at least one from each of the following buckets, according to resources and requirements.

• People who study the long view – anthropology, cultural history, evolutionary theory, the rise and fall of empires, cliodynamics (the mathematical study of history), and other related fields.

• People who understand the cognitive and behavioral sciences – cognitive linguistics, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology.

• People who understand the science of complex systems – nonlinear dynamics, system mapping, root-cause analysis, ecology, and so forth.

• People who live an alternative cultural worldview from the bones out, as it were, rather than just the head down – Indigenous thinkers, leaders and activists, well-established post-capitalist communities.

When we look through a lens created by this sort of multi-disciplinary, multi-experience diversity, we start to see the world differently. Instead of framing policies as issues such as health care or climate change, we start to see cultural ‘anchors’, like GDP, as a measure of progress. These anchors are the fundamental connectors that express the cultural logic baked into the system. They constitute the ‘common sense’ of a culture – the unquestioned filters of interpretation that give shape to political agendas outside conscious awareness. This is where the real power hides and, as always, it is in plain sight.

We see it as a task for 21st century social movements to ‘make the invisible visible’ by consciously deconstructing, analyzing, and re-constructing the cultural patterns of meaning that shape political and economic outcomes. This requires a systemic perspective about culture. And it only works when informed directly by rigorous research methodologies from the social sciences.

To give an example of where this sort of approach can lead:

When the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched in 2015, practically every government, large non-government organization (NGO), corporation, and United Nations body signed up and celebrated them. We, at /The Rules, took a different view. Rather than seeing their many laudable objectives, or the fact that they were, in traditional policy and process terms, a marked improvement on their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), what we saw in them was more of the same. More of the same basic cultural and economic logic that has created so much poverty and suffering, and brought us to the brink of climate disaster. We saw them sticking like glue to the ‘Plato to NATO’ logic of material progress being synonymous with actual progress. Specifically, they hung entirely off the idea of GDP growth. All the good they hope to deliver is dependent on every single country – North and South – growing its GDP. And they are very specific about it: overall they are aiming for at least 7% per year in the least developed countries, and higher levels of economic productivity across the board. Goal 8 is entirely dedicated to this objective.

And so we saw the SDG moment as an opportunity to start to question and deconstruct some of the cultural narratives that underpin International Development ‘common sense’. We set ourselves the objective, ‘to open up the mental space for inquiry among development professionals and change agents working to address systemic threats to humanity’.

The strategy had two parts:

1. Weaken the core logic of development-as-usual by challenging its assumptions and revealing covert, unpopular agendas.

2. Ask questions designed to initiate people on a learning journey that reveals the structural causes of poverty and inequality  –  thus opening up the conversation landscape to a new set of stories that give meaning to these emergent understandings.

This was built on a Theory of Change informed by the science of cultural evolution, which has observed that people live within stories that make sense of their social world. These stories become entrenched as institutional structures and practices, making them difficult to dislodge and change. Telling a ‘better story’ is therefore a process of making the dominant stories less coherent and more difficult to understand, which opens up space for new meanings to fill in where they have broken down. Our Theory of Change is to challenge the logic of the problematic narratives while facilitating a learning process that helps people craft their own new stories that make sense of the knowledge and insights gained along the way.

The questions we encouraged people to ask were:

How is poverty created? Where do poverty and inequality come from? What is the detailed history of past actions and policies that contributed to their rapid ascent in the modern era? When were these patterns accelerated and by whom? Who’s Developing Whom? The story of development is often assumed or unstated. What is the role of colonialism in the early stages of Western development? How did the geographic distribution of wealth inequality come into being? What are the functional roles of foreign aid, trade agreements, debt service, and tax evasion in the process of development? And most importantly, who gains and who loses along the way?

Why is Growth the Only Answer?

The mantra that ‘growth is good’ has been repeated so often that it has the feel of common sense. Yet we know that GDP rises every time a bomb drops or disaster strikes. Growth, as defined up till now, is more nuanced and complex than this mantra would have us believe. Why must the sole measure of progress be growth (measured in monetary terms)? Who benefits from this story? What alternative stories might be told?

We spread these questions through blogs and articles. They were woven into infographics and short videos, and we worked with a network of interested journalists who used them as a basis for reflection and commentary in as many media spaces as possible.

Our strategy was, of course, imperfect in both design and execution. But the intention was correct, and the level of cultural logic it targeted was roughly right. One way we know that is so is because it did not win us many friends. We were accused of naysaying, of undermining hard work of the people who developed the SDG framework (as if that is the point!). And, of course, we were called naïve, because questioning something like GDP growth is akin to questioning the blue of the sky; it just doesn’t make sense in the ‘real’ world. We know that GDP growth is essential to healthy economies. Just as we know that international development is about developing all countries along the same capitalist, consumerist path. These things are simply common sense. Tellingly, though, we received a fair amount of private, back-channel support. A number of NGO staff, for example, contacted us to say things like, ‘I know growth has to be challenged but we can’t do it [at x organization], it’s too radical’. It’s impossible to know from the data we were able to gather how prevalent these opinions are, but it is safe to say we have a long way to go before the political mainstream develops the desire or the imagination to confront the deeper cultural logics that keep us locked into our current path to almost-certain environmental ruin and various forms of civilizational collapse that may ensue.

This does not mean that there are two binary options for historical perspective – the rationalist, linear Western perspective versus the holistic, cultural perspective that accounts for the deep logic to which our rules and laws give daily power. What we are saying is that without understanding the latter, we will be forever locked in by the very logic we are trying to change. Culture hacking requires an expanded field of vision that includes a broad range of perspectives not traditionally found around the activism table, and that revels in the non-linear complexity that is the defining characteristic of culture. In order for us to achieve lasting, structural change, a new generation of activists armed with the tools of culture hacking will have to deconstruct and de-program the dominant modes of action and analysis. As we bear witness to all the changes that we are seeing in the outside world, a critical battleground will be our own conceptions of how activism works.