Free Radicals.
Photo by Simon Thorogood.
"Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.”
– Robert Caro
A great many minds throughout history have written eloquently about the corrupting nature of power. Presently, on the world stage we witness a complex screenplay of power being rehearsed and violently acted out. Reflecting on this, we may ask ourselves what this fatigued script says about us, how we can renounce systems of domination elsewhere, and contemplate what we might find when they are gone?
Thievery Corporation.
One of the many things that the on going crisis in Ukraine cautions, is the importance of collectively making a stand and denouncing perceived wrongdoing.
What we are also learning is that this circumspection should not be something we simply ‘put back in the box,’ once an event, scenario or moment has passed. Rather, we will need to cultivate perpetual, evolving, and maturing conditions of preparedness and vigilance, and across a breadth of issues and phenomena, whether large or small.
Through extensive media reports about the situation in Ukraine, and a range of ways to explain and contextualise this, many of us have been abruptly introduced to a number of ‘cracy’ suffixes, employed to describe particular types of administrational structure.
‘Cracy,’ an affix from the Greek word kratos, meaning strength or power, typically describes a form of government.
In misstating grounds to wage war, the Kremlin has been widely described as an ‘autocracy,’ where one person or small group has uncontrolled or unlimited authority over others. This autocracy has been said to have practiced ‘kleptocracy,’ in which a government strategically utilises political power to peculate the wealth, land and assets of a people.
Kleptocracy can then be linked to ‘thievocracy,’ or rule by thievery, often associated with an absence of accurate public announcement explaining any misappropriation. In turn, thievocracy feeds into ‘plutocracy,’ described as a society that is controlled by a few leaders or luminaries of great wealth. The extreme of plutocracy is ‘monocracy,’ in which a government of a system or state is controlled by one single person.
Following from this, we are led to ‘kraterocracy,’ or governing bodies ruled by those who seize power through force, political cunning and social manoeuvring. Similar in nature to kraterocracy are ‘stratocracies,’ or the rule of a system of governance composed of military government, in which the state and the military are traditionally or constitutionally the same.
Separate, but nonetheless implicated in the previous categories may be found ‘oligarchy’ – a power structure also held by a small group. However, oligarchy differs from other ‘cracies’ at play here as an oligarch can be characterised as someone who not only has great power and wealth, sometimes obtained through questionable means, but who courts fame, status, notoriety, prestige, patronage, corporate dominance, and political association.
These very same qualities, however, may uncomfortably connect us with governing structures considered to be on the ‘right side of the fence,’ and within the complex realm of ‘democracy.’
The ‘demo’ prefix, from the Greek word dēmos, or ‘people,’ describes a form of government in which citizens have authority to decide legislation, known as direct democracy, or otherwise can choose to elect governing officials to do this, known as representative democracy. These very same people are perpetually engaged through the varied instruments and prisms of capitalism, that society should aspire towards conditions of acquisition, fame, status, notoriety, prestige, patronage, corporate dominance, and political association.
For some, democracy, or otherwise ‘electocracy,’ is also built upon certain constructs of religious ideals. Yet, religions can connect us to ‘theocracy,’ or systems of governing in which priests or religious elders rule in the name of a particular god or deity.
Such perception, however, might take us back over the other side of the fence again, and back to plutocracy. It may be argued that certain religions and ideologies have been implicated, to some extent and at some point in their history, with particular episodes of misconduct or misappropriation, and often in the service of a god or doctrine.
The fundamentals of democracy, underscored by the epitome of the power of the people, have oftentimes sought to supplant outmoded social structures, conspicuous as not working for the good of all. Aristocracy may be one such example. Derived from the Greek work aristokratíā, meaning 'rule of the best,' aristocracy has often closely been associated with monarchy, and characterised as a form of governance that places authority in the hands of a small, privileged ruling elite, or aristocrats.
Make The Best Of.
If we adapt aristocracy’s maxim of ‘the rule of the best,’ but where we determine that it is categorically not about the rule of the few, or the rule of those with power, or elites, or those who believe they are connected to that greater or higher, then we might re-write this as the ‘distinguished conduct of the very best of us all.’
This is a doctrine that many universities and places of learning have traditionally upheld, and resonated through their studentship and teaching staff to a wider world. But, it is this particular ‘distinguished conduct of the very best of us all’ that can advocate concepts of ‘outernationalism’ for us, or the interconnected and harmonious amelioration of the entire world above nationalistic or localised interests.
In this admittedly idealist picture, there must be empathy, support, and assistance available to those who require it, whether on a large or small scale. But, there must be real and shared appetite and ambition for visionary, egalitarian, deferential and open futures. Sadly, this is not always forthcoming in a world still driven, as we witness now, by mindsets, politics, economics, and campaigns of acquisition.
Currently, it is the aggressor nation that may be exemplar of a stark depiction of a world without openness, altruism, respect or wellbeing at its heart. On a present trajectory, this assailant state may cement an external perception as an autocracy – a place without complete freedoms; with a declining population; with a failing economy; with a marked exodus of world-class scientific and cultural minds; with over investment in fossil fuel resources as the rest of the world de-carbonises, (we hope); haunted by elderly ideals of power and domain; and with evaporating civic optimism and trust.
But most significantly, Russia may be severely incapacitated through a defective mindset, distilled by the very few for the consumption of the many. So, whilst seeking to re-capture something ‘greater’ from a fictionalised past that never really was, we are reminded once again how history has agency to misinform a present.
Such blanketed lack of vision for a propitious future may, precariously, cultivate a populace of ‘intra-nationals’ for Russia – citizens who effectively ‘hunker down,’ are obedient yet unsure how to look forwards and outwards without instruction. Those who may gaze too longingly at distant or exotic shores run the risk of state censure. And so history repeats itself again.
This is certainly not what new generations of world citizens want or need, representing as they do the architects of progress and prosperity for the construction of all our connected tomorrows.
But we might remember, that this model of constraint and contraction may be variously found on a micro and macro level elsewhere in the world, and often in our day-to-day lives. Civic or cultural curtailment, cuts to social services, to arts and humanities universities for example, may analogously lead to degrading societal landscapes of many kinds.
Curtailment is often a by-product of efficiency or cost-cutting agendas and the increased deferment of risk. But it can be further argued that efficiency often has very little to do with innovation, and that programmes of contraction can lead to declines in character, quality and morale. Subsequently, citizens, consumers and end users may be compelled to find outlet, achievement and fulfilment differently and elsewhere.
Schools Of Thought.
Throughout any operation or period of curtailment, it is essential that effective channels of communications be maintained with perceived ‘reductionists,’ detractors or adversaries, so as to mutually mediate ‘difference.’
These channels, and the types of language used therein, are vital to either persuade or frame compromise through benevolence rather than castigation or assault. Where these conduits may be shut down or compromised by one side, there must always be a contingency for new portals to be imaginatively opened and maintained.
So, not only are avenues of communication crucial, but they are also eminently creative in nature, and should be endorsed as such. Indeed, forms of creative arbitration might yet form part of art & design curriculum in due course. Dedicated personnel or ‘creative emissaries’ will also be required to conduct this task, to establish new mutual literacy and language, and to determine what the future role of their institution, connected with others, could really be.
As agents or progenitors of a sort of ‘offshore thinking,’ these creative emissaries may establish intriguing new synergies for a range of institutions and organisations, engaging with less regulation and less prescription of ideas, and having license to push the distinct attributes of an organisation to logical extremes.
Akin to a large-piece jigsaw puzzle, institutions, departments, or teams all become valuable components within a complex and interconnected creative entity. Obedience is, then, to a distributed disturbance of ideas rather than universal learning conformity.
Mix Ups.
“If we might understand evolving realms of creativity as implicating advanced insight, and awareness tied to expertise, in digital terrains for instance, we may correspondingly experience ‘outcomes’ as amalgamations of theory, analysis, process, responsibility, activism, and storytelling.”
Places of learning must never be allowed to become just perfunctory places of convenient instruction for convenient adoption of skills by end users or industry. Aside all the other great things they do, learning institutions might need to work harder at becoming sophisticated, open, and networked ‘uncertainty modulators.’
It is the nurturing of capricious curiosity, vision, passion and intensity in new generations that will furnish them with the fortitude to challenge what they see as wrongdoing in the world – whether the illegal invasions of countries, illegal felling of rainforests, human rights abuses, opaque offshore accounting practices, unsustainable extraction of fossil fuels, reduction of foreign aid, or cuts to education, the arts, or health services. When, and where, this nurturing might no longer be supported, then these new generations may not have a place to start from, narratives go unquestioned, conditions are ripe for nostalgia and in due course, as we currently see, this can turn fatefully sour.
If we might understand evolving realms of creativity as implicating advanced insight and awareness tied to expertise, in digital terrains for instance, we may correspondingly experience ‘outcomes’ as amalgamations of theory, analysis, process, responsibility, activism, and storytelling. Here, a breadth of creative disciplines might vivify as mediums of philosophical ‘connected affordances’ rather than as principally physical manifestations, products, or spaces.
Resulting synergies might progressively galvanise artists, designers or creatives of whatever persuasion, to re-appraise their discipline as a different kind of social and cultural activity or experiment. Such operation, then, may demand different types of interdisciplinary learning spaces, tools, personnel, methodologies, stakeholders, evaluators, audiences, and epistemology.
And, if we do not constantly exercise alertness, developing conditions of indifference can inadvertently lead to an individual or collective surrendering of control, and to incipient forms of autocracy. We might also acknowledge that states of affiliation, familiarity and ‘normalization’ can, in some cases, represent the very first steps towards totalitarianism.
But above all, it may be where principal decision-making in large institutions are made by the few through a ‘rule of the best’ that may prove grounds for review.
Thinking Out Loud.
Accordingly, there may be cause for direction and stewardship to be determined through other means of administration, and through another series of ‘cracy’ suffixes.
We might consider a vibrant blend of ‘ergatocracy,’ the rule of the proletariat, or those on the shop or classroom floor; ‘geniocracy,’ a system of governance in which creativity, innovation, intelligence and wisdom are the required attributes for leadership; ‘meritocracy,’ a system of governance where groups are selected on the basis of specialist knowledge and recognised contribution to society; and ‘noocracy,’ a system of governance in which decision making is made by philosophers or creative logicians.
Such ‘outernational mixes’ might constitute the qualities of highly dynamic, informed, egalitarian and empathetic teams of academic and commercial agitators. This may further collective action on the big perceived differences and challenges of our time, but also focus on the big commonalities of our time, that no single organisation or nation may address singularly.
By behaving so, we may become (co)authors or (co)editors of new expressions of dissatisfaction and activism that may lead to new forms of consensus and harmony. In turn, this can establish original and inclusive forms of cumulative insight, cooperation, and agency for us all in a world that often struggles with a sense of ‘all.’
