Turquoise Politics

Summary: we need each other. Can we move beyond othering?

There’s a kind of a simple beauty to our political economy in the UK,

Three sectors, each with a different role, mutually interdependent.

Business makes stuff. Our tech. Shoes. Glasses, clothes, music lessons. And, ideally, surpluses. 

Surpluses are fun. I’m struck by all the times I’ve been the recipient of a surplus someone else generated, and the kinds of new stuff and richness of life that that has produced. Now I’m beginning to be the creator of surpluses, with which I create jobs for others. They seem to like that.

So, surpluses are fun. In Machynlleth where I’m living now, there aren’t many surpluses, it seems, and there’s a feeling like a scarce sharing of a small cake, economically.

Being at the helm of a business is intense. You need startup capital, so you deal with investors and loan providers who you become obliged to; it’s pressure, risk. There’s always uncertainty and insecurity. As we see in the current C-Virus crisis, it’s businesses and self employed people who seem to be hit hardest economically. My friends working in public and third sector jobs seem to be able to keep going, whereas those of us delivering direct in-person services to the public / our customers see our incomes suddenly crashing and it having a series of devastating effects on our spreadsheets and the realities they represent, like, people getting paid.

Given the pressures of business leadership, it’s not surprising that business leaders are often focused on a single bottom line. It’s scary in here. Create surpluses as much as possible, for security.

So, businesses make and do stuff, and create surpluses that go to, generally, investors and employees, but that doesn’t take care of everybody so we have government.

Government taxes the surpluses of business, and redistributes them and provides public services available to all, to take care of the whole population and not leave anybody out. (Ideally.)

Cool. 

Businesses and government can get quite large and stuck in their ways, become a bit blind sighted so we have:

The third sector. NGOs, media, arts, think tanks, charities, social enterprises. They’re often funded by surpluses from businesses, and sometimes by government / public taxes.

The political philosopher Foucault said, if you want to see what’s coming next, look to the edges. Not to the big players in the middle carrying the heavy weight of current economic everything, but the lighter smaller players at the edge, looking, seeing, imagining.

Look! They say. This thing over here could be better! How about this? Huh this seems broken. These people are missing out! They need extra attention. Over here!

It’s kind of beautiful; this three sector system. It’s like a fountain with businesses generating spouts of water and then government and the third sector being part of the water sculpture that moves the water here and there, and thus we have, our economy / our country / our world. (Plus a few underlying ingredients, like, worldview, nature, consciousness…)

I see two things.

One. Each part needs the other. 

Currently, we seem to be in a lot of othering and mistrust. 

Some people in business don’t trust government. They avoid taxes; re-invest, go offshore.

Oops. Government can’t do its job so well. It tries.

The third sector kind of hates on businesses. When Corporations Rule The World. Bankers are evil. Bag the assholes.

Business turns their backs on the third sector. Feels unsafe. (Understandably..)

The median level of charitable giving among the ultra-rich is just £240 a year.  “It’s like putting landed gentry in front of a bunch of Guardian readers,” said Ms Dovey. “It’s not a comfortable place for them to be.” (Financial Times)

So, enter talk of Spiral Dynamics. Different colours for different “stages in the evolution of consciousness.” Perhaps, the third sector is “Green,” the progressive left. Perhaps, business is “blue” and “orange:” boundaried interests (prioritising the small ‘we’ over the big ‘we’), old-school science (Newtonian separation), onward-and-upward linear growth trajectories.

Greens are coming under fire for celebrating all kinds of diversity, but not worldview diversity. “Bankers are evil” etc. 

Let’s not blame it all on greens. In their single bottom line focus and cost externalisation, businesses have done a fair bit of damage and one can see why the greens are pissed off.

As for government? Well, it feels siloed and no one has done a good job at really celebrating the contribution of each of the three sectors and helping us come together.

This is the thing. If sector relating is characterised by othering, mistrust, enemizing, and a turning away from, we’re basically all in a horrible world together, facing collective challenges like the C Virus but more significantly, climate change and extreme inequality, without being able to work together respectfully, with each giving and receiving what is theirs to give and take. 

How do we get to a place where we can see each other. Listen to each other. Communicate well. Speak so that others can listen. Listen so that others can speak?

Can we move politics beyond a gladiatorial battle of one side vs the other - I lob you harder, you fall off the plinth - victory is mine! -

…towards a round circle where we need each other, and we are patiently and curiously listening to every voice in the circle. “Here’s how it is over here.” “Over here it’s like this.”

I’d go beyond. Adding voices for the natural world, for future generations.

We all matter. We need each other.

Can we put down the fight and co-operate? We feel so siloed at the moment it’s like we need a peace and reconciliation commission. 

A personal story.

I grew up pretty green. Political Science degree and work in campaigning and social enterprise in my 20s compounded that. Corporations rule the world. Corporations are evil. Bankers caused the financial crash. Bankers are evil. Oil companies are laying waste our world. Oil companies are evil.

A year or two ago, I was walking around my boyfriend’s house on the phone when my eyes casually landed upon his investment portfolio lying open on a shelf. I had a general sense of his wealth. But seeing the amount of zeros, as I was on the phone to my eco-village founding, song-leader Elder friend in Port Townsend, my body started to boil. Getting off the phone I flipped open my laptop and quickly did a search of all of the companies on the $2m portfolio. 3 oil companies. Car hire companies. Fossil fuel based consumer capitalism. I freaked out hard. I wasn’t only sleeping with the enemy, I was in love with him, living with him, bonded to him.

A relational explosion followed. After weeks of not speaking, therapy, 6 hour conversations in cars in parking lots smoking cigarettes, we resumed our partnership. He divested his portfolio, shifted it to impact investing and bought a Tesla. I owned and investigated the violence in my political belonging.

We’ve separated now and he’s dating a wealthy former model while I’m founding an eco village. Back in California where they live, the earth is drying out, power outages are getting more frequent and fires grow in size each year. Here in Wales the rain is falling harder than ever and so, so many trees have fallen in the worsening storms.

We’re in too much trouble to keep hating on each other like this.  Each position is trying to do their best, I believe.

What will it take to lay down our enemization, respect one another, learn from each other, be able to hear each other?

Ultimately, we are in it together. We could say, we are all berries on the same vine. A human family sharing a fragile earth. 

This, I would argue, is the realm of Turquoise Politics.

Turquoise is a stage in the Spiral Dynamics model where you can see the value of each position and integrate them.

This goes beyond sectors and into relationships between and within political parties, and the demos.

I don't know if this stacks up but it might be that generally, the private sector votes blue, public sector workers votes red, and third sector folks vote green / yellow / red. 

So turquoise politics means people at different places in the circle of political experience to listen to one another with curiosity and respect. It also involves people within political parties doing the same. 

And in the demos, us out here, it involves us somehow getting back to town hall meetings where we meet difference and listen with curiosity and respect; rather than siloing in our Facebook and Twitter echo-chambers, hating on the Other. 

Here’s the second thing I see. That whole model of the private sector, surpluses, the stock market, tax and redistribution, philanthropy and the third sector, gets foundational disrupted by progressive business ownership models, discussed for example by Marjorie Kelly in Owning Our Future.

If the private sector doesn’t drench quite so much from the human, social and ecological spheres to create its surpluses; if surpluses are not so large or not so confined to the already wealthy in direct relationship to the wealth through the stock market; if consciousness and the legal forms it is expressed through live inter-being from the start…. All that is going to change that afore-mentioned water sculpture structure in ways I can’t forsee before my 10am meeting.

But I’m interested.

Thanks for reading this far.

In it with you.

Briony.