Launching the new Constructive Programme
The work we need right now has to be practical, doable, and spiritual.
I (and millions of others) have long been inspired by Gandhi, especially his commitment to nonviolence and movement for swaraj (“self-rule”) that led to Indian independence from colonisation.
A central part of this success in gaining freedom for millions of people was Gandhi’s Constructive Programme — a practical handbook for liberation. It was published in 1941. Six years later, India gained independence.
It wasn’t a manifesto of big words and vision. It was a deeply practical guide to how Indians could live; to work constructively in the village, especially through spinning; to free oneself from being reliant on the colonial power; and even how to wash! This was all to maintain the dignity, pride and discipline necessary in the work to achieve freedom.
It was also deeply spiritual. Gandhi’s Constructive Programme was most of all a straightforward but profound instruction for how to live in good relation to oneself, one’s neighbours, and one’s nation, in terms of doing.
A constructive programme for us?
So I got to wondering: bearing in mind everywhere most people already agree: it’s bad, it’s us, and we have to act fast — what would a new constructive programme for the UK look like?
We’re already bound into a future of worsening events, increased disasters, and social breakdown. We’ve all heard and know the compelling arguments: stop, slow things down. We focus on what we shouldn’t spend money on, what needs to stay in the ground, what we’re anti- and where people have had enough. But that’s what we don’t want; what it entails is mostly not doing something.
Instead, we need a clear-eyed sense of what it is we should proactively do.
Not a wordy manifesto, but a practical and practically spiritual guide to how we can live in right relation to each other, to free ourselves from the obstructions of power wielded by those who don’t want us to be free to live our lives as we want.
A Constructive Programme for our neighbourhoods and nations, here where we live.
Sorry if it sounds grand. It’s not meant to be. And I certainly don’t have all the answers. Yet, I’ve set myself the task — and this Substack is a large part of that — to work alongside and learn from others about creating this new Constructive Programme for us, here where we live, and as members of our human family.
Because we really need it now
Gandhi’s Constructive Programme is not the only successful example of social reality design. We are right now living in a world that was designed 30-60 years previously by a small group of extreme-libertarian individuals, who gathered, plotted and wrote books and programmes whose instructions shape today’s geopolitical materiality.
William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual is one example. It constellated the social imagination of the Mont Pelerin Society and laid down much of the thinking for the dissolution of the state we are seeing in front of our eyes today, taken up by people such as Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel and organisations such as Turning Point (USA and UK).
What we are seeing in front of our eyes today is not yet an endgame, but those with power who are now advancing the chess pieces in play. Musk, Thiel, Andreesen and others have shown us that they believe democracy is an inefficient way of running the world. Governed by AI, tech and weaponry, their new techno-optimist manifestoes are written for controlling a climate-deranged future through Authoritarian Capitalism, evidently based on the logic that there is no room on the planet for both the ruling elite classes and the rest of us. While they are already living in the future, meanwhile many of our allies are stuck in analyses based on the 1970s.
So I want to construct something new, and it’s this:
that we have to respond not only to the present, but also to blueprint ourselves (at least) thirty years into the future, if we are to have any hope of sharing freedom and resources equally with everyone.
That’s not the work of writing a manifesto. It’s the work of researching and designing a new programme of how we make new relations, and therefore, a different and better way to live. That’s my life’s work.
A blueprint for freedom with care
This constructive programme will be a practical blueprint for UK citizens to free ourselves from the yoke of a broken neoliberal political economy, that continues to purposefully widen inequality and is actively destroying our earth energy systems’ ability to support life.
I’m asking us all to imagine how to forge and establish new social, economic and political cultures from the neighborhood to the nation. We know this work of how to build a better world is essential. We believe this project makes a critical and unique contribution to that need, filling a gap in our contemporary understanding of what the better world beyond this one actually looks like…
…with instructions.
And so, I begin with a series of conversations about where I believe we need to start learning: from the spiritual.
Beginning with the spiritual
Over the next six weeks I’ll be sharing conversations I’ve had with “teachers, not preachers” who have helped me shape my thinking on where to begin, and the essential spiritual foundation of this practical work.
As a designer, my interest and experience has expanded from my time spent with clothing and textiles, through building grassroots organisations and mobilising millions of people into nonviolent activism with Extinction Rebellion, to questions of how to design systems and structures, social movements, communications and identity, and relational dialogic spaces and processes.
The future we can survive needs all of this design thinking. It especially needs us to do serious relational work now.
No one has all the answers
And because this work of building society is always relational, it means that something else I’ve learnt along the way is that no-one has all the answers; and in fact, the tyranny of certainty and needing to know is part of the design flaw in problematic and outdated systems of how we’ve organised ourselves up to now.
So I don’t have all the details of the best possible plan; the research agenda for this constructive programme doesn’t so much answer a question as collaborate on a design process, where the dots we can join by making this a living project, will take us a step forward.
Or two steps: into thinking about how abstract ideas meet the real world; and then, about suggesting the things the real world needs — a path towards action.
So please be part of helping me co-create this design process and research agenda.
I’m looking forward to sharing these interviews with you, and the many that will come over the next few weeks, months and years.
The first will arrive next week.