The Great Reset, an oceanic perspective

Part 2 of The Great Reset perspective series

To recap …

Last time I suggested that Great Resets happen every few hundred years, each instance triggered by a breakout technology plus a new socio-moral concept. This combo gives rise to religious or quasi-religious fervor and harsh censorship.

These occurrences cause political, economic and social upheaval - that’s their purpose. But, the current instance is the most extreme yet because it attempts to encompass the whole world.

In Part 1, I concluded with this: “last but not least, there are questions around the way we humans respond to change, and whether there are ‘deep currents’ in our societies that it is dangerous to try to swim against.” Subsequently, this thought was far better expressed by Melanie Phillips:

‘A culture is like a deep ocean. While prevailing winds may be whipping up the waves, the currents deep below may be going in a very different direction.’¹

With this metaphor in mind when you think about The Great Reset, might an attempt to harness our supposedly now-borderless countries, on a frontierless planet, through 24 time zones of unsleeping world actually result in precisely the opposite to that which is intended? Instead of harmony, discord if not full-on chaos?

The reason I pose this is that the evidence of history seems to be that when ‘engineered new starts’ are attempted they often end in chaos. The French Revolution, for instance, started out with a reasonable, even noble, intention - to build a better state:

‘They called it a ‘Revolution’, but it started almost entirely peacefully, and it went on being largely peaceful for another three years; and when, eventually, it began to descend into failure, chaos and Terror, it was the Revolutionaries who progressively dismantled, piece by piece, their own system of the rule of law.’²

And in the 20th century alone various ‘engineered new starts’ resulted in the deaths of well in excess of a hundred million people.

So, are there natural new starts?

If engineered new starts are so dangerous, how do things actually change? And can genuinely new starts happen naturally without the accompaniment of such horrors? The answer, fortunately, appears to be ‘Yes’.

Remember, we’re not talking, here, about incremental change. That happens all the time. No, rather this is all about ‘engineered new starts’ - attempts to, if you like, reinvent and restart the world. Past attempts to do this have been local or regional, and they have caused chaos. And nobody has ever before attempted, or even thought about, a global restart. And yet, Great Resets are a means to manage significant change. But it seems that the crucial component of these resets is that it’s all about how people see themselves to the extent that the changed viewpoints become analogous with mutations in human nature. Put it another way: it’s all about how individuals spontaneously think and tends, therefore, not to be susceptible to forced change.

Mutations in human nature

Time, methinks, for me to pause to provide a few personal notes. When I embarked on this investigation into Great Resets it was because I have a professional interest in trying to understand the changing nature of customer-supplier relationships. I’ve spent decades working in Marketing & Sales, written swathes of materials for a global consultancy, co-written a book on value propositions³ and, now in my eighth decade, still enjoy working⁴ and retain my fascination for that which goes on at the Customer-Supplier Interface. In fact, it seems to me that what is going on now must constitute the most dramatic and extraordinary shift in the way Customer-Supplier matters are conducted in all of our lifetimes. It's also likely to signify the most dramatic and extraordinary shift in human nature in all of our lifetimes.

To be honest, I find the fact that I’m writing about something as enormous as ‘Mutations in human nature’ a tad scary. Gulp. Where is this taking me? After all, I am not an academic. However, deep breath, here goes ...

Back in 1949, German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) introduced the world to the Axial Period. He coined the term to cover the two-or three-hundred years either side of the year 500 BCE - so, around 2,500 years ago. Jaspers described the period as ‘the most deep cut dividing line in history’, and wrote:

‘Man, as we know him today, came into being … Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Leh-tsu and a host of others. India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers - Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato - of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any of these regions knowing of the others.’⁵

This, then, appears to have been a natural, unforced new start. No external engineering involved. For whatever reasons, people across swathes of the world came up with the idea of pursuing an inner goal rather than primitive gods. And this topic has been at the heart of Great Resets ever since, including today.

Time’s arrow

It didn’t all happen at once, of course. In the West, where the three Great Resets that I briefly outlined in Part 1 of this series took place, people’s experience of the world was as an enchanted place until what I called GR1, the Reset window that occurred circa 1450 to 1520 in Europe. But the direction of change was clear - towards greater individual autonomy within co-operative communities.

In the enchanted version of the world, every tree, every stream, every thing was believed to have ‘magic’ properties that influenced human life. This Reset marked a change. The socio-moral concept at the heart of this European transformation related to the shift from belief in the absolute power of the medieval Christian Church to the revolutionary concept that humans, using God-given ingenuity, could master the world. It was not a rejection of religious belief, but a repositioning of it. The Protestant assertion of faith as a personal and private matter was on the march. It took time to fully materialize but, as Lionel Trilling wrote:

'Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement that, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.'⁶

Up until this point, Trilling proposed, in the European medieval period, individuals could be assessed in terms of their Sincerity: that is, in terms of their performance as an example of who they were within a fixed hierarchy - a noble, a peasant, an artisan, a cleric, whatever. But GR1 marked the birth of a new measure, Authenticity, a concept that acknowledges that individuals have multiple roles - for example, a parent, a sibling, a merchant and so on. It’s why, by 1600, Shakespeare was conducting large-scale testing of Authenticity in quite a number of his plays.

Later, GR2 moved things further in the direction of individual autonomy within (as described in Part 1) a more rigid ‘Protestant’ framework. This turbocharged our success in innovating and manufacturing a vast array of new products and services. The results are plain to see, succinctly put in an article in McKinsey Quarterly:

‘Life isn’t drastically better for billions of people today than it was in 1800 because we are allocating the resources of the 19th-century economy more efficiently. Rather, it is better because we have life-saving antibiotics, indoor plumbing, motorized transport, access to vast amounts of information, and an enormous number of technical and social innovations that have become available to much (if not yet all) of the world’s population. The genius of capitalism is that it both creates incentives for solving human problems and makes those solutions widely available. And it is solutions to human problems that define prosperity, not money’⁷

And, oh, another result of all this was an increase in human population; an eight-fold increase from 1 billion in 1800 to 8 billion now.

Is everybody happy about this? No. The problem, it seems, is that the success has brought us up against some uncomfortable limits of human activity. Directly and indirectly, our increased (and still rising) population puts pressure on ourselves and everything else on the planet through our requirements for food, energy and other resources. The negative outcomes include factors affecting the well-being – survival, even – of our own and other species.

So, the irony is that the entrepreneurial free-for-all initiated in the West by RG1 then powerfully accelerated by RG2 (see previous post), that gave our species the ability to flourish and enjoy hitherto unimagined health and wealth, is now viewed by many as dangerous and destructive. There is now a narrative where all of the elements that led to our unprecedented prosperity (e.g. western science, innovation, manufacturing within a context of individual freedom) are now demonized by a smoke-and-mirrors campaign that demolishes borders only to create entirely new ones.

More about this and an alternative solution coming next.

Thanks for reading.

1. An altered state

2. Davidson, Ian. The French Revolution: From Enlightenment to Tyranny (2016)

3. Barnes, Cindy & Blake, Helen & Pinder, David. Creating & Delivering Your Value Proposition (2009).

4. valuegenie.com

5. Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History (1949)

6. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity (1971, 1972)

7. Beinhocker, Eric & Hanauer, Nick. Redefining capitalism (McKinsey Quarterly, September 2014)