"If you want to change the world, throw a better party." 

Isn't it lovely? Perhaps you've heard it before (attributed to Rick Ingrasci). It seems deeply true doesn't it, whether or not you're versed in the various quirks of our psychology. Like many a good truth, it feels both soothing and rousing.

It’s also simple, and like any simple thing, there is much beneath its surface. If we don't plumb its depths, we risk wielding it simplistically, and creating a mess. 

To apply it in positive change efforts, we need to ask a few questions.

First, we need to clarify the terms:

1. What do we mean by 'change'? 

2. What do we mean by 'world'? 

3. What do we mean by 'better'? 

And then we need to think practically about what it means to 'throw' this party:

4. Where is the better party?

5. What happens to the current party?

6. How do people hear about it?

Each of these questions needs exploring, but for now let’s focus on two, which we should address first. Beginning with 3) What do you mean by 'better'?

The answer might not be what you expect.

The typical interpretation of 'better' is that it means an incremental improvement – progressing to an ‘improved’ state. 

This interpretation often assumes an historically linear trajectory of improvement, of progress, from bad to good, sad to happy, poor to rich. And here's the first thing we need to attend to when understanding 'better': this assumption is simplistic, and now understood to be misled – the product of a traumatised attempt to control complex systems that we didn't fully understand, and feared. 

As a result of pursuing this simplistic fantasy of linear ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’, humans have made themselves and the world around them unwell. Harm has been caused. Communities have been destroyed, cultures have been erased, species have been made extinct. Some things have ‘improved’ in that process of course, but at the cost of much suffering, and putting all else at risk. From a state of trauma, we have caused harm, making ourselves and our world sick. 

By acting from a place of sickness, we are damaging our world, whether you identify with that sickness and its behaviour as 'unhealed ancestral trauma', 'Wetiko', ‘Koyaanisqatsi’, the 'Cannibal Giant', the ‘Superorganism’, 'Moloch', the 'Dark Triad' or the ‘Disease of Separation’. Unless we heal ourselves, to act from health, we are simply going to keep harming each other and the world that supports us. 

We need to heal this sickness, we need to 'get better'.

So rather than thinking of 'better' as meaning 'progress' (in that misled sense of linear improvement), let's emphasise its other meaning: ‘better’ = 'healthier' / 'healed'. 

If we want to change the world, we have to 'get better'. 

If you want to change the world, throw a 'healthy' party.

So to the second of the questions above: 6) How do people hear about the better party? 

‘Hear’ implies both being exposed to information, and being able to understand it.

For many people the appeal of the healthy party is immediately understandable. The healthy party meets our fundamental needs, including for joy, belonging and meaning, as well as offering a better-tasting, fresher-smelling, more nourishing life for us and our kin. So it meets both emotional and physical needs, in a way that is sustainable long term. 

But many people are blocked from understanding this because they are addicted to the current party.

Their addiction is to the various remedies we are offered for our trauma symptoms, which don’t properly heal us, leaving us wanting more. Things like fast food, celebrity news, luxury, entertainment, alcohol, opiates, shopping, war, outrage. These remedies are superstimuli: attractive but empty. They are Haribo instead of an apple, the TV show Friends instead of real friends, porn instead of sex. 

Numbed by these shiny but empty palliatives—these ‘fake’ remedies—and driven to keep seeking them, it can be hard to understand what’s good about the 'healthy party'. And not only that – much of the time people aren't even given the chance to try.

The current power-holders in the world—those with the most wealth and those at the top of big corporations, banks, energy companies and governments—are at the same ‘fake party’ as everyone else. They’re just in the VIP section, where their drinks are paid for by everyone else, and they get to choose the music. 

These power-holders’ addictions to wealth and power are just as misled and self-defeating as our addictions to Haribo and porn. Many of them know ‘better’, they know of the potential of a ‘healthy party’. But they therefore know that the ‘better party’ doesn’t have a VIP section.

If everyone went to the better party, the power-holders would have to give up their wealth and power, which is even harder than giving up Haribo and porn. So the power-holders are powerfully incentivised to keep the ‘fake party’ going, and they need everyone else to stay so they can keep getting free drinks. It is in these power-holders’ interest to keep promoting the ‘fake party’ and stop people hearing about the ‘better party.’ And it’s in their power to do so as they typically have significant influence, if not total control, over the mainstream channels of communication.

The power-holders are the ones writing the party invitations, and they aren’t going to promote a party where they no longer get free drinks or control of the music.

Our collective task is to help people hear about—be exposed to and understand the benefits of—the ‘better party’, despite attempts by power-holders to keep us at the ‘fake party.’ This means understanding the power-holders: how to get through to them to help them see how their incentives are self-defeating; or, perhaps more likely, just get through them. 

So, the phrase "If you want to change the world, throw a better party" suggests two actions:

1. Recognise that for the party to be ‘better’, it has to be ‘healthy’; and for it to be healthy, we need to heal, not just remedy. However you conceive of making the world 'a better place' through your work, if you are just remedying the symptoms, it won’t be enough in the end.

2. Be clear-eyed about the forces that are incentivised to block that healing, and work together to get through to them, or through them. There’s a good chance they don’t want to go to the better party, and don’t want us to either. So we might have to leave them behind.

There are more questions to answer, and a lot of what has been said here is obvious. I personally find it quite helpful to see things this way, perhaps you will too.

The fake party is dead. Let’s get together, get better, and throw a party we can all enjoy.

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We don’t have to look far to find evidence of this.

But I wonder if we can go further. I wonder if this simple phrase might offer a deep explanation of our world’s predicament, of why we’re in this mess.

This isn't my explanation. It emerges from thousands of years of collective wisdom, and is shared today by those who still connect with that wisdom.

The simpl-est version of their explanation is this: We are unwell, we must heal.

In a bit more detail: we are unwell, suffering from trauma, trauma that disconnects us from reality. Our systems, designed by traumatised people, are traumatising, violent, and harmful. By also being disconnected from reality, our systems clash with it, putting them in perpetual crisis. To design healthy systems grounded in reality, beyond crisis, we need to come together and heal.

Typically we apply remedies to the symptoms of this trauma (which comes in many different forms and intensities) but do not seek to see and heal the root cause. The suggestion from the collective wisdom is that while much of the trauma is fresh, it has a much older common origin – a shared root cause in an ‘original trauma’.

This suggested root cause is that when human societies were growing and experimenting with more settled social arrangements (having mainly been wanderers), and practices of agriculture (having mainly been gatherers), unprecedented events meant some people experienced horrendous trauma – likely from new diseases, famine or natural disasters. 

These experiences eroded their faith in life and life-givers – in the availability of resources and care. This was accompanied by an urge to control, to arrest and correct the conditions that were causing the harm. 

In the case of people who were dying and running out of food, this urge to control spawned several impulses:

• Accumulation: to gather and hoard resources to avoid further shortages 

• Domination: to master the life that seems to threaten, forming rigid hierarchies

• Exploitation: of 'nature', and of other communities who weren’t experiencing what they were, and had resources they needed. 

Together these 'control' impulses led to a feeling of and belief in 'separation': that the people were separate from each other, and from the world that seemed to have deserted them. 

So: these traumatised people, having lost faith in life and life-givers, sought control, by accumulating resources, dominating nature, and exploiting others. This led them to invade other communities, kill them, take their stuff, dispose of the protocols that kept our shadow side in check, establish rigid hierarchies of power, and in the process create more traumatised control-seekers. All of which began a death spiral of invasive violence, creating ever more trauma. 

The explanation offered by the collective wisdom is that we never healed from this ancestral trauma, so the violence and trauma has spread, becoming encoded in our modern systems. 

Does this sound familiar? 

What are the priorities and incentives of our modern systems? 

Can you see the tendencies towards accumulation, domination, and exploitation? A loss of faith in life and life-givers, and attempts to control them? A belief that we are separate from 'nature' (the fact that we call 'it' anything is telling) and can 'master it'? A departure from what had so far led to our flourishing: cooperation and care, replaced instead with competitive individualism?

Control, Accumulation, Domination, Exploitation, Separation – all are both traumatised and traumatising.

Hurt people hurt people...

Treating the symptoms of this is not enough. The only way out of the death spiral is to heal the root cause. Healing the trauma that has been carried for generations, and relentlessly repeated and topped up by the traumatising systems that it has misled us to design. 

Hurt people hurt people… until they heal…

I can imagine two reactions you might have to this: 1) This sounds like hippy nonsense, be serious, or 2) How can we possibly heal when so much new violence is being perpetrated, surely that involves forgiveness, which surely is impossible now?

I sympathise with both questions. As the descendant of scientists, lawyers and corporate executives, I am very suspicious of anything asking me to hold hands in a room and hum. But it is also because of that background that I am now seeing the sense in this analysis, as modern sciences catch up to indigenous wisdom, much like when we realised that the earth goes round the sun.

As for the possibility of healing and the possibility of forgiveness, perhaps we should look to the example of so many of the collective wisdom holders, many of whom come from indigenous communities that are the most exploited, oppressed and violated in human history. They are often showing up today from a position of compassion and forgiveness, recognising that as we are each part of a whole, divisive fighting is ultimately self-defeating. Their beautiful example demands that we consider: if they can do this, why can’t we?

But we can't do it alone. Coming together wherever we are to face these traumas, both ancestral and fresh, to understand what it might take to heal, is our only chance of finding a way through the predicament we face today. Dispelling the misled belief in separation, and recognising – as modern science does – that we are a connected whole and must nurture caring relationships to survive.

Hurt people hurt people… until they heal… together.

How do we do this?

What will it take for us to face our trauma and the harm it is causing, and heal, when our cultures and systems are denying us the time and space to do so?

What will it take to resist the powerful people seeking the most extreme accumulation, domination and exploitation; who are telling false fearful stories of separation and control?

What will it take for us to let go of control ourselves, to see the risk in accumulation, the delusion in separation, the harm in exploitation, and restore faith in life?

What will it take for us to recognise that unless we do this, unless we make the time to heal, we will keep designing traumatising systems and keep hurting people?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, or even if they are the right questions. My understanding so far is led by the work of Vanessa Andreotti, Miki Kashtan, Tyson Yunkaporta, Sophie Strand, Bayo Akomolafe, Yuria Celidwen, Sherri Mitchell, Thomas Hübl, Gabor Maté, Lisa Schwartz, Mathew Green, Collective Change Lab, Kazu Haga and others. All of whom are sharing their wisdom and experiences with great humility and generosity. If the simple analysis in this post intrigues you, please explore their work, which will offer a much richer and more thorough understanding. 

I am inspired by their faith.

Faith in the collective wisdom that presents this simple analysis of the root cause of our predicament.

Faith that together we can stop just medicating the symptoms.

Faith that together we can heal.

If you share this faith too, more power to you. Let's find the others.

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We have a tendency to over-simplify things. To make them simplistic, which leads to complications. 

Our limited brains conserve energy by spotting patterns in an onslaught of information. This is enough to get by, but it leaves us vulnerable, much like how our eyes only see a narrow band of the light spectrum – we can get around, but we struggle in the dark.

I'm using the words 'simplistic' and 'complications' carefully. I like to imagine there's a difference between 'simplistic' and 'simple'; between 'complicated' and 'complex'. 

'Simplistic' suggests flimsy, lacking depth, lacking rigour. 

'Simple' suggests something robust, solid, elegant.

'Complicated' is illogical, messy, chaotic, stuttering.

'Complex' is majestic, organised, intelligent.

Simplistic makes things complicated; simple requires an understanding of complex.

A good example of this is when people thought the sun went round the earth. For this simplistic explanation of reality to work, they needed very complicated, fiddly models. Eventually science caught up with the wisdom which showed that actually the earth goes round the sun. The reality was complex, but the explanation and the models that explain it are simple. 

So simple is possible – it just takes work. 

I used to work in brand consulting, where elegant simplicity was highly prized. There was a much-respected 'elder strategist' on our team who used to work magic for clients. He would sit in meetings, not saying a word, doodling on his notepad. The meeting would typically cover all sorts of complex dynamics, with various people in the room offering their simplistic, complicating solutions. At the end of the meeting we would turn to the elder, and he would offer a single, simple, perfect phrase. The room would melt, the client would pay handsomely. 

The doodling was his way of understanding the complexity, swerving the simplistic answers that made things complicated to instead arrive at simple answers that delighted.

Delight is often a reliable indicator of simplicity. Simple resonates with some deep truth about our reality that we intuitively connect with. In branding we always knew when we had reached a simple solution for a client because it would bring a smile.

Developing something simple takes energy, it takes work. But once that work is done – say, the work of understanding a complex situation – simple is satisfying because it demands less energy. Our brains are saying 'good job' to simple because it makes life easier. 

But our brains are vulnerable. Simplistic things can have that effect too, especially if we don't understand the complexity they are failing to represent.

Were the elder strategist's suggestions really simple? 

They seemed simple in the limited context of that client's brief. But those briefs typically didn't understand how our economic system is ravaging the living world. Once that is understood, articulating a snappy purpose or slogan for a corporation, one which encourages them (unintentionally, perhaps) to keep destroying the living world, will lead to complications. 

A company slogan that doesn't acknowledge the damage it is causing is simplistic.

Some people use the word 'truth-y' to describe the feeling of a simplistic explanation. We are particularly susceptible to truth-y things when we're stressed, exhausted, overwhelmed, under pressure, or oppressed. In that state, we'll take whatever relief we can get. Struggling in the dark, we’ll welcome any light, even if it's artificial.

So if someone's living standards are falling, they are vulnerable to believing a politician who tells them it's "because migrants", showing them a picture of crowded boats. Perhaps this person has been worked to the bone today. Perhaps they've only eaten nutritionally empty processed food today. Perhaps they haven't eaten at all. They don't have time or energy to understand the complexity of our political economy, to be able to see the simple explanation – “plutocrats are robbing you blind”. 

Whatever I write here runs the risk of being simplistic. I am trying to understand as much complexity as possible, to arrive at energy-saving, delightful, elegant ‘simple’. To find instructive truth in a world awash in truth-y deception.

But I only have a human brain, it is limited, and vulnerable. 

Sometimes I will bump into things in the dark.

Please let me know if I do.

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I'm afraid of doing this, of putting thoughts into words and words onto pages.

There are two sides to this fear.

The first is personal – fear of failure, fear of success, fear of upsetting people because I want to please and be liked – fear that I'll get it wrong in a way that will hurt me. Perhaps you share this fear.

You might say that I should overcome this fear – put this fear 'in my back pocket' – and maybe this is proof of me doing just that.

But there is the other side of this fear...

I'm afraid that what I'm writing will be wrong in a way that might hurt others, that this is unavoidable, and that it's therefore better to just keep listening and talking.

Let me explain that a bit:

I heard a story recently of an indigenous elder who was being interviewed by a man from the USA about solutions to climate change. The elder was sharing wisdom that resonated strongly with the American. So strongly that the American wanted to take that wisdom and share it, to solve the problems he was facing. So he asked the elder where this wisdom was written down, to which the elder, bemused, replied "Oh I never write anything down – it would be wrong".

Writing it down would be wrong. 

What did he mean by this? A couple of things, it seems:

1. Written words cannot be accurate because words are too limited a vehicle for describing the full breadth and depth of complex reality; a reality that is dynamic and nonlinear, where words on a page are fixed and linear. Better to keep the attempt to navigate that reality ‘alive’ collectively, in relationship, so that it can stay responsive, adaptive and emergent – accurate in the moment, or as accurate as possible.

2. The wisdom the elder carries is not 'theirs', it is ancestral intelligence that has been evolving and emerging for thousands of years; so they are in no position to put their pen and name to it. To 'claim' it and 'capture' it like this would diminish it, undermine it, harm it, cheapen it, and dishonour the generations who enriched it. It would be like removing key ingredients from a broth.

How does this resonate with you?

I hear a warning that writing things down can lead to harm because when things get 'stuck' they become unwell. The universe is always moving, always changing, always emerging and flowing; when we get in the way of that, it hurts. Many of us in Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (W.E.I.R.D) cultures mistakenly believe that we can control this moving energy, that we can fix it in place. This hurts us, and many others.

You might say that writing is an expression of this delusion – capturing wisdom in words to control it and fix it in place on the page. Capturing it harms the wisdom by diminishing it, and harms the reader by stopping that wisdom being responsive, accurate, as though it were some final product, rather than a temporary window on something that is continuing to emerge. Therefore writing to convey wisdom is harmful and we shouldn't do it.

But you might also say that, given the right conditions, words on a page can be like pollen on a flower – not stuck, but held temporarily, waiting to be picked up and moved about in service of flourishing. The words on our pages might not be moving, but the words in and between our minds might. 

The question is whether we are in those 'right conditions' now...

Which leads me to the elder's second point, and the worry that a ‘modern’ culture of building personal brands, incentivised to accumulate attention, accolades and wealth, cannot possibly be the ‘right’ conditions. In this culture, rather than pollen on a flower, words are honey in a jar waiting to be consumed or stored away. 

A culture of capture and control, seeking individual gain, cannot support ‘live’ collective wisdom. Pollen is moving, honey is stuck.

And yet here I am, writing...why?

One simple answer is: because my friends asked me to. I have the privilege of speaking regularly with fascinating, caring, thoughtful people. Many of these people have encouraged me to record the things that I say in our conversations, which they find interesting or helpful. 

These are not 'my things', they emerge in the moment, blooming from the rich soil of our conversation. But perhaps ‘writing them up’ might aid our emerging understanding, as a mechanism for processing – ‘writing as thinking’ – and also for discharging, for 'putting down' ideas as a way to declutter and create space for clarity. 

Are my friends like the American, asking for something living to be captured in a way that might harm it? Or would writing down our emerging thoughts help them bloom?

For now, to honour those relationships, I am keen to explore the potential for blooming.

The question that remains is whether any writing I do can be generative for anyone else outside of those relationships. 

An obvious question then: so much of what emerges in conversation is also fed by all the words that I (and my conversation friends) have read over the years. Words stuck on pages from writers who we love, respect, admire – most of whom we are not in conversation with. Are those writers’ words wrong? 

Does the potential for the writing to contribute to a blooming collective intelligence outweigh the risk of harm posed by the form and the culture?

I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know how much to heed this second side of my fear. Perhaps it is all just an expression of the first side I mentioned. Perhaps I am worrying about all of this so that you won't judge what I write. Perhaps I am saying all of this so that you will like me.

I don't know yet, so my writing comes with a health warning: anything you read is probably wrong. 

But it also comes with a promise: I will always write in service to life and relationship, so that my friends and I can try to keep wisdom ‘alive’ – to keep the meaning moving, the pollen flowing, and the broth richly brewed.

As another Indigenous Elder put it: ‘let us continue to continue’.

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This piece has been published in a reader from Beyond Storytelling: Hear & Now, alongside pieces from Alma Quiroga, Rebecca Solnit, Marianne Schapmanns, Ielde Vermeir, Jeffer London et al.