Democracy and Supranational Organizations

Speaker A Wilfred Brown was interested in constitutional matters. He actually joined the Constitutional Party, he sat for Parliament and he became a politician. But he was a politician long before. From his teens, he was interested in what he saw as social injustice and how unemployment hit the workers in Glasgow on the Clydeside. He saw that when he was a teenager, he was a public school boy. He had quite a nice life, so he went along to nice schools. Public school in the UK means private school. We have special language for it. It's in the name, right? For those of you who are with Warren, it's in the name. It's a public school. So he had a good life. He saw that other people didn't, and he worried about constitutional matters. And the Works Council, with all the managers, et cetera, was his determination to create a constitutional arrangement so that his workers could deal with what today we would call the asymmetrical power structure between the owners and the workers. So he built it in. Now, my interest is in carrying that kind of philosophy forward and using some of the ideas that come from this and other ideas, but some of them from this for other sectors. In a few years time, in 2015, it will be the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. And I happened because I was at Brunell to be on the campus at Runnymead, because we owned the campus there. And I thought, why are we designing kettles at Runnymead? There's a bigger picture here. And so I got into my head this idea of a Magna Carta Institute. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about why I think that way. And the obvious bit is on the slide here. The world's complicated, it's complex, it's messy, and it's getting worse. And quite apart from the political dynamics of that, some of the impacts of our economic efforts might be coming home to give us a bigger set of problems. The second and third order problems of being economically successful are that you become economically complicated. And the economic complications include things like getting rid of the waste, environmental things, global warming, et cetera. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing. It's growing in Toronto, it's growing in London, it's growing between Addis Ababa and everywhere else. So there's a big messiness going on. The difference is that largely in the past, the poor people didn't really know about it, or if they did, they had some sort of reasonable explanation for why that was okay, because actually, this person was in a higher caste than me, or they were lord, or there was some feudal arrangement which made that okay. It was an acceptable thing. And we've seen how nearly all the world religions structured belief systems, and I happen to believe in some of these religions. So structured belief systems which actually say you're in your place in society, it's a good thing for you to be happy where you are, be contented, lose your expectation. So there's a big history of acceptance of that. Not anymore, there isn't. Nowadays, people can see very rapidly these differences. And you know what? They're unhappy. And they're unhappy in big numbers. And if you, for example, just look at China, at the number of agrarian workers who want to go to be part of the industrial wealth in China, last commentary I heard, 350,000,000 workers. What's? The population of America. 350,000,000. Are all the population of America workers? No, because there's people who don't work, there's children, there's all sorts of folk, there's pensioners. These are just the workers who are moving now. Africa much more. So you know the narrative, you know the picture. I don't need to write it anymore. The poor people know about it. And of course, as we help them with our Western technologies, let's send them the iPhone, because I've actually run events for well, I won't tell you who for, but for big players in the telecommunications industry where we've spoken about the implications of technology and seamless mobility on society worldwide and particularly on the emerging countries. And to do these consultations, we get people from all across society so that we can have a sort of depth consultation. And while one group is talking about the wonder of an Indian farmer being able in his mobile phone to get the latest data on weather and what's going to happen and all the good news and so on, there's another group saying, yeah, but actually, and this is not a mistake when I say this, 69% of the wealth created on the internet is through pornography, and mobile phones do the same. So to all of these places where they do not have access to the best of our Western technologies, they're going to get access to the whole of our Western technologies. And who knows what the consequences of all that are. So there's messiness out there and it's going to matter more and more. And it's going to matter because some of the rich people are getting worried about it. Because if you want to stay rich, you better start dealing with the tension. And some of the poor people want to do about it because they have passion and anger about the injustice. So there's a bunch of stuff going on and I don't hope there's nothing up there that's particularly a surprise to anybody. So let's talk about democracy for a minute. Because most of us live in countries I think there may be one or two exceptions here, but most of us live in countries where democracy is kind of the deal and we've had it for a wee while. But actually, it comes in many forms because Canadian democracy and American democracy and British democracy just to take three or French democracy, they're dramatically different. And they're created from the culture and experience and history of where they come from. And they may have been very relevant to some time a long time ago. They may not be as relevant now. So there's a dynamic thing about forms and structures of democracy and actually there's two things about democracy that are important. People generally think democracy is about voting. Well, probably politically it's more important to recognize that democracy first of all is a principle for removing leaders within the law. You don't have to take off their head. There's another way to do it and that's important for civil society. And then there's another thing which is about there's a structure of process by which you have an ability to point the leader. And I say here citizens have some ability. I mean for example, Gordon Brown has just become the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Did the citizens make him the prime minister of the United Kingdom? Does anybody know the answer to that? No. They were never asked who made them the boss. The Labour Party made him the boss. And I guess this will be the same in the watching on TV here the American debates going on now for their is it the primaries, they call it, where they're going around. And actually the news just now is who's got the most money? That's actually what's on television news. Somebody's just raised an extra $7 million this morning. So that goes in the news because we know that buying something with large dollars is more likely to make you a president or at least win the primary in this case. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in there and it's all very different. Why am I interested in this when we're here to talk about levels? Because is this managerial hierarchy at work? Well, let's look at who appoints the leaders. Sometimes it's the citizens, sometimes it's a direct election and this could be a community association or a government or parliament. Sometimes it's the citizens, sometimes it's an elite group. Sometimes it's a mixture of these two. Who is attractive to each of these two groups? Who is attractive to an elite group and who's attractive to the citizens? Is it in the language of us who live in the ro world, the neat level above us, where the language is clear, it's coherent, we understand it, they're able to contextualize it in ways that suit us and therefore things are coherent. Or is it what I call the harmonic, the quintave notion that the level one worker, for example is always the first to know when level five is getting it wrong. They can tell you long before the vice presidents know. The vice presidents are having all their conversations. The level one workers know right in here and in their daily life this is wrong. They may not know exactly why. They don't actually often need to know why, although sometimes they do. So we've got this scenario where somehow this quintive, this harmonic seems to have validity in how people perceive things about themselves. So we've got two levels of understanding as I see it. We have the direct understanding of an immediate level above for the person who makes things coherent for us. But we also have this harmonic. It's a C in the guitar string here, it's a C in the guitar string there, but it's a different C because you've just moved the string. But you know what? Still a C, and you can hear it. Now, you could argue we're polyphonic, so it's probably not the best argument to make. But in this whole notion, there is this scenario where level one, people using a Scottish concept, and let me tell you about a famous Scottish concept, a Scottish concept called common sense. Right? Why am I claiming it to be Scottish? Because the phrase common sense was written about and developed by a philosopher called Thomas Reed, who was from Aberdeen, and he was a philosopher in, I think, Edinburgh University. It might have been Glasgow, I can't remember exactly. And he wrote about common sense in the sense that when a leader talks about how the world is to be or makes some general statement, the common people can hear the sense of it. It's not common sense in the sense of using your mouse, using your street cred, using your intuitive ability to make a good decision. It's the ability of the people to hear wisdom when expressed up here. And all of my experience, and I've been looking at this now for about 20 years, that works between one and five, and it works between two and six, all right? Who's operating at level six? And they talk to people who are in level two about what we're doing overseas, why we're doing it, how it's working. They follow it, they understand it, because they live with the same boundary conditions. The level two people work by putting boundary conditions on the behavior of people who work for them, standards and boundaries. And they understand the need for the organization to be boundary conditions above. So here's this interesting thing, then. So if you're going to have a country, take a Scandinavian country, I'm just looking at Rolf here. What do you think mean, if we were to guess at it, do you think the level of sophistication of the typical voter in Scandinavia is the same as the level of sophistication of the typical voter in Chad? It's not, is. It just isn't. There's education, there's history, there's all kinds of things. There's also the activity of the voting population that when people lose touch with what's going on with politics, they withdraw their vote, they don't participate. And in the UK and Liverpool, which has done other things apart from the Beatles, but one of the things it's done is it has destroyed any involvement of voters, because nobody turns up for elections in Liverpool. So people at one end of the spectrum are withdrawing and are not active in the political process. And on the other end of the thing, there's older people as well who are also participating in voting. So if there are older people, let's say I'll just be in general when I say this. Let's say people in the population are largely oneish, getting to two over the life or the margins of two in terms of the global population. Well, depends on which part of your population is voting and physically active, what kind of policies you can pass. So I'm giving you this as a hypothesis and I'd like us to argue about it sometime, but obviously not today. So there's two things. The citizens probably using common sense, probably looking to the quinte, probably listening to whether or not this story, this narrative, this set of mythologies that the politician has offered, works in their life and makes sense. Is it coherent? Does it fit? Are they emphasizing what I want? Or is it an elite group who are choosing and they want somebody who's a notch above them to talk sense and do what they want to do? Am I doing for time last few minutes. So what kind of democracy do we need? Well, my interest in the Magna Carta is largely about this, because all over the world, in emerging nations and in mature nations where democracy is in some kind of state of collapse, we need to think about how this is going to happen. So if the required level of development in society is to shift society from level one to level two, and I'm using these concepts very crudely, right? Forgive me, I'm kind of prostituting the language a bit here, but if society actually needs to get systems built a bit better at level two, good tribal systems really working well, do you think development is a big help to them? Sorry, democracy is a big help to mean do you really think democracy in Iraq is going to make a big difference? I've had people say to me, can't understand what the problem is in Iraq. They've got the vote. Well, actually, you need another bunch of stuff apart from the vote. You need education, you need hospitals, you need a whole bunch of things that actually fit together coherently in some sense, and then sophisticated systems above that, and then eventually emerging things, and eventually something that might be like a real democratic phase. And if the needs are relatively balanced, perhaps even at two and three and four, then we could expect the people to hear what is common. But if the activities are beyond the boundaries of the voters, so they've been asked to look at supranational levels. Let me give you an example. France has just had 50 years of peace for the first time in its history, probably ever since the Second World War, largely because of the creation of the European Community and all these other things. And although we all laugh at the bits and pieces and the silly bureaucracy and all the rest of it. The reality is Europe has been stitched together politically at a level which is above the nation in a way which has led many millions of us to be alive who otherwise wouldn't. So when the French are asked to review the new constitution got a new constitution, we've all been working on it. Let's have a look at it. Wait a minute. This isn't at the common sense level. This is something else. This is somewhere up there where I can't hear the common sense. I can only listen to the newspaper propaganda about bureaucracy and silliness and too many people in Brussels and places that things that go to three different centers. So I don't hear it as common sense. So what do they do? They voted it out. So we've got a bunch of stuff there which I think we have the opportunity as a group of global citizens to start to influence the way people think by looking at some of these level things. Now, if we get beyond a bit sorry, if I just go on to the next bit. There are many kinds of supranational organizations, and some of you heard me talk about this recently and when I was talking about human resources, but essentially there's all kinds of different kinds of supranational organizations. UNESCO, George Weber used to be the head of the you know, George who's on our board internationally, there's a World Health Organization, you can name them NATO, United Nations, blah, blah, blah. Are they all the same? No, they're not. And we are some of the people who can help those folk understand what it is that they actually do, what the structure is, how they think, what the modeling could be, and some of the things which they currently find difficult could be sorted. Now, my interest is in doing it partly politically, at least partly in terms of developmental economies, but there's no reason why we can't just be doing it in terms of our own organizations. Just seems to me we've got a role to play.