INTRODUCTION: THE SHEER CLIFF FACE

Some stories from the young twenty-first century:

When the H1N1 “swine flu” virus struck Mexico in early 2009, it took only hours and days to spread to every continent in the world except unpopulated Antarctica. Authorities struggled to contain the spread of the disease. Desperate to prevent the import of infection, some governments resorted to aiming remote thermometers at arriving air passengers to measure their body temperature. The World Health Organization, responsible for global coordination of the fight against disease, admitted some months after the first outbreak that it had been unable to keep up with the vast flow of data from national health bodies. The virus, it later appeared, was spreading out of control.

One Sunday that same year, a preacher from a Sikh sect was attacked during a service in Vienna, Austria. Sant Rama Nand was set upon by six men armed with knives and a pistol and died early the next day. Within a few hours, widespread riots had broken out across the Punjab, where the preacher’s sect was based. By nightfall—some six hours after Sant Rama Nand had died—several people had been killed in turmoil that had convulsed Punjabi towns and cities. Thousands of Sikhs took to the streets, clashing with police and setting fire to buildings and vehicles. Major highways were blocked by bonfires of tires and sticks. Trains were attacked in several places. The authorities had little or no warning of the outbreak.

One afternoon in 2010, it took less than thirty minutes for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall nearly a thousand points—the biggest one-day points decline in the Dow’s history. It took five months for regulators to explain what happened. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission report, the rapid plunge was triggered by a poorly executed sale by one mutual fund company. The firm started to sell $4.1 billion of futures contracts through an algorithmic trade, mistakenly taking account only of volume, not time or price. Buyers, including “high-frequency” traders who make rapid high-volume purchases and sales to exploit tiny price margins in a dynamic market, purchased the contracts. As sales of the contracts accelerated, the seller’s algorithm responded to the increase in volume by unloading the contracts faster, pushing prices down further. The liquidity crunch then spread to the equity market. Many traders withdrew from the market. Some reverted to manual systems but could not keep up with the spike in volume. As the market dived, shares in some household name companies were sold for as little as a cent. The SEC’s report was widely criticized for offering no effective prescription on how to prevent such disruption in future.[1]

In the summer of 2008, food prices increased dramatically across the globe thanks, it seems, to a sudden surge in oil prices, although the causes of the spike are not fully understood. One factor may have been the introduction of subsidies for ethanol production in the U.S. Congress. Another possibility, speculation. The rocketing prices caused riots and political tension in Cairo and Indonesia and many other countries and reinforced an already emerging trend that some have called a “food crunch” of static global supply and rising demand.[2] The prices of commodities such as rice and wheat jumped to record highs, triggering food riots from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh and Cameroon and prompting UN appeals for food aid for more than thirty countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

In response to this phenomenon, companies and in some cases governments in money-rich but “food-poor” countries, like South Korea and Saudi Arabia, began to buy up land and agricultural rights in money-poor but land-rich countries. The Saudi Star company plans to spend up to $2 billion in the next few years acquiring and developing 500,000 hectares of land in Ethiopia, one of the poorest—and hungriest—in the world.[3] Up to fifty million hectares of land—an area more than double the size of Britain—has been bought in the last few years or is under negotiation by governments and wealthy investors, often enjoying state subsidies. The South Korean company Daewoo bought the rights to as much as half of Madagascar’s available agricultural land. This deal in turn helped trigger a coup against the Malagasy government that signed the deal. This coup produced political instability in Madagascar that continues to the time of this writing.

Earlier in the century, an Egyptian architecture student living in Hamburg was horrified by reports of Russia’s brutal campaign against separatists, mostly Muslim, in Chechnya in the Southern Caucasus, a war whose atrocities were scarcely reported in the information-overloaded citadels of the West. The Chechnya war confirmed his view of the global oppression of Muslims. Mohamed Atta joined a local mosque where, it was later learned, he was introduced to the concept of jihad, a personal struggle for liberation.

Atta made his way to Pakistan, to join a terrorist network called “The Base,” or Al Qaeda, which had been founded—and funded—by a middle-aged man who himself had been radicalized by the Soviet Union’s occupation of Muslim Afghanistan—as well as America’s military domination of his home country, Saudi Arabia. In the Afghan mujahideen victory over the Soviet occupation forces, Osama bin Laden found his inspiration to seek a global jihad. Mohamed Atta was to become the pilot of the American Airlines Boeing 767 which cannoned into the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. Walking to work that dread morning, I heard his aircraft fly overhead.

The singular act of the 9/11 attacks helped trigger the allied invasions of two countries, and further massive, complex and unforeseeable change. The attacks were brilliantly anatomized in the U.S. Congress 9/11 Commission Report, which took over eight hundred pages to describe the antecedents and chronology of this one single, if remarkable, event—and that was concise.

More recently, the defaults of a few subprime mortgage holders concentrated in just three American states triggered in a very short space of time a global economic meltdown that—among many, many other things—brought down several long-established banks in the United States and necessitated a $700 billion bailout of other banks. When confidence in the ability of U.S. banks to meet their obligations collapsed, rapid contraction of credit was contagious across the globe, destroying in quick time both overleveraged banks, and the deposits of their customers. Banks in Iceland fell overnight, eliminating at a stroke the savings of depositors in the UK. The ramifications of that event continue to delay Iceland’s entry into the European Union, while in Britain the credit crunch, among other factors, has contributed to the most severe austerity measures and government spending cuts in many decades, including a 70 percent cut to higher education budgets. In Hong Kong, thousands of small investors and pensioners suddenly lost their Lehman “mini-bonds,” worth billions of dollars, when Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, fell in the U.S.[4]

The origins of the “credit crunch” were manifold and are debated still. Greedy lending by banks, unwise borrowing by homebuyers, loosening legislation from government, enacted with the worthy intention of enabling broader home ownership: perhaps all of them played a part. But some have suggested a more deep-seated cause—the growing inequality in America between the rich and everyone else, which drove the income-stagnant middle classes to borrow ever more to maintain their living standards amid rising costs.

Another intriguing factor has been barely noted. The statistical models used by the banks to assess the risks of bundled mortgages were out of date: Not only did they underestimate the volume and riskiness of the increasingly popular subprime mortgages, the banks’ models also underestimated interconnectedness within the housing and mortgage markets, regionally and nationally. The preponderance of the “no money down” high debt-to-deposit subprime mortgages meant that only a small dip in the economy made huge numbers of mortgages suddenly unaffordable, and the buyers defaulted. The banks had underestimated the degree to which one thing would lead quickly to many others. They underestimated complexity.

Whatever the cause, no government was ready for the crash, which came almost without warning. Then President George W. Bush said later that he had been “blindsided” by the crisis, stating that he “assumed any major credit troubles would have been flagged by the regulators or credit agencies.”[5] The cascading and multiple effects of the “credit crunch,” many of which have yet to be felt, included the loss of tens of millions of jobs across the globe, and an immeasurable but nonetheless notable shift of power from West to East, as the U.S. relied ever more heavily upon China to buy up almost a trillion dollars’ worth of American government debt to finance the government bailout.

The tortured, twisting paths of cause to effect in these stories of the twenty-first century are discernible only in retrospect by separating out these threads from the confusing rat’s nest of simultaneous events—itself a somewhat artificial and falsifying exercise. But these stories are not extraordinary. They are typical of a vastly interconnected age, where billions and billions of people are interacting constantly, a wholly unprecedented phenomenon which we are only beginning to understand. These events were not predictable by most conventional theories of politics or economics.

Some may see chaos in these events, or purely random cause and effect. These events do not suggest the structured order of past experience—of units, be they states or individuals, behaving according to established theories of international relations or neoclassical economics, predictable for the most part, and comprehensible within our existing models. But neither are they chaos, a random, meaningless mess. They are something else. This is a new dispensation—complexity—requiring new tools: the science of complex systems. Pioneers in many fields are using techniques like agent-based modeling and network analysis to begin to offer powerful new insights into this multiplying complexity.

But this new world requires something else beyond new tools of interpretation. This world is defying the ability of existing structures and institutions to understand and arbitrate events effectively. Even senior government officials confess the decline of state power:” We are in a world where governments, as a whole, have less power than they once did,” a senior U.S. State Department official recently said, sensibly concluding, “Let’s take the world as we now see it.”[6] Confidential briefing papers prepared for the UN Secretary-General noted the declining importance not only of the UN itself, but also of governments in managing the world’s most pressing political, economic and environmental problems, observing cheerily that “Our planet’s ability to sustain life, as we know it, is under enormous strain.” [7] As Parag Khanna has commented:

Globalization is… diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists. This force of entropy will not be reversed for decades—if not for centuries.[8]

Timothy Garton Ash has called this world “not a new world order but a new world disorder. An unstable kaleidoscope world—fractured, overheated, germinating future conflicts.”[9] Governments failed to predict the credit crunch, as they did 9/11. Their blunt methods to manage both economic volatility and terrorism—as well as other global problems—are insufficient, and sometimes counterproductive.

Politicians argue that only if they are in power will decisions be the right ones, and thus we must suffer tedious rounds of facile political argument over enduring and deep-seated problems, when closer analysis of these problems leads to the more disturbing conclusion that no politician and no government, however wise, however right, is able to solve them. Somehow we know this. Frustration with conventional politics is rising everywhere, depressing voter turnout and fueling popular anger. Politicians too can sense the mood, but are unable to offer any prescription except more of the same politics, perhaps spiced with a dangerous and hollow populism.

This new world requires something else beyond more promises, something beyond new theories of interpretation, something that might, just might, make us at last feel that the tools might fit the job. This new world requires a new politics.

Climate change, terrorism, ceaseless wars in places that defy understanding or resolution and where victory or defeat both seem far away, a perpetual economic volatility.[159] These are now already familiar problems of this young and turbulent century. They are easy problems to define: borderless, a product of the new “globalized” world. But at the same time they seem intractable: There seems very little that any individual can do about them.

Taking their allotted role, instead governments, and associations of governments—the UN, the EU, international conferences in Copenhagen or Doha—claim that they have these problems in hand. Every day witnesses a summit, a statement or a resolution claiming to address these worrying ills. It is a never-ending video-feed of activity, tedious to watch in detail, but nonetheless reassuring in its unceasing activity and torrent of verbiage—at least, that is the intention.

“Trust us,” the statements say, “we have these problems under control.” But the evidence suggests otherwise, more and more insistently. Measure the outputs, not the promises made. Take two familiar problems.

At the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit, an intensive two-year international negotiation involving hundreds of delegates from almost every country, and thousands of pressure groups and lobbyists, produced at its end a short two-page document which, in hastily drafted and ungrammatical prose, offers only the most general statements of concern about the problem of climate change and no binding commitments to limit carbon emissions or to compensate those most affected by its manifold impacts.

Despite the global membership of the negotiation, encompassing every country in the world, the statement was hashed out in the last few hours of the conference in a closed room session involving China, Brazil, the U.S. and India. The needs of those most affected by climate change, like low-lying island states or Bangladesh which are already losing land to rising seas, were ignored.

The Copenhagen process had been formidably complicated, involving multiple “tracks” of negotiation in an attempt to address the many different aspects of the problem of climate change, including forests, technology transfer and protection of oceans as well as the “big picture” questions of carbon emissions and how to finance the costs of adapting to the effects of rising temperatures. Despite the thousands of hours spent negotiating these subsidiary issues over the previous two years, none of them was addressed in the final text.

In Cancún, a year later, delegates successfully agreed that their states wanted to limit global warming to 2°C—the “danger” level, beyond which, a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature warned, warming may increase beyond any control. The conference was widely touted as a “success,” as the Mexican hosts managed to secure agreement on key issues, including financing for climate adaptation in poorer countries. But there was no agreement on how climate change might be prevented—concrete agreement on the carbon emissions targets that scientists concur as necessary. As The Economist reported, Cancún was successful in rescuing the UN climate negotiations “process”; its value in rescuing the climate was less clear.[10]

Recently, the UN Environment Program reported that even if states fulfilled all of their commitments to reduce carbon emissions, including those made at Copenhagen, the world’s temperature would still most likely exceed the 2°C “danger” level. Outside of predictions and commitments, and in the real world of the Earth’s atmosphere, where success or failure is truly measured, the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere has continued to rise unabated. In 1992, at the time of the first international gathering of governments to address climate change,[160] the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was 354 parts per million by volume. By 2010, it was nearly 10 percent higher, an unprecedentedly rapid increase.

Meanwhile, in the global economy, the years that immediately followed the 2008–2009 credit crunch witnessed innumerable G8, G20, UN and Basel Committee discussions attempting to agree on new standards and rules to prevent a recurrence of the devastating crash. But within the confusing barrage of statements and commitments on new task forces, committees and “watchdogs,” nowhere to be found was the one simple measure—substantially higher capital/debt requirements for banks—that almost all disinterested analysts believe would actually prevent a crash happening again. And there was a reason for this absence.

While globalization intensifies apace, its rigors and stresses ever more evident, its rewards seem to accrue mostly to a minority: the top 1 percent of the population in the U.S. took home nearly 25 percent of all income, the highest percentage since 1928.[11] Middle-class incomes are declining, but living expenses are not. Meanwhile, for many of the poorest, life has actually gotten worse.

Across the globe, more than one billion still live on less than one dollar per day; two billion live on a pathetic two dollars per day. And while it is easy to ignore the miseries of life in Somalia and Bangladesh, it is more astonishing that in New York City one in five children is dependent on food stamps for survival, while Goldman Sachs bankers enjoy bonuses of some $700,000 each and hedge fund traders throw parties costing hundreds of thousands. In 2011, as leading bankers declared that the “years of apology” should be over,[12] one study showed that seven million of the poorest Britons had seen their living standards decline by a massive 10 percent over the previous decade.[13] In 2009, one in seven Americans was living in poverty, the highest proportion of the population for fifty years. In some parts of America, life expectancy is actually declining thanks to poverty, though health care spending per capita—averaged across the population—is higher here than anywhere on earth.

As the whole world, except North Korea, adopts the capitalist model, such inequality is rising everywhere, both between and within countries. In China, the introduction of free market economics has freed hundreds of millions from poverty. But at the same time it has created the worst inequality in Asia, apart from Nepal, until very recently an autocratic monarchy: Official estimates suggest 1 percent of Chinese households enjoy 40 to 60 percent of total household wealth.[14] In India, politicians obsess about headline GDP growth rates, and the richest build billion-dollar skyscraper houses, but hundreds of millions remain in abject poverty and malnourishment—the calorie intake of the poorest has remained stagnant for over a decade, and more than half of India’s children under five suffer stunting and poor brain development.[15] Even in the supposedly egalitarian Nordic countries, the gap between rich and poor is growing fast. Worldwide, a new trend has emerged, barely noticed: Beyond a certain level of development, those at the top benefit enormously, those at the bottom often actually do worse, while the income of the bulk of the population stays more or less stagnant.

It is little wonder, then, that this model is so confidently extolled as ideal by those who benefit from it. So often are the virtues of this system avowed that it has taken on the characteristics of a moral system, where anything done in the name of that system, however gross, is morally justified as part of the necessary mechanics of the market.

The future offers an unsettling vision of ever greater competition for markets and scarce resources. The ferocious contest of the global marketplace is like being chained to an accelerating treadmill, under constant pressure to cut costs and invent new products, trapped by a ceaseless desperation to attract customers who themselves are ever less satisfied, hopping from product to product (as surveys reveal) craving a satiation—a fulfillment—they can never find. As billions join the global labor force, no job is secure, no industry is stable, no profession may not one day face obsolescence.

While economic insecurity is on the rise, so too is a more insidious and equally permanent anxiety—political insecurity and violence. As U.S. officials with great candor admitted after 9/11, we are in a “Long War” with global terrorists, and it seems to be getting longer. The war with Al Qaeda is spreading across the world’s geography, as its affiliates metastasize. The invasion of Afghanistan whose rationale I delivered to the UN one winter morning,[161] wholly justified to remove the government brazenly hosting our attackers, has succeeded not only in perpetuating civil war in Afghanistan but has also triggered the spread of instability and extreme violence to the border areas and across Pakistan, where now every major city has seen repeated suicide attacks of horrific violence.

In the “homeland,” violent jihadists may be found not only among immigrants and visitors, but from the ranks of our own population: “Jihad Jane,” who was radicalized in her Philadelphia suburb; the U.S. Army doctor who killed thirteen and wounded thirty at Fort Hood. A third of all charged U.S. terror suspects are American citizens.[16] Contrary to the received wisdom that economic underdevelopment is the fount of terrorism, former CIA case officer Marc Sageman found in a study of 172 Al Qaeda terrorists that the majority were middle to upper class, well educated, married with children, and occupied professional or semiprofessional positions, often as engineers, architects, scientists and doctors. In Britain, suicide attackers who killed fifty-six and injured several hundred on the London Underground and busses on July 7, 2005, came not from Saudi Arabia but from Dewsbury and Leeds. The would-be murderers who tried to detonate a nail bomb in a London nightclub in 2007 included a highly trained and British-born National Health Service doctor.

Thanks to the spread of technology—which can be as simple as cell phones and fertilizer—and information on the Internet, it is now straightforward for small groups of extremists to kill large numbers. In Japan, police discovered that the Aum Shinrikyo sect had the capability to produce the deadly nerve gas sarin in aerosol form. Had they chosen to use this method, the fanatical group could have killed many hundreds. Instead, they chose to deploy the less toxic liquid form of the agent, but still killed scores and horribly injured many more.

In Oklahoma, Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh killed five hundred and injured thousands with a truck bomb assembled at a cost of less than $5,000. After mounting attempted attacks in 2010 to detonate package bombs on several airliners, the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda (AQAP) announced that “Operation Hemorrhage” was part of a new approach eschewing major attacks, and instead setting out to cause “death by a thousand cuts,” stating that “To bring down America we do not need to strike big,” and adding that the total bill for the parcel bomb operation was a mere $4,200, but that it “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. This is what we call leverage.”[17]

Some 700,000 to 800,000 light weapons are produced every year, adding to the vast stock of weapons already in circulation, as many weapons remain in use decades after their manufacture—Taliban fighters carry AK-47s produced in the 1960s or earlier.[18] Countries like Austria, Canada, the UK and U.S. join North Korea, China and Russia as the largest producers of these weapons, the primary means of conflict worldwide. The annual authorized trade in such weapons exceeds $6 billion a year.[19] The Small Arms Survey now reckons that globally there are nearly 900 million light weapons, some of ever greater sophistication: sniper rifles deadly at two miles’ range; man-portable missiles that can down airliners; mines that can sink cruise liners. In Mexico, drugs traffickers have used submarines and antitank missiles in their wars with each other and the authorities.

But it is not only the growing ubiquity of weapons and terrorism—what’s in the backpack of that man down the railroad car?—that threaten our sense of safety and well-being. In Britain, the millions of CCTV cameras broadcast their own message of our lack of trust in one another. Some cameras now bear loudspeakers to broadcast their correctional message to the “antisocial.” In some city centers, authorities deploy noise-making devices whose deterrent screech can be heard only by the young, like dogs or rats already designated as “troublemakers.” Police are beginning to deploy unmanned drones with high-resolution cameras to monitor car traffic and the population, as defense companies push for military technology to be adopted in policing. Some of the drones carry loudspeakers with which to relay instructions to the civilian populace.[20] It is reported that the London 2012 Olympics will be monitored by Royal Air Force “Reaper” unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), hitherto deployed in Afghanistan to attack insurgents.

Meanwhile, in the United States, nearly four thousand federal, state and local counterterrorism agencies monitor the population, while thirty thousand officials are employed solely to monitor telephone and other communications, creating, in the words of The Washington Post, “a new level of government scrutiny” of its citizens. Thousands of Americans are included in a vast database, including many who have never been accused of any wrongdoing.[21]

But the intrusiveness of such measures does little to lessen the evident tension in public spaces, nor deter random, almost casual violence. In 2008, Kevin Tripp had an argument with a stranger in a supermarket check-out queue in South London. The argument escalated. Tripp was punched to the ground, suffering serious head injuries. He died later in the hospital. In Baltimore in 2010, one man killed another with a chunk of concrete during an argument over a parking space.

Research data show that community life in Britain, and America, is deteriorating. Measuring the number of people in an area who are single, those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and those resident for less than a year, researchers found that all communities in Britain were “less rooted” than they were thirty years earlier.[22] Comparing data from a census taken in 1971, researchers at the University of Sheffield found substantially higher levels of “rootlessness” and “anomie” in contemporary communities. Commenting on this data, the research leader, Professor Daniel Dorling, said, “Even the weakest communities in 1971 were stronger than any community now.” Ninety-seven percent of communities studied had become more fragmented over the last three decades. “These trends may be linked to higher likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and therefore understand each others’ lives.”

In the U.S., over a similar period, the rate at which Americans invite people to their homes has declined by 45 percent. In his classic study Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reported indices of discohesion and social fragmentation rising across the board. For instance, membership of chapter-based organizations, where members attend regular meetings and participate in social activities like the Rotary Club, the Masons, the NAACP, Boy and Girl Scouts, etc., halved in the last fifty years. Others report that Americans are also—unsurprisingly—lonelier. Between 1985 and 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no close confidants tripled. Single-parent households are on the rise, and the U.S. Census estimates that 30 percent more Americans will live alone in 2010 than did so in 1980.[23]

As if these data were not dismal enough, it seems too that the very ground on which we stand is less firm than before. Mankind foolishly believed that nature, once conquered, would remain quiescent in our plans. Rising sea levels have already required the evacuation—forever—of several low-lying islands. In Australia, forest fires rage with a new and terrifying ferocity, consuming whole towns. Even the skeptical notice greater volatility in the weather—everything’s hotter and colder, and wetter and windier—than it used to be. This too is consistent with science’s predictions. This volatility feeds a deeper disconnection between man and his environment. For the first time ever, more people now dwell in cities than the countryside. The urban majority now barely encounter what their forebears took for granted: trees, fresh air, birdsong, silence. Lives are lived out in a frantic, noisy hecticness; fulfillment is distant, with peace and escape dreamed of, sometimes purchased, but all too rarely experienced.

This list is so depressing that together these problems offer a sheer and intimidating cliff face, upon which there appears no handhold, no purchase at all. The temptation is simply to switch off, tune out, escape.

And indeed advertising offers us a tantalizing vision of that escape, a ceaseless promise to leave the burdensome everyday and wander into sunlit uplands: “Go forth!” says one advert for jeans, with an evocative image of a young man shirtless in a field of waving grass. These messages claim not only to sell us jeans but to solve our all too obvious, if never to be admitted, existential crisis: That all this—the modern condition of prosperity, a sort of peace, a sort of freedom—is simply not enough. The yearning for more, for distraction, never quite goes away however much is purchased, however many holidays are taken.

This hunger is all but explicit in the advertising (Go forth! Find yourself! Choose freedom!), but can never be confessed in a culture where our arguments—capitalism, democracy—are supposed to have won, and provide a convincing, empirically justified answer to all objections, except the one we cannot admit to.

But in this existential crisis, the first fragile handhold upon the cliff face of intractable problems is revealed. The answer to both crises is, in fact, the same. And it is simple. It is embodied in one word: agency. Agency over events—the feeling of control—is a gross absence in the contemporary condition. Recapturing it is available through one simple mechanism: action. Action to reassert control over events in our lives. And this in a nutshell is the simple essence of the philosophy to be offered here. We lack control; we need to take it back.

The incredible and seismic changes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have forced dramatic and sometimes revolutionary changes in almost every realm of human activity—finance, technology, culture—save one, politics. In this most crucial forum, the institutions and habits acquired in different times have endured, even when their effectiveness is less and less evident. On the contrary, the evidence is accumulating that these inherited bodies and rules are less and less able to comprehend and arbitrate the forces now swirling around us.

Something else is desperately needed. That necessity has been articulated by many but none has offered a solution except more of the same, politics as usual: pathetic calls for more “political will” to address this or that problem; celebrity-endorsed “single issue” campaigns for the public to pressure their representatives to address one particular crisis over others; superficial online campaigns to address some deep and poisonous malaise, like starvation or child slavery. Some believe that technology alone will deliver the necessary revolution, but here too it is clear that technology’s effects are often as malign as benign, serving the dictatorial as much as the democratic. A more fundamental shift is needed.

One telltale sign is the increasing number of politicians who now promise to “change politics” itself. In 2008, it was Barack Obama; in Britain, it was the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010 which promised to change the very nature of the system. In America, the change-the-system sentiment is now expressed by the Tea Party movement, with its demand to “take back our government.” And just as surely, the Labor Party in Britain, now in opposition after thirteen years in government, will develop a new claim, that it too will “change the system” if only voters give them a chance. The pattern is a clear one. Politicians can smell the frustration, and must respond to it, but are surely doomed. With each electoral cycle, the disillusionment appears greater, data show that voters chop and change parties with greater frequency, while turnout falls steadily in all democracies, with only the occasional upward “blip,” like the sputtering of a dying fire.

This revolution is as profound as it is simple. Evidence and research are now suggesting that the most important agent of change is ourselves. At a stroke, the prevailing notion that the individual is impotent in the face of the world’s complex and manifold problems is turned on its head. Instead, the individual is revealed as a powerful motor of change, offering the prospect of immense consequences for politics and the world, and, no less, for themselves.

I once believed in the capability and rightness of enlightened government so fervently that I went to work for it. I was a British diplomat, in an institution and a system which was founded on a deep belief that state officials like me could understand and arbitrate the world effectively, for the benefit of the less informed masses. I no longer believe this. This disillusionment came not from ideological conversion, but experience.

In my work on many of the world’s most worrying problems, including climate change, terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (I was responsible for both issues for the UK at the United Nations), it became slowly clear to me that government was unable, by its very nature, to comprehend and manage these forces effectively. Why will become clear, but in short I realized, dimly and slowly, a profound and intrinsic deficit of governments: that they are required to take what is complex—reality—and turn it into simplistic pronouncements and policy, the better to convince the population that government has matters in hand. People in government are not bad or stupid, on the contrary; but the contract between people and government forces them to claim something which no sensible person should claim, that government—anyone!—can understand and predict the massive complexity of the contemporary world, and manage it on our behalf. Every politician must claim to the voters that they can interpret the world, and produce certain effects, just as the officials working for them must pretend that they can too. I know this because I did it.

I saw how in looking at places like the Middle East, and by extension the whole world, governments were forced to reduce hugely complicated and dynamic situations into simplistic models, us and them, security versus threat, just as they were required to project the manifold needs of their own diverse peoples into simple and artificially invented sets of “interests.” Such a process is inherently false, requiring governments—and officials like me—to create stories and policies that offer clear, straightforward and therefore often very simplistic solutions. Then, to justify these stories, their officials must seek out the facts to suit the policy, the very opposite of a more valid empirical method—where we observe the world, then respond accordingly. Governments have it the wrong way around.

I gladly took part in such processes, writing speeches and talking points, and arguing in vicious negotiation to claim that Saddam’s Iraq was a threat, that his regime’s overthrow would deliver stability and spread democracy across the Middle East. On Afghanistan, I wrote embassy telegrams from a Kabul freshly liberated from the Taliban, explaining how democracy “Afghan style” would bring peace and prosperity to the Afghan people, conveniently overlooking the reality that much of Afghanistan remained unliberated from the Taliban’s grip and that the democratic government we proclaimed was in fact largely our own creation, our own fantasy of what democracy should look like, rather than necessarily what the local people really wanted. After fifteen years as a diplomat, I was highly skilled in writing cables and reports and policy submissions that endlessly reaffirmed our version of events, often without the benefit of any knowledge from the ground at all. In five years working on Iraq, not once had I set foot in the country, yet at the UN. I was called Britain’s Iraq “expert.” I was not alone in such ignorance, nor in the arrogance that, despite it, government could declare with confidence what was happening or what might happen in such places. Only after much subsequent slow and sometimes painful reflection did I come to these broader conclusions about the intrinsic amorality, but also incapability, of government.

I watched dramatic forces at play in the world, and felt rising frustration at the seeming inability of government, or indeed anyone, to offer meaningful and plausible solutions. As political violence spread, and the credit crunch exploded, I watched desperate politicians, some of them friends, as they argued to pretend that they might understand, might control these forces—terrorism, the stresses of globalization, the deteriorating natural environment. I watched the growing angry chorus in public gatherings and on the Internet, demanding action, change, something, with ever more belligerent rhetoric, but never themselves offering solutions beyond a rejection of the current cohort of lousy politicians.

And I pondered change itself, how to react to this vastly complex world in a way that might work, that might provide the satisfaction of finding real traction upon the ghastly sheer cliff face of problems. And I realized that perhaps the worst deficit of government itself was this: In claiming to arbitrate the world’s problems, unintentionally it encourages our own inaction and detachment. And in that detachment, rage and frustration has fermented dangerously. In the disembodied anonymity of the Internet, or the vapid chatter of commentators and newsreaders, and in the ceaseless demand for government and politicians to act—do something!—I saw how our opinions have become yet more polarized, an alienation from each other exacerbated by the mobility and rootlessness of modern economies. The problem is always someone else’s, never ours, to solve.

And yet it is action—and only action—that changes things. Whether in the history of the battle for civil rights in America’s South or the Franco-Russian wars, or in the contemporary research of social scientists and network theorists, the same and ancient truth is repeated: It is the action of individuals which has the most effect on those around them, on their circumstances, and thus the whole world. Whether in Gandhi’s salt march to free India from colonial rule, or a group of men trying to stop muggings in their neighborhood in New York City, it is the expression of conviction through action that has the most powerful impact upon each other, our surroundings, and indeed our own well-being. The scale of the world’s difficulties—the sheer cliff face—and the magnitude of globalization produce a paralyzing sense of impotence and frustration. But in fact, a world that is more interconnected than ever before, where each person is only a few links away from anyone else, means that actions in our own microcosmos can have global consequences.

These stories and ideas will be explored in this book: facts, research and stories that together suggest a radical philosophy of how to create a better world, one that more closely reflects the current reality than the easy but dangerous assumption that we can leave it all to government to fix. This philosophy could fit under the broad school of thought known as “anarchism,” a term commonly associated with violence and nihilism—more what it is against, than what it is for. And mere opposition to government, authority and hierarchy is clearly insufficient as a solution. This book has a more positive vision, presented in detailed principles to guide action. It is not proposing a violent overthrow of government, but a much gentler revolution—in the way we think about the world, and how we—ourselves—might therefore respond to it. Changing our own approach is critical: embodying our political beliefs in every action. Changing the self may change the world. In all the haze and chatter, rediscover what you truly believe in, then act. And following that transformation, another necessary shift—negotiating directly with one another, rather than leaving it to distant institutions. In contrast to the paralyzes of modern legislatures, too often dominated by the interests of the powerful rather than the mass, collective decision making, whether in New Orleans or Brazil, has emphatically shown the benefits of shared debate and responsibility: respect for one another, for facts, but above all agreement upon better, fairer and more enduring solutions.

In a world where government influence is in inexorable decline, and other transnational forces assert themselves, some beneficent but some malign, there is little choice but to take on the burden of action ourselves. If we do not, others surely will, whether criminal mafias with worldwide reach, global terrorist movements or multinational companies and banks with no concern but their own profit. This book offers some simple pointers to what that action might comprise—conviction, action, consultation—with some inspiring stories of how these principles have worked before. But this is no historical survey; it is an attempt to look at the world as it actually is, not as we or governments might wish it to be, and design a plan of action to respond. It is above all a manifesto about how to act—method—not a prescription of what end-state or utopian system to seek. No book can offer solutions to every problem, though there are several suggestions here. But that how is the key, for, as we shall see, the method is the point—the means are the ends. For in that method, there are extraordinary prizes to be won—not only the accomplishment of the desired goal, but a greater sense of cooperation, respect and community with our fellow human beings, and a deeper sense of our own satisfaction and purpose, needs that are all but ignored in the current obsession with material well-being, status and celebrity. It is a humble and very practical manifesto, though its ideals are transcendent.

In the current crisis there are small but glimmering signals that point the way forward. These signals are but rarely noticed by those who defend the current order, but the lessons of this new philosophy are all around us, if we care to look. You won’t find this teaching in the academy, or in economists’ predictions or politicians’ speeches.