“The Politics of Politics is Politics.”
I just came up with that quote preparing for this episode, obviously riffing off the notorious quote “The business of business is business.”, from Milton Fridman, the godfather of our current neoliberal economic paradigm gone haywire.
The question then is rather, does it need to be what it is today?
The current model of institutionalized representative parliamentary democracy is broken. Voting cycles prevent politicians from truly thinking and acting for the long term. Party politics aggravate the many existing divides in our societies. There has been a class emerging of professional politicians which all too often do not represent the electorate. And political parties as institutions themselves are eroding as they are highly biased towards the older generations in power, creating multiple gridlock effects for those that will have to live with the world we hand over in the next decades.
Yet, what could be a new way to imagine politics?
In this episode we are diving deep into the weeds of Citizen Action Networks (CAN). We reflect how much of the inner worlds we all inhabit, from the trauma we hold, to the memetic center of gravities that steer our perception of reality, to the culture we need to nourish, for a “Politics of Waking Up”.
-
How can we create a CAN of CANs?
-
How can we harness soft power vs. hard power in the digital age?
-
What is already here, a reference to the Indonesian “Ada”, which literally means “there is”. So, everytime you are searching for something or want to manifest something, actually, it is already here.
Indra Adnan
For over twenty years, Indra Adnan has been writing, consulting, network-building and event-organising on the themes of future politics, conflict transformation, the role of the arts and integral thinking.
She is Founder and Co-initiator, together with Pat Kane, of The Alternative UK political platform, which answers the question: if politics is broken, what’s the alternative?
The Alternative UK publishes The Daily Alternative blog, and runs community collaboratories around the UK, building Citizen Action Networks (CANs) to reconnect people to cosmo-local eco-systems of solutions available. Central to the vision of an Alternative politics is the interdependency of the complex individual, the community and the planet: I, We, World.
Indra has been writing consistently about soft power, public diplomacy and the power of attraction and relationship in international relations for over a decade, in major UK and US publications.
Indra is concurrently a psycho-social therapist, founder of the Soft Power Network, and a writer and events producer. She has consulted to the World Economic Forum, Indian, Finnish and Danish governments, NATO, the Scottish Executive and the Institute of Contemporary Arts amongst others. Indra is currently Co-Lead in Bounce Beyond, a social enterprise network doing transformative work to cohere and connect the next global economies.
