WEBVTT 1 00:00:02.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Welcome to how to Save Democracy. I'm Omezine. 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:06.000 And I'm John. 3 00:00:06.000 --> 00:01:23.000 We love democracy genuinely and wholeheartedly, but it's like a dysfunctional relationship. Democracy today is full of flaws. It's not by the people, for the people anymore. There are resentments and frustrations and anger and we can't go on like this. But we want to make this relationship work. It's important. It's valuable. Valuable. It's a long term thing and we need to have the tough conversations and that's what we are doing. But today I'm interviewing my friend and co host, John Alexander. I'm super happy to be doing this. I want to know more about you, even though I think I know a lot of stuff. But you are the founder of New Citizenship Project Project. You are the author of Citizens and you have been doing awesome jobs talking about democracy and innovation and collecting and telling stories about people who are giving us hope in this world. And before going there, I want to know more about the decade you spent in advertisement before coming to this world. What happened? Who were you when you were doing that job? 4 00:01:23.000 --> 00:03:13.000 Yeah, how did I get here? Yeah. So I came to the work of democratic innovation of democracy from a slightly unlikely source. But the story really begins. My first boss in the advertising industry described my job to me by saying, what you've got to remember is that the average consumer sees something like 3,000 commercial messages a day. And you've got to cut through that. You have to make yours the best. And I also used to be pretty keen on my sport and I was quite competitive, so I was like, make mine the best. But then over time I started to, quite quickly, actually, but then deeper and deeper go, what are we doing to ourselves when we're surrounded by messages that tell us we're consumers, actually, like whatever they're selling us, whatever the thing is for, the underlying idea is you're a consumer and. And you hear that thousands of times a day. And not to date myself, and I'm obviously very young, but that stat originally comes from 2003. So the latest estimates are anything up to 10,000 times a day for certain cohorts. That really set me off on this trip of asking, what are we doing to ourselves and what becomes impossible in that world? And I had a bit of a breakdown, actually. So the journey from working in advertising to working on democracy is not a smooth one. And I had to rebuild myself after that breakdown around a question, another question, which was, what would it look like to put the energy and creativity that currently goes into telling people they're consumers, into inviting them into their agency as citizens. 5 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:20.000 Do you remember what was the spark that led you to co founding the New Citizenship Project with Irini? 6 00:03:20.000 --> 00:04:28.000 So we used to work together in the advertising industry way back, and we went on very different journeys. Irene had actually, she'd had really quite a serious kind of personal trauma, actually. She lost the sight in one eye through an infection she originally contracted through a contact lens. But what she had done was she had started organizing among patients of this disease and finding agency together and creating communications that warned people about some of the dangers in relation to this disease and contact lens wear. And she had written academic papers and she became a patient leader. And we got back in touch, actually, because she read something I'd written about the importance of voting in a general election. And we started talking and realized. So at that time, I was developing this set of ideas around what I call stories of self in society as an academic project. I was doing a master's degree with a. With an intention to go and do a PhD and Irene, in true Irene fashion, grabbed me and was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You are not gonna go and study this for six years. You go and go do this. 7 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:30.000 Yeah, because you have three master's degree. 8 00:04:30.000 --> 00:04:55.000 Right, Right, Exactly. Enough already, dude. Stop geeking out and let's go do something. And because she'd been living it, right, she'd been living what it is to situation, which had removed all of her power, really, by working with others. And she was like, you're onto something, and it is potentially a transformative set of ideas. So let's go do something. 9 00:04:55.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Was it then that you had this concept of consumer story and citizen story? 10 00:05:02.000 --> 00:08:43.000 At that point, I had the notion of consumers and citizens, but I was developing the understanding of subjects. So where I am now and the framework of ideas that citizens. Underneath all of my work, including what I'm bringing to this podcast, I talk about the subject story, the consumer story, and the citizen story. The easiest way to introduce them is as a sort of historical shift. So end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th. I argue that we were in something like the subject story, as in subjects of the King. The right thing to do in that story is keep your head down, do as you're told, get what you're given on the basis that the God given few who run society know best. They'll lead us to the best outcomes. And across the world, that story held for a long time. And Britain, the colonial empire, was absolute leader of that but it fell apart. End of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, two world wars, and out of the other side, we more or less consciously, more or less deliberately created what I call the consumer story. And in the consumer story, the logic becomes, don't just keep your head down as you're told, actually pursue self interest, because self interest will add up to the collective interest. Both of these stories, all of these stories are ideas for how the best society results and what I believe we're living in now. Just as the subject story fell apart before, I think we're living in the collapse of the consumer story. You just can't solve the challenges of our time from within it, because it actually kind of created them. Like, you can't solve a crisis of loneliness and mental ill health from within a story that says we're independent, isolated individuals. You can't solve crises of inequality from within a story that says that everything needs to be a competition. You can't solve ecological crises from within a story that says we're separate from nature and that success is about material standards of living, because the story creates all of those crises. And what's happening, I think now, and for me, the reason behind this podcast is that as that collapse happens, the real danger is that the subject story is back, right? Like consumer story collapsing because it's failed. But what's replacing it is the return of the strongman leader and in some ways the consumer story and the subject story fusing. Like in America, this sort of weird thing where Queen Victoria might have appealed to God for her authority, but Trump and Musk are appealing to some sort of weird, perverse version of the market for theirs. And I think in that moment, you can't save democracy. You can't face these challenges from the same logic. We actually have to step into something else. And I think it's possible because I think it's happening everywhere. And it's what I call the citizen story. So the logic of the citizen story is actually, don't just keep your head down, do as you're told. Don't just pursue self interest, get involved, contribute your ideas, energy and resources and critically, like, reimagine and open up our institutions to tap into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone on the basis that actually all of us are smarter than any of us, that it's by tapping into the ideas and energy and resources of everyone. As I say, that is how we will face the challenges of our time and what I see all over the world. And like I say, for me, the motivation behind this Podcast is I see this happening. I see Taiwan crowdsourcing their Covid response and Mexico City crowdsourcing a constitution and Iceland doing the same. And I see Ireland resolving huge divisions, age old divisions and traumas through citizen assemblies. And Brazil participatory budgeting and legislation. I get so excited. 11 00:08:43.000 --> 00:09:48.000 Hold up for a second. So there is, I'm hearing two big ideas. The first idea is the story that we tell ourselves about who we are, right. And the second idea is this story is actually has been shaped and for centuries, millennia, one century. And depends I guess on the geographical context. But it gets us stuck on where on that context and not change at all. Right? So there is the story of being consumers. That is the one that is, that is predominantly in democracies right now. But I also see that the subject story is in lots of places in the world. Actually the majority of world population lives in hybrid regimes and dictatorship. So it's still ongoing. But you also see in all these places where there is the citizen story that is emerging, but it's still not the story that we tell each other about who we are right now. 12 00:09:48.000 --> 00:12:19.000 Right? This is the thing, like I have two kind of key beliefs about humanity. Two founding ideas for me. The first is that humans are citizens by nature. We are collaborative, creative, caring creatures that all of us have that. But the second is that we are storytelling and story dwelling creatures. And that we can't help but appeal to stories to inform who we collaborate with, what we care about, who we care about and what we create. And as you say, so much of the world for so long has been trapped in that subject logic. And only in the last 80 years that the consumer story gave us maybe a hint of something. It is freer than the subject story. In the subject story there is no freedom. You get what you're given in the consumer story. You choose between a fixed set of options and you can express your self interest. But the citizen story actually it's much deeper, much older. I've been spending an increasing amount of time working with indigenous folks in communities in New Zealand and Australia and in north and South America as well. And actually in those logics in those places, they immediately recognize what I'm talking about. When I talk about the citizen story, they're like oh yeah, of course. And it's such a like one. My favorite example was probably in New Zealand. I was giving this talk and this Maori lady came to me at the end and she was like. And I apologize to anyone listening from New Zealand because I probably won't get the pronunciation of this. Right. But you do know the concept of pup and a hole, right? And I was like, no. And she goes, well, look, it's the word that means the meeting place between the two hulls of an ocean going canoe. And she said the reason it's called that is basically when, if there's a storm and we like the canoes lose their way or whatever, we gather in that place and we hear from all the different expertise, the one who understands the currents, the one who understands the stars, the one who understands the creatures, and we pool that intelligence to decide what to do. And it was just like, this is so powerful. It's like this citizen story and there's so much of it, so many little things like that that I could share. The citizen story isn't a new creation. It's a remembering. And it's closer to the surface for some people than others. And also it's in all of us. 13 00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:53.000 I think it's powerful when you say it's remembering because how do you remember something that you forgot and you have no clue about? Right. Seems that it's common knowledge, for example, in Maori tradition and communities. I guess what you're trying to do is bring these stories that are still like being not only told, but practiced in other places to more global visibility. So we all kind of benefit from this knowledge. 14 00:12:53.000 --> 00:15:40.000 That's exactly it. And maybe the thing I would say is because it's remembering that doesn't make it easier to do in and of itself than do something new. But once we start, it means we have a natural tendency to it. I think it's a bit like, you know, that thing they always say about riding a bicycle once, you know, And I think it's in us, in our DNA. But that doesn't mean it's easy to start doing. But what's fascinating, I think is all across the world, when you find places where some kind of participatory thing opens up, a citizens assembly happens, a big crowdsourcing project, then more and more seems to follow. I was just coming across the other day in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Who knew? But there's just been a really fascinating, quite big digital democracy project with like 8,000 people and millions of online comments and ideas being shared in Bowling Green, Kentucky. And I was digging into it and it turned out they'd done a little version like five years ago. So you have this thing where there's a phrase. I love my friend Stephen Green, he talks about the idea that citizenship is a muscle you build, not a cup you empty. And when you start to use that muscle, you kind of like it and want to use it more and more. He founded this thing called Rockcore where basically the only way you can get a ticket to this big exclusive gig is you have to do four hours of volunteering, four hours of community action. And they find, and I won't, don't quote me on the statistics, but it's something like 90% of the young people who do the volunteering to go, they've never done volunteering before. They're doing it to get the gig ticket first time up, but then 90 odd percent of them go on to do more unrewarded. And Steven's thing is like that four hours is enough to get the muscle. And so the remembering happens pretty quick once we do it, but it sort of then comes back. And the reason for me for this podcast is like, there's so little trust in people. We talk a lot about whether people trust institutions and we know all the stats about declining trust. Ya, ya, ya. Boring. What not enough people talk about, I think is that institutions actually don't trust people and don't believe that kind of thing is possible. And that I think is. That's the real danger. Because if we don't break out of that, and I understand why it's hard to do when you see what goes on every day, when you see people voting for the F. Whatever, but actually when you give people the opportunity, when you create the conditions for people to contribute and participate meaningfully, we always do. 15 00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:52.000 What have you found was the hardest part of challenging the consumer story? Was there any type of resistance that you were not expecting or backlash? 16 00:15:52.000 --> 00:16:09.000 I think ultimately it's what I was just saying. It's like the lack of trust in people. It's like when you are in a position of power and influence in the consumer story, to get there, you have been conditioned to see people as lazy and selfish. 17 00:16:09.000 --> 00:16:15.000 And if you had real issues with people, I guess where you have life experience as tells you that people are. 18 00:16:15.000 --> 00:17:51.000 Not to be trusted, then it's very hard to. And so I think you see, I mean, take politicians who are at the heart of our conversations a lot. And I know you were a politician yourself. I understand that it's really difficult because we see people becoming angrier and angrier as democracy fails to deliver, actually. But the danger is that the response to that is to draw power further away from people. And when that happens and it's happening and it's happening, the only result that will ever really have is to make people still angrier. It becomes a vicious cycle. And look, I know it can sound very easy to say these things, but good friends of mine, I am in the same circles as Jo Cox, the British MP who was assassinated, who was murdered by the far right. And I understand that it's that to say into that space, trust in people can sound glib. But also in the research for my book Citizens, one of the most profound experiences and at the time I didn't really even know how to write about it. And I want to go there more was, was I went a little way into the QAnon conspiracy theory world to understand it. And what you find when you go into that world is the entry point into that world is you're needed here. Here's your first task, here's your first contribution. 19 00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:57.000 They value you see your contribution as relevant. 20 00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:06.000 Right. It's not that they want to do something for you or they think that you're in pursuit of your own self interest. They recruit you into a cause that's bigger than you. 21 00:18:06.000 --> 00:18:08.000 Yeah. So you have a purpose. 22 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:09.000 Right. 23 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:14.000 You find belonging as well. Like you belong to a bigger group who's doing something together. 24 00:18:14.000 --> 00:18:57.000 And when you think in that context about consumer democracy, about consumer politics, this idea that the thing to do is to appeal to people's self interest, to appeal to them for their votes on the basis of their self interest, you start to understand that what we're actually doing is saying to people, you're lazy and selfish. We know you are from the best intentions, but we're trapped in that story. This is what I mean about the consumer story. It's a logic that we're stuck in and is itself like pushing people into the arms actually of the subject story. 25 00:18:57.000 --> 00:19:00.000 And how was working on this idea changed you? 26 00:19:00.000 --> 00:21:00.000 I think very profoundly and mostly in very positive ways. Like I think what I feel I do for a living now is stare at, give my attention to the positive, the possible, the emerging. And I feel a deep joy in the work of going to places and communities and telling them stories of the possible. Part of my work is opening up institutions and that's what I think this podcast is really about. The the other part of my work is going because these things come together. My theory of change, as it were, is that we need to connect up and celebrate and platform all of the stories of community level power, people just getting together, whether the institutions recognize it or not, and doing their work and that going to those places is super joyful. And seeing that agency and validating it and seeing them revel in that validation is just great and actually the more challenging part of my work. And I think what we're leaning into here is that ultimately, unless we can open up the institutions or create new ones, that rising agency doesn't fulfill. Like we are in a moment where these things have to change because otherwise we can see it everywhere. They're going to get crushed. And so it's made me, what's it done to me? It's made me very determined. It's made me, it's made my life quite hard. No tiny violins for me, right? Like I enjoy my life a lot and I love what I do. And it's not easy, it's not easy to maintain personal relationships when you're so committed to something you're trying to do in the world. But I love it and it feels like commensurate with the scale of the challenges we face. So yeah, I feel certainly feel more alive than I did when I was working in the advertising industry, let's say that. 27 00:21:00.000 --> 00:21:22.000 Wow. And what do you think people feel or do after hearing this conversation on your personal transformation? Like from a talented, skilled, three masters degree guy in the arts industry to becoming a change maker and like telling these stories and opening institutions. 28 00:21:22.000 --> 00:23:11.000 I mean, from this conversation alone, I hope people feel energized and enthused and want to get involved themselves from this podcast, like what we're doing together. I think the combination of our voices, mine as a change maker, as a serial geek, maybe a sort of a bit of an outsider to politics, but with a vision and a theory and a set of ideas and you with your activism and your practice and your creativity and also geographically and the places that we're speaking from, the combination of our views and how we bring them together to look at the possibility of a different kind of democracy. I just hope people, particularly those who are in positions of power in these existing structures, I hope they take some inspiration, I hope they see some. Something else is being possible and I hope they make some space to try something because so much is possible in this time and yet fear, staring only at the rise of fascism, the rise of the far right, actually that will if we only pay attention to that. And I think too many people in positions of power and influence are only staring at the rising danger. That in itself is a self fulfilling prophecy. So what I think we exist to do with how to save democracy is to create somewhere else, to look something else to pay attention to that can actually drag us away from the chasm rather than throwing ourselves into it. That's the point for me. 29 00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:30.000 This was how to Save Democracy, the podcast for people who love democracy but know we've got serious work to do to save it. This episode was hosted by John Alexander and me, Omezin Khalifa, and produced by Joe Barrett. 30 00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:50.000 How to Save Democracy is produced in partnership with the Conduit and wouldn't be possible without the kind support of Open Society foundations and you, our listeners. We've got big plans, so if you can chip in to help us make them happen, we'd love to have you on board.