Flare Blog

On the weight of what we opt not to say

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 11:48:06 GMT

On the weight of what we opt not to say

Photo: Kelsey Trevett with his guide dog, Lacey

By Kelsey Trevett

A warm summer evening, on the 6th of July, a group of strangers gathered at Full Circle House — a beautifully gentle atmosphere of welcome in the hubbub of Brussels — a city sometimes so contradictorily inhuman for its status as the heart of European politics. In itself, there was something heartening that on doubtless a busy weekday evening, more than two dozen people made a conscious and active decision to spend time in each other’s company. And in the company of Andreea, who opened the event with an unexpected admission of fatigue. I felt incredibly seen in that moment, recognising the flame of optimism for something better — or different — whilst sharing the realisation that all flames require nourishment from inevitably finite fuels.

Andreea offered such a clearly-heartfelt expression of her life, her work, her experience. She spoke openly of growing up in Romania in a time of such sudden change — of progress, in so far as progression is the act of moving forward, and yet simultaneously in a time of the outright dismissal of a whole in light of the negatives of a part . Listening to her recount memories from her childhood, of collective action within communities, then of rapid onset system change, I was drawn to my experiences of the pandemic. I have never experienced the type of system change which alters everything overnight. But I know the feeling of hope, a dim light amidst an all-encompassing shadow, when radical societal shifts come into focus for the very same reason that the accepted state of affairs falls into disarray. And I know the crushing weight of normality returning, seemingly by the will of those around me, as opportunity passes, because the familiar narrative is safer than the as yet unimagined possibility of new.

Andreea spoke to values: the values of capitalism, and their stark contrast with our inherently human moral values — something she introduced almost with apology, acknowledging the embarrassment of appealing to “unfashionable” notions of morality. What spoke more resoundingly to me, though, was the ease with which the group connected with this appeal. The erosion of altruism and trust, and the sacrifice of our own collective happiness by a system characterised by transaction and markets is not controversial, but it takes considerable courage to step out of line to articulate it. As the room opened to discussion, I felt that courage envelop us. It’s a rarity that a group of strangers, atomised and isolated, could meet and share such candid vulnerability, and yet as, in turn, we found our voice to do so, the importance of expressing it became all the more evident. I had rarely heard the silence for the noise which consumes day-to-day life, but as people began to share their stories and feelings with increasing confidence bult on the words of those who had spoken before them, the weight of what we opt not to say each and every day became deafeningly apparent.

We shared thoughts on fears and everyday experience. The behaviour of others on pavements for instance, so obviously mundane, reveals so much, if only we’d look beyond ourselves to notice it. As a guide dog user, this spoke to me. From London to Brussels, I know what it is to feel like an inconvenience to commuters walking towards me, certain of their right to their square metre of pavement, legitimised by the destination towards which they rush, immutable in the face of someone unable to see it. The way in which we embody our isolation from one another, reaffirming a system of individualism by becoming its agents, is not merely around us, but within us too.

Some spoke of hope. Non-hierarchical organisations, driven by and fuelled by love — the care for the flourishing of others. Such a subtle yet impactful resistance against the alien system which we have unquestioningly constructed, operating so unapologetically within its shadow, demonstrated what is possible, and what it takes to achieve it. Another braved the question which has rested on my lips, silenced by the tribalism of politics, the creation of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’: “who is this serving?” Who benefits from a system which centres profit, the currency solely of a system far removed from our humanity, over people?

Undeniably cathartic — to not simply share and construct an idea of how things could be different, kinder, gentler, more human, but moreover to enact it in the process. As the evening came to a close, smaller groups formed and interconnected. Murmurs of hope amongst the challenges of ‘the new normal’, itself indistinguishable from the old normal which preceded the grinding halt of 2020. But those quiet murmurs, shared between strangers but for two hours on a Thursday evening in Brussels, felt powerful. They stemmed from people who knew now, if not confidently before, that their feelings were not anomalies. They were the truest expressions of determination, if not to have the answers now, then to collaborate, plant the seeds, and discover them together.

I arrived in Brussels, a little under two weeks ago, feeling desperate and lost. The pandemic was and continues to be devastating, but amidst the hurt, it gave light to the possibility of change. For the first time in my life, I felt the draw of a pause, the reevaluation of where we were, and an acknowledgement of the disconnect it represented between who we are, and what we do. I felt the seemingly-irreparable agony of that hope being snatched away again, almost overnight, when transformative change was snubbed in favour of a return to how things were.

Our shared evening in Brussels may have lacked the type of concrete outcomes which mark success in a system focussed exclusively on production, but for me, it represented in itself a concrete moment of reflection: the end of, or at the very least a welcome reprieve from, a malaise which has enveloped me for over a year. It would be naive to suggest that one evening could resolve such deep-rooted feelings, but upon initial reflection, I sincerely feel that I entered a room with strangers, and left it with renewed purpose.

Everything is certain, until it's not

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 12:22:38 GMT

Everything is certain, until it's not

Reflections on a conversation with Andreea

John Higgins , March 2023

Image credit Stefan Caltia (Casa albastra)

We talked in the shadow of the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an event which Andreea sees in black and white, a matter of one right and one wrong – which is quite unlike her. She is drawn to nuance and complexity, seeing little to be gained from simplistic binaries which result in a war between world views. Except in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

She’s from what I was brought up to know as Eastern Europe, behind what was then the Iron Curtain. A Romanian by birth and upbringing, she feels the chill of Russian threat viscerally. As a dedicated internationalist she bumps up against friends and colleagues, especially from Africa and Latin America, who see this particular European war quite differently – more attracted to a narrative of NATO (OTAN) provocation, to which Russia’s response is a natural one.

In these conversations her Romanian heritage gets folded into a Western colonial frame, one where the Global North (or whatever you want to call the world of allied US hegemony) has had things its own way for far too long – and has no moral legs to stand on when it comes to calling out the actions of other nations. She sees a bitter irony in this. Her grandparents, like many generations of Eastern Europeans in living memory, didn’t have access to running water.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

She is hopeful that the grand narratives, about how the world works and how our lives fit, can change, not through necessity or force majeure, but through choice. She’s hopeful we still have time to know and create our world in a different way, through an act of our own discretion. She knows that established narratives, such as the power of capital and market economics, can appear irredeemable, beyond challenge, that we can mistake the habitual for the natural. But she’s lived through times of such certainty before and seen how quickly they can dissolve into smoke, in her case between the end of one school term and the beginning of another.

In 1989 she was at school in Romania, in a primary school with a picture of the great President Ceaușescu on the wall at the front of the class, alongside the proud flags of the Communist Party and the Romanian Socialist Republic. As a class they’d sing heartfelt songs at the start of every day, praising the wonders and achievements of their great leader and the new world order their country represented. The winter term finished soon after the Berlin Wall came down, and then class started a couple of weeks later in the New Year, by which time the perfect leader and the wonders of the Romanian Socialism were being decried as the opposite of everything she’d known up until then. What had been good was now bad. What had been perfect was now rotten. The pictures had come down from the wall. Everything that had been certain, no longer was.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

My notes from our conversation contain rich phrases, of ‘being lumped in [as a European] with all colonial powers, ‘of how ‘the obvious is holding us prisoner’ and how it’s the ‘limits of our imagination’ that makes us powerless. She spoke of how dogmatic thinking injects venom into the conversation between people, even when intentions are of the best. She feels that being caring and curious is a better way of promoting change than policing the language we use. She embraces her reality, and that of others, who don’t need to be told what to think and say. She wants to be in a context where people can express themselves freely but with kindness. It is the kindness that gets squeezed out when we want to box and label people, or impose our felt reality on them.

She spoke of her work in creating space for exploring masculinity and how she looked to avoid ‘stigmatising’ men’s experience, by ‘imposing a value set’ she believed in, and instead staying with what was valued by football going men, the camaraderie they found from being in a crowd, dedicated followers of a team. Her work is to help people make a leap of imagination, question the inconspicuous obvious which is holding us prisoner, and embrace a world that is not created through the narrative of economics – which is a human-created story, not a scientific truth, however much economics would love to claim such a perspective for itself. She knows such ‘truths’ can disappear as quickly as the ones she’s already seen disappear in her life, and which were also treated as beyond doubt.

Her way of going about things is one that seeks to escape the tyranny of method, the temptation to prescribe and live to a plan - treat ourselves, others and the world around us as things to be manipulated, as if uncertainty can be eliminated. What we eliminate instead is authenticity, presence, trust. She is sceptical of the over-reliance on method for social change, of the prioritisation of facts and reason over feelings, especially fear and hope, which are the wellsprings of so much human endeavour. Her anti-method is to focus on bolstering courage and connection, bringing people together to shift collective ideas – to imagine and step into a different grand narrative, one which privileges dignity, kindness and personal vulnerability. Things may be in a bad state right now, but we are not powerless. We still have time to come together deliberately and kindly to tell, and so live, a better story, one where we don’t look to label, stigmatise and colonise others with our values.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I found listening to Andreea both stimulating and provocative. Her take on the world is stimulating because it is hopeful, because her work invites us into the headwaters of our current ways of thinking and brings to our attention that these ways of thinking are of our own choosing. We are active agents in creating the world we know, not passive recipients of an objective social truth.

And I find her provocative because I struggle in the face of idealism, that it is possible for kindness and care for others to take root in the world, where the hate mongers and fear stirrers seem to drown out every attempt to foster our better angels.

I need to find out more from her, about what can be done so that what can seem so immovable in our current epoch around money, nature and community, can become smoke as surely as Ceausescu and his orthodoxy did.

Seeing beyond the struggle

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 08:51:49 GMT

Seeing beyond the struggle.

Without a destination, our collective journey is drift

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves, blog post written for Global Diplomacy Lab

In late August, I drove myself from Brussels to Alpbach – a town in the Tyrolean Alps, where people have been gathering since 1945 to share ideas of unity, peace and progress. It felt good to be alone on the road. The silence was just what the head (and heart) needed. These are frantic, frazzled, uncomfortable times. Timelines are warping, realities dissolving. We’re in a liminal space, between the worlds. The old has withered, the new is not yet here. I realise I was saying exactly this sort of gibberish two years ago, when the altered reality of the pandemic made all sorts of new things seem normal.

More of what we took for granted has gone since then. Peace. Multilateralism. The illusion that economic inter-dependence is a shield against bloodshed. Let me put that more bluntly. The insanity of believing money can buy you peace.

I feel in that same in-between space now as I did then, only more uncomfortably aware of how ill-fitting the truths, assumptions, certainties of the past are as an answer to our needs in this moment. And how far we still are from a future that soothes our fears and meets our aspirations. Our age of shocks demands that we huddle together to reinvent society, our lives, our identities – and yet our energies are centrifugal, pulling us apart, North from South, East from West, liberals from conservatives, oppressors from the oppressed. Rupture seems to be the reality we inhabit, both the consequence and symbol of dead ways of organising society.

OK, I’ll stop talking in abstractions.

The European Forum Alpbach was beautiful, clever, buzzing and tense. I saw the words NEW EUROPE emblazoned everywhere, in huge capital letters. I heard the words “this is serious” and “we’re in real trouble” in almost every talk, debate, conversation. One day, I went to an early morning political briefing and sat on a slouchy sofa next to a former Austrian foreign minister. She made this quiet comment that absolutely floored me.

“What is being destroyed right now is the chef d’oeuvre of my generation.”

Her words still give me goosebumps. Her generation is my mum’s generation. The people who came just before us. The people who ended the Cold War, reunited Europe, had everyone sit back at the table once again. Their generational legacy was peace. Their chef d’oeuvre was peace. Multilateralism, with all its flaws, is peace.

Russia’s murderous act of aggression against Ukraine is the dissolution of a reality that has served us all, whatever its injustices and imperfections, for more than 30 years. Every time I hear “this is Europe’s problem” and “the world has other wars”, I think yes of course, and no, no, no, my friends. A whole way of doing things has vanished. A fragile equilibrium, an intention – however sincere – to reach big decisions together, they’ve imploded.

We’re in zero sum, strongman, dog-eat-dog territory now. We can only lose.

All wars are immoral, all human pain matters. This war changes everything for everyone, in that terrible way that some wars can.

So, what comes next? Whether you (and I) are melting with hot rage or thinking Europe or NATO or whoever had it coming, something has to happen next. What are we going to fill this void of vision with? What now? What will a new global order look like?

I have a vested interest here, because my life’s work is about that. I run a little think-and -do tank ( www.flaregovernance.eu ) that brings people together, from all walks of life, to talk about collective purpose. About what societies should deliver. Talking about the future and hopes and what happens next sounds simple, but it can be counterintuitive. Our instincts pull our attention towards the fear, tensions and injustices of now, and as a result our energy goes into critique, and much more rarely into vision.

The week after Alpbach, I was on another work trip, on another mountainside, in a long-deserted village in Greece. Once again surrounded by beautiful people who dedicate their lives to better things ahead. Laconia’s hot dry earth felt familiar, like the Baragan dust I come from in south eastern Romania. Alpine cowbells made way for distant sheep, the feeling of grounding, silence, permanence a beautiful, reassuring continuum.

One afternoon, a nice man brought us lettuces for us to plant together as a group bonding exercise. He made a lousy quip about big shovels for the boys and not ruining manicures. I rolled my eyes and shrugged it off. Later I found out my friends there were incensed, that their experience was sullied by that lame relic of unreconstructed masculinity.

What do these stories have to do with one another, you might ask. What’s geopolitics got to do with lettuce?

Geopolitics has everything to do with lettuce

Geopolitics has everything to do with lettuce. Alpbach has everything to do with Vamvakou, and Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and the Baragan.

The way that we approach each other and the future matters. How we engage with those who see the world differently from us matters. Planning for a reality that meets everyone’s needs matters. You may say I’m a dreamer and all of that. There’s nothing dumb or utopian about a reality that meets everyone’s needs. What’s dumb is telling ourselves that a reality that meets almost no-one’s needs is the absolute best we can do. That, my friends, is how we live right now.

I see a global order where everyone comes back to the table. Where we take collective responsibility for injustice and put it right. I see people and countries putting their money where their mouth is, prioritizing our collective well-being and survival over self-interest and greed. I see a Europe that takes responsibility for its moral inconsistencies and does something about them, where we really do live by the values we preach to others. A global order where every pain and fear matters (including those of Europe).

Whether it’s war or gender roles, I see beyond this excruciating struggle with evil, warmongers, wrongdoers and retrogrades. I want to do more than fight – and look beyond the fight. I see a need to extricate myself from the language and mindsets of conflict. I see less time spent on condemnation and more time imagining and planning what should be.

What will be our generational legacy at Alpbachs of the future?

Let’s imagine for a second what things will look like when we have put them right, once we have finished fighting the righteous fight. Let’s figure out together the steps that are going to get us there. Please let’s think ahead about our generational legacy, the things our kids will be looking back on 30 years from now. The things that we might describe as “our chef d’oeuvre” at the Alpbachs of the future, when we can rejoice that we came close to burning down the world, melting every Alpine glacier and searing every bigot in the process, but we pulled through somehow and walked together into something really worth the pain and fear and sacrifice.

Let’s imagine the day that enemies lay down arms, and our children build good lives together. A brave, beautiful woman who carries on her shoulders the burden of intergenerational pain and intractable conflict shared this vision with me in Vamvakou. It will inspire me forever.

When we look beyond the fear and rage of now, we see the things that truly are worth the hope and the fear and the leaps and the struggle. We see safety, wellbeing, love, care. The struggle itself is not the end. Without a destination, our journey is but drift. The struggle, wasted effort.

Our shared vision of the future, the dream that brings us together, that is our destination. For the generation before us, that vision was peace (and prosperity, however wasteful and unjust the recipe). What will be ours?

Andreea Petre-Goncalves is President and Founder of Flare Governance, a Brussels-based think-and-do tank that brings people together to imagine a radically better future. Email her on andreea@flaregovernance.eu to join in Rethinking our purpose, a big conversation about what comes next in our collective journey.

Differences that matter

Mon, 26 Sep 2022 07:30:01 GMT

Differences that matter

By Ella Myers

Earlier this month, I attended a couple of committee meetings at the European Parliament. As an intern for Flare, I was incredibly excited to get this opportunity to see the inner mechanisms of the Parliament. Walking into the committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, I knew that this was the place where European women were represented. It felt like this was where the change happened.

I was immediately jolted by the intensity of the debate. An MEP began by summing up the findings of a report on women’s rights but soon began to rail against the presence of trans women in women’s spaces. Her incendiary outburst provoked a reaction from more liberal MEPs. The committee room began to resemble a spat on Twitter. Everybody assumed their roles. The conservative MEP raised her voice, made overarching and provocative statements. The liberal MEP called for the Chair to report hate speech, the conservative MEP’s staff clapped her tirade and the Chair had to admonish MEPs multiple times.

Meanwhile, all other topics went largely untouched as a result of this all-consuming debate. I left the meeting feeling dismayed. Even at the highest level, these topics were preventing discussion and collaboration, consuming all the air time. Many MEPs pointed out that the committee was not addressing the treatment of female civilians in Ukraine, due to the time spent on one single issue. Trans rights are incredibly important but trans women make up an incredibly small sector of the population. I wondered why there was seemingly no room to discuss other topics.

I was reminded of a conversation I had with my sister earlier that year. She had been complaining about the fact that all of the candidates for the British Prime Ministerial race had been asked about trans rights, when she didn’t think they were being asked enough questions about the cost of living and the energy crisis. I had understood where she was coming from but felt it was a question so often asked because it was highly indicative of where people stood on the political spectrum.

Trans rights have become one of the most divisive topics in contemporary politics. It is one of the biggest talking points because it reflects so many of our own opinions – on the individual vs the group, on our understanding of gender, on our understanding of feminism and on what we see as normal and correct in our society. The issue of trans rights provokes incredibly strong reactions from people – so clearly, it is an important issue and one that needs discussing.

The problem is, however, that whenever people with even slightly different views discuss the issue of trans rights, it can quickly dissolve into a total impasse. Accusations are thrown, feelings are hurt and any productive debate soon becomes impossible. Just like in the committee meeting, people quickly assume their roles, both believing the other person to be the one preventing any fruitful debate. In many ways, this is understandable. It’s an incendiary topic, one that gets down the core of many of our beliefs. Many women feel that their own rights are under threat, many queer people feel the same. Even those who are neither female nor transgender feel either bewildered at what represents a significant change to social norms or deeply angered at what they see as discrimination.

Yet it is the very difficulty of this conversation that makes it so important. In that committee room, those pointing out that we needed to discuss the women of Ukraine were correct. Of course they were. However, I find it unlikely that there would have been deep disagreement over the way in which to respond to the persecution of Ukrainian civilians. Moreover, if we are unable to collaborate because of deep fissures caused by debates over issues like trans rights, then this will have a knock-on effect when we come to discuss our collective responses to emergencies. It is the most painful things that we need to address as a collective, because they represent the greatest threat to our unity and to our capacity to act together.

It is in these spaces, where the deepest disagreement exists, that the true struggle lies. Because overcoming our differences, collaborating with people when it would be easy to walk away from the table, is what is necessary for truly collective action, which is so fundamental for progress. Trans rights might seem like a fringe issue but when a topic is capable of stalling an entire room of MEPs and preventing discussion then we know we must dig deeper, in order to prevent an unbridgeable rift from forming. We must resolve what divides us, rather than focusing solely on topics that we can all agree on. If we fail to address our most incendiary issues, then sooner or later, universal collaboration will become an impossibility. So, whether we like it or not, we must spend time discussing these issues that seem so impossible to resolve. This is where the true struggle lies.

Rethinking the rethinking

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 13:14:06 GMT

Rethinking the rethinking

By Sofiia Kosourova (pictured, image credit Marian Cramers)

On July 13, Flare held its first in-person event from the Rethinking our purpose in an age of shocks dialogue series, which took place in a beautiful Art Nouveau house in Brussels . The night was just as beautiful and inspiring as the venue — it was a gathering of people who dedicated their lives to change, trying to make a difference in this world full of injustice and suffering. They shared their visions of the present and discussed what was not right about it, as though presenting their diagnosis of our realities in an attempt to find a cure: lack of security, climate crisis, fear and lack of trust in society, to name a few. The conversation affected me deeply and I left the event feeling inspired and full of hope. Or at least I wanted to think so.

What presented itself first as hope, gratitude, and admiration turned out to be a mask for exhaustion, disappointment, and bitter scepticism, which only surfaced later and left me feeling like I was ultimately and completely misunderstood. This is quite ironic given that I did not contribute to the shared discussion in any way, where then did this ‘misunderstanding’ come from?

A couple of days of reflecting and a few mental breakdowns later, it finally occurred to me — I felt that way because no one talked about the one thing I wanted to talk about. How can one talk about screen time and recycling when Ukraine and its people are burning every day? Yes, climate change is important but how can one favour this in a discussion and not what state-sponsored propaganda has done to many Russians or how military service in Russia has become a ghetto tax? How can one talk about anything that is not the war? As someone coming from a Russian-Ukrainian family, these are the buzzing questions that I have in my now hive-resembling head every day. And since the war started, this is the only thing that matters to me, so should it to others, right?

This last part took me another bit of reflecting to realise that my judgment may have been unfair. Later, I remembered something I heard in a lecture on Russia’s war in Ukraine that helped me make sense of it: together with peace, security, and life, war also eliminates complexity. It gets rid of shades and tones until nothing is left but black and white. This is evidently part of the survival instinct, helping to draw a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and thus determine which side we are on. Short-term, this is key to staying alive. Long-term, this dichotomy further entrenches conflict, it burns bridges and ruins lives. And the closer we are to the war, the fewer shades there are on our black-to-white spectrum. Having seen what this mentality does to people, I always tried to be aware of the existing complexities. So no, I would never think that I had this black-and-white mindset, if anything, to me there were always way too many shades of grey (forgive me for this accidental yet barely appropriate pun). And yet seeing myself have such a response to the event was a reality check. Trying to avoid picking a side and to stay neutral and therefore ‘objective’ in questions pertaining to the war, it turned out that I had picked my side a long time ago — in dismissing any other topic, I looked down on those ‘privileged Westerners’ who had the luxury to talk and think and live anything else. I myself ended up drawing the ‘me’ vs. ‘them’ line that I was so wary of.

War de-complicates life. And even though I have been ‘privileged’ enough myself to be physically away from the war between Russia and Ukraine, it has become the centre of my everyday existence, the sole thing I can focus on. And for a reason, of course — it has made my past tainted, my future uncertain, and my present unbearable. And this is a story of a person who has not lost their home and family to the war like many other people have, at least not in a conventional sense. Being aware that there is so much more damage done and so many lives ruined by the war only further proves my initial point — I have no right to talk about anything else. We as society have no right to talk about anything else. But taking this right away from myself and denying it to others means that the war has won. Not being able to imagine what life should look like after the war means it has won. And not allowing ourselves to see beyond the death and destruction, to imagine peace and think of the steps we need to take to get there, means that we have lost. Screaming about the world burning is useless, and frankly, unnecessarily fatalist, without discussing how to put out this fire and thinking of how to rebuild the world once the fire is out.

Granted, this is not a comfortable conversation, as one may have noticed after reading this rebel yell of mine. It is not easy to imagine how life should be and much easier to furiously scrutinize its injustices but this only adds value to these conversations.

Having the privilege of relative distance from war should be used to bring peace. And this was what was attempted in that Art Nouveau house on July 13, which took me so long to realise. I am only now beginning to see my privilege and trying to use it for the collective good, even though it is only baby steps so far. But there are people out there who have long fought for change, and Flare has become a platform for many of those change-driven individuals. My time with Flare has been as humbling as it has been illuminating and cathartic, and I only hope to live up to its ethos one day.

Common purpose in an age of shocks

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 13:47:24 GMT

Rethinking our purpose in an age of shocks

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Who and what do we protect in times of crisis? What will our societies deliver? What are we about?

It’s a long time since I’ve had headspace to put words on paper. I’m not complaining. Life doesn’t care much for our scripts, but I can still take some things for granted. I have a roof over my head, my kid can go to school in the morning, I don’t hear air raid sirens, nothing around me is burning.

Since the start of the pandemic, one of my usual boasts has been that as an Eastern European at least I know things are not fixed, that mighty systems crumble, that realities change, that yesterday’s certainty is tomorrow’s anachronism. I’ve relished dropping this into conversations with folk predicting returns to normal, without even disguising my “I’ve seen things you haven’t seen” smugness. We’re in the midst of a societal shift and I can feel it in my bones. The end of history it is not. We either seize this with our best selves or wither. Etc.

I could see - and do see - the actual pillars underpinning our political and cultural realities (which are to a large extent a convention of our collective imagination, a constructed shared meaning, a faith) being chiselled at, wobbling, teetering. The “self” being contained, restrained, metaphorically and literally. My very breath suddenly toxic, held back behind a mask as an act of love for others (or as an oppressive conspiracy, depending on what one’s been drinking). My every urge on hold until further notice. Me and my desires, the fundamental unit of late capitalist imagination, restrained.

I relished - and do relish - the sense of possibility this creates, the reimagining, the re-emergence of better, phoenix-like. The thought that from this shock and sacrifice we can walk away with the realisation that, as a society, as a collective, we do have a choice over what and whose interests we prioritise. That our future is not predetermined. That we are reassuringly intertwined.

What I did not see was the possibility of war. This ups the stakes of our existential crisis. I have no salty Eastern European sea dog pearls of wisdom for this one. It’s do or die, apparently. Our old reality, with all its fictions, really is falling away. So much for the strategies, the pragmatic readings of interest maps, the know-it-all confidence. All bets are off.

These moments, at personal and societal level, push us to decide who we really are, what matters, what doesn’t, what we want and what we will sacrifice.

I am trying to answer these questions for myself, and want to create space for all of us to do that work collectively. I’m part of a group of people determined to use the power of our networks to begin this process. We’re opening up a big old chat we’ve titled Rethinking our purpose in an age of shocks .

Here’s the premise.

Two years ago, our lives were turned upside down by a dangerous disease that spread through the world like wildfire. Today we watch horrified as Russian tanks roll down Ukrainian streets.

These crises have forced us to face uncomfortable truths. They have made us question the purpose of society, who we are as a collective, what matters and what doesn’t. The rules and assumptions that have shaped our lives for generations need to be reviewed, and a new story told about our shared aspirations and how we will face our future.

Rethinking our purpose in an age of shocks is an opportunity to come together and answer some important questions:

Who and what do we protect in times of crisis?
Was it right to sacrifice individual freedoms for the collective good during the COVID-19 pandemic?
When is it acceptable and necessary to sacrifice self-interest for the benefit of all?
How far will we go for our collective safety?
What will our societies deliver? What are we about?

Join us by emailing me on andreea@flaregovernance.eu .

All this Rethinking…

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 09:05:11 GMT

All this Rethinking…

Is making us hungry. Read about how we re-imagined the global food system in 90 minutes in our latest report, available here .

This stuff matters. Rethinking is about making space for hope, changing the story by which we live. Moving from me to us to our whole society. We take things that feel stuck and fixed and paint the picture of how they can be radically better. We do it together as equals, no matter our level of knowledge and experience.

At the heart of Rethinking we’ve planted a simple seed of an idea. If we agree where we need to get to, we can find our way there. We can work out how to make change happen when we allow ourselves to imagine how things should be. The essential first step to get over our fear of being stuck in the now, in how things are, in feeling there’s no choice and no alternative – is to say what should be.

It sounds banal, but it’s actually quite hard. We had a go during Rethinking food a couple of months ago. We’d spent a little while in a small group talking about access to food, injustice, food deserts, class, food snobbery and a multitude of ills. We were stumped when we tried to turn things around and say what “justice” looks like for an overweight single mum working two jobs and living in a “food desert” in the USA. We could see what the multiple injustices were, but naming what should be took us a little while. What should her life be like? What needs to happen to make that possible?

You might recognize that pattern from how we approach challenges in public discourse. We’re very used to denouncing bad things, calling emergencies, demanding change from others. It’s a lot harder to name what should be, what the good society looks like, how we will feel when we’ve righted social and environmental wrongs. And once we’ve done that, I promise you, we’re cooking with gas (or something less planet heating).

Over the last two years, we’ve developed a simple three-step method that takes people from hopelessness to action, from lone voices to collectives, from me to us. It’s not voodoo. It’s just humans talking, being brave and being nice. We think it can change society. No apologies for optimism.

We’ve done it for football and eating , two things that feel like they belong to our private lives, but that are the most powerful embodiment of our moral systems, because we feel them viscerally. We’ve got a couple of high stakes experiments lined up for the end of 2021.

If you’re tired and sad and despondent and you despair at the state of the world, please join us, fund us , talk drop us a line on hello@flaregovernance.eu . We have hope flowing out of every pore.

Is Productivity all we really dreamed of?

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 14:06:16 GMT

Is Productivity all we really dreamed of?

By Lauren Brown

Productivity. It’s one of those words that is thrown around – ‘Oh I’ve had such a productive day’. It’s

one I’m guilty of using, on those rare occasions where I feel as if my life is tied up into neat ends. It’s

the feeling of satisfaction when you manage to get all those tiny tasks on your to-do list ticked off, eat

healthily and manage to engage in one of those ‘mind-improving’ habits you set out to do at the

beginning at the year. It’s definitely not limited to this sense of personal growth and improvement

either but tied inherently into our working lives and culture. It rarely gives us time for rest but instead

‘more’.

This productivity culture permeates our lives and is often held up as the way to have more time – that

precious ‘more’ time to spend on things we truly love. But as Anne Helen Peterson points out, its

mandate is ‘never ‘You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time

working’. It is ‘you figured our how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks’’.

It’s the sense that if you can get that one extra task done a day, you will be far better off for it. And for

many, the rewards that come with these tasks (especially those in precarious situations, for whom

productivity is just a way to survive basic economic needs) are maybe not all they seem.

It’s also tied up in ideals of self-improvement. ‘Oh, if I could just be more productive with my time, I’ll

manage to squeeze in Duolingo’. We are taught we must maximise our output (and our consumption

for that matter) to be the best we can be, at all times, in every potential area. But we all have a ceiling

to this – no one can work infinitely, and at some point, diminishing returns sets in. There’s only so long

I can pretend my endless to do list is improving my life, instead of stressing me out that once again I

haven’t done X Y and Z. Whilst I could happily spend the rest of this blog theorising how neo-

liberalism is a key part of this (don’t worry, I won’t), this sense of disquiet around working cultures has

been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic for many.

Debates over whether workers get more done at home or the office are prominent in the news,

accompanied by endless articles on burnout culture. Businesses are testing out four-day work weeks

– with the caveat that this is obviously to improve productivity, though admittedly through a method

that involves ‘working better’. All of these stories question the idea of boundaries. Whether these be

physical (home vs an office environment) or mental (when do we ‘switch off’), the pandemic has led to

discomfort over our current working practices.

I’m a case in point. During the first lockdown, I felt I needed to produce at ever higher rates in order to

‘secure my future’. So I regularly worked 40+ hour weeks (often splitting my time between my

supermarket job, research internships and volunteering) as well as finishing my studies. I thought it

was normal, desirable even, to only have one ‘proper’ day off a week. I believed this was the best way

for me (a busy person even in ‘normal’ pre-pandemic times) to stay sane, to cope with the ever

closing walls of the world. But when I compare this to the third lockdown I experienced here in the

U.K., this outlook seems obscene and naïve. I struggled to concentrate through my degree and the

drudgery of life in my small four walls. However, I still felt I needed to produce at the levels I had been,

to make this lockdown a success. I felt I needed to do ‘more’ – I had the time, why wasn’t I doing it?

And that’s what is so all-encompassing about this productivity culture. It’s prevalent and fetishized

(what do you mean, you don’t have a side hustle?). There’s, as Pandora Sykes identifies in her book

Are We Doing it Right?, a status to being busy and getting lots done. It’s also a way of coping with

insecure futures and bleak employment prospects. Admittedly this was heightened by a mild personal

panic that came with the realisation I was soon to be an unemployed postgraduate student. But is it

healthy?

It's hard to admit that maybe you can’t improve in every section of your life. That there’s a point where

burnout sets in. That maybe you don’t need to learn French or do that typing class, unless you really

do have the capacity and desire for it. Maybe we shouldn’t have to be excessively productive. Maybe

we should talk about what we actually want for our futures and challenge what we see as normal. I’m

not saying productivity is inherently evil and I can’t pretend I’m not sucked into the machinery that

surrounds productivity culture. But as time goes on, the apparent need to produce and consume more

is one that becomes more questionable to me. At what point can I say I’ve done enough? I might

never be able to fully manage the expectations of myself and workplace culture with what actually

works for me, but through talking it through, I can start to try.

Change: the view of a young, hopeful sceptic

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:30:29 GMT

Change: the view of a young hopeful sceptic

By Sam Ajakaiye

Change. It’s such a small word which encompasses so much. So often I reflect on the various ways I want the world to change and yet I also find myself in a position where I must question whether this very act is naive. Negative change is surely worse than the status quo. Social (and, to a certain extent, political) conservatism is often predicated on this understanding that change can easily break down the good things we have whilst failing to replace them with anything of equal, let alone better, value.

I am also a university student. University students are famed for their rampant desire for change and their youthful radicalism. In my first year at university, I have witnessed how a surge in the use of social media and a significantly greater awareness of international affairs has led activism to become commonplace amongst a generation of ‘Social Justice Warriors’.

I am also a 19-year old black man who does not only feel society’s divides but actively studies the histories behind them in his degree. How could I not desire change when I see how hypocritical greed has led (and still leads) to the crippling of continents, communities and families in places like my homeland, Nigeria. Perhaps I wouldn’t because those same studies have bred within me a deep distrust for the leaders who have the greatest potential for change - stories of poor Nigerian governance are too numerous to count.

If you are struggling to grasp where I lie on the political spectrum or what I want for the future of the world, welcome to the club! I do as well. However, I will clarify one thing for you - I do want change. It’s just that, whilst I am hopeful for a better future, I’m also sceptical about it.

The reason why I am sceptical is that I have seen how the realisation of ideals doesn't just require more money, or more time, or more planning. They require people to change. If people don’t change the way that they act, the way they think about others (and themselves) and what they aspire towards, any real systematic change is not possible. For example, over the course of last year, systematic/institutional racism came to the fore of many debates once again. However, whilst systematic racism may have a completely different effect to interpersonal racism, it is certain that any system which places people at a disadvantage is rooted in decisions made by people, influenced by their personal approach to life and others.

My hope for change is not rooted in seeing declarations made by governments which suggest that policy will be more aligned with the future I wish to see (otherwise I would be in love with the UN). It’s not when I see thousands of people gather on the streets to protest about problems of global importance. It’s not even when I am allowed to feed into conversations which are far beyond my pay-grade (I’m a student so I basically don’t have one) and share my visions for the world.

My hope for change increases in those situations where all performance is stripped away and people are at their most open and vulnerable, yet I see genuine concern and kindness expressed towards others. When I see people truly empathise with each others’ struggles, regardless of whether they fully agree with their viewpoint, and have proactive and serious discussions marked by mutual respect. That’s because these are the types of spaces in which policy should be formed. These are the types of conversations that allow society to become naturally diverse. These are the types of people who will use influence to actually serve people rather than simply to boost their ego.

Now, I will introduce a dose of scepticism here. As a Christian, the idea that everybody is flawed and has their own struggles is rooted in my worldview. However, I think I can confidently say that you don’t need the Bible to understand that humans aren’t perfect. There will always be people in power who are self-serving and people whose altruistic actions are only performative.

But why should that ever be an argument to maintain the status quo?

Instead, that fact should drive us to create as many open and genuine spaces as possible for people to learn about others and learn from others. We should prioritise creating opportunities for individuals to express themselves openly and then take each others’ concerns and opinions seriously. We should allow for debates which enable us to question each others’ views and find solutions to the different problems we experience and perceive.

I am still sceptical about how many people will truly change from these spaces but that’s the thing about change - things will be uncertain. These conversations can only function as a starting point of change but, if we neglect this crucial initial point, how can we expect a different end product?

Cheese, chocolate and how I want to eat

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 06:25:19 GMT

Cheese, chocolate and how I want to eat

By Lauren Brown

Food is something that connects us all – whether it’s a quick stir fry, a hungover takeaway pizza or a Sunday roast around the table with your family and friends. But it is also something that means different things to everyone. As you may be able to tell from the first sentence, a good Sunday roast reminds me of my family, whilst a pizza is my cure-all from a messier night than intended.

Despite being a self-proclaimed foodie, and an enthusiastic if not always successful cook, how I feel about food and how it’s produced isn’t something I examine in detail too often. I know I love cooking and sharing food with others, I try to be a mildly successful vegetarian most of the time and I know cheese and chocolate are the primary reasons I would never go vegan. However, it wasn’t until I sat down as part of Flare Governance’s dialogue workshop at the BMW Foundation that I really examined this.

Discussing topics from the social and cultural norms around food, to how we produce it, I began to think more and more about how food shapes my life. I began to question what I ate, why I ate it, and what I could do to create a world where I can balance my love for cheese with the environmental considerations of that. How could I feel connected to the food I ate, without knowledge of where and how it was produced, and under what connections? And how could I use food to connect to the people around me?

Through discussions in smaller groups, we started to think of both what problems we saw in the world today and what we wanted the future of food to be. Answers to ‘fixing’ the food system varied from prioritising local produce, enriching the soil and inviting everyone to share food together. And at the heart of both these visions and solutions was a desire for food to be just and to work to connect us.

It’s this that we should take forward, in order to challenge and to create a food system that is fair and just and belongs to all.

Reconnecting public and private life

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 09:31:20 GMT

Reconnecting public and private life – and how the cracks don’t appear where you strike

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

This is a long article. If you read nothing else, just read this. There’s a simple and powerful way to turn suspicion and conspiracy into hope and connection. We’ve been testing it in the private spaces where we are our true selves, coming together around the things we love. Like football. And food. We’ve built a model for change that can connect us around what matters and restore trust in our public sphere and public systems. With it we can transform society and renew our bonds with each other, feeling empowered and energised in the process.

Summing up two years of Flare’s experiment in hope

There’s a Romanian saying that paraphrased and stripped of its humour goes “ the cracks don’t appear where you strike ” (Unde dai si unde crapa). It’s an expression of surprise at unintended consequences, with a hint of amusement, or exasperation, depending on the circumstances.

Nearly two years into the hope project and foray into the wilderness that is Flare, the most exquisite thing we have to show for it - except for what a cool team we are - is an unusual hypothesis. We came to it through instinct, experiments, feeling and most delightfully – accident. Accident in that we were looking for something else, not unrelated, but a touch less ambitious. And there it was, a powerful insight into what is possible. We struck the wall in one place and got a crack somewhere unexpected.

We are experimenting with bridging the chasm of mistrust that separates our private lives from the public systems that struggle under the weight of our unmet expectations. From this point onwards our work will focus even more resolutely on reconnecting our private and public lives to help hope emerge. We will do it in the spaces we all love, around the dinner table, on the football pitch and wherever else we feel like our true selves. This is not madness. It’s reclaiming power over our lives.

In some spaces we trust and hear each other

In the autumn of 2020, at Flare we were busy helping to deliver a collective narrative through clever methods, in a thrilling project on the future of football (more on this really soon). Unexpectedly, like angels singing, or rainbows in a summer storm, what we were looking for emerged 20 paces away from where we were digging. We struck and the cracks appeared elsewhere.

We discovered that shared moral stories take shape without much prompting when people come together around something that they genuinely, truly value. When we gave folk space to talk about their love of football, what came out like a rousing drumbeat were stories of shared values: community, belonging, being part of something bigger than oneself, fairness. Check out this wonderful example here .

Football is a common , an immaterial one, a shared precious thing that scores of people bond around instantly, whatever life path brings them there. And in this space that genuinely connects without the need for words, we were seeing what we had been pursuing tirelessly since Flare was born - a shared story of who we are as people, what matters, what the future should bring.

Our hypothesis therefore is that shared moral narratives - upon which we can rebuild the world - emerge in the commons, and that real-life spaces are where we should pursue them.

From the football pitch to the dinner table

Our discovery shone new light onto our food project, frozen in time since we were thrown into lockdown two weeks before delivery in March last year. We called it “ Speaking one language for the future of food” . Pre-COVID we focused on helping people talk differently about food through methodology. In its new iteration, we are creating space for connection in the only place where food is truly a common: where we share it, where we express love with it, where it builds bridges to our past, where it tells the story of who we are. Not in the conference room or the policy debate or the righteous campaign or the marketing wheeze.

At the stove and around the table. Where we feed friends the treats our grandmothers once made for us as children. Where history and the human journey come alive in the enjoyment of the same things in different corners of the world. Where the stories are told and we are together as human beings, whatever hats and labels and boxes we’re in the rest of the time. Where civil servants or salesmen or righteous campaigners can take comfort in our shared humanity. That’s how we will speak one language for the future of food. What we have in common, our shared morality. This is where we bring people together, be they officials, parliamentarians, refugees, the man in the corner shop and anybody else.

The narrative thing again

Our new world will be redefined by the stories we tell about ourselves and our future. Will we be angry, caring, generous, suspicious, cautious, greedy or cavalier? What sorts of things will matter to us? Whose interests will prevail? These stories are what we mean when we talk about a shared narrative.

We can’t contrive a shared narrative, we can’t build it out of sticks and stones, it has to emerge of its own accord, it has to make our hearts swell and give us the courage to do new things and start again. Like the empowerment of the oppressed, heaven for the righteous or enrichment through ambition, it has to stir our passions and make us want to be part of it. It has to feel like our story, the distilled expression of our true selves.

QAnon and far-right populism are emerging shared narratives. They are feeding on the growing chasm between our public and our private spheres, then mistrust we have developed in our systems and our elites. It’s no good feeling superior to the people who espouse them, their grievances are legitimate. A genuinely felt and owned shared story - or narrative - will move us away from these aberrations. Something better, that brings our best selves forward. Our job is to help that precious “something” emerge from hopelessness and rage.

Reconnecting public and private life

I’ve spent my entire career pursuing change in the corridors of power. The world looked different 20 years ago. So much more seemed clear then. Around me today are masses of people who believe the cards are stacked against them, that their voice is never heard, that their private fears and hopes are not reflected in the public space.

The challenge nowadays is not just to secure policy change. To run successful campaigns. Our language and instincts are rooted in our old world and our old ways. The real task is to restore faith in the idea that our societies can deliver on our dreams and keep us safe from the things we fear. To do this we need to feel we are on the same team again. The chasm between our private selves and the seats of power needs to narrow, and fast. As odd as it may sound to those like me who’ve spent their lives pursuing top-down change, the dinner table and the football pitch are better placed right now to deliver what we need.

When I started Flare I was warned repeatedly it was going to be impossible to get important people to ditch the garlands of their performative lives and step into a more informal space where they can truly connect with those they represent. Time and time again, we’ve proven that wrong. We’re about to do it again.

We’re not mad. We can change society by breaking bread together.

Join us.

This is the stuff change is made of

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 07:16:37 GMT

This is the stuff change is made of

by Andreea Petre-Goncalves

How do you like being made to feel guilty? Do you see the world differently when you’re accused of stupidity or greed? Does it bring you close to your accuser? Do you suddenly see things through their eyes? Me neither.

It makes you wonder why so many of us who dream of a better world spend our lives talking down at others, in the expectation that they will follow us the second they’re exposed to our superior grasp of the facts and unimpeachable ethical principles. In every aspect of our life, we experience aggression negatively. Yet when it comes to social progress, we morph into missionaries denouncing the sinful ways of our fellow man. You know exactly what I mean, we do it on every topic that matters, from climate to racial justice.

At Flare, we’ve known from day one that hope is born from true connection, from togetherness. From shared experience of the things we enjoy and which make us one. Making space to cultivate and grow common ground has been our approach from our very beginning. We brought dialogue into the public square . We took Brexit, so bitterly divisive, to a night of beer and comedy in the pub .

Informality, music, laughter - they were no accident, they weren’t padding. We realised early on that true connection is not easily born around the preacher’s pulpit, but that it emerges naturally in the spaces that already bring us together. Not the stale conference rooms, but the street where laughter rings out from open windows, the soft belly of our humanity, where we are our true selves, without the labels, hats and garlands of our performative “official” lives.

Not for Flare the puritanical admonishment of so much otherwise admirable social campaigning. We are here to help hope grow. We are here to create space for our collective dreams to take shape. This is the stuff true change is made of.

Most of us feel frozen in impotence, bowed by fears big and small, sodden by the drizzle of life’s daily humiliations. Most of us just want to keep our heads down and survive. We feel hope in our hearts when we are part of something bigger, when we’re one of many, when we believe good things lie ahead.

So rather than shouting loud and expecting the world to gather round our pulpit, we are going into the places that breed connection and helping collective dreams grow. Sometimes this lands us in excitingly unusual territory ( like the football stadium – more on this soon ). I am so proud of that. I am so proud that we are going out there in the world with curiosity and empathy, using the best of our knowledge base, our methodology and our networks to help hope grow, to help collective dreams take shape. Never to proselytise. Never to humiliate. Never to scare.

We create space for dreams. It’s more useful than shouting, and more fun too. Join us .

Our personal brands are relics from another age

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 08:10:02 GMT

Our personal brands are relics from another age

I cringe when I think back to all the things I’ve called myself in old job applications. Or on this platform . Not because they were untrue. Not just because they were reductive. Not only because I’ve always found immodesty deeply fishy. Rather because in this new world, both within and all around us, they seem laughably irrelevant.

Take “a seasoned leader”, for example. What a load of old cobblers. The most incompetent folk I know say that about themselves – without exception. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and the people out there who are truly inspiring tend to not bother with this kind of preening peacockery.

I don’t really know what “a seasoned leader is” and I don’t much mind if I am one. I sense that in this new world our old personal branding strategies will lose all currency. A leader will be the person who can inspire others to keep wading through the chaos, to find new ways, to create new hope.

My team at Flare is coming up to celebrate its first anniversary. These four incredible people who keep coming to the table with energy and fresh ideas when we would have had every excuse to pack it all in a thousand times if we’d felt like it – well, that’s leadership. It’s when you’re able to give others a sense of faith in what’s around them and what lies ahead. I work with true leaders.

The world around us is shapeshifting into its next iteration (yes, this truly is happening, trust me, there’s no return to what we knew). Our old personal branding strategies, our “outstanding this” and “expert that”, that seemed compulsory until not long ago, will be a pretty insubstantial armour in a radically new reality. This new age we are entering will ask of us new truths and new rules.

I distinctly remember going back to school in January 1990, days after the fall of the Communist regime in Romania. You’ll often hear me talking about Communism because I am lucky to have already experienced system change once in my lifetime. There are parallels, there are learnings. Anyway, I went into my classroom and the big portrait of Ceausescu, the recently deposed and executed head of state, had been taken down. Back in December, it had been a symbol of power. In the first days of January, it was a shameful memory.

Forget your old garlands. What will matter in this new world of disruption and sickness and poverty and maybe Trump winning a second term, what will really make a difference, will be how you make others feel. How you help them cope with the present and the faith you give them in our collective future.

The true test of how seasoned our leadership really is will be how we make others feel. It’s that simple. My team at Flare, well we remind each other just how much is possible when good people come together to do good things. That alone helps me wake up happy every day, wanting to be awake and wanting to be in this world. I walk the path with people who give me faith in the future, whatever madness lies ahead. That’s the only calling card I need.

Andreea's contribution to Before We Go

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:00:20 GMT

Andreea's contribution to Before We Go

Hello everybody! We hope you're having excellent, well-deserved summer breaks.

Flare's Andreea recorded a short reflection video for Michael Maynard's excellent YouTube channel "Before We Go", as part of a series of thoughts that we might want to leave behind before we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Andreea talks about the role that others have played in her life to make courage possible and calls for daring leaps to free our imaginations in dangerous times.

Midway through 2020, I don't need a roadmap

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 12:58:06 GMT

Midway through 2020, I don't need a roadmap

This month of June has stretched me all out of shape. Two days after I wrote about freshly dug graves to better feel the pain of thousands of nameless COVID deaths, the grim reaper obliged with a very freshly dug grave close to home.

I wrote about my wonderful father-in-law a few years ago. He’s now memories, just like my own father, each in my life for 19 years only, like some cruel expiry date for fatherly connection.

This strange month of June, too many of my conversations have been about the fear that change won’t happen, not the joy that it might just be possible. Division in the streets and all around me have made the quiet torpor of lockdown a distant memory. As always, good encounters, friendship and love all around me kept me above the waterline.

I passed the summer solstice, nature’s exhilarating high point, thrilled by the sense of possibility and exhausted by how slippery a fish this hope business is. I am doing some things differently as a result. I am getting better at prioritising what genuinely sustains this collective march into a new world. I urge all of us to do the same.

I’ve been trying too hard to get the numbers in, when what really matters is the essence, the juice, the life force emboldening us to continue. I am moving forward in the wilderness of 2020 trying to walk the talk. Here are my two learnings at this mid-point:

You can’t prioritise self-interest and solidarity simultaneously. They are moral opposites and sit within different moral systems. You cannot put yourself and the other first, that’s obviously nonsense. There is no such thing as enlightened self-interest. The pursuit of self-interest will not serve the interest of all in any way other than accidentally. It doesn’t trickle down, never has. It’s OK if that’s what you want, but you can’t have both. I am going to stop pretending that you can.

This is mainly from a conversation about business leaders wanting to be on the side of the angels but not knowing exactly what they need to do to achieve that on Monday morning. Here’s the truth: to be seen on the side of the angels, you have to actually be on the side of the angels. We can resolve this tension through dialogue. And wonderful things will come of it.

Having said that, some self-care is required if you want to serve the collective. I’ve not kissed any actual frogs the last few weeks, but spent a lot of energy nurturing the ineffective, the draining, the loose, the obstructive. I need to balance my compulsion to please with an acceptance that a depleted me is not a useful me – and not much fun either. I want to choose what sustains me without “othering” those who are not walking towards the new world alongside me. We are journey fellows, but we don’t have to hold hands each step of the way. This is a tension I still struggle with.

Prioritise those who are lifting you and moving you forward, and be helpful to everyone else - but don’t drag them along paths they’re not ready to follow. That’s not helping anyone.

Because we live in uncertain times, this short blog piece has an uncertain conclusion. There is no roadmap for what lies ahead and that’s fine by me. It would be of little use to anybody right now. There’s no insurance policy. We’ll have to learn new things and unlearn some old things. Not everything we love will make it, but we will love new things and be thrilled with new joys.

The rest of 2020 may be even stranger, but that’s OK, for this year has already given us an enormous gift. It’s made the invisible visible. It’s given us the taste of unimaginable togetherness. It’s messed up our rules and our order and our logic. It’s shone a light on all that was hollow and clarified new meanings against the shadow of uncertainty. It’s made everything possible.

We, the unpeople

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 17:21:16 GMT

We, the unpeople

We are unpeople. Our lives are counted in numbers and acronyms. Our fears in graphs and curves and pie charts. Our vulnerability in abstractions. Our life stories in labels.

My friend Harry Marven shared with me some searingly precise thoughts on justice, privilege and unpeopling a few days ago. The term “unpeople” stuck with me. Harry borrowed it from Mark Curtis, who’d used it to encompass those whose lives were deemed expendable in the foreign policy of the UK and other powers.

When and how do we become unpeople? When do we become numbers, statistics, labels that leave others cold? When do our stories and our pains become invisible?

As soon as the word entered my consciousness, I couldn’t shake it off. Unpeople are everywhere I look. The numbers of COVID casualties, thousands of horrible deaths, of loved ones heartbroken, of fear and freshly dug graves. Unpeople. Pain masked by numbers, the injustice of their fate erased by distance and scale. Herd immunity, end the lockdown, get the economy running, infections slowing, church bells ringing slowly.

The more you look for the unpeople, the more it’s all you see. Our pains are hiding in plain sight. We are screaming for justice, insistent on metamorphosing from abstraction to flesh.

That’s why right now the US is burning. Black lives matter. Goodness me, of course they do. What terrible unpeopling led to a reality where injustice is so deep that the statement is necessary. What a painful and shameful state of affairs to not understand for so long what having the cards stacked against you in every aspect of life really looks like. Our BAME or POC acronyms (in the UK and US respectively) and equal opportunity policies are an indictment of our refusal to see injustice and demand of ourselves, the complicit, that we correct it.

How terrible that the death of George Floyd offered up such hideous visual symbolism of what this injustice means. That injustice is literally denying life, with the might and weight of power and privilege.

It’s like the terrible symbolism of 2017 when Grenfell tower burned like a torch of injustice and despair, its dark coffin-in-the-clouds shape dominating eerily the West London skyline long after. For those who don’t know it, Grenfell was a residential tower block where hundreds of poor people lived, a stone’s throw of one of London’s richest areas. Their building was given a face-lift with cheap, flammable cladding, which set the whole structure alight within minutes of a fridge catching fire on one of the lower floors. Residents had been questioning fire safety for months before the atrocity in which 72 people died. No one had listened. The injustice of their powerlessness, the indifference of the privileged, literally stole lives and broke hearts with indelible trauma.

A society that unpeoples so readily is ripe for some serious questioning. We are not who we claim to be. What kind of cannon are we fodder for? What higher purpose are we sacrificing our personhood for? Why is this a price we should accept to pay? It’s not subversive to ask this, it’s elementary accounting.

We, the unpeople, are yearning for justice. You can’t count our lives in numbers and acronyms. Like George Floyd, we are much more than a slogan. We are re-becoming flesh. We, all of us together, will do much better than this.

Please don’t stand on the side-lines. Join us, drop us a line on hello@flaregovernance.eu .

Image credit Ben Gray / Atlanta Journal - Constitution via Associated Press

#blacklivesmatter

Global day of solidarity message

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 22 May 2020 18:41:52 GMT

Global Day of Solidarity Message

To re-build the right way we support the #GlobalGoals to drive recovery & ensure no one is left behind. Today we join people across the �� in sharing their colourful expression of #SolidarityinAction to create a powerful story of hope for our shared future. Because we are #StrongerTogether��

Flare's Andreea shares her hopes for a new world. Please add your voices to the global movement.

To build the future we want, we have to spell our what kind of people we are, what matters most and what our societies will deliver in the new world.

Drop us a line at hello@flaregovernance.eu to join the conversation.

Six impossible things before breakfast

Fri, 01 May 2020 09:27:05 GMT

Six impossible things before breakfast

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

[ Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll]

As our own whimsical Alice, we too tend to forget that our collective story of society is one that we ourselves craft and re-craft. I am Bosnian, and when I think of the history of the former Yugoslavia, I can see a whole sequence of crafted stories, all of which would have felt like unquestionable reality in their own time:—a society thrashed by East and West, always the conquered and never the conqueror, never given a breath to tell its own story. Fast-forward past the unifying Yugoslav identity, military prowess, and multiethnic harmony to fragmentation and heightened ethnopoltitics. Fast-forward again to years of war, stunted reconciliation, and a tripartite system that keeps Bosnia behind its neighbors. In the Western Balkans and everywhere else, we see that our paradigms can shift and reality can quickly change.

No doubt, the devastation of war is irreversible, but each casualty is a decision made by man. When a mass illness befalls the world, clinging to enemy lines bears no meaning anymore. Unlike the carefully calculated sniper, pathogens do not discriminate— they do not care if you are Catholic, Muslim, purple, or green. What we do have full control over is how we respond, and what we prioritize when we do so. Wherever we stand in terms of politics, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and the like, I would like to believe that one of our top collective goals is to mitigate the suffering of humankind. Increasing numbers of us in this crisis are starting to see that economic growth is not a litmus test for societal well-being and betterment. If anything, what us millennials have morbidly memed ‘Corona time’ has shown us the fault lines of the neoliberal world order. COVID just ended up being that unwanted third-party opinion that truly showed us that we are in a toxic relationship with the economy, and guys— he is totally gaslighting us. Don’t let Tesla billionaire Elon Musk tell you otherwise , as he feigns concern for the people’s rights and safety while encouraging the preemptive reopening of the economy.

With this realization comes some inevitable foundation-shaking. Indeed, we are affronted by some topsy-turvy times and media headlines—we don’t trust our governments, but we want them to put on a hero’s cape in times of crisis. We want to save lives and clap for medical workers, but we also don’t want to scorch the economy in the process. We are uncomfortably wedged between our old profit-first world and our new reality, more vulnerable and more communitarian. There doesn’t seem to be a happy medium, and time is of the essence. Luckily however, while we all panic within the cushy four walls of our own homes, there is ample time for some for personal growth and maintenance. So in this rare time of chaotic stillness, I want to briefly remind us of a few monumental and previously unimaginable things that have happened during the global lockdown:

Government deadlock and potentially mass ideology are being forced to rapidly change by an invisible force. Increasingly, people are reaching across the aisle to come to agreement on the importance of access to healthcare, managing disinformation about the COVID virus, emphasizing the need for government competence .

There has been a massive drop in crime rates around the world. Even the most populated and crime-ridden cities such as Chicago and New York, are seeing drops from 10-30% in murder, robbery, assault, and burglary since the beginning of the pandemic.

War and/or combative military engagement has waned (at least, temporarily). Hopefully influenced by the UN appeal for global ceasefire , we are seeing a decline in combative military action. Through a shaky cease-fire was brokered in Syria prior to the pandemic, Syria has recently seen the least amount of civilian deaths since 2011. Iran and US tension has also deescalated in the Iraqi region ( Syrian Observatory of Human Rights ) . Even some Palestinian-Israeli cooperation has resulted from the global adversity.

In the end, little Alice didn’t know what she was getting herself into when she arrived into a new upside-down world, but she had the guts to face it head-on. With changes unfolding before our very eyes in this new reality, the impossible has become possible. We don’t even need to go chasing rabbits—the power is ours to weave our own stories, and we too can dream of six possible things before breakfast.

Talking to mum about her journey with dogmas

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 06:45:25 GMT

Talking to mum about her journey with dogmas

The fall of communism launched my mum ’s political career and set the blueprint for my own life narrative. I realised as an adult that it wasn’t the system rupture per se that marked me. It was learning from mum that the world is built by humans. And that justice, fraternity and a good life for all are worth fighting for. When she left politics 11 years ago, tired and disappointed, my own hope in the future was rather dented. I realised not long ago, comically late, that I defined myself as being of her, as being of someone who believes and does and dares. When she stopped, I didn’t really know how to continue either. Now I do.

I spoke to mum at length about my critique of neoliberal economism and why I felt it amounted to dogma. We agree on all of it, and we agree especially that a dogma is a dogma, whether pre or post 1989. It’s so interesting to see how free-market fundamentalism, which was “the future” and “the new” as I was growing up, is now visible to us as ideology, its hollowness and cruelty quite plain to see. How remarkable that in Eastern Europe we sleepwalked so willingly from one dogma into the next. How sad that we compromised so much of our humanity in the process. How extraordinary for all of us that we are given a reprieve, with time to think. What luck to be able to rebuild the future around the things that truly matter.

Here are mum’s thoughts on her journey with dogmas (I translated this from Romanian with apologies for losing some of her nuance and poetry):

"It feels appropriate to look more deeply into things when we’ve been locked up inside for six weeks. This is the only spring I can remember that seems to have crept up on us. Where I live, the silence and stillness are only punctuated by occasional ambulance sirens or church bells ringing mournfully.

Dogmatic approaches are dangerous in whichever period of history we might find ourselves. I have the benefit of hindsight, having spent 38 of my 68 years in communism and 30 in capitalism. I am an economist by training and for 20 years I was a local, national and European politician. I know my dogmas, having swum in one or the other, and I have a grasp of economic theory too.

During the communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe, dogma insinuated itself into our lives in thousands of ways. One example among many was this. Dogma stated that the Romanian Communist Party was the vital centre of the nation. All of us regular folk recited this religiously, with never a detail on exactly how and why the party was so essential.

Sometimes in various exams we’d have to pass, elements of the communist dogma would come up as topics. I had this very experience once. I was 37 and had never cheated in an exam in my life. But for this one, I had ripped up a page from a political magazine and so I copied the dogmatic verse word for word. There was nothing to add. I passed with flying colours.

And not that long after, in December 1989, the Romanian Communist Party, the vital centre of the nation, disappeared in one day, swept away by revolution. In just one day, it left behind hundreds of empty offices, under lock and seal, from where until then the vital centre had been run. I worked in the local administration at the time, on the same floor as some of these structures. I remember exactly how the dissipation of this dogma felt. I remember the absence of freedom, how hard it had been to get your hands on a good book, but also how comforting that everybody had roofs over their heads and a job to go to everyday. You always win some and lose some with dogmas.

What’s on our minds now? What do we dream of, what do we feel during this longest and widest pause of our lifetimes? Widest because it stretches from one end of our Earth to the other, all round. On TV and all other news outlets, we hear much panic about the economy, the deficit, the negative price of the oil barrel. This is the dogma of our times.

Now though is a good time to reflect and replace old and new dogmas with our lives themselves , with what fills them, what makes them joyful and what makes us happy. We can truly feel that for once we and our lives are all. We can finally see that we can’t continue wrecking things around us without picking up the tab. Now, in this longest pause of our lives, we can see that we matter and life matters. We stopped and madness stopped with us. We stopped filling up our tanks and we have more petrol than we need. We are discovering we can live without millions upon millions of invented nothings. Some of us are trailing behind in the process of realisation, which means the crisis is likely to be with us a while.

Often, I think the new world is coming and it will be different, and that I should support its delivery in whatever way I can, help build it. Enough of the nasty, selfish stuff. I will support those who hold the truth and press those who deceive us to show their true colours.

The work starts now to build the new world. All of us who have learned the lessons and survived need to stand shoulder to shoulder and voice our truths with courage. All our energy needs to go into this construction of our new life, after our longest pause. We are the true vital centre of everything, not profit, not the deficit, not the highs and lows of the stock market. These meaningless creations, like the Romanian Communist Party, can disappear in seconds if we are not well."

Every dogma has its day - and its thought police

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 13:54:33 GMT

Every dogma has its day - and its thought police

This article was written for John Rapley's Subversity blog.

It’s the economy, stupid. There’s no magic money tree [stupid]. The age of irresponsibility is giving way to the age of austerity [stupid]. Disagree with this if you dare [but clearly you must be stupid]. Let me explain what is possible [stupid].

“I think people in this country have had enough of experts, from organisations with acronyms […]” Michael Gove, June 2016

We are in the dying days of neoliberal capitalism. Its rulebook lies abandoned, its promises ridiculous, the science behind the doctrine evidently inexact. COVID-19 has hit us hard, when our defences were low. A decade of austerity had depleted our healthcare systems and weakened our social safety nets. The multilateral architecture had been enfeebled by much macho posturing. The free markets were no match for a pesky little virus. Global supply chains faltered instantly, and all emergency actions were undertaken by the public, not the private sector. When the chips were down, our lives took precedence over our economies, solidarity over profit. When we re-emerge, we will be poorer, more vulnerable and less willing to believe that the invisible hand can glue the pieces of our broken world back together. We won’t be told there’s no alternative. Our re-construction will be deliberate, collective, and have people and planet at the heart.

An economistic dogma disciplined us into submission

No one doubts the role that the discipline of neoliberal economics has played in ordering our societies. What we often misunderstand is how it has done that. We assume it was by way of offering a scientific pathway for prosperity and development. Yet benefits we may have derived from its learnings come second to its most powerful contribution - that of sustaining and policing the enforcement of a very particular moral system of assumptions, values and restrictions on behaviour. Economics, like religion once upon a time, has long delineated what we are permitted to think. John Rapley describes this eloquently here .

Tony Judt portrayed the way these limits operate on our imagination in his moving and incisive testament “Ill Fares the Land”:

“Today, we are encouraged to believe in the idea that politics reflects our opinions and helps us shape a shared public space. Politicians talk and we respond – with our votes. But the truth is quite other. Most people don’t feel as though they are part of any conversation of significance. They are told what to think and how to think it. They are made to feel inadequate as soon as issues of detail are engaged; and as for general objectives, they are encouraged to believe that these have long since been determined.”

The scientific aura of economics has helped cement a highly ideological way of ordering society around the key idea that an individualist meritocracy is an evidence-based way of delivering social justice, of making sure there is fairness and balance in the world. This evidence base was always thin at best and not unequivocal. Economics has helped enforce an individualist, competitive worldview by meting out disdain and derision on any alternatives, deemed unscientific, backward and ideological. And frankly, stupid.

Stupidity became the new sinfulness

Stupidity, in the context of a moral order built on striving for progress, is a breach, a contravention, something to be controlled through thought policing and ridicule. In older moral orders, sinfulness would have played the role that stupidity or backwardness play in pre-COVID 19 neoliberal economism.

So successful was this narrative strategy in disciplining ideas that old left-right political divisions became irrelevant in the 1990s (in the era of Clinton, Blair, Schroder and others) as all of politics re-aligned itself with the assumptions of the neoliberal market-first, business-first, justice-through-individual-merit consensus. Anything else began to feel stupid, and risible. Progress was going to be attained through scientific method, not old-fashioned ideology, via purely rational, technocratic processes.

The political contest itself became a managerial competition, a patronising politics of progressive knowledge over backwards ideological conviction, of educating the stupid and looking down on the uncouth. The content of politics was no longer something to be debated, only the competence, the actors and the methods. Embarrassed by the ideological backwardness and stupidity of talking about structural economic injustice, the left dedicated its energy instead to identity politics and individual liberties, unwittingly reinforcing neoliberalism’s individualist filter with entirely noble aims. It simply stopped telling its own moral story, limiting itself to a slightly softer version of the core neoliberal narrative, with the free, worthy individual at the heart. No wonder its constituency grew ever smaller, as ordinary folk chose the main brand over the bleeding-heart imitation.

The success of neoliberal ideology was measured by how ubiquitous it had become, protected by the invisibility cloak of economics as a reassuring scientific base for progress.

Sic transit

In neoliberal societies, the moral order sits on a justice story which, put simply, says “the worthy individual does well”. If you are worthy (through effort, genius, brilliance), you will be successful. If you are not, you will not enjoy rewards. Conversely if you are successful, you must surely have deserved it. And if you are not, it’s probably your own fault. This is what justice looks like. Economics provides the proof (by stating that individuals are self-interested and competitive above all else). It also offers the means for operationalising the justice narrative, by prioritising market competition as a way of determining worthiness. Scientific socialism played a similar role in sustaining the communist totalitarian moral order across many parts of the world after WWII.

With both neoliberal capitalism and totalitarian communism, the narrative held best for as long as it did not sit too uncomfortably with reality. In my native country of Romania, totalitarian Communism didn’t feel awfully scientific or progressive during the hungry years of the mid to late 1980s, when the shops were empty, milk and meat a rare luxury and butter an improbable-sounding invention, the stuff of fairy-tales, surely. The “scientific” bit of socialism felt a bit unlikely when waiting for hours in queues for petrol, so you can drive your Dacia (the only car available), two out of four weekends a month, specifics depending on whether your number plate was an odd or even number.

A similar thing happened in neoliberal capitalist societies in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Living standards declined as austerity programmes bit hard. Millions upon millions of people joined the ever-increasing ranks of what Guy Standing termed “the precariat”, a pay cheque away from destitution, living lives of insecurity on low-wage, no-rights, zero-hour contracts. Competing in this callous job market meant that for an increasing number, the reward for worthiness never came. The housing market, clearly an inadequate way of supplying one of the most essential public goods (roofs over heads) pushed a large mass of bodies into ever-shrinking, inadequate, soul-crushing accommodation, rents ever-rising and home ownership a fata morgana.

This affected people from all walks of life, not just the destitute. A few years ago, my senior NGO salary only stretched as far as 85% of our London rent and childcare costs. My reward for worthiness was hand-to-mouth living with a sprinkling of psychological exhaustion and feelings of failure.

The moral order, propped up as it may be by grey-suited economists preaching appropriate thinking, cannot hold indefinitely in dissonance with the lived experience and prevailing mood – one of ever more wintery discontent.

So when Michael Gove cynically told us that people had had enough of experts back in 2016, he was onto something. He knew it with confidence of course, as he was steering a Russian-backed strategy to capitalise on that discontent and shake-up the political (if not economic) consensus. The moral order cannot hold forever if the promised justice looks implausible and undeliverable. If you are looking to gain political ground, it makes sense to cast doubt on the validity of a weakened moral narrative. This is exactly what populist movements have done in Europe and beyond since 2015 (I include Brexit and Trump here). And true to form, the mainstream response was exactly what the economistic neoliberal narrative prescribed: “ these guys must be some kind of stupid ”.

A new story is emerging

Our new COVID-19 reality means a return to neoliberal economism will not go unchallenged. When the Netherlands insists on fiscal responsibility before solidarity in the worst crisis Europe has known since WWII, the moral order starts looking distinctly strained. We all know we can’t judge Italy as a miscreant during the COVID-19 crisis, as many did Southern Europe every time it was bailed out after 2008. Its predicament is not a result of stupidity or immorality, it has not breached the moral order. It has simply been terribly hit by a very contagious disease with a high mortality rate. We are seeing the callousness of the neoliberal dogma exposed. The perceived desire and collective need for solidarity means the Netherlands are singing a dissonant tune, from a film that has already finished.

This crisis is the very definition of Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive dislocation, a momentous event via which the fabricated aspects of a narrative construction become visible. We see our old dogma in its hollowness. Its political aspects are suddenly obvious, when for decades they were veiled in the illusion of economic science or technocratic common sense. We can see we were making a choice, although we didn’t realise we had a choice. It was our choice to allow a topsy-turvy world where profit came first and justice came never, but we didn’t realise there was an alternative. And we didn’t want to look stupid.

We are creating collective meaning out of shared trauma. After this our societies will not accept private profit as an instrument for delivering social justice. Our new world will be built to deliver the common good. Individuals will not have to compete for survival, they will have a right to thrive and live without fear and humiliation, in a world where our wealth is our common.

This is not utopia. Altruism and community living are the very story of human evolution. Individualist man was humanity’s embarrassing mid-life crisis, all fast cars and inappropriate lovers. As we stare into the rubble of our old world, smoke clearing from the debris, our debts to each other and our planet are clear as day. A new story is being woven, and in this one knowledge from economics or other disciplines will help us deliver on our values, not limit our imaginations. Politics will not disguise itself as technocracy again. This selfish dogma has had its day. We will do much, much better when we re-emerge.

Support Flare's work to enable a new moral narrative fit for our post-COVID 19 world.

Andreea's lockdown diary podcast

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:43:51 GMT

Andreea's lockdown diary podcast

Flare's Andreea recorded a lockdown diary podcast as part of a series on experiences in confinement all over the world. Here's also a nice article inspired by Andreea's story , written by John Rapley, the curator of the podcast series.

Andreea's message is one of hope for a new world, re-built around the things we all value most: solidarity, safety, dignity, connection.

Stay safe and hopeful, one and all!

This transformation is not a product

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 09:09:53 GMT

This transformation is not a product

A new world is being born and we are in the midst of labour. As happens with the birth of children, before the event we envisage beautiful scenes in romantic pastels, draw up clear birth plans and line up the aromatherapy bottles. When it’s all over, we’ll breathe a resigned sigh of relief, grateful that we’re still alive, our detailed birth plan not worth the paper it was written on. Incidentally, the one I drew up for my daughter’s birth was the opposite of what I’ve just described, and still of no use whatsoever.

The transformation of our world is happening in ways we hadn’t planned, much more traumatically, by force. The inadequacy of our old strategies is clear, their role in this drama quite evident. The threat of COVID-19 stems largely from our old ways of operating (our invasion of nature, commodification of food, unsustainable travel, de-prioritisation of public safety nets, obsession with growth and profit, lowest-common-denominator public policy, etc). Make no mistake, this crisis is a product of our old world.

Product is a key word here. Because while our minds adjust to the chasm and possibilities ahead, we are still mouthpieces for our old dogmas, the very philosophies that got us here. I see calls to action asking for ideas that combine profit and social purpose, as if value could not exist unless it is marketable. We’ve just joined the Global Hack knowing fully well that we fall short, because while our vision is powerful, those looking for products may not have patience with our crumpled packaging and luddite ways. There’s huge money being offered out there for magic bullets in whatever field is flavour of the day for philanthropists. EU ministers are banging on about fiscal discipline, while Spanish nurses fashion protective aprons out of bin bags. In many ways, nothing has changed. Except that hedge funds are apparently cashing in on the uncertainty. Doubles all round, cheers everybody!

This transformation is not a product. Our old market-centred dogmas are a comforting distraction, understandable as our world shape-shifts at bewildering speed. We cannot commodify this change. The market will not deliver our future world - and we are more imaginative than that, aren’t we?

Our new shared story is fast emerging, and it’s one of justice through solidarity, not profit. We do not have to make sure our transition to a new world is profitable, but it must compulsorily be just. Our new world will protect the right to safety and dignity, not the right to riches. This crisis is showing us that we can dare to live meaningful lives, connecting, not competing with each other. Let these be the dying days of neoliberalism’s individualist man, and the re-birth of our true altruistic, communitarian selves. Those were always more important evolutionary traits.

Systemic ruptures make old frames for viewing reality redundant. It takes a while for our minds to catch up. Like bringing a child into this world, we get there in the end and when we do, what came before ceases to matter.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

We've got this

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 07:04:57 GMT

We’ve got this

There’s a lot of post-COVID scenario-mapping going on out there. Some are eagerly signposting the return to “business-as-usual” , some arguing for progress within the boundaries of realpolitik . In my liberal, green, leftie, cosmopolitan bubble, every heart is dreaming of a new world – calling for cool-headed, strategic action but tentative in pinpointing what that action is.

I’ve felt weirdly calm throughout the upheaval (so far). Carefully laid, crucial work-plans disappeared in an instant - yet there was no grief at their loss. It feels like there’s much harm in chaos - but some opportunity too. With our backs pinned against the wall, our hearts and brains are aroused anew. If we weather this storm, our opportunity to change the course of history is a rare, once-in-a-generation gift.

How things work

Let’s devise a basic strategy for hope. Forget complex manifestos right now. Forget all the problems we must not forget. Forget how loud and overwhelming and huge everything around us is.

Here’s a simplistic sketch of our reality. A basic narrative underpins the way we run our societies. It’s a moral story that can be summed up as “ the worthy individual does well ”. Whether or not it stands up to scrutiny is irrelevant.

This moral story is at the heart of how we organise our political economy. It is how we are able to prioritise the market as a means to determine merit through competition, and why we reward the winners by favouring economic over other types of interests. It’s as powerful as “ it’s god’s will for feudal lords to enjoy wealth ” was, once upon a time. Or the populist “ they are screwing you ”.

The same narrative is also embedded into the fabric of our societies, where it shapes our cultural attitudes towards those who are losing out. We deride them (scroungers, louts, tearaways, foreigners) because we assume their disadvantage is deserved. After all, the worthy individual does well.

Here’s what we do now

If COVID-19 is teaching us anything, it’s that we are yearning for a deeper, more fraternal story to order society. This is all we have to do right now. Tell that new moral story in one short sentence. Once this is done, we will build a new political, economic and social order fit for our times on its shoulders. The manifestos will be written. The future will be different, maybe better.

So, what is the moral story that will guide us into the future? Don’t send the answer on a postcard, it will be too long. Take a deep breath too, we’ve got this.

PS: At Flare we’ve not built a methodology for nothing. We have an idea how to do this. Please fund us and get in touch .

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

The past is a foreign country

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 13:35:42 GMT

The past is a foreign country

This is a short one as my thoughts are not fully formed at the moment.

We will not be picking up where we left off when COVID 19 eases its grip on us, whether that’s in 3 months or 3 years from now. Things will not, by default, be better or worse (in some ways worse is inevitable) and this is not the time to make complacent assumptions. Please, let’s lay off the lazy “planet is breathing” stuff (for how long?) and stop wasting energy on trying to shoehorn our old magic bullets [insert single issue of choice here] into this brand-new reality. It’s blank sheet time, friends.

Here are some holy tenets of the past 30-40 years obliterated in an instant by the COVID 19 jolt – and some recent knotweed growth too:

1. Economism . Turns out it’s not the economy, stupid. When the shit hits the fan, we can pull out the safety nets, and not wait for the honey of wealth-making to trickle down. That stuff had been losing its shine for a few years now, with the ever-growing precariat increasingly turning to populism. It’s now shattered, its quasi-religious aura gone. What a depressing reduction of our humanity it was, too.

2. The timid state , so much maligned in neoliberal rhetoric despite its ever-shrivelling capacity. It’s back with a vengeance and, out of necessity (oh the irony), in its authoritarian form. We need to obey because our lives are in danger. So much for the market as the choice purveyor of public goods. Turns out there’s value in the commons and the public realm. We all knew it , one way or another. For now, power to the people is an empty platitude and the multilateral space a corridor for tumbleweed. There’s danger in both of those things, but opportunity too.

3. The polarisation prompted by a political-economic paradigm approaching redundancy vanished overnight. We are reverting to the commons by necessity, threat to life a powerful leveller. Brexit feels like an anachronism. The almighty populists are exposed in their incompetent, cynical buffoonery. The bile of no longer than two weeks ago is suddenly ridiculous. I watched a video last week of some dude interpreting Macron’s eyebrow movements in search of signs of insincerity. You don’t have to like the Jupiterian French president, but it’s a crisis and his eyebrows are of no interest to me. They seem fine.

To conclude. We are reverting to the commons by necessity. This fuzzy, warm solidarity I see in furtive glances in the street, sympathetic words, neighbours coming out at their windows every night to applaud emergency services, this stuff is precious and fleeting.

Let’s not squander it with noise. Let’s start with some quiet reflection. If the world was the way it should be after this, what would it look like? What is needed for that to be possible [ do not insert single issue of choice here]?

Support Flare to help us through the cacophony towards our common future after COVID 19.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Look after each other!

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 11:26:33 GMT

Look after each other!

Flare followers, do you remember Andreea’s 3 tips for saving the world from last year ? Us neither :-). They might help us get through this coronavirus pandemic situation. Here they are again:

1. Be kind to each other. Stay in if you can. Help those who need it. Avoid the dreaded #hamsterkauf. Leave snogging strangers for another time, even if they’re gorgeous.

2. Be brave . Say no when you should. Stay in if you can. Stand up to peer pressure, this is no time to be cool. Fight the urge to #hamsterkauf. Leave face masks and other PPE for healthcare professionals, we need them alive to save our backsides.

3. Do your bit for the collective . Keep yourself inside, do it anyway but especially if you’re coughing, tired, feverish or grumpy. Check in on those you love and those you don’t, but do it remotely. Do not spread any information from unofficial sources, even if it looks plausible. Follow public health advice to the letter. Only buy what you truly need, leave some for others, do not #hamsterkauf. Make each other’s hearts sing, remember to laugh and make merry, but for once do it remotely.

We are putting all our love out there to each and every one of you. Let’s look after each other.

#covid19 #coronavirus #brusselslockdown #restezchezvous

By the whole team at Flare

Who knew? Vulnerability and happiness are bedfellows

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 06:14:53 GMT

Who knew? Vulnerability and happiness are bedfellows

It's about a year since I took the Eurostar from London to Brussels with my little girl to find us a new family home and pave the way for a new life. As I look out to fresh shoots of spring rising up in my beautiful Brussels garden, it seems clear that the risks of embarking on the madness of the last 12 months are an irrelevance. Every bit of it was worth it.

This article started a few weeks ago but came to a halt at the request of my team, who (very sensibly) pointed out that some will read my profession of vulnerability as a sign of poor judgement. Brene Brown doesn’t think so .

I have thought about it a bit since then and decided to own this space regardless. I took an enormous risk last year by throwing my family into a new life without a safety net. The cost was high precisely because I opened us up to a world of vulnerability. We paid the price in sheer terror, the fear of the unknown and a million possible failures gnawing at us daily. We stared into the abyss many a time, wondering how this madness would end. The nerves are far from over.

Creating Flare was an inevitability, because my career brought me to a point where no alternatives were conceivable, where I had to nail my colours to the mast. There was no point continuing in old ways, doing things I felt were not bringing about the change I want to see in the world. Today, I am about a galaxy outside of my comfort zone, by being that change, not just a voice demanding change. I have never been happier.

Vulnerability is not just the price I pay, it’s my ticket to this new exhilarating space I am inhabiting, where a new world is possible and I am part of making it happen. I had to allow myself to feel this fear and let it live with me or else the old ways would have held me in their stale grip forever. I still kick myself for lots of things. I miss having someone else pay me a salary, the sense of reassuring everyman accomplishment it gave me. Often I do still question the selfishness of straining my family’s resilience for an idea.

This Kool-Aid I am drinking is no longer just my own recipe. I have four world-class professionals with me on this Flare journey. We are breaking patterns of thinking and action, putting ourselves out there with fearless vulnerability. Asking others to join us in embracing fragility and facing the unknown with honesty and courage. To stop acting like we have it all figured out when our world is tearing at the seams all around us.

And you know what? It’s working. We’re tapping into a real need for authenticity and human connection that is being felt across sectors, from EU policy-making, to business, campaigning and grassroots mobilisation. In March we are sitting down with 60 folk who care about the global food system to see how we can begin to tell the same story to end hunger and feed all of us sustainably. In April we are taking that story to the UN stage . Who knows what comes after that? The scales are falling from our eyes and we are no longer afraid of being afraid.

Join us.

And donate to our work here https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress .

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

A halfway point between truth and a lie

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:38:23 GMT

A halfway point between truth and lie is still a lie

-- (McIntyre 2019 interview)

As I was sitting in my living room the other day enjoying my morning coffee in an attempt to distract from record-breaking smog here in Sarajevo, I flipped to the news channel on TV. I rarely watch the news nowadays (it is way more convenient to read through news reports from various sources) because of the rampant polarizing agendas of major news outlets, but that day I decided to entertain *said* news channel. While listening through the main highlights of the Trump impeachment hullabaloo and the fear of WWIII initiated by Trump and Iran, something dawned on me: Flare Governance has come to the community as an organization fighting for the good of humankind out of necessity.

This necessity comes from the loss of faith in our institutions and leaders that has spanned across oceans, and has caused a societal fissure so large that we cannot even discern obvious facts from fiction. I mean— if you think it is perfectly dandy to distract from the imminent issues of climate change and political corruption by playing chicken with Iran and by making fun of Greta Thunberg, then I would like to find out more about your priorities, to better understand them.

Now that I have reached the main point of my rant, I am glad I already have your attention. Climate change is science. Let me say it again for you at the back, climate change is science, and it’s here, now, TODAY. Only hungry political rhetoric could possibly take such a blatant truth and spin it on its head.

It dawns on me more and more every day when I watch or rather, read the news that us “liberals” surely aren’t the only ones who fear that the sky is falling. At Flare, we are not simply pushing some hippy-dippity agenda, but we approach society with a measured temperament to fight the era of “Post-Truth” where alternative facts — and even people's feelings —are permissible as actual facts (McIntyre, 2018). We are not stuffy academics that aim to analyze how we got here, but rather we put our methodology to practice to resolve grievances around the Post-Truth era we are living in.

I refuse to live in a world where facts don’t matter, and I am proud to be part of an organization that has finally said “enough”. I refuse to raise my hands in defeat and concession as the sweat above my brow drips more and more than the year before, and wonder to myself: how can others deny the science behind how we got here? You would think that those who speak on our behalf and uphold our institutions are rational enough beings, (I mean we voted for them right? They are a reflection of us, right?) to see the truth as clear as the raging fires that span from California to Australia.

How can we so fervently even argue about the factual merit of climate change as each and every breath we take on this Earth becomes harder and harder? The way I see it, from any side of the political spectrum, there is no point in battling if there is no ground to battle on. Though we do need to learn to actively listen and compromise with one another on the government level, some things we cannot concede. As poignantly stated by McIntyre, “a halfway point between a truth and a lie is still a lie.”

This brings me to my final thought— a call to action. I ask you to do something positive today that is for the good of the environment. Bike to work, use your reusable KeepCup, avoid buying plastic, or anything else you can think of! Share your ideas with us on Facebook or Twitter :)

Want to become a part of saving our democracies and making the world a more sustainable place for humans alike? Donate to our cause at: https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress

By Leylah Hadrovic

———

McIntyre, L. C. (2018). Post-truth. Available at: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/post-truth

Do you know what I mean? What we lose in translation

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 14:34:58 GMT

Do you know what I mean? What we lose in translation

Have you ever noticed that some polyglots love to tell you about the words that exist in their language for concepts that don’t exist in yours?

A woman I knew whose parents were Dutch never got sick of telling us that there was no way we could ever fully understand what gezellig meant, and that English was a very much poorer language for having no equivalent to this most exquisite concept. I’m going to go out on a limb and say ‘cozy’ pretty much covers it. Sorry, Briona.

Loan words from one language to another often indicate this phenomenon - is there an English word to cover the concept of a doppelganger , for example? I mean sure we have lookalike , but it hardly has the same sinister undertone. Makes you wonder whether doppelgängigkeit was a particular problem at some time in the German-speaking world, that they needed to give it a name.

I got thinking about all of this while reading about a study that looked at emotion words across nearly 2,500 (!) languages*. The researchers showed that the way we understand such fundamental concepts as ‘love’ or ‘anger’ differs depending on our native language.

Surprise!

Take surprise for example. Speakers of Austronesian languages such as Hawaiian, closely align the feelings of surprise and fear. If you, on the other hand, speak a Tai-Kadai language from South-East Asia or Northern India, you’ll tend not have this negative association with fear but to experience surprise as a neighbouring concept to hope or want.

Closer to (my) home, the article quotes Maja Konkolewska, a Polish/English translator and interpreter who believes the emotions we feel are connected to the experiences of our ancestors. “I always struggle to translate the word vulnerable to Polish because there is no direct equivalent,” she says. “When I listen to my grandmother’s stories about her childhood during the second world war, I wonder whether there was no space for vulnerability in Polish history.”

Or indeed, how the Dutch have laboured on so long without a proper word for cozy.

Not so surprising

Honestly, the lack of direct fit between different languages’ expressions for basic concepts shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. So often whether we’re talking, writing or texting between native speakers of the same language, meaning fails to be conveyed.

An acquaintance of mine frequently refers to my violin as a banjo – I suspect this might be supposed to be humorous, or perhaps a coping mechanism to disguise a failing memory. But I’m not a very good violinist, and calling my hobby by the wrong name can feel calculated to belittle my abilities or my passion. Especially because the banjo is such a (wrongly) sneered at instrument .

Another friend recently asked me what new instrument I’m ‘playing around with’ at the moment, which again seemed to trivialise my endeavours on the mute cornett . Now, the fact is that in English we do play an instrument – same as all the other European language families** and likely further afield. That’s a fairly objective fact. Playing around introduces an element that’s more subjective. It could mean experimenting, seeing what you can do with something. It could also mean picking something up frivolously, with no intention of ever mastering it.

If I’m generous – some would say rational – I’ll assume that my friend wasn’t shooting from below the hip to belittle my latest musical fad. Sadly as a Scorpio, I’m not rational and I will always assume you are trying to take me down, however subtly or innocently you appear to do it.

Joking aside, the point is that as soon as our language leaves our lips, our pen, our fingers or thumbs, it belongs to our audience or our interlocutor as much as it does to us. The impact it makes on them can be instantaneous, powerful and irreversible – or at least very difficult to take back, should that prove necessary.

Clean language

Clean Language can help us move past misunderstandings like this. It involves using a person's own words to direct their attention to some aspect of their experience. It was developed by David Grove who found that it is useful to focus attention on the metaphors people use naturally to describe that experience. Clean Language enables people to discover and develop their own symbols and metaphors, without contaminating these with any judgments, assumptions or opinions introduced by an external influence, such as a conversation partner.

Clean questions are used in many different fields, including coaching, therapy, business, organisational change, health, education and as a research interview technique.

Using Clean Language questions, I could find out from my friend what he meant when he asked me what new instrument I’m ‘playing around with at the moment’. I may find out that the ‘around’ came from trying to take me down, or from a place of recognising that I play multiple instruments at one time, or from somewhere completely different.

What Clean Language will allow me to do is find out about my friend’s experience without clouding it with mine. I can then explain my experience to him, and come to agreement on how each of us experienced the moment. Yes, it may seem like a long winded way of going about things. But when it comes to working with others, we need to recognise when we’re making assumptions and work with each other meaningfully to create the space to understand differences and work together for change.

Takeaways

So here’s some ideas I am left with after mulling all of this over.

First, in the words of Erikah Badu , “keep in mind that I’m an artist, and I’m sensitive about my shit!”.

Remember that people do not use words in the same way as you, even if you’re ostensibly speaking the same language. Be curious and find out what is going on for the other person, in their own words.

Second, if our aim is to include, we need to be aware that conversations in English will exclude many voices point blank, while introducing an unlevel playing field for those who remain. Remember that even people who are comfortable in English - native speakers included - might not be using the same words in the same way as you.

Translators and interpreters can help, but those guys are expensive. More importantly they slow down the pace of discussion. In our world of rolling news and lightening quick surges of opinion on social media, that means you lose a lot of your audience from the jump. The pace that artificial intelligence is developing in translation and even real-time audio translation is remarkable, but comes with its own limitations and dangers.

Finally, if we want to talk constructively with anyone at all, but especially if we know we’re coming from different standpoints, we need to establish a shared linguistic framework. We need to be sure that we agree about concepts, that we’re not antagonising one another every time we open our mouth. Rather than thoughtlessly shutting down conversation, let's open our minds and our hearts to other points of view. Share your ideas on how to do that on our Twitter !

If any of this has resonated with you, then you know that finding ways to talk effectively through the cacophony of today’s politics is absolutely vital if we’re going collectively solve the multiple crises that are threatening humanity and our planet today.

Flare is working to do just that, but our work costs money. If you are able to give a little to help us fight the good fight, please donate here ; every little helps.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to this blog post. Join the discussion on our Twitter here .

* For the long read, check out the full study in Science Mag, for language geeks it’s truly fascinating.

Resources

• https://cleanlearning.co.uk/

• From Contempt To Curiosity, by Caitlin Walker

• So ... You want to be #DramaFree, by Caitlin Walker & Marian Way

• Metaphors in Mind, by Penny Tompkins and James Lawley

• Clean Approaches for Coaches, Marian Way

By Joe Carew

Happy holidays from the Flare family!

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 10:39:08 GMT

Happy holidays from the Flare family!

Dear friends,

From the Flare family to yours, we want to wish you a warm holiday season. We hope 2019 has brought you the joy and happiness you all deserve.

This year, we set ourselves the task of fighting for our democracies. They are under serious threat. Dangerous levels of polarization, hatred and disinformation are re-shaping our world, as we speak. It’s a huge job for all of us. At Flare, we’re tackling it with evidence-based solutions for dialogue. We bring together unlike minds who see the world in different lights but who need to come together to safeguard our societies and our shared future.

This year we tackled rising intolerance and Brexit division in our first Brussels Get Togethers . We couldn't have done it without your encouragement, expertise, friendship, donations and support. Thank you.

Early in 2020, we give sustainable food systems and European identity the Flare treatment with our clever mix of cognitive linguistics, sense-making dialogue, Clean Language and Systemic Modelling™.

This is much-needed work in an era of unpredictability and tension. None of it is possible without your continued support. These are some of the things we would love your help with:

Donations. We are volunteers giving this our all. Please help us by donating here .
Pro-bono support (finance, fundraising and Belgian legal advice in particular)
Recommendations for new Flare members, including Board members
Connections to others who can amplify and enrich our work
Oh, and did we mention donations

Happy holidays and a wonderful, joyous 2020!

With thanks and friendship,

Andreea, Joe, Aga, Leylah and Lucy from Flare

5 steps for difficult conversations over the holidays

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 08:51:35 GMT

5 steps for having difficult conversations during the holidays

By Lucy Walker

With an increase in polarisation across our political and social spaces, we may find ourselves feeling at odds with family members, friends and acquaintances over the holidays. They may appear to be on the other side of a vast divide.

At Flare we have been discussing alternatives to crossing our fingers and hoping politics, the environment or the state of our society won’t come up. We have developed the following step by step guide to creating dialogue with those who are different to you:

Start by asking people what they think about politics, about society, about who they voted or want to vote for.
You could ask: “if there was a miracle, and this country was just as you’d like it to be, what would you see and hear?”
Be interested and tell people that you are - say something like, ‘I’m really interested in finding out what’s important to you and where we might have some common ground”.
Once they say what they think, you can ask one or a combination of these five questions to put the focus on their values, beliefs and understanding:

What’s important to you about that?
What will that give you and your community?
What do you think will happen in the longer term?
Where will that change come from?
What lets you know that that’s true?

5. If conversations become angry or contemptuous, or unfounded claims arise, then you can switch attention again by asking “So what’s really important to you? What are you protecting when you feel like that?”

These questions may uncover common ground. These questions may uncover deeper divides than you were aware of. What they should do is help you understand how others are thinking, what they’d like to have happen and what’s important to them in their country and their community.

Here at Flare we look to do this on a society-wide scale, bringing together unlike minds to help them find shared language to move from division to solutions. This year we tackled rising intolerance and Brexit division in our first Brussels Get Togethers . Early in 2020, we give sustainable food systems and European identity the Flare treatment with our clever mix of cognitive linguistics, sense-making dialogue, Clean Language and Systemic Modelling™.

Get in touch with us if you want to help our and please support our work by donating .

Buckle up

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 09:01:33 GMT

Buckle up

As I woke this morning to the news that the UK, my beloved home of 22 years, fell prey to a mendacious campaign of barely dissimulated hatred, it was clear that we are collectively entering some very dark times. Friday the 13th indeed.

Safe on the other side of the channel, where the hatred and division disease propagated cleverly by our powerful Russian brothers has not yet incubated, I know that we at Flare are doing the right thing, trying to fix our democracies before they shuffle off their mortal coil.

Why are you making this about you, I hear you say? Because I have spent the best part of this year making the case to friends, fellow-travellers and funders (to name a few) about the need for real action in unprecedently dangerous times. About the need to roll up our sleeves to do the real work of bringing our societies together around a vision of the future that is worth fighting for. Before they fall in love irredeemably with the toxic snake-oil salesmen. The UK is in their grip for a while to come, even if our shared journey is far from over.

Grateful though I am for all the praise I’ve had, I would really prefer some actual help .

Every time someone shares another clever meme, slogan or shocking news article, just know I am rolling my eyes behind my screen at the tediousness and laziness of our inaction. Nevermind the dangers of acting like unwitting pawns for the gods of polarisation . That’s not what fighting for change looks like. Fighting for change is actual work, built on actual strategies and with actual effort put in. Fighting for change is understanding how ridiculous we are when we do nothing because reality does not fit neatly with our beautiful, pre-determined strategies.

Being successful in a fight for change means understanding when the old tools and ways will no longer do. Fighting for narrow single issues when the world is burning, for instance.

We at Flare are bringing together unlike minds and helping them find shared language to move from division to solutions. This year we tackled rising intolerance and Brexit division in our first Brussels Get Togethers . Early in 2020, we give sustainable food systems and European identity the Flare treatment with our clever mix of cognitive linguistics, sense-making dialogue, Clean Language and Systemic Modelling™.

If you want to be part of the solution and stop the wave of Putin-Trump-Johnson-Orban-Bolsonaro hatred spreading like fire across the world, do this :

• Donate

• Give us pro-bono support (finance, fundraising and Belgian legal advice in particular)

• Recommend new Flare members, including Board members

• Connect us to others who can amplify and enrich our work

• Oh, and did we mention donating

Buckle up, we’re in this for the long haul.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Patriotism and the European way of life

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 18:15:39 GMT

Patriotism and the European way of life

In her meditative and elegiac Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere , the Welsh writer Jan Morris wonders: can you feel truly patriotic for your place of residence while feeling alien to its race?

That question really hit me for six. I don’t normally think of my identity in terms of race, patriotism and alienness. But the feeling of belonging – or not – in the particular place on our planet where I find myself is something that’s affected me deeply throughout my life.

As a little kid, I remember standing on the poop deck of the Holyhead to Dún Laoghaire ferry with my older sister. We were both glad to see the coastline of our country recede into the mist and we gleefully executed a ‘national up yours’ to the whole of its population. I guess in my small and childish way I’d sensed that while I might have been a square peg in a round hole in my little northern English village, there were other people and other places where I’d be right at home.

Well, as a young adult I first made use of my EU citizenship and its right of free movement. How natural a right that seemed, and how I took it for granted. Settling in different towns across southern and western Europe, I quickly noticed that people still thought I was a weirdo, but they seemed happier to accept me because the fact of my foreignness gave them an easy way to understand and categorise why I wasn’t exactly as they expected a person to be. “Ah, he’s just English – they do things differently there. But he’s a good lad all the same.” Little did they know!

I’ve never been convinced by the idea that a person’s identity is a container of finite proportions – that if you feel a little or a lot ‘European’ then have to feel that much less English or Northern or Mancunian. It seems to me that we humans have complex and ever-evolving identities. That’s why I don’t think that I ‘became’ more ‘European’ when I started to live away from the country and people that I grew up with. Rather, I think bouncing around and trying out new landscapes, perspectives and customs just allowed naturally occurring elements of my innate identity room and nourishment to grow. I’m a naturally lazy person, so being able to soak up a sense of our millennia of shared history just by hanging around – well, it suited by way of learning.

Observing the quirks and foibles of the different social and cultural pockets that I drifted through or settled in for a year or two, I felt tremendously at home and tremendously welcome everywhere I went. A great deal more so than I had as a kid and a teenager in my home village, region or country.

I haven’t been in the UK for any length of time in the last couple of years, but when I’m there I enjoy a very peculiar mix of feelings. On the one hand I know that I absolutely belong both to the place and the people. Both are so much a part of my thinking, my language, my deep-seated identity. On the other hand, to the people I meet I’m still an oddity. Now they treat me as a welcome alien, and they have all kinds of questions about what they and their town seem like to me, an effective outsider.

Good old Sam Johnson – who by-the-by tells us that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel – also defines a patriot as: necessarily and invariably a lover of the people. I think 11-year-old me making his scornful salute on that ferry out of Wales would like the idea of growing up to be a patriotic alien: loving and being welcomed by the place and the people without sacrificing his own natural, inborn identity.

Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate here .

By Joe Carew

Now we've done two - so what?

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 09:07:35 GMT

Now we’ve done two – so what?

It’s a week since our second Brussels Get Together . We called it #stilltogether #beyondbrexit . Who cares? What changed? Are we just a bunch of people organising knees-ups in Brussels pubs?

Here’s why it matters. Division is increasing in our societies, making constructive dialogue very difficult indeed. In the UK, a 2019 study from King’s College in London showed that divisions on Brexit are more important to us and a greater part of our identities than political party allegiances. Polarisation is real and stops us for coming together around the big issues of our time, like climate and social justice. Polarisation makes our world less safe, now and in the future. Unravelling societies are not safe societies. Dialogue and trust are not nice-to-haves, they are the key to our security, touching on every issue from disinformation, to civil unrest, all the way to action to stop seas and temperatures from rising.

Flare’s approach is a work in progress. We are learning from doing, improving every time. Here’s what we know so far, from hosting two Brussels Get Togethers:

It’s really worth getting people out of the usual stale spaces for debate. Sitting in a pub in Brussels with MEPs, EU officials, Brussels journalists, business reps, students, builders, workers, people from all walks of life and all over the world, we knew this kind of thing wouldn’t happen anywhere else. It doesn’t. It matters – we will keep doing it.

The division in our society pitches people against the system, the elites, as if they are enemies. The reality is we are all just people whose lives and opportunities might be different but whose hopes and fears are not. When we get a chance to talk about the future together, it’s clear we want the same things, whether we are law-makers in the European Parliament, tech gurus, activists, comedians or lorry drivers moving goods between Zeebrugge and Calais.

There are ways to help us have purposeful, future-focused conversations. That’s the method behind the Get Togethers. And a very good one for bringing us together as friends who want the same things for ourselves and our children, even when our lives and our politics are different. The way we talk often makes it impossible to see how much we agree. I am proud that Flare makes conversation possible.

Dear friends, our systems are there to support us, but they are empty vessels that we must fill with vision and hope for the future. Don’t let anyone tell you Europe is your enemy or that your politicians and elites are conspiring against you. Maybe there is bad will out there and darker forces too, but we are much, much bigger than them. Stay and help us make Europe what it needs to be, revive politics so that it delivers for all of us. Join us in putting positive ambitions out there and help us look to the future #stilltogether #beyondbrexit.

Andreea

Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate on our site https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Laughing cure - or gateway drug?

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 07:43:34 GMT

Brexit laughing cure - or gateway drug?

Stuart Jeffries warns that the UK, and the rest of the Western world for that matter, has overly-compensated for their powerlessness in mobilizing their political grievances by using the bandage of political mockery. Yes, perhaps we have come too far with the rampant satirical cynicism and apathy of the digital age, but that is not what is all to be said about satirical solace. Satire brings human emotion to the forefront of stuffy political banter and blatant elitism, and this is supported by studies conducted on the relations between civic engagement and comedy. Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, a professor at the University of Ohio, insists that satire matters when it comes to the delivery of news. In her 2017 study performed on students at the University of Ohio, she concludes that “satirical news can engage people who otherwise would avoid political news.” This in turn, can be a “gateway” as she puts it, for those who are normally apolitical, sparking an interest in more serious politics.

Rebuttal aside, Flare intends to be the proof in Brussels’s pudding, enacting constructive change through the next Great Brussels Get Together, where comedy will be a main form of entertainment to inspire open debate. Join us at The Back Sheep in Brussels on the 19th of November at 19:00, for an evening of stand-up comedy, live music and open floor debate.

At Flare we do agree, Mr. Jeffries, that satirical solace as a remedy for powerlessness has come too far. Even though laughter may not be the best medicine for political engagement, it sure is the gateway drug.

Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate on our site https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress

By Leylah Hadrovic

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Sources:

Jeffries, S. (2019). When it comes to politics, the UK suffers from a chronic disease. It’s called satire. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/british-politics-uk-chronic-disease-satire-hignfy

Knobloch‐Westerwick, S. and Lavis, S. M. (2017). Selecting Serious or Satirical, Supporting or Stirring News? Selective Exposure to Partisan versus Mockery News Online Videos. J Commun, 67: 54-81. doi:10.1111/jcom.12271

Breaking the patterns

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 09:43:29 GMT

Breaking the patterns

I am still digesting an extraordinary and unexpected day, at the 3rd Berlin Global Forum of the BMW Foundation . What an enormous privilege it is to have been part of it. I was blown away at the sheer guts of it all. I should have known from previous conversations with staff at the Foundation.

I didn’t expect Michael Schaefer to put his finger so unequivocally on the failures and delicate state of our political systems. I didn’t expect the Foundation to openly question the privileges and economic system that made possible its very existence. I didn’t expect such frankness and daring from diplomats. I didn’t expect to have a serious discussion with a senior BMW Board member about correcting the failure of the market to deliver public goods. I didn’t expect an extraordinarily accomplished individual who is years ahead of me on his journey as a founder to be quite so open and helpful in showing me the way. I didn’t expect to leave feeling supported, validated and at home in the world. I didn’t expect quite so many hugs from extraordinary strangers. Nor did I expect to meet a wonderful lady wearing the exact same dress as me.

As I leave this Berlin morning, the sky is pink, leaves rustling underfoot and the air smells of earth and autumn. The world feels good, which is no small thing. Here are some bleary thoughts, in no particular order:

For the first time in my life I went to one of these events as me, speaking for the things in which I truly believe. For the first time in my life, there were no nerves or awkwardness, but sheer joy and a whole day that went by in a flash. I recommend it. Shake off your chains if you’re tempted, break your own patterns, it’s terrifying but worth it.
For the life of me, I still don’t understand why we on the NGO and grassroots barricades think that we own change. Why we congratulate ourselves on being so challenging and brave in our thinking and actions. We are pretty mainstream, my friends, and that’s a good thing. There are people in the heart of the establishment who actually agree with us. Let’s stop shouting and roll our sleeves up. There’s work to do. Don’t be cool, be helpful.
Sometimes extraordinary things happen for no obvious reason. Remember to be thankful. I am thankful beyond words.
I know our dream team at Flare is doing the right thing. We’re on the right track, doing something that people from all walks of life agree is much needed - and needed right now.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

#breakthepatterns

If they are wrong, don't belittle them

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 07:31:11 GMT

If they are wrong, don't belittle them

With the dreaded Brexit-o-ween date fast approaching, there are many among us who wonder how we got here. While we can question each other’s motivations and point fingers, it is not conducive for a debate that enacts change. We have to move beyond the wallowing internet memes, and other clever social media mockery. Though cathartic to us millennials, we have never been the greatest at voicing a constructive road map for coping, especially when we can’t change the status quo. That brings me to the title of this op-ed, a mantra if you will, when approaching your Trump/Brexit woes and news littered with populist rhetoric, political polarization, and even extremism. If they [insert expletive] opposition are wrong, take the time to persuade them and not belittle them. As inconvenient as it is, people have different values and upbringings, and we cannot forcibly change people’s perspectives. When people aren’t given access to knowledge due to socio-economic status or aren’t privileged otherwise, the political duel is not evenly matched.

It is our duty, for a more prosperous and sustainable world, instead of scolding or shaming, to rather persuade the “other” on our stance, and to listen to why they think what they think, leaning toward nationalism or the like. There are (mostly) rational reasons for this, as we are all human. Modern political thought on identity politics points to the fact that nationalism is tribal in essence, and is used by elites in times of systematic or resource flux to manipulate the lower classes (Rothschild, 1981; Barth, 1998). We all want to belong to our community, and our identities provide us, frankly, with substantial meaning on this Earth. When societal categories change or resources decline, people react. When our identities are jeopardized, we react. We all want to blame the “other” for our own problems, and it’s the hardest to blame our respective society. And this manifests in politics all too well, where identity politics run rampant among the world’s most powerful countries.

Instead of using my platform to express outrage, I want to create space of change. I don’t want my generation to just be another cog in the political machine, but to recreate the machine altogether with sustainable organic-vegan-gluten free material.

Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate on our site https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress .

By Leylah Hadrovic

Further reading:

Barth, F. (1998) “Introduction,” in: Ethnic groups and boundaries: the social organization of culture difference. Waveland Press, 9-37.

Rothschild, J. (1981) “Ethnicity as a Political Phenomenon in Search of Scholarly Analysis,” in: Ethnopolitics: A Conceptual Framework. Cambridge: CUP.

Autocracy, revolution and why I would rather eat an orange

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 10:58:22 GMT

Autocracy, revolution and why I would
rather eat an orange

The kids were in the streets again last week. An indictment of our failure to offer them faith in a safe future. The right-wing media libels them deviants from the moral order, for being “climate truants”. If truancy is bad because it leads to ignorance, the climate change deniers have more to worry about than the children who are targets of their vitriol. It’s interesting to see that the prevailing moral discourse on the right is a conservative objection to civil unrest as a threat to order. This disruption is immediate and visible, unlike the abstract perils to our way of life being described by climate scientists.

At the other end of the political spectrum, civil disobedience is the only response to a political system prey to climate hypocrisy and in thrall to business-as-usual thinking. The moral story here is also one of security and preservation, through revolt against destruction by indifference.

Climate hypocrisy or stasis is in fact sustaining both moral systems, supporting the case for climate action rhetorically, whilst denying it through inaction. Stasis tells one side that everything’s just fine and carrying on as normal, whilst sending a warning of dangerous prevarication to the other.

The schism between the two understandings of moral order preservation seems difficult to bridge. Autocracy and revolution are coming to the fore as attractive options on both sides of the spectrum. Last week, Vincent de Coorebyter asked in Le Soir if climate inaction wasn’t in fact a failure of democracy that could only be resolved through action via autocratic means. On the further right reaches of the spectrum, tough repressive action is often called for to overcome the impudent inconvenience of climate protests. Civil disobedience is increasingly a means of expressing frustration on both the right and the left of politics, fed by suspicion for representation, authority and the elites.

It may be that the sun is setting on a blissful few decades of widespread optimism and stability, all their flaws and injustices notwithstanding. Of course, we cannot take our existing governance systems for granted. Such seismic shifts always seem inconceivable until they happen.

In December 1989, age 8, I was queuing for oranges in a long line of people, in a small provincial town of Communist Romania. Such opportunities to sample what was for us a truly exotic fruit were rare. Supplies were low, infrequent and strictly rationed. My dad walked into the shop, grabbed me by the hand and walked me out speaking in hushed tones. I was overcome with the purest white rage and searing disappointment for losing my place in line, the dream of eating an orange withering away with each step. He told me Ceausescu was a bad man and a revolution had started to topple him and that all things considered, he wanted me at home. My mum was on her way home from Bucharest, where she had been sent by the Communist authorities for post-graduate training she didn’t want. Up until then, I had started every day at kindergarten and at school with a hymn honouring our great leader. Our literacy lessons were illustrated with sentences exemplifying his awesomeness and achievements. There was a picture of him on the front wall of my classroom. Almost every song we learned was in some way an ode to him and his regime. And I couldn’t have oranges because all of a sudden, he was a bad guy. It was all a little unexpected and frankly unwelcome. I’ll take the orange, thank you very much – this 8-year-old would have happily given revolution a swerve.

I asked my mum a couple of months ago how long before Communism fell she suspected that it could. She said “not even two seconds before it came crashing down”.

Seismic shifts are preventable for a long time, until suddenly they are not. I am still of the view that I would rather avoid autocracy and revolution if I possibly can. The former, because it’s distasteful and unjust, the latter because I fear progressive values would not fare well in a culture war – and then we would all be sorry. This is why much of Flare’s work is about finding ways to talk about re-purposing our political economy deliberately and voluntarily. With the determination but not the oppression of autocracy, and the vim but not the destruction of revolution.

Nowadays I can have oranges for breakfast, lunch and dinner if I want to – so I rarely have them at all, just like in the old days.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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How to inspire with a moral story (without moralising)

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 06:36:18 GMT

How to inspire with a moral story (without moralising)

I’ve spent the past 11 years looking at how the language we use shapes how we see the world. Whether we think social safety nets are solidarity or theft, refugees vulnerable or dangerous, the EU an armour or an oppressor, all of these are stories we weave and reinforce through language. A good illustration of how this works in practice is the success of austerity and Eurosceptic narratives in the UK over the past ten years, as John Harris explains in the Guardian here .

Politics is in many ways a battle of the fictions, with language as the key instrument for making such fictions feel real. There is nothing sinister about it, and no need to be precious about ideas like mind-control and manipulation, at least not below the thresholds laid out in our legal systems. Us humans use stories to understand the world around us. Those stories that best fit our predispositions and unmet needs are the ones that stick.

I don’t mean to sound amoral on the matter, because I really am not. Not all stories are equal and not all lead to good things. Some are truly cynical strategies to mislead, but focusing on this characteristic rather than on offering viable alternatives is unhelpful. While we implode with righteous outrage, hateful narratives are filling the public space. If we have nothing to offer as an alternative but sanctimonious disapproval, we are in real trouble.

What all stories in the public space are built on, whether we agree with them or not, are moral systems, philosophies that categorise right and wrong. Virtually every story flying around in our universe, and especially the ones that are successful in shaping our politics and our political systems – well, they are moral tales. They paint a picture, most often, of wrongs to be righted. They form the basis of our political choices, providing a strong moral justification for our actions.

“Social benefit claimants are receiving something for nothing, they are stealing from the community. Immigrants are changing the cultural make-up of our communities, they are threatening our value systems. The EU is telling us what to do in our own country, in our own homes.” These narratives might be negative and deceitful, but the moral story of wrongs to be righted shines brightly inside them. So they stick and they influence political choices and courses of action.

George Lakoff wrote persuasively on this in the 1990s, intending to help liberals better understand their own political philosophy and the reasons why it doesn’t always fly readily with the wider public. I think his key premise, of morality underpinning our metaphoric understanding of reality, is just what we need in our troubled, polarised times, to inspire a transition to sustainable and just societies and avert ecological and political meltdown.

One key problem for me (and for Lakoff) with the way progressive politics uses language is that it doesn’t talk compellingly about the moral story of its philosophy, which it too often replaces with moralising. Instead of describing why it’s a good thing to live in a society that nurtures and supports all individuals to live a fulfilling life and making a case for what that looks like, we too often sneer at those whose opinions are different from our own, without understanding where they are coming from. We express moral superiority over those we regard as bigots, ignorants, uber-individualists and planet-despoilers.

Strongly-held antagonism is also part of politics and of how we make sense of the world, of course. We should disagree and argue the merits of competing worldviews. But we need to remember to do both of those things, making sure that the moral story we are telling is compelling and inspiring, going beyond mere outrage and disgust with our opponents.

In our polarised and fragile world, speaking convincingly about the future is not simply a topic for theoretical debate, it’s a necessity. It’s not enough to shudder at the rise of flat-earth bigotry and nativism, we need to grapple with this reality and bring people over to a positive vision we can all get behind. Hatred is rising because (perversely) it offers hope. We can do better than this.

Do what exactly? When Flare was created, we couldn’t convincingly explain how we would help to tell a new story, but we knew that we needed to do something. Over the past few months, our approach has been shaping up and we are much more systematic about what we believe will work. We know political debate and action require serious ramping up to deal with global threats. We can see that widening divisions are a threat and this is a time for togetherness and commonality.

Keep an eye out in the autumn for the next Great Brussels Get Together, join us and help us tell a new story for our shared future.

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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On factfulness, meritocracy and other well-meaning placebos

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 06:37:41 GMT

On factfulness, meritocracy and other well-intentioned placebos

Can we satisfy discontent with "facts"? And is statistical validation of the status quo all that comforting?

Recently, I finished reading Hans Rosling’s excellent Factfulness on a cheap flight filled to the rafters with young immigrants coming back to Belgium from a homeland holiday. They were returning to their insecure jobs, often low in pay and high in drudgery. To their small and crowded lodgings, where dozens of them live in insalubrious conditions, under roofs that have seen better days. To a country foreign to them, where their precarious presence will sometimes be viewed with suspicion and resentment. The contrast between Factfulness ’s “reality is the things you can count and they are getting better” brand of scientific positivism* and what is so readily palpable in our everyday lived experience could not have been more striking. There is plenty to keep striving for in the world.

There I was, on a short-haul flight that was far too affordable, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, surrounded by young people whose loss of hope in the future had prompted them to move abroad and live precariously. There they were, filling a cheap, bright yellow plane with riotous catcalling and questionable humour, seeking validation in camaraderie within their group – and through frankly appalling manners. I might be sensitive to social injustice but discourtesy is a transgression of the moral order I cannot tolerate. I am (half) joking.

Rosling’s Factfulness reminded me of Michael Young’s dystopian satire The rise of meritocracy, in that they both do away with political explanations of the world and of injustice by proposing a sort of scientific framework for understanding reality. In both cases, this removes the need for ethical interpretations. The world is what you can see and its trajectory is pointing upwards towards the sunlit uplands of progress.

Michael Young does this satirically, to highlight the blind spots, cruelty and hidden injustice in such a system. His meritocracy follows the formula IQ + EFFORT = MERIT. Written as an account from the year 2034, it describes a society reshaped so as to uproot the centuries old tradition of hereditary rule and fortune. Those who are most capable rise through the ranks, as opposed to those who are born into power and wealth. As he himself points out in his introduction to the 1994 edition, his narrator is a staunch advocate of meritocracy as an enlightened social arrangement, but doubt is embedded into the fabric of his account, like an unsettling shadow:

"That author was meant to be vulnerable. He was, as it were inadvertently, the mouthpiece for another story, showing how sad, and fragile, a meritocratic society could be. If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage."

Hans Rosling proposes factfulness earnestly and with the best of intentions, highlighting important global progress and arguing for cool heads. He rightly highlights that our perceptions of reality are not always in line with global trends, berating alarmism and unfounded opinions not anchored in available evidence. However, in raising these important points so admirably, he weaves a narrative that is prey to its own blind spots and the very same fallacies he correctly critiques.

Thus, he gives the impression of pre-destined inevitability in global progress as different countries move up income levels. He generalises in suggesting uniformity of the lived experience within his income categories and (I hope I am wrong here) suggests that all levels except extreme poverty are largely acceptable. He distorts reality through his factual selections (for instance by highlighting three wildlife species no more critically endangered than they were in the 1990s, when the global context is one of notable habitat and species loss). Whilst his analysis of some of the factors contributing to contemporary anxieties is plausible (in the form of his identified series of primitive instincts), it is far from scientific, with no evident effort made to demonstrate a causal link to social attitudes.

Rosling’s underlying premise seems to be that the vestiges of our primitive brains are preventing us from accurately assessing the state of human progress, which is more advanced than we appreciate. The evident gap in his analysis is the impact of actual, observable, measurable injustices on our attitudes and perceptions of reality. It is not enough to highlight, as he does, that Brazil, one of the world’s most unequal societies, has inequality levels that are less extreme than they were several decades ago. Our collective social values have progressed in line with global economic advancements. They are a legitimate filter through which our worldview is shaped. It is therefore entirely reasonable to view social injustice as unacceptable, and to be concerned when presented with evidence of it. As Rosling himself points out, things can be both bad and better and his preference, which is his legitimate choice, is to focus on what is better. I agree with this but cannot help but notice his impatience with those who focus on what is bad, even though he acknowledges this is an important step towards “better”.

What if we are rightly anxious and concerned, albeit in an environment that heightens our fears (and I include our own instincts and pre-dispositions in this notion of “environment”)?

To claim that factually speaking, our discontent is more of an evolutionary hang-up than a substantiated response to our circumstances is primarily a political, rather than an epistemological gesture. Rosling’s reassuring facts, much like Young’s dystopian meritocracy (misunderstood as it has been for decades not as satire but as political vision), will be most palatable to those viewing the world from a position of privilege. They will offer solace to all who are uncomfortable with our polarised and fraught contemporary reality. What these well-meaning placebos will not do is tackle the underlying causes of division and discontent. And tackle them we must, lest they unravel, in their fury, the very systems and safeguards we have put in place to fight injustice and build a common future (democracy, multilateralism, tolerant and inclusive societies).

*(n.b. I am using positivism in its scientific sense rather than as a misnomer for optimism)

Image credit www.theguardian.com

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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Hatred is a (perverse) hope project

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 07:35:35 GMT

Hatred is a (perverse) hope project

Exactly three months ago today, my little family of three moved the last of our belongings from Brexit London to Brussels. We came here looking for hope. Never did I imagine I would be standing here in front of you so soon after that day. Things are not looking too bad on the hope front.

I have spent much of my adult life campaigning on issues I care about, from environment to poverty and feminism. I’ve always felt that change is possible, however big the challenges. I’ve done all the usual things that well-meaning folk do to feel better about themselves and the world. I’ve worked in the non-profit sector, I’ve volunteered, I even tried and abandoned a PhD after four confidence-sapping years.

Then in 2015 I had a huge loss of faith episode. I didn’t fully realise it then, I thought I was just a bit down, but it really shook my faith in mankind and in the future. That year nearly 4000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean and find safety and shelter in Europe. We, Europe, the pinnacle of civilisation and sophistication, let 4000 desperate people drown. That image of a Syrian toddler face down on a Turkish beach will never leave me. In 2016 more than 5000 people drowned trying to get to safety.

The refugee crisis didn’t just shake my mental wellbeing, but brought the worst in the soul of Europe to the surface. It provided the perfect backdrop to a rise in nationalism and nativism across the continent. The images of thousands upon thousands of desperate people, with the contents of their lives in bin bags and tiny children in tow made Europeans feel uncomfortable. Inconvenienced. Insecure. Invaded. I was a little disappointed, I must say.

We were living in England then and of course Brexit came. During that horrid, low, mendacious campaign, Jo Cox was murdered by someone who saw her as a threat to his identity and his community. Jo, as many of you will know, was a politician who preached kindness.

Then Trump got elected. Then his reign of falsehood and bile began.

When 2017 started, my New Year wish was that my family would make it through alive and unscathed. Everything felt so fragile and unpredictable, that was the limit of my ambition.

We made it through 2017 and 2018 almost unharmed. That’s not true. Our optimism took a big hit. So when 2019 came, something had to happen. We stopped waiting for change to come from elsewhere. We packed our bags and came to Brussels and Flare came to life, with the help of my friend Andrea Cucchini.

Flare is a hope project, even if for me it came from a place of discomfort. What it does is bring people together to make a difference to a world in crisis. If you didn’t realise it, this is why you’re here. You have been brought together, primarily to have a good time, but also because there is work to do. You are here so we can all be part of a hope project.

What will make a difference

The waves of hatred rising in Europe are feeding on hopelessness. They are feeding on hurt feelings and a loss of optimism, and they cannot be fought with facts. People are voting for xenophobes and bigots because they are offering hope. Weirdly, hatred is a hope project. Quite a dangerous one.

And that’s why our new European Parliament is a patchwork quilt, nearly 25% of which offers the xenophobic variety of hope. While much of the rest panders to anti-immigration agendas, failing completely to understand the feelings of hopelessness that brought it to life.

So we really need hope. We need a way forward that we can get behind. Hope to overcome divisions and have faith in a common future.

Barack Obama famously said “we are the people we’ve been waiting for”. And that’s kind of nice, although all my life I’ve looked to bosses, politicians, my parents for change. What are we supposed to do?

Here are 3 ideas for starters (that Jo Cox might agree with):

We need to be kind and try to understand the perspective of our fellow man. Even when our fellow man seems to be acting out of hatred and stupidity.

We need to demand courage from ourselves and others. So much of what we do is fuelled by fear. What if they will think I am stupid? What if I annoy my boss? What will the other boys think of me?

My family have a favourite story about the power of fear. I grew up in Communist Romania. We had a leader called Nicolae Ceausescu, who had a low level of educational attainment. Consequently, his spoken Romanian was less than elegant and he made abundant grammatical errors. Being of a pedantic nature, I used to highlight them enthusiastically at home. My parents were terrified that I would repeat my findings at school and that the repressive regime might not take kindly to my scrutiny of the great leader. So they insisted, time after time, that Ceausescu did not make mistakes and that his Romanian was perfect. Fear is a powerful force. Much stronger than grammar.

Finally, we need collective effort, active creative contribution to a positive vision of the future, not mere likes and shares. We are brilliantly connected by clever technology, but our engagement is too often passive. We can all see the problems around us, we need to articulate what we want.

So why are we here?

Our job, collectively, is to imagine what tomorrow should look like before it happens TO US.

This Get Together was prompted by the Jo Cox Foundation and the anniversary of Jo’s murder. Being here in this square named after her is a powerful reminder of what is at stake if society continues on a path of division and hatred.

I don’t just want a pious memorial for Jo, I want a living legacy for her. The best tribute to Jo that I can think of is to make sure this Get Together is not a one-off.

So we will do this again, just after the end of the summer holidays and frequently after that. We will talk about everything that matters, from climate to European identity, from hunger to populism, from despair to hope. And we will be heard by those with the power to make a difference.

We invited politicians this time, but with time being short, we didn’t give them a fair opportunity to accept our offer. We will be knocking on their door again.

So, my ask for today is simple. Tell us who you are and what you want tomorrow to bring.

Tell us what stands in the way of that so we can explore together what we might do about it. What will bring hope to Europe and the world? How will we reach out across divides?

How will bring others on board with our collective vision?

Thank you.

Intervention by Andreea Petre-Goncalves at The Great Brussels Get Together, 23rd of June 2019, Place Jo Cox

How to change history in three simple steps

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Thu, 20 Jun 2019 08:05:01 GMT

How to change the course of history (in three steps)

A few months ago, we packed our bags, took our daughter out of her English school and moved to a new country. There were many good reasons for it. We needed fresh optimism and a new beginning. And quite honestly, it was a relief to take Juliet out of an education system that mostly felt cold-hearted and excessive. A bit too determined to shape four-year-olds into standard-issue, fully-uniformed and fully-literate units of human. I often wondered who it was all meant to help, who all that pressure and rigidity was for. Other parents at school praised us for bravery, although I suspect many privately deplored our irresponsibility.

Why am I telling you this? Because when things are weighing down on us, we wait diligently for them to improve. We wring our hands in frustration, maybe let out the odd grumble. We despair, sure, but keep our heads down and comply, because that’s the safe and sensible thing to do. That’s one thing that rigid education systems do well, they enforce this sense of ordinariness of the cog in the machine. We wait for change to happen around us, to be delivered by those with power, our bosses, our politicians. I mean, there’s nothing we can do.

Little good can come of this. History changes when our souls demand it. It takes us along when we merely comply. We can despair at the state of the world, share images of melting ice-sheets on Facebook, be aghast at casual prejudice from world leaders. Things will start shifting when we embrace our own power and responsibility for what surrounds us and the direction we want to see.

Three simple things will change the course of history and secure our future as temperatures rise on our planet and in our societies.

1) Start acting with kindness . The evolution of the human race is built on altruism, on our ability to think collectively and park our short-term interests for the greater good. We need to understand the despair of our fellow man, even when it manifests itself as hatred, prejudice or what looks like debased self-interest. We need to be forgiving of those who say changing course is naïve and childish, because they are speaking out of fear. The future depends on our ability to understand our collective burdens and to feel compassion for those around us, whose fears are legitimate even when they are mis-placed.

2) Demand courage from ourselves, as well as others . We must face our own fears. We must stop seeking approval and reward for diligent compliance when our hearts are demanding change. We must stand up for what is right, whatever condemnation we think it may bring from others, whatever consequences there may be for our own individual “business-as-usual”. I am not inviting you to riot in the streets, I am suggesting we re-arrange the furniture of our souls.

3) Participate in the collective effort . Voting is not enough. Protesting is not enough. Venting our anger on social media is not enough. Despairing as hatred takes root in our societies is not that helpful. The enormity of global challenges is too great for politicians to resolve alone (I was rightly advised not to say this, in case decision-makers find it patronising). We need to describe what future we want, together, so that we can all get on board with the changes it will surely entail.

No one but us can create opportunities for this to happen. In Brussels we are making a start on Sunday, with the Great Brussels Get Together. Join us at 12:00 PM in Place Jo Cox and help our fundraising efforts .

*A short few months after our move, Juliet is in a wonderful Brussels school, where the much gentler Belgian curriculum will let her spend another year doing what matters at her age: playing and making friends. She is happy, relaxed and her French is coming through in leaps and bounds. Sometimes a small drop of courage pays fast dividends.

#BrusselsGetTogether #MoreInCommon

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

Why Brussels gives me hope for the future

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 08:10:05 GMT

Why Brussels gives me hope for the future

There aren’t a lot of odes to Brussels out there. It doesn’t have any glamorous nicknames. For many in Europe, it’s synonymous with grey-suited bureaucracy, self-satisfied in its unaccountable, semi-dictatorial arrogance. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when we first moved here eleven years ago. I never knew how extraordinarily beautiful it is, in its understated, everyday way. Many who live here might roll their eyes at this bit, but walk down any Brussels street and I dare you to not be moved by quirky architectural details, subversive humour and life, pulsating humanity, palpably just under the surface. My neighbourhood has flowers growing out of pavements, crocheted socks for trees, murals on bricked-up windows and a picture of a cat “flipping the bird”, which I now strongly have to urge my five-year-old not to imitate.

But enough waxing lyrical about the implausible beauty of Brussels. The thing I love the most about it, its most life-affirming and energising quality, is its easy generosity, its big-hearted warmth and decency. The Zinneke spirit (nowadays a nickname for the town’s diverse patchwork of people from so many cultures and with so many identities, originally a name for stray mutts along the banks of the filthy Zenne river) - well, it’s not just a marketing invention. It’s real. This place has a culture of altruism, that unassuming evolutionary trait that we too often forget, especially in contemporary capitalist societies, where our prevailing political paradigm is built on individualism (altruism’s boastful big brother, great at sports, crashes the family car).

A couple of weeks ago I decided to push ahead with a plan some would call brave and most would call foolish. I worry the latter is true, but I flatter myself with the former. The Great Brussels Get Together - a togetherness picnic in Place Jo Cox, with music, debate and film thrown in – is the most life-affirming proof I’ve ever seen of how much is possible when people act with generosity and solidarity.

Here are just some examples of what I mean:

• the awesome Ancienne Belgique , one of Brussels’s best concert venues, graciously offering us use of their infrastructure when we are already inconveniencing them

• the authorities of the city of Brussels approving a permission request submitted, frankly, about a month too late

• the incredibly talented, multicultural Brussels band Le Collectif for accepting our invitation despite the lateness and the rush, oh the rush

• all you wonderful people of Brussels and beyond, for considering joining us on the 23rd of June in Place Jo Cox and for helping our humble fundraising efforts if you can.

On the most serious of notes, the title of this post is heartfelt and deliberate. Our world is in a tumultuous place of division, at a time when threatening clouds are gathering on the horizon. As the recipient of such generosity in the unassuming setting that is this town I love, my heart fills with hope and faith for our future on this planet. It’s precisely our ability to come together that will secure our collective future.

#BrusselsGetTogether

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate on our site https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress .

Togetherness is powerful

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 07:30:24 GMT

Togetherness is powerful

We are organizing a picnic, with music, film and lots of chatter, on the 23rd of June 2019 at Place Jo Cox in Brussels. What could be nicer than breaking bread together on a summer’s day, watching a film, dancing to some nice tunes and talking about the future? There’s no better feeling than warm togetherness and easy conviviality.

Exactly three years before the day of the event, I was standing on a train platform in South West London with my then two-year old daughter, waiting for our train into Waterloo station. All around us was silence. Worried, grey faces, staring into news feeds on phones. It was the morning after the Brexit referendum. There were hushed tones as I dropped Juliet off at nursery. The receptionist was whispering to her colleagues that she had voted for Brexit because of immigration. The others had done the same. There I was, dropping off my London-born immigrant’s child. When I entered my office, my own colleagues were in tears, asking what was next. That day, on a building site in London, my immigrant husband was advised to move back to his homeland, because “leave means leave”. It felt like a void had opened between people, one that could never be re-closed.

Jo Cox was killed during the campaign for that referendum and since then darkness and division have spread to other parts of Europe. But hope has also risen to the surface. The chasm between intractable differences can be bridged. We will face whatever lies ahead with solidarity, love and ingenuity. We are better together.

There is no better proof of this than the Great Brussels Get Together. It would have been impossible if Brussels wasn’t the sort of big-hearted, generous place where people help each other and “community” is an every-day lived experience. We started organizing the Get Together with less than four weeks to go, and it’s shaping up to be goose-bump wonderful. Thank you, Brussels!

Tell us that you’re joining us on Twitter @FlareGovernance or Facebook here .

#BrusselsGetTogether #MoreInCommon

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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The Great Brussels Get Together

apetregoncalves@yahoo.co.uk (Andreea Petre-Goncalves) — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 14:57:37 GMT

The Great Brussels Get Together - 23rd of June

I was cooking dinner for my young family when the news of Jo Cox’s murder came on the radio. The thought of her own young family - or indeed anyone - being plunged into such desperate grief took my breath away. It still does.

Three years have nearly gone by since that awful day, when Britain was in the grip of the toxic campaign for the Brexit referendum. Since then, nationalism, anti-migration and intolerance have risen all over Europe. More and more of us are looking inwards and shutting out the “other”.

I wasn’t alone then – nor am I alone now – in feeling that ever-deeper divisions in public debate are opening the door to violence. When we talk about the world as a battle between “us” and “them”, the dividing lines are so thick that reconciliation seems impossible. When something is talked about as a threat to identity, community and way of life, the gut reaction is to eliminate the threat. Elections become vehicles for anger and hopelessness.

Since Jo’s death, the Jo Cox Foundation has been organising The Great Get Together to celebrate kindness and all we have in common. This year we are honouring Jo in Brussels too, with The Great Brussels Get Together on the 23rd of June in the square named after her, Place Jo Cox Plein. We want to promote tolerance and solidarity in an age of division, weave a shared, positive vision of our collective future. Please bring a picnic and join us for an afternoon of debate, live music and a viewing of Reflect – a ray of hope.

#BrusselsGetTogether

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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Should we argue with Flat Earth theorists (and other eccentrics)?

Mon, 27 May 2019 09:40:23 GMT

Should we argue with Flat Earth theorists
and other eccentrics?

Here at Flare we are actively inviting critical input into our existing plans, projects and our theory of change. Last week Andrea and I grappled with such a critique, coming from a well-informed and trusted source, who took exception to the allegedly thin scientific basis I had used to discuss what they deemed a contested concept. The science in question was the 2018 IPCC report and the supposedly controversial concept was climate change.

With my usual calm and diplomacy, I informed Andrea I would not be engaging with such wilful ignorance, given that most people who take an interest in public affairs should be able to discern the difference between scientific consensus and the drivel that resides in the dark belly of the internet. Climate denials after all go hand in hand with other misinformation drives that threaten the whole of society, from the irresponsible (anti-vaccination paranoia) and the comical (Flat Earth theorists) to the downright toxic (xenophobia, anti-Islam movements, anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny).

This morning the European Parliament results are coming in and as expected, the voices of hatred and ignorance are taking a firmer hold on the beating heart of European democracy that is the European Parliament. So perhaps the child behaviour method that stipulates ignoring bad conduct to starve it from the attention it very clearly seeks is as ineffective in politics as it is in child rearing. Nothing gets solved when the causes are ignored.

How then do we gain a meaningful understanding of how politics ended up like this, without offering undeserved platforms to the lowest, most hateful manifestations of our anger and discontent? How do we faithfully inspect the current state of our social contract, without legitimising hatred as grassroots political expression? These are not easy questions.

Here at Flare we will be grappling with them as part of a core element of our theory of change, which demands a new global narrative conducive to positive collective action to overcome our multitude of global threats. Just re-reading this sentence I realise we have a mountain of a challenge ahead, in a world where our attention is most easily captured with facile arguments in black and white, not wooden intellectualising. Friends, we will need our best, smartest, most generous selves, to survive and thrive in this uncertain episode of our history. Please join us .

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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Just who we think we are

Fri, 24 May 2019 12:17:03 GMT

Just who we think we are

I am the proud co-founder of a brand-new NGO, Flare Governance, together with my ever-resourceful friend Andrea Cucchini. We are adding another voice to the cacophony of well-intentioned shrill that fills our public space. What luck for the world, I hear you say.

So, why then?

Our world is in trouble. Climate instability, hunger and poverty, disease, resource depletion, loss of faith in elites and governance systems, a rise in nativism, you name it, we are facing it. As an NGO sector veteran, I know that every issue that each and every one of us is fighting for matters, and most are seemingly intractable. We all tick happy boxes when those in power name-check our concerns, or when wooden legislative texts make helpful provisions, however anodyne.

The solution to our crisis is not piecemeal, friends. No salvation will come solely from technocratic instruments or from steady bureaucratic progress. To tackle the climate emergency or the unravelling of our global governance systems (hello Brexit, hello unilateralism), we need political courage. We need coherence and a new narrative that will inspire us to work together. We need to cut through the unbearable noise of our single issues, however deserving they may be in our own eyes.

That’s why Flare exists. The questions that affronts me most is “why you, what makes you think you can do it?”. Well, who wouldn’t try to make a difference in the midst of a global emergency?

I have never been afraid of those who hold power, even less so after working with them for most of my career. What a privilege it is to create space for them to be courageous and to embolden progress. Please join us .

By Andreea Petre-Goncalves

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Support our innovative work so that we can continue to deliver solutions to division and healing for hatred. Please donate on our site https://donorbox.org/powerful-conversations-for-progress .

Flare Blog

On the weight of what we opt not to say

On the weight of what we opt not to say

Everything is certain, until it's not

Everything is certain, until it's not

Seeing beyond the struggle

Seeing beyond the struggle.

Without a destination, our collective journey is drift

Differences that matter

Differences that matter

Rethinking the rethinking

Rethinking the rethinking

Common purpose in an age of shocks

Rethinking our purpose in an age of shocks

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All this Rethinking…

All this Rethinking…

Is Productivity all we really dreamed of?

Is Productivity all we really dreamed of?

Change: the view of a young, hopeful sceptic

Change: the view of a young hopeful sceptic

Cheese, chocolate and how I want to eat

Cheese, chocolate and how I want to eat

Reconnecting public and private life

Reconnecting public and private life – and how the cracks don’t appear where you strike

Our hypothesis therefore is that shared moral narratives - upon which we can rebuild the world - emerge in the commons, and that real-life spaces are where we should pursue them.

This is the stuff change is made of

This is the stuff change is made of

Our personal brands are relics from another age

Our personal brands are relics from another age

Andreea's contribution to Before We Go

Andreea's contribution to Before We Go

Midway through 2020, I don't need a roadmap

Midway through 2020, I don't need a roadmap

We, the unpeople

We, the unpeople

Global day of solidarity message

Global Day of Solidarity Message

Six impossible things before breakfast

Six impossible things before breakfast

Talking to mum about her journey with dogmas

Talking to mum about her journey with dogmas

Every dogma has its day - and its thought police

Every dogma has its day - and its thought police

Andreea's lockdown diary podcast

Andreea's lockdown diary podcast

This transformation is not a product

This transformation is not a product

We've got this

We’ve got this

The past is a foreign country

The past is a foreign country

Look after each other!

Look after each other!

Who knew? Vulnerability and happiness are bedfellows

Who knew? Vulnerability and happiness are bedfellows

A halfway point between truth and a lie

A halfway point between truth and lie is still a lie

Do you know what I mean? What we lose in translation

Do you know what I mean? What we lose in translation

Happy holidays from the Flare family!

Happy holidays from the Flare family!

5 steps for difficult conversations over the holidays

5 steps for having difficult conversations during the holidays

Buckle up

Buckle up

Patriotism and the European way of life

Patriotism and the European way of life

Now we've done two - so what?

Now we’ve done two – so what?

Laughing cure - or gateway drug?

Brexit laughing cure - or gateway drug?

Breaking the patterns

Breaking the patterns

If they are wrong, don't belittle them

If they are wrong, don't belittle them

Autocracy, revolution and why I would rather eat an orange

Autocracy, revolution and why I would rather eat an orange

How to inspire with a moral story (without moralising)

How to inspire with a moral story (without moralising)

Autocracy, revolution and why I would
rather eat an orange

Should we argue with Flat Earth theorists
and other eccentrics?