EP 191 - The Inner Dimensions of the Future - Jay Gary

 
 

Jay Gary returns for a chat and we discuss leadership development, institutional support, practice development and how his faith is foundational to his work and purpose.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

More about Jay

Transcript

Peter Hayward:On earlier podcasts I have said that our work sometimes means we have to spend a lot of time thinking deeply about futures that we would wish would never come to fruition. In order to better see pathways of prevention or transformation, we need to deeply understand how something could eventuate. When were doing this work, then how do we keep our balance? What is our compass?

Jay Gary: the inner life or the private not just private life, but the private worlds of our spaces, interior, as you say really that's a leader. development, not leadership of others. It's the interior, right? And it took me a while. And I think the reason I was drawn to Richard Slaughter, you mentioned him, this is 25 years ago or more, he was talking about the inner dimensions of the future.

In other words, the future had an inner dimension. That was foresight. How we cited The future capacities, right? The perceptions, the capabilities, the concepts, the applications, right? Of choices and that human dimension or the interior dimension of what the external future comes to be that was Richard's greatest gift to me.

And, thousands of others, it was writings and books. And, but to me, that's I think you've nailed it related to leadership, that you don't have leadership unless you have an interior and an exterior balance, the same as a futurist or foresight practitioner. Yeah,

Hi, I'm Peter Hayward. And that is my guest today on FuturePod J Gary educator, researcher, and practitioner returning to the Pod for a chat.

Peter Hayward: Welcome back to FuturePod Jay.

Jay Gary: Thank you, Peter. It's a joy to be with you. How long has it been?

Peter Hayward: Five years ago we spoke. You were, I think, my first non studio recording back in the days of pre COVID when we used to use recording studios to record these things.

Jay Gary: Fantastic to meet you over the new and improved podcast echo systems and want to be with you, be with all my friends down under. I'm coming from the States here, North America, and congrats on leading the, what I think is the longest, greatest, great conversation on the future, what's yet to happen, what we don't know about what could happen, who we are.

So congratulations on future pod.

Peter Hayward: Thanks, Jay. It's been it's been great fun. And you have had another change in your life. Do you want to just tell the listeners where you've been? Cause it's five years ago. Our last talk was pre COVID. So there's been a lot happening.

Jay Gary: Oh my, we must have met at a conference somewhere, maybe Vancouver or where you're in D. C. or something, but no, it's been quite a while, but I'm, and to know now that you've parachuted out of academia, you must be full of joy, but you're still, it sounds like you've flunked retirement once or twice here, I think.

But you're  a recovering academic. I started accidentally 20 years ago but then the woman that hired me to develop foresight for a university in Virginia, she rehired me in 2015 at another university. So I'm in the middle of the country, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm at Oral Roberts University, just having the time of my life, great sandbox, starting new degrees all over the university.

My passion has always been like yours, the future of, and the foresight in. And so, it's great to be with you back again. And what number are you up to?

Peter Hayward: Oh, we're getting close to the double century now.

Jay Gary: Oh my.

Peter Hayward: Now, you talk about your passion for teaching and learning and of course, your real big passion is leadership and its relationship and application through foresight.

I think that for you Leadership is central to the practice of foresight. Do you want to talk about your latest ideas on leadership?

Jay Gary: Oh, goodness. I remember we have a common friend Richard Slaughter and I invited him to visit me early in my academic, work maybe in 2004,  before I started a terminal degree, in our doctor agrees, we all die and we have to come back to life at the end of terminal degree. But he asked, I was doing a PhD in organizational leadership. He said, Jay, how do you see leadership versus foresight?

And, and goodness, I was all taken by all the organizational studies, all the discipline studies, everything. I was just beginning. I said I'm, I've still got to get my hands around it, Richard. But the more I've soaked in it, the more, I guess I've embedded and embodied leadership.

I've always been a let's get it done person. But, leadership is more than just leading and then relying on behind you. It's leadership. It's the ship, right? What's it's the ship's seaworthy and who's with you. And what about teams and what about organizations? What about alliances?

It's a huge way of thinking that I came to appreciate. I was never much on the pop leadership stuff. So I didn't stop in the airport and buy those pop books, I wasn't on the latest management fad, but as I got into it, I realized that leadership is really, there's great practices and who we are as best as a leader.

And in my case, I think maybe your case, I've been challenging the process, right? I've been creating a shared vision and what if futures do they look for alternatives? So I found a meeting between leadership and creating from the future, right? Not just the past. If we're talking aboutthe past, a leadership theory might be a theory of power, right? Or hierarchy or the push of the past through stable things or hierarchy or all kinds of ideologies. But leadership at its best leads leads from the future. It creates the future. And it's off, it's so fascinating. I've become involved with the International Leadership Association after a 10 year hiatus but they're holding a research summit in August in Colorado on future forward leadership. Like the question is, how do we put the future on the leadership agenda?

So many theories of leadership are past or at present oriented, supervisory leadership, middle management, all that kind of thing. There is a strategic leadership stream, which was more external. Looking outside the organization to make better decisions, but there's a strong tradition leadership you've been part of it yourself and some have called it integral theory, but there's an integral leadership stream, right? And you've thought quite a bit correct about leadership.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, integral, I was introduced to when I was studying with Richard Slaughter

whatever is our external focus, whatever is the external we see, there's an equal inner component to everything. There's an inner component to us, ourselves, there's an inner component to organizations, and the thing for me about leadership is predominantly a focus outwards, but it's drive, the ethics The basis of the person who does the leading or the collaborating comes from inside the person and to me leadership and foresight sit in this inner outer balance imbalance game and maybe leadership is that thing that one of the things that helps us achieve balance in our inner journey and our outer practice.

Jay Gary: I think you've put the nail in the head, the inner life or the private not just private life, but the private worlds of our spaces, interior, as you say really that's a leader. development, not leadership of others. It's the interior, right? And it took me a while. And I think the reason I was drawn to Richard Slaughter, you mentioned him, this was 25 years ago or more, he was talking about the inner dimensions of the future.

In other words, the future had an inner dimension. That was foresight. How we “sighted” the future, our capacities, right? The perceptions, the capabilities, the concepts, the applications, right? Of choices and that human dimension or the interior dimension of what the external future comes to be that was Richard's greatest gift to me.

And, thousands of others, it was his writings and books. And, but to me, that's I think you've nailed it related to leadership, that you don't have leadership unless you have an interior and an exterior balance, the same as a futurist or foresight practitioner.

Peter Hayward: Like a lot of people who work in this. Ambiguous spaces. We have to often think about and imagine futures that we hope never arise. But if we don't spend time inhabiting them, making them real how would we act to prevent this from happening? And yeah, that work of doing that, of going into those dark places and spending time there. I actually think it's part of our responsibility. If we are future is that we imagine futures that we absolutely don't want to happen.

Jay Gary: I think you've pinpointed something very well. It was Herman Kahn. Was it thinking the unthinkable, and then in the pandemic The larger search words for the unimaginable or the unthinkable, that those kind of things are a lot of entries on it. Um, I was schooled really simply as a early foresight futures practitioner or budding futurists, a wannabe futures, but really a foresight practitioner that we had.

What was it? Probable, possible, preferable futures, right? The three P's. It comes back to Roy Amara, 50 years ago or more. But then the last decade or two, or at least 10 years or more, it seems like preventable has come up the fourth P, right? You've seen that. I've seen that. And everybody's talking about resilience, obviously sustainability muddling down, remember Richard's writings and others, all this sense of, can, what can we prevent?

Not just what can we imagine that's preferable or as a, what a possible an alternative. The probable is always, it's default but we come from a practice like, we're Mandalorians, right? This is the way where we overturn the concept of T.I.N.A. There is no alternative, right?

We stand against Thatcherism. We claim there is another way.There's another way other than cold war, right? There's another way down a day in terms of whether it's climate, there's another way in terms of misinformation, whatever it is. But I think you're right in the leadership or even futurist need to think more related to the unimaginable and the imaginable.

Help us make better choices. I want to put a puzzle to you. It might be not a puzzle to you, but it took me a long time to realize that maybe five or 10 years can I've been in. Practicing as a futures for, I don't know, 30, 40, but the distinction, how do you distinguish between like there's the association of professional peers?

How do you distinguish between professional futurist versus foresight professionals? Do you make that distinction in your Australia between foresight professionals that are practicing and professional futurists, or is that synonymous?

Peter Hayward: It's a great question. Professional in the, what you're describing is how they practice and to the level and depth and so to me there's a continuum. And so a foresight professional is a long way along the practice continuum. Whereas a professional futurist is actually one, the field or the community within which the person practices. And they are regarded as a professional. So there's my splitting of hairs on that one.

Jay Gary: Yeah. So this came to mind, you mentioned the, the, or I interpret it as the preventable future. John smarts weighed in on this quite a bit, I think the last 10 years, but he's also weighed in on this subject.

In fact, I'm using his textbook called Introduction to Foresight, for a doctoral course I have here. And Richard Slaughter's book. He has many books, but one, a basic is what Futures Thinking for Social Foresight, the former DVDs now a PDF, but John Smart makes a distinction than what I mentioned, but he used some different terms.

He used, there's a difference between a futurist and a foresighter. I go, come again, John, what's a foresighter? It grew out of his thinking about occupations and course practice professions. But when he looked at LinkedIn, he saw how many people were classified as futurists. And then how many people are working on the future?

They're not using futurists in their linked in, title. And he said there must be 10, 20 times more. I forget the number other than futurists that people are actually engaging organizationally and sector or otherwise. Professionally in using foresight. And so it's say an iceberg, the tip of the iceberg, my future is above the water, but below it would be a foresight professional above.

It could be a professional futurist and we've always known thaI'm a slow learner. It took me a decade to realize this. But what do you think about those distinctions? I don't like the foresighter or term, right? I'd rather say foresight practitioner versus a professional futurist, separate in those ways.

Peter Hayward: See, I've just come off a podcast series with the APF where they have a series of awards called the if awards and the if awards are open to people who. are doing work. There's no question of what they call themselves or their qualifications. They're simply using the future in interesting ways. 20 people who won awards and nominations. And I suspect almost none of those people that I spoke to would refer to themselves as, Professional futurists, they are actually artists or they are educators or they're game developers or whatever else, but they're all using the future as professionals, as masters, what we give people is, the infinite toolbox of ways to use the future in helpful ways and to me, that's always been the gift of futures, that it It gives people another way to look at something, another way to find pathways, to find goals, to find hope. They're not part of professional associations, but they are using the future in masterful ways.

Jay Gary: Yeah. No, that's, I agree. I run a Doctor of Strategic Leadership, not a doctorate of professional futurists, right? For this largely reason that and I, we have a, we have a track or a concentration of Foresight.

We have a Change concentration. We have a Coaching concentration, but the funny little tidbit of history brought up John smart he and you and I have shared this background with the association of professional futures for goodness, at least two decades or more. But John bought the domain APF.org.

Before that, the APF had a profuturist. org and John comes to the board. I wasn't on the board at the time. I came on the board like 2015. He must've come to the board a year or two before and he said, Hey, I got this domain. I paid a chunk of change for it. Do you want it? And of course, Cindy and others said yes, but the way as I heard it, John says I'd like to give it to you on the condition that you change your name to the Association of Professional

Foresight, not Association of Professional Futurists, right? Because, he'd seen this larger body of no name people, right? Its’ like Ayra, the character in the Game of Thrones. She was like a young gal, who learned to embrace the path of anonymity.

APF didn't go that way at that time. And then I became chair later and I was aware of it, but it just didn't seem that our identity, was professional futures. But I think there's probably a case to be made for foresight professional. I'm a professional, whether, whatever level organizationally or whatever sector I'm applying foresight.

But there's been a lot of ways. Our field has been you're quite diverse, right? Our practice has been quite diverse. I want to say some would debate whether we are a community. I don't think we're a movement, but I think we are in a renaissance time for foresight or, and then others have, approached this beyond considerations of this as  human systems, but natural systems with anticipation, right?

So you're probably more on the pulse of what's happening in our practice than anybody almost in the world. You talk to everybody. I just, I'm out there doing it, but how are we coming along? I did a study a decade ago on the, what sort of the future of foresight professionals 2030.

Jay Gary: What are you seeing where are we at? our identity, our inner life collectively, and then where we at related to our impact or our positioning or our or emerging careers of people.

Peter Hayward: Yeah, I think, I think we're a community of practice. We all have our pet ways. We all have the particular things we lean into. There is a huge pool of people, young old, from different backgrounds who use Futures tools to get inspired and excited by the creative and innovative side of Futures work. For me, what the APF was about was, it's fantastic, we've got this community and it's great, we've got everyone feels welcome into the pool, but we also need to accredit and show who we regard as professionals, then who exactly are they? And so the APF was about moving from people just calling themselves futurists. To an actual body that said, yeah, okay, you can call yourself a futurist, but we've we've got some criteria for what we think goes along with being a professional in the field.

That does create a tension. There's no question. And the thing I'm grateful for with the APF is that it's never been a barrier to anybody getting involved in futures and using futures tools. So it's not proprietary in protecting the tools or the ways of working.

 And the F Awards are fascinating, Jay, because people self nominate. So this is not someone coming along saying, Hey, put this person in. This is a person coming along and saying, Hey, I think I'm doing something interesting. Do you agree? And I love that. I love the fact that it's self nominating. And then allowing them to be judged by professionals as to whether they are doing something truly interesting.

Jay Gary: Wow. Hats off to John Sweeney and all the other judges. There must be a community of at least 10 to 30 judges, minimum 40 over the years.

It's been a long running program and I've been what, three or four years out of APF but I've just I continue to be amazed that it's It's a bit of reinvent itself to create its own culture of pop up conferences and all that we always want more but Kudos to them. Yeah, so here's the thing about I gave up on and the thing I embrace I gave up on asking the question Should a should futures grow up to be a profession right and I said no we should grow up to be professional And to exhibit professionalism and to know how to evaluate what's, as you say, if's work, most substantial futures work or superior work.

Yes, we need ethics. Yes. But to be aspire to think that we're not mature level. Okay. We're teenagers. Okay. I think we're better than that. But it's not the goal, be a licensed professional that locks out other occupations from doing our work. You mentioned the tool set is open, right? For the most part.

In other words, there's great, there's best practices everywhere, but there's been a history and a heritage of applying foresight tools and future methods all across the board. So our aspirations as a community. And I came to this from the 2030 Delphi I did back in 2012 or so, is not to become a profession, but it's become professional.

And that may require certifications at different sectors and levels. But APF was providing the credentialing, that's a parallel term to certification, that's private and recognized by a community of practice, right? And so that sense, that's where we're at, and I think we're at a healthy state that way.

Peter Hayward:I hope you're enjoying the podcast. FuturePod is a not for profit venture. We're able to do podcasts like this one because of our patrons. Like Dan Freer, who has been a long time patron. Thanks for the support, Dan. If we would like to join Dan as a patron of the Pod, then please follow the Patreon link on our website.

Now let's just move from APF to our other wonderful organization that we're both heavily involved in, which of course is the World Futures Studies Federation, which is a completely different animal. Again, another community, but with a different agenda I know you are involved in a really significant piece of work.

With Luke van der Laan and others in doing some work to support really the academic side of futures and foresight. Do you want to talk about that?

Jay Gary: Yes. So for those are just listening in that there are various communities of practice in the future space. There's two main communities Association are the Association of Professional Futures, and then as you mentioned, the World Future Studies Federation.

So one is more professionally oriented in its practice. The other is more academic in its practice, it has futures research. It encompasses, of course, academics more expressively, it has a 50 year history versus a, like a 20. So the Federation just celebrated the 50th anniversary in Paris last October.

So the World Future Studies Federation has future studies in its middle name, right? And and that itself is a discipline. But the caution here is Peter, just as. If we're part of the APF that we don't need to wait until become a professional, there's no reason to believe we should be, but we should be professional.

Related to the World Future Studies Federation, we shouldn't be discouraged that future studies is not a discipline in the whole realm of colleges or schools or theories. We're, it's not like we're the parallel or analog of history, this is futures, right? Yeah. We want to aspire to that.

We want to teach the future as Peter Bishop says. But the quest to be recognized as disciplinary, or to lock down the knowledge base of future studies is a it's always an open quest and we're in early days and but what my experience has been, I've benefited greatly again, we go back to Richard Slaughter.

He was the was the president. And in. General secretary role, but of this NGO. But Richard really encouraged me to apply myself toward the toward futures theory, futures, research to focus my PhD on in this case, foresight styles, two.

to actually, I've been more of an entrepreneur and an educator in my work in terms of higher education. So I've like you I've worked in schools. First was 20 years ago, school of leadership studies at Regent university. They had an MBA up to PhD of organizing leader, but I worked all across their programs, turning them Toward foresight in terms of concentration of segments and then coming my present work since 2015 or Roberts, I've been starting new degrees left and right, put a slotting foresight courses in sports management degrees, all kinds of things that, you know, but my dedicated work is when a master of organizational leadership, a doctor of strategic leadership and particularly a doctor strategic leadership with a foresight concentration.

But you're talking about the Federation as a whole and I can talk more about my own work Let's talk about the accreditation because that was a significant milestone And it's not, it doesn't mean we're established discipline. What it means is we have peer review universities that are offering a graduate foresight programs helping each other to sharpen each other.

So yeah, that was a great innovation. And really Luke van der Lann. From Australia has spearheaded this now, but I was in the early stages of ideation with Eric and myself back in 2018, 2019. I was the lead site visitor to accredit the longest standing Future Studies master's program.

50 years. Founded in what? 1974, the University of Houston master Science of Foresight. And they me and Dr. Guiermina Buena visited thatprogram and they went through a whole self study program and then we accreditation asked the question, are you doing what you say you're doing? So they document what they're doing and then we came along and said, Hey, I think you're doing what you're doing from what I see, the evidence you show me, and now here's how you might even improve, take it to another level.

So it's like a peer review consulting of programs to programs. And then the, we have applicants this. This year standing with visits that are forthcoming with turku with Tamkang with Stellenbosch. And then Luke has a goal of getting 10 more programs over the

next

couple of years, so yeah, 20, 30 focus and their programs are out there.

Many of our emerging, many of our embryonic sometimes they start as just a. But we're here as let's call ourselves academic futures, not professional futures to help strengthen others. And that takes it's sector knowledge. It's a lot of you could be teaching as faculty for a decade.

I was, and I hardly gave a a rat's tail for, how academia worked on the inside and how to establish thriving programs with enrollment and quality.

Peter Hayward: I think something like this, yeah. If it had have been in place when we had our master's course at Swinburne, the course that Richard started, It could have helped. It could have really given the university more confidence that this actual course of study actually is a thing and is worth keeping.

Jay Gary: I have my own,

own testimony on that. I think if we had accreditation like this back when I started programs at Regent. From 2003 to 2013 or whatever accreditation could have been a counterbalance, right? Externally, that is a stamp of quality, but it's also a stamp of continuity, right?

And you the Federation has accreditation of university foresight programs for five years, right? Then you re up it. Uh, it's, we're meeting the moment. And thanks to the leadership of the Federation, I'm not on the board, but Luke is, Eric is, and others we've been able to bring academic futures together to support each other from, major different cultures, whether South Africa, Finland, Taiwan.Dra. Guillermina Buena Paz is leading up the charge in Latin America related to exploring how we can serve just even courses, just quality review of courses and not accreditation of programs. So that's the stage there. And yeah, I'm very pleased. Very pleased with that. And it's kudos anyone who's, if you're, if you're in higher education or if you're a student and you want to be affiliated with the federation, it's WFSF.org and and great continuity.

And great studies. I just presented a paper there, I think, in Paris on five decades of future studies lessons from 50 years of PhD dissertation. So there is quality doctoral work being done in this field. And you're in a PhD dissertation. Many times, you're obviously become an adjunct. You become.

Instructors, maybe a professor, but it's the quality of the professors would be the quality of the programs of the future. So that might be

Peter Hayward: a presented, Jay, because it's a fascinating paper.

Jay Gary: Yeah. Aletheia who was doing the virtual conference, just sent out a link, I think five months ago to my

presentation. So the yesterday I looked it up, go, Oh they did a good job in a multi camera video setting. I received a and I had a postdoc working with me and we explored we started collecting dissertations and we got up to about 120 and I can't say it's a sample.

If it's 20 percent or 30 percent of existing over 50 years, it might be more, but we were Anglophiles. Fortunately, we had some Persian, we had some Spanish, but we didn't have many German, there's a lot more out there. But we could think about them and classify them in terms of four buckets.

Uh, the buckets were epistemology, theories, methods, and practice. So you talk about a community of practice. Remember Richard used to talk about pragmatic futures and then what was the second one was a progressive? I forget yeah, social?

Peter Hayward: social.

Jay Gary: The third civilizational, but I think but Practices, very important.

What's a good future study that's applied Practice. And so we looked at dissertations in these modes, things like yours, your dissertation 2005 from individual social foresight. That was, that's the practice. I've obviously, there's a lot of other things involved in that, but that was It wasn't based on theory alone.

It was actually documenting the literature and the inner development of individual foresight, integral futures. That's how you understand it, correct?

Peter Hayward: Yeah.

Jay Gary: It was. Participatory action research. Yeah. Yes,

Peter Hayward: it was. It was. It was very much a theory based, using the community's own work to work up to where it was going.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sitting in, we taught alongside an MBA and they were distinct communities. They were very different communities to be in an MBA community and a Foresight community. And of course, I was asking the question, how do they differ?

Jay Gary: Very much. So we had a Methods bucket, and this is things like Stuart candies, the futures of everyday life, experiential scenario, experiential futures, and that's a method right now, gamification of the future.

It's a, an immersive method, right? And we had Noah Rayford's what large scale participatory future systems, the We had a bucket of theories and this, the classical PhD, Peter, that there's the participatory pragmatism, there's interpretive PhDs, but then sometimes you get to realism, critical realism and positivism, but the classical PhD is more of empirical science.

we had a number of collection of dissertations were that there. We need more in that field. But sure, Chermack’s theory of scenario planning. And there's a testing of organizational effectiveness against constructs that usually theoretical person. Doctorates look at improving a theory base, a discipline, a base, Robeck's corporate foresight or Amstutz managerial assessment connected to foresight firm performance. So you compare constructs individual to, causal models and things. And then we had one, I think you and I love this bucket because we've gained so much from it.

And I think the Master of Strategic Foresight that you were taught it and that you've schooled in was produced so many Epistemological exemplars. Here we have Richard Slaughter's work in 1982 introducing critical futures, right? Inaytullah’s understanding of Sakar’s epistemic boundaries, critical commentaries, or Gidley's work on evolving education and Kousa's  dynamic paradigm of futures research.

So this whole area of Epistemology has been central in doctoral study and how we see and. And what's our paradigm? the other day, I have a South African student, and he wrote a post. He said what about the windscreen? And I said to myself, what's a windscreen?

Are you talking about windshield? That's what we call it on cars versus windscreens. But isn't Epistemology a screen? Yeah. And post normal or post structural postmodern critical views. recognize that we have screens in front of us or shields, so anyway, you always got to laugh at yourself.

Peter Hayward: Absolutely. So Jay, I think one of the things that surprised me when we first met all those years ago and you showed me what Regent were doing was you had the Bible as one of your texts that was used to teach leadership at Regent University.

And that was a surprise because I don't think, I don't think at an Australian university you'd see the Bible in a list of texts. And I'm guessing that Oral Roberts has got a similar. Approach faith and particularly for you, Christianity has been an important part of both what you teach and also how you practice. Where are you now on that kind of personal faith journey and the work?  

Jay Gary: Peter, thank you for asking. I think one of the presentations, you came to a presentation I did at a conference was on the Future According to Jesus, right? We have all these great progenitors of our field, HG Wells, and you keep going back to Da Vinci, you keep going back and back.

And I said to myself, what was Jesus’ future horizon did he exercise foresight? So I presented a paper on that. It's become one of the. more popular citation cited programs that won an award 2008 or whatever, nine, I think had 50 top, journal articles and all 50, 000 publication or something like that.

Let me think about faith. Let me chat you from a practice perspective, right? A phemenological perspective, a lived perspectives. Cause religion, Davy Bowe said it is religion is for people fear hell, but spirituality is for people who've already been there.

So I've been there, I want to live on the flip side of life and live in this life and open doors integrate like you mentioned. The Bible is a grand is a narrative. It's a narrative. But it, but our own stories are important too. And so how do we live out our story in the 21st century?

Could we look back to the first century and take any inspiration? I'm not talking about doctrine. I'm talking about practice. And so I saw Jesus as coming from below. He wasn't part of the power structure. He wasn't part of the leadership of his day. We call him a dissident entrepreneur, right?

He was not part of the official leadership of the temple state of Judaism at his time. He was out in the field, so to speak, but he became a teacher, a rabbi, but he brought critique. So in that sense, he brought critique on the conventional path behind him. But in his day, there was a polarization between the conventional path, the blue steaming push of the past and the challenge of the present, the loyal opposition, which were the Pharisees, which is the crisis of the present.

The big thing going on then was that they were people living under occupation. It sounds like a familiar story today regarding the Middle East, people under occupation. And so Jesus was trying to figure out how do I get past this impasse? This civilizational crisis between the push of the past and the crisis of the present. Sohe led from the future what I would call a creative path. And so in a sense, he internalized the crisis in his life.

And he, in a sense, ended up. A martyr's death, but he also told stories and his first followers let's say an act or saw a witness to his, his coming to life again, he identified with the nation as a national prophet predict or sensing foreseeing the fall of that nation through a civil war. And fall of Jerusalem 40 years out from his time.

But in that sense, he was recreating all things, the covenant, the community, and those who followed him would spared from the civil war to come because they were nonviolent. So we really only have two paths. We have, Caesar and Christ. I'm talking civilizational here, Caesar is power over, and Jesus is power under, of the people, by the people, for the people.

Caesar, Julius, and those of Augustus, they were focused on, they were focused on religion. They had the gods. They were focused on war, to impose power on others. But they had a vision of global peace. Jesus also had a vision of peace, but it was a totally different vision.

It was religion of the people and heritage, but that heritage traction was enacted through nonviolence and suffering on behalf of others that led to justice, not victory in war, but justice distributed and that led to peace. And so it was a total bottom up and he recreated faith from the inside out.

When at its civilizational crisis of the Holocaust of the first century, that he said it was nothing before and after to compare. Of course, he didn't see our time. He saw his time. He was a prophet to his own nation, his own time. And the end was the end of the age. He saw it.

He was a New Covenant Jew, like others were of his day, of the Dead Sea Scrolls and people. So I'm talking technically, but at the end of the day, If I would ever reflect on Bible stories or reflect on faith that we are, uh, we can work from below. We can create the future from the bottom up.

Yes, there strategic foresight supporting decision makers and military all kind of sectors, right? But there's also social foresight. And so the values of the futures community is in this vein. It would be in the emancipatory interest of life, the empowered interest. And so I'm all for whole leaders for the whole world, the inner, the outer.

I'm all for I'm all for polycentric pursuits of various paths, The more we do that, the more we can leave better futures and better opportunity and better equity and justice for all. Iit's going to take a lot of work in this century, right?

And the current crisis and in the Middle East or in Ukraine, we have. Ukraine is facing the 1939 moment, right? And right after a Poland, right? The US is facing 1932 movement, right? And choices, right? Israel is have been occupying the Palestinians for 57 years after they were occupied, and driven out of of Europe.

So my question is, in talking about global issues, although all of it, but we could talk misinformation. We could talk about, AI, we can talk about any number of things that futures think about. But my question is, as Thomas Friedman asks, How do we be pro Israeli, pro Palestinian, even pro Iranian?

How do we move toward a world? Where we see some of the healings of the nations in the sense of a regionally Atlantic Pacific Indic. And how do we move toward a vision beyond where we're at. That takes hard work. But in that sense, I think we can be pro-humanity And not buy into endism or only.

We can be cautiously realistic, correct? A realistic optimist. And a defensive pessimist, right? I have faith in you, I have faith in God, I have faith in humanity, in human responsibility, I have more faith that we are responsible for ourselves, but we can grow up if we choose to. But I'm working every day like HG Wells with a race between education and catastrophe

So let's hope we choose better paths moving forward.

Peter Hayward: Let's hope, Jay. Look, mate, wonderful to catch up again. Been too long since our last chat, but thank you for taking some time to chat to me and the FuturePod community.

Jay Gary: Pleasure to be with you, Peter, and keep up the great conversations on civilization, the great work of our time, because there's always those behind us that we need to lift up and those in front of us that they need to serve.

So thank you so much.

Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed meeting Jay again, after a break of too many years. I enjoy speaking to practitioners like Jay, to whom the inner journey of their practice underpins their reach of their external work. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If we would like to support the pod in place, follow the patreon link on our website. This has been Peter Hayward. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.