Riel Miller returns for his sixth FuturePod appearance and another deep dive into matters Futures and Foresight related.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Pieces by Riel
Transcript
Peter Hayward: I think that life is uncertain, unpredictable, perhaps even its random. And I wonder sometimes if we use futures and foresight "in useful ways" in order to give ourselves an illusion of control over that chaos? And if there is any truth in that thought I also wonder if that illusory use of futures and foresight the really best we can do?
Riel Miller: let me start with the positive side of the story which is that and this relates to what i've been doing as I run around which is that i'm very fortunate and i'm able to work with wonderful people in many different parts of the world in Mexico, Norway, Canada, China, South Africa, Europe, Australia, et cetera.
We can nurture and nourish a gradual disintoxication. So going back to the addiction metaphor with the desire to rail and try to somehow eliminate uncertainty and creativity and the novelty that characterizes this universe. So I do think that we can switch and I do see evidence that we can switch to embracing surprise and also crucially embracing ephemerality.
One of the toxic side effects of the desire to control is that the evidence of control manifests itself in repetition. If you control something you can make sure that it reappears. And by its reappearance you are successful in your control. So you build a large pyramid and it lasts for 5, 000 years and you demonstrate that you've controlled the building of the pyramid. But life and meaning is in the moment. It's in the being of now. And ephemerality which does not have continuity, which is not repetitive, is so essential to actually, I think, being in the sense of enjoying life as you live it.
Peter Hayward:That is my guest today on FuturePod. Riel Miller, back for his 6th time on the Pod. Always a a delight for me. Welcome back to FuturePod Riel
Riel Miller: Thanks. I'm very glad to be back and, glad to share some of the updates of what's been going on. It's actually a period that I find, quite, hospitable for a challenge to the way we think about the future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah.
Riel Miller: It's a period when, A lot of people want to think about the future. You have the recent, United nations exercise, and pact summit for the future. But I think there's less, consensus on how to do it.
And I'm noticing, in my travels and attempts to track the cyclical, interest in futures thinking that we're getting a bit of a, post COVID, return or desire stability, back to the future that's a bit, disturbing because I think the message is that we need to change the way we think about the future, are you picking up on this kind of,
Peter Hayward: Way I'm listening here, I'm paying careful attention and my sense of it, and it's only very, general, is that we're actually still working out of old paradigms.
We've almost gone back to the paradigms we've used before, and I actually think as you would have noticed, there's been a lot of chatter amongst the blogging class about the status of the progressive project. In other words, are we still liberal cultures moving towards greater freedoms, or are we in a fallow period where the pendulum swings back to the more nationalistic, the more territorial, there, there isn't much that's unilateral or you'd look across countries.
And I, as I said, I'm certainly interested in your view I'm still hearing people trying to work the old ideas and I'm not seeing a lot of traction.
Riel Miller: Yeah, actually, was thinking about our conversation this popped into my head in the shower where I said to myself, I don't wanna solve the problem I wanna eliminate the problem . And I think that's quite a different proposition.
Yeah.
Riel Miller: And I think interpret what you're saying, I think I feel my 20th century heritage, having been profoundly and pervasively formed by the ideological, hopes of the 19th and 20th century, I think that those hopes Were magnificent in many ways. They were revolutionary in one way, they were reforms in other ways, but they were improvements on something we were familiar with, something we knew, There was an immense amount of sacrifice and effort put into making the revolutions or reforms happen or finding a more humane way or finding the avenues for a multilateral planetary, awareness, et cetera.
But it seems to me that it's pretty evident that the problem is deeper.
I've been trying the last year or more, the eschatological or the religious side of, futures thinking. The narratives and the framing that arise from, The formulation of, eternity, reward, power, reassurance, truth, all of those, very deeply, structural, framings for imagining the future, I think, need to be profoundly questioned.
Because I think they set us up in a relationship to each other and to the world around us, which is, not tenable. I'm not even making a judgment about it, good or bad. It just doesn't work. It's just a kind of a bizarre fantasy. And I'm not against fantasy per se, but at a certain point, if the fantasy, results in getting whacked over the head continuously, then, it's maybe time to give up the fantasy.
I think that really, characterizes the current conjuncture. Where the nation state clearly a continued expression of empire. It's a slightly more, manageable, organizational version of empire, but it's empire nonetheless.
the whole relationship of, empire to the future. And then the vassals of the empire, the vassals of the nation, the citizens of the nation. to a certain extent, the citizens of a nation cannot make a revolution because they're citizens. they're trapped inside that vessel.
And that vessel is a hierarchical vessel, that is a command and control and elicits this craving. For navigation, and I think that's the wrong metaphor.
Peter Hayward: do you think, coming from my left leaning background and education do you believe that the meta narrative of the left got us through, the late part of the 20th century?
Do you think that narrative is losing its appeal such that it can sustain the kind of challenge to the dominant paternal empire model that has been with us since the Treaty of Westphalia, if you want to go back that far?
Riel Miller: I think you raised the right, how do you deal with patriarchy?
How do you deal with paternalism? And how do you deal with the, necessity imposed by patriarchal paternalism to attempt and to take grand responsibility, for controlling the future and for instrumentalizing, and therefore extractivism, instrumentalizing the world around us. and one of the really It's not wonderful. It's horrible. But the symptoms of this, pathology is intelligence, which is going on with artificial intelligence. People are so impressed by intelligence as if intelligence could solve the problems. As if intelligence, means that you're capable of being an intelligence ‘paterfamilias’ who can, take care of everybody and reassure everybody.
Eternal stasis. So things will continue just as always. and it's all under control. Thank you very much. And it's completely bogus intelligence Substitutes for the emperor. Somehow the Emperor is supposed to know, because the Emperor has the word of, something from higher up, and intelligence somehow gives us access to this higher up knowledge, which will allow us to turn the universe into a place it isn't.
Peter Hayward: I wonder too, Riel, whether, again, certainly I'm going to put my hand up and say, I fell for this one, but. One of the things I believed, probably coming out of post enlightenment, was that if we had better data, people would actually make intelligent decisions. And if you just take the story of climate, that climate and change has been an ongoing conversation for over a hundred years, go back to the limits to growth and before then, but we have got better data.
And yet, as the data has improved, some would say we are further from a data driven consensus. And in fact, I think you could actually argue the more data you get, the more resistance you face if that data says I have to change the way I think.
Riel Miller: Yeah I, I hear you and let me make an association that, that came to me a little while back, which is that I was very, in some senses, encouraged and seduced by the idea of hospicing modernity.
Cause it's a thank goodness. Finally, we're going to, get over this this in some senses, this idea that, data and intelligence and determinism and all and progress and growth, all of the the trappings of modernity. We would finally put it to rest.
However The idea of hospicing is too deterministic. It implies inevitable death. Hospicing suggests that, you're just going there to become deceased. But I don't think that's happening. In other words, I think as usual, evolving and morphing and changing. And so I guess the point that I would raise about and the sense of, if you tell an adolescent, this is dangerous, here are the statistics, even if, we can look at things like smoking I think the much more apt issue for, or way, one, one metaphor for one way of thinking about it would be to think about addiction, I think we're addicted.
To certainty. We're addicted to this desire to control. We're addicted to a sense of superiority. And we've constructed so much of our awareness. In other words, the sensuality and sensory the world that we see. Is one that has been constructed with this notion of control and stasis and power.
And I think that there are examples of human societies where a much more humble, much more integrated, much more how can I say it? The weird thing is to even have to talk about us being separate or different from the universe we're in.
It's bizarre. We have to talk about how we can rethink to become part of the universe, whereas we are part of the universe. and I very much hear the kind of
Confusion and mixture of things around the inertia of the past. And therefore the need to deal with that inertia, it's a juggernaut, whether it's radioactive waste or the weapons of destruction or the three day delay in supply chains for cities, we have an immense inertia for planning, it is an absolute necessity of survival in the way we've constructed the world around us.
So I don't see planning going out the window anytime soon, but the question is, can we wean ourselves off that addiction and find a way to actually understand that it's more agreeable to construct a life that is not yoked to, repairing, improving a lunacy. Which is this desire to conquer control plan the future.
And it's obviously an immense transition, but that's what I mean when I talk about eliminating the problem, not just attenuating or improving it.
Peter Hayward: Have we, is, it's a lot to ask a small field like ours to, create the change. But I'm wondering, given your literacy frame for the ideas, the fuel for our thinking, do we have sources of, Futures literacy that can revolutionize the way we see ourself in the world.
And I'm reminded of my mate Zia Sardar, who said to me once, the job of futures is not to prop up a corrupt system, but to put its foot against it and give it a good shove. So where do you stand in that space?
Riel Miller: You know let me start with kind of the positive side of the story which is that and this relates to what i've been doing as I run around which is that with the world because i'm very fortunate and i'm able to Work with wonderful people in many different parts of the world in Mexico, Norway, Canada, China, South Africa, Europe, Australia, et cetera.
We can nurture and nourish a gradual disintoxication. So going back to the addiction metaphor with the desire to rail against and try to somehow eliminate uncertainty and creativity and the novelty that characterizes this universe. So I do think that we can switch and I do see evidence that we can switch to embracing surprise and also crucially embracing ephemerality.
One of the toxic side effects of the desire to control is that the evidence of control. Manifests itself in repetition. If you control something, you can make sure that it reappears. And by its reappearance, you are successful in your control. So you build a large pyramid and it lasts for 5, 000 years and you demonstrate that you've controlled the building of the pyramid but life and meaning, Is in the moment, it's in the being of now and ephemerality which does not have continuity, which is not repetitive, is so essential to actually, I think, being in the sense of enjoying life as you live it on that, that connects up to this idea of difference.
so if difference becomes something that's good. Difference becomes something that you relish, that you enjoy that's not just the difference of one moment to the next, but it's also the difference when there's a surprise, good or bad. And also there's the question of the difference.
Of the world and people around you. And so the cultivation of the human capacity to appreciate difference, I think what gives us the confidence and capacity, the capability to disintoxicate ourselves to break this addiction. And I see that growing around the world bit by bit, little by little.
In light of, I think, something that we have to give thanks for in a strong, I don't want this to sound destructive or an invitation to immiseration or something, but we've had a lot of messages that have been ideological.
And you made reference to, the various political currents that have stirred human motivation across the ages. But this time around, and here's where the data is a feedback mechanism, which, is obviously quite welcome. Being able to get feedback is important where the planet is providing a non ideological mirror. It has no malice. It has no forethoughts. It's not conspiring against us. It's simply saying, look in the mirror and make your choices from that perspective. It says you not only soil your own home, you not only destroy your own home wantonly and with very little to show for it, except traffic jams and obesity.
And more vicious wars but you're also, not enjoying it. it's misery. Even misery from luxury. this is again, we go back to some very old philosophies and perspectives on human existence, which is we live our lives and if we can't be satisfied with that, then what are we pursuing? I know that abandons certain things that people think are essential for understanding who they are.
But if we do look at the experiential side and the ephemeral side of life, which are there anyhow, it's not like you have to invent it. You live it. You live the experience, you live the moment. If we can find ways to valorize that, to infuse the joy of mystery into being alive, then I think we can begin to transition away from the pathologies of the last few millennia that have characterized our young species.
I don't know if that's hopeful because it's not hopeful in the old way, because I don't know where it takes us and I can't, I certainly don't promise anything positive or better, or, more magnificent or more equitable or more anything. It's just a fundamental change in the conditions of change, which is I think what you were referring to is this idea of futures literacy as a kind of transition away from.
Thank you. And this might be a topic worth exploring a little bit further away from the dominant epistemologies of intergenerational knowledge transfer. Now, what I mean by that is that we've been transferring knowledge across generations using one way of learning, one way of knowing, and that way of knowing, I think, fundamentally devalorizes experience.
Peter Hayward: So are you aiming at the academy or are you aiming more broadly at just the passing down of what people say is the truth?
Riel Miller: Yeah, I think it's the whole caboodle. what we have are these knowledge ecologies, and a lot of these knowledge ecologies are obviously constructed out of ritual, out of power out of anxiety out of signaling and we've constructed them over the ages. Humans are really, I think at the root of the problem.
And here we do have some very interesting and I think inspiring examples in indigenous cultures where the way of transferring knowledge across generations took a much stronger experiential path. A wisdom oriented perspective, rather than the accumulation of data and the manipulation of materials offers something for us to think about.
Peter Hayward: So you are, the way I would characterize it since your time at UNESCO, you're now a futurist at large because you are certainly at large in terms of your travels. One of Richard Slaughter's favorite phrases was signs of hope. What are some of the things that your travels around the globe and your engagement, I imagine, with people of good spirit and intention and purpose, but what are some of the early signs of maybe what you're saying
Riel Miller: that's difficult because mostly what I see is despair more or less visceral, more or less existential meaning people who feel that, that there are people who are dying, people who are threatened, people who don't have hope because the hope that they had turns out to be illusory.
It's just illusory and it just turns into sand. Yeah. So I've written a little bit about this. I'm very suspicious of words. In fact, I've been trying to get rid of the word future or futures. And just say, the not-past, not-present. So what's left? Just the idea of later.
And I’m also suspicious of the word hope. It is also very fraught with baggage. When I hope for something, that something becomes a target. And since to me the really crucial ways to assess or get a sense of transition or change is to move away from goal oriented thinking towards capability based thinking.
When a child learns to read and write, we do not know what they're going to do with it. So when somebody becomes futures literate, we do not know what they will do with it but I think it changes their relationship to the world around them and it changes who they are.
I think, insofar as reading and writing means that our relationship to knowledge changes, meaning we don't just access knowledge through somebody who can read from the pulpit, the elite that knows how to read. In the same way, as we begin to understand better our imagination and the power of our imagination, we become able to do other things that we could not do before.
And so I think that enabling or empowering dimension of futures literacy does offer seeds of transition or change.
Peter Hayward: mean, is there a paradox there is for me and I want you to dispel more. view that the literacy of futures that arises from the very stock of ideas, ideologies, how does literacy, which arises from culture, differ or provide inspiration or provocation to culture?
Riel Miller: Yeah great question. And I guess probably what keeps me up at night and it's the source of my nightmares, which is that it's true that, and that's what I mean about not thinking that modernity is dead or dying. I think, you point to something that's really profound there, which is that modernity has an ability to reassert or reestablish its position.
And that comes from words like hope that comes from words like future that comes from the limited capacity of our imagination to get beyond the tropes of Hollywood and the story of Frankenstein.
Peter Hayward: I've noticed from the bully pulpit of FuturePod that as I talk to people around the place, I'm sensing a lot more practice engagement with the arts for inspiration, as well as engagement with Indigenous culture. I do get a sense that people are leaning into Spaces for ideas. Do you get that sense as well?
Riel Miller: Look, this is our solution and innovation side, which is, we identify problems, we try to solve them and we look for solutions and we experiment. So that's definitely what's going on.
It makes a difference for me. just to take the example of indigenous menus, let's say if you turn to a menu and you say, okay, now I'm going to just try this solution and you plug it in to your existing problem I don't think that takes us very far, really.
So when you see people appealing to our senses and our ability to wonder on the basis of art, meaning something that takes advantage of the human capacity to dream and to hallucinate and to let go and to be multi sensorial and to be multi epistemic, meaning knowing in a bunch of different ways so that human capacity can be sparked catalyzed by art.
It can be catalyzed by using alternative epistemologies. But again, I think that's trying to address the symptoms rather than the disease. So we can take a lot of tranquilizers to calm our anxieties. But the issue is not, I think, to deal with the symptoms, but to really try and get beneath the symptoms to the disease that stalks our species.
And I think that's a lot more difficult, obviously. And it's not that I wanna set myself up like some sort of judge of what that disease is or how to cure it. 'cause that would be just taking the mechanistic perspective that I'm denouncing. But where I do see some potential is in a kind of double movement on the one hand to understand that there's tremendous value in not knowing and to continuously cultivate and experience not knowing and not doing and at the same time, having a very lucid view of what a transition is about.
Which means that we're still making bets. We're still planning. We're still contending with the immense destructiveness of what we've built over the last centuries. And so we have to do that. And I don't think it's helpful to confound the two. I think they're two separate activities and in a sense that if we're going to shift to a different paradigm of what it means to be human, we need to nurture that and cultivate it.
But at the same time, we have to practice coping with our addiction because the addiction requires the severance and being treated seriously. So for me, it's a kind of dualistic strategy. Which probably is, a bit far fetched maybe and I definitely don't want it to be understood as a pursuit of consciousness.
I do hope that it's a respect for wisdom and therefore a privileging or a willingness to give credence to the experiential paths to wisdom where those who are already experienced, so older, don't try to impose their version of wisdom on those who are having their own experiences.
That's a big break for most societies.
Peter Hayward: Yeah, I recall an earlier conversation we had in a podcast where you were talking about being a good ancestor.
Riel Miller: Yeah, and I still think that implies having confidence and not imposing, and I still like the term, lightness but the difficulty is what does it mean to be good compost?
In the current context and, part of being good compost in the current context is being aware that we've set up the conditions for, sudden death whether it's a climate or war. That's something we have to take care of in the present. I wouldn't do it in the name of the future.
So contrary to these people who want to pursue humanity's colonization of outer space I think it's a, from my point of view, it's a moral responsibility in the present to try and address our destructiveness as it manifests itself. At the same time that implies continuing the colonizing imperial perspective, how to build up a respect and in fact, a willingness to gift to future generations, less presence.
I don't want to weigh on the shoulders of future generations. I want them to be liberated from my whatever. It's their lives, it's their future not mine. And I don't want to justify my activities on the basis that I know, or I think this is good, or I think this is bad for them in the future. I think that's pretentious and I think it's invasive.
So it's a very tricky balancing act to go back and forth. I use the metaphor of walking on two legs. These days I've, recently I've been trying to think about the simultaneity of simplistic reductionist determinism as a way of mapping or making sense of the world and the fact that it's continuously emergent, that everything we do is simultaneously connected to some form of betting and making a bet on something.
And at the same time, not knowing what that bet will generate. And so as I wander around, I can see. Here, I've planned to be someplace. What is it that I'm learning? What is it that I'm being surprised by? What is it that I'm appreciating from a new perspective in a new way? How am I being discomforted, disrupted?
Even at the same time as I'm, in an airport that I've seen before. to me this simultaneity is something that you can cultivate. And walk on two legs right now. I really do think that too often we're hopping around on one.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. Riel. I have a little bit of experience working with people in difficult circumstances, prison systems, drug issues, that kind of thing.
a lot of the people I encounter who work with people like that. say to me the central point is to work from love, to work from people learning to love themselves. a lot of dysfunction, a lot of addiction, if you want to use that phrase, stems from a sense that a person doesn't actually regard themselves as being worthy.
from that kind of negative perspective, you actually have a lot of destructive behaviors acted out. while it sounds simple, but of course it's anything but, to give love to people when they're not used to receiving it, to cultivate in them a love of self, and then the ability to take love of self and it to apply in forms of compassion, they're not things that we necessarily as Futures and Foresight explicitly speak about.
But it's true. It does seem to be one of those powerful states, a bit like your presence and ephemerality to the centrality of both giving and receiving love to people.
Riel Miller: Yeah I'm with you and it does surface in a lot of the futures literacy laboratories that I run where at some point in the process people will say, Oh, this is about love.
Because they're thinking outside the usual frameworks that structure their imagination as you say, and because they move outside those boxes things like the power of love become relevant
I would just flag the same kind of nervousness that I have expressed throughout our conversation here, which is that if love is a cake you go buy at the bakery or whatever happens to be your supplier then we're just reinforcing the solution to the problem that doesn't get at the problem.
So it's symptomatic and more superficial. I guess the question I would have is, and I think this is the pathology of so many societies is that we cast ourselves into an alienated position where we're distanced from the self evident beauty, which I think is akin and has associations with love, in the sense of it's the reassurance and energy that love provides of just being alive.
The fact that we're alive is absolutely staggering. It's phenomenal. What I find curious is that somehow we've constructed, and here again, I talk about intergenerational knowledge transfer, is that the way in which we raise children somehow opens us up to this deficit, this lack, this pain of needing love.
Whereas in a certain sense, I think being alive. is an expression of love in the sense of the energy of life.
And in and of itself it's magnificent and should be fulfilling from that perspective. So we don't have to find some substitutes, some sugar to get us high and compensate.
And, given that we manufacture, I think, this situation of deficit and to a certain extent, I think it serves the current way of organizing society to generate this deficit, to generate this fear, to need the love of the emperor, to need the love of the patriarch, it serves the system, it's functional.
The ability to move beyond it, of course, is that much more difficult. And so there, again I would want to try and recast the issue such that we can move beyond the issues like ableism. In other words, life in and of itself is able and life in and of itself is love.
And therefore we've all got it because we're alive if we're thinking about it and talking about it. That might sound inadequate in the face of the terrible suffering and cruelty that our species visits on each other and on the living beings around us. But again, to me, that's not a question of consciousness.
It's a question of capability that allows us to be really part of this universe, because the universe itself is this incredibly creative, in that sense, loving, life creating place. And if we can stop being separate, through some different epistemic, different ways of learning to know the universe we exist in, then maybe there's a way out of some of these deficits, some of these cravings, some of these desperate needs that then allow people to be manipulated and controlled and, in many cases set up for horrible situations of death and addiction.
Peter Hayward: Riel, I think you have the most podcasts in future pods, double century. we just knocked up 200. And I think you're in at least probably five or six of them.
So again, it's always a a mind bender to spend some time bounce and play in your deep pools of thought. And I do enjoy it and I'm sure the listeners have enjoyed the chance, but thanks again for being such a great supporter of future and A good example of the field.
Riel Miller: Thank you.
a tribute to your generosity and your ability to cultivate a wonderful and, fertile conversations. So thank you. Thanks, mate. Bye bye.
Peter Hayward: Good. I'll just turn this off.
Peter Hayward: You will. You will.
Its always a wild intellectual and emotional journey to get in the deep end with Riel. Where you cannot feel the bottom. And its both exciting and scary. I hope you got scared and excited too. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time.