#Meaning2019
Like a pilgrimage for the soul. A blast of consciousness to the mind. A storm of emotions that prompt the thoughts of change.
#Meaning2019 was different from the previous 6 years versions I’ve been to (it’s a 7-year old conference but I missed the 2012 edition as a new freelancer and in start-up frenzy mode).
The last 6 editions have given me something that no other event could. The most alternative thinking of any ‘business’ event. Access to new stories of heroes in the ‘let’s do something different’ school of work and the intersection with people’s lives and society’s challenges.
This one was different.
LOTS of emphasis on the Climate Emergency. And why wouldn’t that be the case with the advent of Extinction Rebellion? We haven’t got any more time to fart around with the reduction of polluting and extracting methods of consuming the planet’s natural assets.
As well as Extinction Rebellion, we had the New Economics Foundation and their advocacy for the Green New Deal. With the state of topsoil around the world, we are likely to have 60 more harvests before that resource is spent.
It was when we got to the incredible inclusion tactic that is Citizen’s Assemblies that my heart began to soar from the previous aching that it was enduring up to that point.
Citizen's Assemblies (see here from .gov.uk) are a form of randomised, inclusive, democratic advisory and decision-making forums, that aim to overcome the current short-circuiting and misfiring of democratic interventions.
The Great Hack on Netflix throws a grenade into digital propaganda and mind-melting media that we should all be careful of. Thank goodness for fact-checking entities like this. I’ve already used the FullFact site more than I’d like to.
Citizen’s Assemblies are not only a way of including people in the democratic process that is more akin with representation and evidence-based policy-making, but it’s a counter for the digital hypnotism we’re in danger of suffering from the propaganda that proliferates in seconds on our social platforms.
But Citizen’s Assemblies are more than the counter-revolution to puppeteering posts on social networks. They are the way to avoid a faux democracy we’re currently in, which is more a vote-based aristocracy.
Yes, we are still in an aristocracy. As we don’t always have the choice to vote for the ‘real’ people; because politics that we have now, is not birth-right based aristocracy, it is often a wealth-based aristocracy and that ifs often who we end up voting people in/for/with.
I’ve long struggled to understand:
(a) why anyone would want to get into politics — have you seen the abuse some people like Jess Phillips, Yvette Cooper, Jo Swinson and others take? Why would anyone put themselves through that?
(b) the intelligence, life experiences and understanding the rituals and machinery of politics. How can anyone navigate this confusing and perplexing series of fora and process?
(c) how people juggle lives, finances and allegiances to make a political career ‘work’ for them and their families.
Now we see even the most out-of-touch, immoral, unintelligent and nasty individual can rise to a seat of political power. It makes you think ‘anything really is possible’. If you have a lot of money and therefore are part of the wealth-based aristocracy.
Citizen’s Assemblies are attempting to change this, and beg this question: Why even have politicians at all?
Citizen’s Assemblies can collectively fulfil and complete the role of representation in a randomised selection that includes people not based on wealth or any other cultural advantage.
Meaning Conference has, for me, given a real sense of how to do business in a better way; heroic people who have created things like Humanitas, Zaytoun, Triodos Bank, Fairphone and as of this week, Camerados.
What this year’s event mainly invoked in me came in two emotional waves:
- That the political system can change to include more Citizen’s Assemblies, and any Government that chooses not to bring these to all areas is only adding to the aristocratic or ego-led politics that has us in the mess we are now. We should be looking for more of these in politics. And also in work-based situations. My commitment to more self-managed organisations would see a form of organisational Citizen’s Assembly helping make key decisions; shape culture; investment and many more aspects of working lives.
- That we have to act now — not just talk and do — about climate change. I have a hybrid car; have removed all meat and most dairy from my consumption but this is not enough. I’m going to look at how to avoid or offset carbon. I will be looking to measure the carbon footprint of PTHR and offset this with tree planting and any other way I can make the business I do be carbon negative and/or ecologically restorative.
I also would love to see Meaning Conference include the actions and stories of its attendees alongside the entrepreneurial, academic, journalistic or protesting activists.
Meaning Conference will not become a virtue-signalling ‘feel good’ for people attending, I’m sure of it. Its alternative-leaning range of speakers and participants is good — it’s the only one I know of in the world that is not vendor-supported; commercialised and really does offer the best of the more stretching insight into new developments in work; economics; education; and socio-political representation.
Yet I think the people inspired enough to come and learn, have an obligation to think and do.
I’d like to suggest that next year, fringes aren’t set up out of interest; they are open-mics and open-spaces for people to tell them what happened since last year. I’ll be certainly looking to host something like that before or after the main event — or even see something in the main event of this nature.
So was this the best Meaning ever? I don’t think there has been a ‘best’ Meaning ever. They’re all good for different reasons.
I think I had a lingering frustration at the end of the day and that was about ‘doing’.
Meaning Conference is a deep way to look at what matters to us and shape our attempts to do good. Yet ‘meaning’ itself is nothing without doing.
Paraphrasing the outstanding Maff Potts: ‘great things can come from people listening to others with no outcome in mind.’
Just being and doing with meaning.
Thank you #Meaning2019 for another great blast to the soul.
