2026 arrived like an ambush. Almost unbelievably, the audacious grab of Venezuelan President Maduro by the United States military was quickly eclipsed in news cycles by President Trump’s renewed threats to seize Greenland by any means necessary, and his withdrawal of the US from 66 international organisations. NATO may now exist in name only, and it is not fanciful to imagine the whole UN edifice collapsing.

New world order? Back to an old one? Or just honesty about the one that has already come into being? With the US invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, some analysts have framed all this as a return to spheres of influence — although of course things might well turn out messier still.

Whatever it all portends, the raw power of missiles is clearly now the currency. Gramsci’s monsters are rumbling, loudly.

As they do so, the old multilateralism splinters. It may be that little survives in its current forms. And the doing-good sector that has built itself on the hopes of international law and international cooperation is in a state of panic, with good reason. Leverage is diminishing, money is retreating, the power dynamics and institutional realities on which it has depended (for better and worse) are evaporating before our eyes. A whole infrastructure starts to fade away.

Meanwhile, inexorably, conflict is becoming the organising principle of global politics once again. We need to be honest about this. It may not have taken over our imaginations just yet, but it looms nonetheless. As one war-like episode follows another, it becomes increasingly apparent that we are all living in a liminal space between war and peace. Hard security, rearmament, deterrence are the menu du jour.

The beginning of the last century reverberates in our era. But this time there is far more complexity, the compounding pressure of a climate crisis, vastly advanced technological capabilities, the foreseeable possibility of entrusting robots with battlefield tactics, the weaponisation of space, and the ability resting in the hands of numerous states to annihilate much of the life on Earth.

The sheer, mind-boggling danger of it seems to be our best hedge against the worst. That’s hardly reassuring.

Is there anything else to hang onto? Most of us don’t have time to fret for long — we are preoccupied simply with the pressures of existing, inside systems that have not been designed for our collective thriving, and distracting ourselves instead of facing up to unbearable realities.

Yet we should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.

We should not have to orient our lives to survival and fear.

This is a time when we need to stand way back, zoom out, discern.

As things collapse, the sense of permanent instability erodes our sense of agency and possibility. It is a poisonous cocktail indeed. The threat of violence is a sign of system failure, a catastrophic failure of imagination written in the script of domination and control. A world organising itself around war can neither save itself, nor see what it needs saving from.

All is not lost from the old order, of course. Less powerful states are still looking to get things done through multilateral action, not least the recent pandemic treaty process from which the US was absent. Just as a newly-independent Jamaica used its maiden speech to the UN General Assembly in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis to call for a worldwide human rights campaign (credit to Stephen Jensen for this nugget), apocalyptic threat has a way of impelling cooperation among those without power.

But this has to be a time for a rethink of fundamentals, not simply trying to preserve as much as we can of the old order. We may not be able to stop that building from being destroyed, or at least badly damaged. But we can build new ones. And we might have to.

Here’s the thing: as conflict looms, we are in a kairos moment of sorts, with an opportunity to think about what is the opposite of war. Certainly it is not our continual state of proto-war, in which grievances and rivalries and zero-sum politics enable the slow escalation towards conflict. Nor coping within economic systems that oppress us, push Earth systems to breaking point, lock us into the meaningless void of endless productivity cycles in pursuit of endless growth for the endless enrichment of… well, whom? Nor, surely, the loneliness and fragmentation and frictionlessness into which tech invites us, a great withdrawal from community and perhaps even life itself. These things all need to be part of the same conversation.

We don’t just need an absence of war, as the tired phrase repeats itself. We need the kind of peace in which we embrace a richer vision of human flourishing.

War is downstream of other things. And yet downstream sounds wrong, for nothing is linear, history is not inevitable. We are living amid a swirl of possibilities, different futures each pushing to be born. We may hear these possibilities in the fragments of conversations, see them enacted in communities, read them in scrawls on walls.

Nothing we have built so far has the right to exist in perpetuity. History is replete with reinvention. Political ideas, political forms come and go. There is no sense in which anything is permanent or inevitable or essential. There is no guarantee of the solidity or furtherance of what we have called progress.

This is not a time to recoil. We have to do the work of reimagining and remaking, not to hide or deny. Our task now is not so much one of defending what we have inherited, but of re-diagnosis and remaking.

At the level of international politics, some sketches: We should do the work of reimagining what a successor to the UN could look like, perhaps a looser set of arrangements centred around tackling a defined set of crises, and experiment with actual forms. We should ask if we need a new vocabulary of human flourishing to supersede human rights, perhaps something that locates humans in a wider ecology of nature and machine — and then start to generate this.

And we do have to start turning around the relentless flow of wealth to the wealthier (yes, there are ideas on how), and to revolutionise the relationship between (certain types of) work and time and money in an age when none of our kids know what jobs are still going to exist for them. And this is just the beginning.

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It is possible that we could do these things. It is possible not only because we humans are extraordinarily resourceful, but because we are capable of wanting good for ourselves and each other, and capable of solidarity and cooperation. Perhaps above all, because we are capable of love.

But we’ve also become deeply stuck, and seemingly unwilling to believe that other futures may be possible.

In the first instance, those without raw power may turn out to be the ones who can hold open the space for a future that is not war. Powerlessness is the best possible incentive for cooperation, and cooperation in the domains that build a future is our best protection against war.

But a broader reimagining is only going to happen if we are willing to give ourselves permission for it, to invest in it, to unleash a new generation of re-imaginers who can open our collective minds to the possibility that the future does not have to be war or destruction. For one thing, we surely need a new philanthropy oriented to the right brain, a massive investment in imagination and purpose and story and culture.

It may seem ludicrous to suggest that storytelling is going to save us from catastrophe. I hesitate even to write it. But while pragmatism and deterrence are the first order of business of course, they do not offer a future. And what does the macho realism of most IR theory offer us?

More than anything, our response to this moment must be a quiet rebellion of solidarity and love. That is overwhelmingly our most precious resource in an age of monsters. And whatever we do in our rebellious reimagining, we will do imperfectly, against the odds, in the cracks, around the edges.

It will be in the hidden strength of fragility; or as Han Kang wrote, perhaps in answer to her own question,

“Like a blooming heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.”

Any crossroads worthy of its name offers three roads to pick. We rarely hear about them, of course. The metaphor usually just signals a time of uncertainty or a decision point. And sure, it can be useful (and sometimes literally true). But it’s tired. Probably so are many of us who use it.

The metaphors and constructions we choose can either reveal or obscure. They can open up our imagination or they can trap us in patterns of thinking about the world that misdirect our diagnoses and constrain our sense of what is truly possible.

Metaphors are more than just linguistic baubles. They are woven into how we make sense of reality; they impose a pattern on the world.

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in their classic text, Metaphors We Live By, metaphors structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do. Metaphors help us in turn to create the realities that reinforce the metaphors.

So when we select a metaphor in the context of talking about issues like injustice and inequality, we are suggesting a certain diagnosis of the problem and the way out of it. But do we even know we are doing it?

In his much-cited 2017 book On Tyranny, the historian Timothy Snyder offered twenty lessons from the last century on how to resist authoritarianism. It is the ninth exhortation that has lingered in my mind: be kind to our language.

Snyder argues that it is when we begin unthinkingly reciting the same constructions over and over again that they become unquestionably, irrefutably true. Familiar sayings metabolise concepts and fix them in our minds so that for a time, no other way of imagining can be true.

(An aside: this is why politicians repeat phrases endlessly. This is how we come to associate words like “migration” with “illegal” instead of “people” and “solidarity”).

Snyder is making the point to show how societies fall into line behind tyranny. But the same insight applies whenever we reach reflexively for the same formulations in any context, whether they make sense or not. We submit to a template. Our imaginations exhausted, we stop thinking about what we mean and let the linguistic preset determine the meaning instead.

In my first post I wrote about how stuck we seem to have become. The crossroads is the metaphor par excellence for stuckness. This is the place where we stop and ask, where can we go?

Maybe we find a kind of tyranny lurking at the crossroads, watching with a wry smile as we take our place in the line. Welcome, it says. This is where we all find ourselves eventually.

But what if there are no more roads to find? What if we need to look instead for stepping stones across a rugged and boggy landscape?

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The crossroads give way to another mental template: strategy. Here we move from the grammar of uncertainty to the grammar of war. How to find direction becomes how to win. In the realm of social change, this can be a valuable shift — but it has a shadow side too.

Any good bookshop is likely to carry Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Head to the Business and Management shelves to find the seminal text on strategy. Essential reading for any competitive undertaking. But there is a caution here for those in the sector-without-a-name (human rights, climate, peace, inequalities, etc.) working for a more equitable, peaceful, just world:

“[I]f victory is long in coming, then men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.”

When you look at burnout among those who dedicate whole careers to a siege that may never end, you might start to wonder if we chose the wrong paradigm. What if the task is less a tussle for victory and more a quest to manifest ways of living that are more in tune with the kind of world and people we want to be? Is strategy still the right lexicon here?

There is nothing wrong with the crossroads, nor with strategy, nor any others besides. All can earn their place. But we need not be imprisoned by their logic, repeating them endlessly until we no longer mean them — or know what they mean.

This matters more than we may realise. Language and truth hold each other, but at a distance. The fixity of our formulations can distort our imagination about what is true or could be true in future.

In other words, getting unstuck may rely on us opening ourselves to different ways of framing things. As Lakoff and Johnson say, new metaphors can give us a new understanding of our experience and of our sense of possibility.

There has already been a shift in social change work towards using metaphors of the garden. That helps us to think about change as organic, gradual, something to cultivate and guide and prune, something that may be beset by pests or that dies back only to regrow and finally mature. It changes the whole way that we think.

Then there is jazz, a metaphor that Mónica Roa has expounded in the context of activism. As a dedicated jazz lover, I find this one promising. It offers a way to describe holding a certain beat, resisting the urge to essentialise things. Rebecca Solnit quotes Cornel West’s idea of the jazz freedom fighter, in which the mere musical form becomes something much richer:

“a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid and flexible disposition toward reality suspicious of ‘either/or’ viewpoints.”

Jazz is fluid, it is communitarian, it is all about improvisation and responsiveness and building collectively towards moments of soaring beauty. As the first notes are played, there are many more than three roads to take.

If we are going to get unstuck, we need to liberate our imaginations from tired formulations that simply reinforce the stuckness. We need to be open to new vocabulary, new grammar, new genre alike. From there, who knows what new stories and possibilities may emerge.

Metaphors are at the crossroads. So perhaps we need to install a roundabout. Or a jazz band.

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Stop.

This is our rhythm. Fragments of everything crowd in on us, relentlessly. We catch glimpses of possibility here and there, but the backdrop is grim. Global crises weigh heavily if we let ourselves think about them. The media reports scientific studies outlining climatic tipping points we can barely imagine. Democracy, where it exists, offers its bright moments, but… are those really the zeitgeist? Technology is precisely everywhere in our lives, but deep down we wonder why, and ache to be free of it, at least some of the time. War is back on the table, squarely in the middle of it actually.

As for ourselves, even those of us not immediately ravaged by calamity are locked into systems and ways of living that don’t care for us to thrive, not really. Are we flourishing? Best ignore the question. We grit our teeth and press on.

If there is anything beyond the now, is it not some kind of collapse? Will there be an ending, or renewal, or just eternal hopes for renewal in this elongated present?

Something about progress is broken. We seem to have become stuck, caught in a loop of the same anxieties, the same patterns with no way out.

I hesitate to reach at this point for George Orwell, but his early memoir of living in squalor left what seems to me a useful clue about our predicament:

“You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.”

It is as though we are experiencing something similar at a collective level. The cultural critic Mark Fisher extended the diagnosis to our wider societal life. He argued that capital has created a state of permanent structural instability that simply cancels the long-term. Our culture and politics are condemned to repeat the same exhausted forms over and over.

We enter a mental world of ennui and procrastination. Nothing beckons anymore; all that is left is to protect ourselves from an unsafe world.

And yet.

The quiet deceit we face today is that everything we are living through is historically inevitable. Not quite in an “end of history” sense, but still. This-here-today is the necessary culmination of all that has come before. It’s here to stay.

But, not true. Nothing is or was inevitable.

When we allow ourselves to believe in our stuckness, then our task shrinks to managing harm. We have to make the most of things within this system. Make tweaks, perhaps.

And overshadowed by crises, the left brain takes charge. We deal with each threat as it comes, leverage what we can, look for marginal gains within the rules of the game. We weigh option A against option B and act accordingly. And keep grinding on.

The homo economicus of the past gives way at last to homo certans — the striving human, forever chasing control, forever performing, unable to rest.

But, don’t we have a right brain too?

When the striving simply isn’t enough (and it never is), we seek solace in distraction. Impoverished in myths and meaning, and damned already by the vicissitudes of consumerism, we buy comfort in whatever packaged forms it comes. Our dystopia is one in which we have learned to play along.

So, what instead?

Can it be any other way?

I think we have to believe it can. We are caught between Ama Ata Aidoo’s call for planting and Arundhati Roy’s sense that something is already stirring. But there are things we need to (re)discover if this is to be more than wistfulness, and for imagination, hope, and strategy to converge. Here are two such things.

One: Nothing is the only way it could have been, and nothing about the future is settled. Maybe the current disorder in the world offers an opportunity. Maybe these are even the birth pangs of something different yearning to be born — and that something does not have to be a calamity.

Two: We are playful and creative beings, capable throughout our history of far more experimentation and reinvention than we may realise (try reading this). If we are able to reach inside and pay attention to our elemental yearnings, we might just find there the ingredients of different ways of being and doing — not only for ourselves but for the world.

We cannot wish away the crises overshadowing us. But we won’t deal with them unless we can imagine getting unstuck, and unless we can start describing the world we want instead. This task calls on us to think beyond the categories we have inherited, the institutions and processes we have created — and to begin weaving new stories about our flourishing.

Here we need not science and law, nor even politics and psychology, but story and memory and mythology. Amitav Ghosh and Julian Aguon are among those who have made the case for a new imagining in the context of climate, while a writer like Cole Arthur Riley leads us on a journey from fear and lament and rage through justice and repair to find rest and joy and liberation. These are the kinds of stories that set us on our way.

So, yes, we can become unstuck. But it will take far more than playing within the system. It calls for a bigger story. The time has come for poets and heretics, for prophets and sages.

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The world we are becoming

This is the beginning of a project over the coming months (and years?) to think afresh about the world we are becoming.

It flows from two places, distinct but closely related.

The first is my twenty years of work (and striving) within the relentless endeavour of making the world a fairer and more just and equal and peaceful place, straddling human rights and adjacent sectors. This now takes the form of my strategy practice, but has previously taken me to countless places of trauma and power.

Increasingly, this work has revealed a desperate longing for fresh hope and inspiration, and for a joined-up way of articulating the world that we actually want, instead of a forlorn battle against the one we have.

The second is my experience of mental exhaustion a few years ago, often branded as burnout, which I wrote about here in a little effort to break the taboo.

This experience was by no means disconnected from that wider sectoral pathology. It has become viscerally clear to me that we cannot attend to the big picture without also paying close attention to the personal, nor the other way round. For, what is the state of the world if not the aggregation of the lives of billions and the way we experience ourselves and power and all that surrounds us?

The aim is that this project will eventually yield a book. I am pouring most of my time and energy into that. But in the meantime, this Substack is going to be a place for sharing ideas and an invitation to travel together. I’d love you to come along.