philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt expressed this as follows: “The
activity of knowing is no less related to our sense of reality and no less a
world-building activity than the building of houses” (Hannah Arendt Center 2013).
This is different from today’s ubiquitous call for an unspecific boost in education
that is supposed to somehow bring all the unemployed young people into structurally unavailable jobs and transform the wealth gap between the rentier class and
working people. Instead, the first challenge is to jointly identify which kind of
knowledge is important to quickly spread transformative literacy and the courage
and connections to help unlock the unsustainable path dependencies that keep
societies hostage today. Arendt unequivocally declares such normative aspects to be
part of any scientific endeavor: “Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in
every scientific enterprise, but it is a role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be
scientific” (Hannah Arendt Center 2013).
This is what The Great Mindshift stands for. Since thinking does not happen in a
vacuum, it needs to be embedded in a great institutional shift. Not only, as discussed in detail in this book, is a particular way of seeing and experiencing the
world turned into the powerful default by enshrining it into ‘the ways things are
done.’ These ‘ways in which things are done’ will also either support conditions for
change or inhibit them and host unevenly distributed forms of power for different
groups or individuals. There exist brilliant scientific studies on the politically
motivated and strategic build-up of the mainstream economic worldview through
think tank funding, lobbying and financing of elite university chairs, political
campaigns and media outlets (e.g. Gill 1990; Scherrer 1999; or Sklair 2001). The
perception of what is the ‘right’ thing does change with believes about how the
people and the world work—and of course with intended outcome. So thinking and
knowing differently is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for behavioral
change. Complex system theory as well as empirical studies in sociology, psychology, and institutional economics show the importance of feedback mechanisms
that reinforce positive or negative learning and create anticipation about the reliability of others changing as well (Ostrom 2009: 431).
But so far, collective action theory, once again influenced by the mainstream
economic paradigm, has placed more attention on transaction costs and
payoff-functions than on how individuals can build the trust that allows them to take
the risks of actually doing things differently. That would lower both structural and
sociocultural moral hazards and could keep power abuse in check.
All of the pioneering examples in Chap. 4 have design principles that emphasize
the reflexive-adaptive aspects of navigating change in complex systems: explicit
learning and amendment of their indicators or matrix or principles through ongoing
engagement with the groups that decided to be governed by them. All of them were
conscientious about their governing structures and how these would enable or
inhibit sustainable development principles. This also meant that their benchmarks
for progress made the integrated perspective explicit, and contained qualitatively
differentiated and contextually fitted ideas and measures of value, productivity,
cost-benefit, or progress. Furthermore, the benchmarks involve the scrutiny of
5.3 Summarizing Outlook
165
activity of knowing is no less related to our sense of reality and no less a
world-building activity than the building of houses” (Hannah Arendt Center 2013).
This is different from today’s ubiquitous call for an unspecific boost in education
that is supposed to somehow bring all the unemployed young people into structurally unavailable jobs and transform the wealth gap between the rentier class and
working people. Instead, the first challenge is to jointly identify which kind of
knowledge is important to quickly spread transformative literacy and the courage
and connections to help unlock the unsustainable path dependencies that keep
societies hostage today. Arendt unequivocally declares such normative aspects to be
part of any scientific endeavor: “Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in
every scientific enterprise, but it is a role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be
scientific” (Hannah Arendt Center 2013).
This is what The Great Mindshift stands for. Since thinking does not happen in a
vacuum, it needs to be embedded in a great institutional shift. Not only, as discussed in detail in this book, is a particular way of seeing and experiencing the
world turned into the powerful default by enshrining it into ‘the ways things are
done.’ These ‘ways in which things are done’ will also either support conditions for
change or inhibit them and host unevenly distributed forms of power for different
groups or individuals. There exist brilliant scientific studies on the politically
motivated and strategic build-up of the mainstream economic worldview through
think tank funding, lobbying and financing of elite university chairs, political
campaigns and media outlets (e.g. Gill 1990; Scherrer 1999; or Sklair 2001). The
perception of what is the ‘right’ thing does change with believes about how the
people and the world work—and of course with intended outcome. So thinking and
knowing differently is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for behavioral
change. Complex system theory as well as empirical studies in sociology, psychology, and institutional economics show the importance of feedback mechanisms
that reinforce positive or negative learning and create anticipation about the reliability of others changing as well (Ostrom 2009: 431).
But so far, collective action theory, once again influenced by the mainstream
economic paradigm, has placed more attention on transaction costs and
payoff-functions than on how individuals can build the trust that allows them to take
the risks of actually doing things differently. That would lower both structural and
sociocultural moral hazards and could keep power abuse in check.
All of the pioneering examples in Chap. 4 have design principles that emphasize
the reflexive-adaptive aspects of navigating change in complex systems: explicit
learning and amendment of their indicators or matrix or principles through ongoing
engagement with the groups that decided to be governed by them. All of them were
conscientious about their governing structures and how these would enable or
inhibit sustainable development principles. This also meant that their benchmarks
for progress made the integrated perspective explicit, and contained qualitatively
differentiated and contextually fitted ideas and measures of value, productivity,
cost-benefit, or progress. Furthermore, the benchmarks involve the scrutiny of
5.3 Summarizing Outlook
165