The systemic crisis that has battered us since August 2007 has been analysed from multiple points of view by economists, sociologists, philosophers, and an assortment of citizens that, with their particular cultures, have been providing us with their vision of this great problem which advanced societies and their economic systems based on high finances must confront in order to favour the state of well-being.
With great concern, we have seen that the “Bank of Dreams” (Lehman Brothers) was drawn into bankruptcy, leaving the world without a reference for all those that aspire to convert their ideas into numbers that increase the veracity of their objectives, whether those are the development of patents or services of any sort.
We have allowed the tree of hope to be felled probably by the devastating silence on the part of economists as well as politicians who have always seen the vital necessity for State intervention in this crisis. Insurers, banks of all kinds, automobile manufacturers in particular, and others have witnessed urgent fusions and monstrous injections of public capital in an authentic orgy of cash, drowning the markets in order to contain the systemic cataclysm.
For the great majority, as Lehman let slip, many years will have to pass before we understand that what we have done is finish off the essence of the culture of talent, imagination, and enterprise by blocking off access to credit to those suffering fighters who present new ideas to our world.
In the present moment, July 2011, we are complaining about the drying up of credit and the difficulties of offering societies or bonds of very large companies on the Stock Market. We have definitely created a culture of distrust that, only with difficulty, will successfully meet the hard tests that are coming. In Spain, audits of regional communities and general elections in the near future are some of those tests.
I need not to go on. We have at our disposal an unlimited number of reflections that provide different explanations of this situation. In my honest opinion, the solution to our current problem requires an entirely new perspective in order to improve our strategic approach to this problem.
To that end, I propose to you that we must reformulate this crisis of the past four years in a different manner. We must think in a cubic way about the moment in which we find ourselves and, on each side of this imaginary cube, we must assign a relevant weight and analog to that of the other side.
The six sides are:
1. Industrial economy
2. The economy of knowledge
3. Political power
4. Street power (the Spanish Revolution)
5. Physical transport
6. Digital transport
What has happened?
All of sudden, without realizing, and in a single vision, we perceive this reality in a new and different manner. The imaginary cube allows us to move the various positions of the board and transpose one with another.
I have selected these six because, in some way, they are vehicles that are colliding among themselves, that is, among the different systemic intensities in play. Facing this asymmetric movement of forces and counter forces, the measurements of the democratic public vector are confused with the pressures of the markets as well as the pressures of emerging intensities.
What measures should we adopt in order to resolve and consolidate our as yet unsolidified flow of systemic uncertainties?
The first is to persistently think that a radical change in our personal and national objectives is necessary. My friends, the management of our instantaneous tweet of our discontent, the discomfort of this collective feeling of indignation to which we have been subjected by the overwhelming lack of institutional responses should not be seen only as an irreflexive and prerevolutionary breeding ground. It is better to be patient, to contemplate, and to have a long-range vision regarding our objectives. The Society of the 21st Century is taking its first steps and, as the public can see, it is pressured by the monthly conditions of survival, viewed with distrust and increasing preoccupation.
Public order and collective security are elements of the social equation that must be present in order to advance in conformity with the rules of the game of the new society.
Think for a moment about the way in which the reform of the Constitution of Iceland is developing. It is the anonymous citizens that, from their Twitter and Facebook accounts, give their opinions and send their reflections so that the Constitutional Council can evaluate them and, in some cases, incorporate them into a future text to be approved by referendum such as a no vote on a text decided on and pacted by a few representatives, Direct Democracy (interactive digital democracy in real time), etc.
We know that we are entering a polyhedron world; that is exactly what we must assume. Our goals now are not only our personal satisfaction, rather they are the objectives of a globalized digital body that acts locally in Tahir, Istanbul, Madrid...
These new realities demand of us extra reasoning, tolerance, complex thought, moving ourselves in the cube at the same velocity with which, in the past, we analyzed the socialist, liberal, or social democratic recipes of the 20th Century reality.
The cubic thinkers will be all sorts of social leaders that will have the inevitable mission to give form to our lives as we the people are terrorized by the weakness of responses via laws, measures, and contradictory decisions that are the fruit of this mental chaos itself which the digital revolution presents to the young leaders of tomorrow. Talent, patience, and a more profound vision of each possible path to follow are required.
Moreover, how easy is it? We make a mistake in our Tweet at 10:50 so, at 10:52, we send a new one. Nevertheless, we need something more. That something more is to unite our intelligence with our creativity and to combine those and other factors that is in state of active tension. This tension corresponds to those who want to open the frightened minds of millions of people that do not find comfort nor consolation in our own reflections.
That is the great challenge for the cubic thinker. To know (how) to be (1), to know how to get there (2), to make oneself understood (3), to live
digicratically (4), to think liberally (5), and to act socially (6). Yes, once again, there are six facets - the cube. Rubick and the digital thinker. Now, the most transcendental task must be accomplished and that is to develop the culture that gives shelter to this new generation of the indignant.
© Manuel Gens 2011
Managing partner of GDI