G20 Leaders Executive Talk Series LEAD FEATURE
Leadership
› And alongside these questions, how do we deepen our sense of optimism and use it positively to ‘rise and resist’ and achieve meaningful change? Popular Integrity 20 speaker, A. C. Grayling’s insights to the strains and stresses confronting the Westminster model highlight the need for reform and new ways of engaging communities, especially Millennials, in liberal democracies (in which a ‘right to a voice’ and the ‘right to good government’ are central). For Grayling, key contributors to the erosion of democracy are social media, global conflict and the fear of terrorism but also China’s proof that you don’t have to be a democracy to be economically successful. However, Grayling is optimistic about the future of democracy: “If we make these small reforms, it should really work. By ‘really work’, I mean it would give us a ‘good enough’ government. We cannot expect all government and constitutional processes to work perfectly; all things human are deeply flawed and events and complexities intervene” (https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/14032). Listening to the discussions at this year’s Integrity 20, it was easy to be reminded of the late Kofi Annan and his speech just a year ago on the crisis of democracy. As he rightly said, “the setbacks of the last decade have to be set against the remarkable gains since the end of the Second World War, when there were only twelve fully-fledged democracies. Today there are 117, and elections, however flawed, have become almost universal, illustrating the legitimacy they offer. We should not forget that liberal democracy almost died in the 1930s, but liberal democracies eventually defeated Nazism and Fascism”. Kofi Annan’s over-riding optimism came from his belief that the majority of the world still aspires to more freedom, more rule of law, more accountability and more say in politics, outcomes that only a genuine democracy can deliver. A robust democracy traditionally also gives much greater air time to women’s past, current and future contribution to society. Among the social and political challenges reaching a crescendo in the last 12 months, feminism has sprung back, illustrated most visibly by the five million people who joined women’s marches around the world and the viral explosion of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. And yet New Zealand’s Professor Marilyn Waring’s book Counting for nothing: What men value and what women are worth continues to shine a light 30 years 36 ❙ g20g7.com
since its original publication on the overwhelming exclusion of women’s contribution through unpaid work to GDP calculations. How we re-shape our democratic institutions and processes to re-engage citizens (most especially millennials) and deliver greater inclusivity across genders and cultures deserves an open and optimistic mindset. As Barack Obama has previously said, young people drive change because they’re not vested in the way things have been and can readily imagine how things should be. Yet global research tells us that our youth have lost faith in existing institutions and this brings us fairly and squarely back to the issue of democracy itself losing ground. However, we should also heed IPSOS ’ 2018 conclusions about the level of optimism in some of the world’s most highly populated nations – “The prevailing media narrative in the West of decline and fragmentation is literally a world away from connected citizens in India and Indonesia who see a bright future” (IPSOS, 2018). In the west, as Bill Gates has often said, our failure to focus on what’s getting better suggests the media generally is missing an enormous story. The focus of this year’s Integrity 20 on inconvenient ideas and how we re-learn how to listen and contribute ideas with respect and logic (in the media generally and on the internet) was especially important. Social media has been described as both enabling and destabilising democracies. Polonski from the University of Oxford sees the internet creating ever increasing conflict and ideological segregation with extreme views getting far more air time (World Economic Forum, 2016). Yet it is naïve to assume those views do not represent very real divides in social and political opinions and disillusionment with our leaders. And it is increasingly naïve not to grasp the impact, power and manipulation of the truth in digital media that reinforces and embeds social tribes (sometimes working for the greater good and at other times perpetuating mistruths and installing leaders whose agenda and principles fall short in delivering a genuine democracy). Integrity 20 speaker and philosopher, Julian Baggini speaks to these challenges of a ‘post-truth world’ honing in on the role of reason in helping us to deal with a lack of objective truth in public debate. As Baggini points out, “reason is the process that
Victor Perton: Australia’s most vocal champion of optimistic leadership
‘A Divided World’: the central theme of Australia’s Integrity 20 event this year
gives room for different points of view and processes to negotiate or consider them” and it is challenged in a world where almost all sources of truth including media and science are questioned. The critical thing to grasp is the line of reasoning that people adopt in a post-truth world. As Baggini has previously observed, “It matters less to people that Trump has said things that aren’t true…they just want to know that his basic understanding of how the world works chimes with theirs and he basically wants the same things as them” (Baggini in conversation with Daniel Rhodes, 2017). A belief and acceptance that everybody is a liar at least some of the time is the apparent driver of the ‘does the truth really matter’ phenomenon. Startling evidence on the extent to which we conceal our real lives and opinions in traditional research has been given by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, author of the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Our general lack of inhibition and intolerance for the views of others on social media appears to be more than matched by our willingness to expose our true selves in our Google search behaviour. Tribal divisions form quickly on social media and moral judgements by a few quickly coalesce into many more