If you’re not familiar with Enter Shikari, they’re a band from my hometown and the most badass thing to happen in St Albans since Boudicca sacked the Roman city of Verulamium in 61AD. Not the kind of thing I generally write about on the blog, but there’s a song on their new album that caught my attention.
“How I long for a different story,” they sing on the track Shipwrecked. Success is about competition and dominance, say the verses, a ‘Lord of the Flies’ existence of fighting for ourselves and grabbing what we can. Then the bridge crashes in to tell us that “this is what we’re told, it’s a stranglehold, it’s a lie!”
I noted the lyrics because I’d just read exactly the same point earlier that day, with less shouting and thrashing, in John Alexander’s book Citizens.
The core argument of his book is that we are in the midst of a long cultural shift from consumers to citizens. We could call it a paradigm shift, or an emerging mindset. It’s already well underway, both driven by and responding to changes in culture and technology.
In the current paradigm, we are addressed as consumers and encouraged to think of ourselves as such. We expect to be served, and organisations see us as a means to profit. We are individualistic and materialistic, entitled and ready to assert our rights.
As Alexander points out, the emergence of the consumer way of thinking has a historical context and there were useful things about it. We can contrast it to the dominant mindset that preceded it, which saw people as subjects. In such as system people are dutiful, obedient and subservient to a higher authority. They know their place and get what they’re due. This too has a historical context and isn’t something for us to look down on, but times change and society evolves.
A new evolution is underway as consumerism gives way to citizenship. In this new paradigm, power is exercised together. It is participative and creative, recognising our interdependence with nature and with each other. Alexander sums up the contrasting three worldviews in this table, also available from his organisation the New Citizen Project.
Cultural shifts aren’t neat and orderly, and elements of all three of these co-exist. There is a push and pull, movements and counter-movements. Citizens was published post-Covid and pre-Trump 2.0, a distinct time when things might have looked more optimistic. But paradigm shifts unfold over decades and centuries. If the old model isn’t working – and the current polycrisis suggests it isn’t – then the shift is inevitable. It can be delayed and obscured, but it can’t be stopped.
Like all such broad theories, it’s best not to lean too hard on it. A citizen mindset won’t solve everything, but it might be our direction of travel, and the alternative story that Enter Shikari are looking for.
The Earthbound Report 