Dialogue recording & synthesis: A Logic for the Future – Reimagining Global Cooperation & Humanitarian Futures
November 22, 2024
The Challenge of Our Time
When we compress the history of Earth into a single year, modern humans appear only in the final 14 seconds of December 31st. In these brief moments, we have created systems of unprecedented complexity – and unprecedented risk. The dialogue captured here, facilitated by Gerry Salole, brought together three remarkable voices to explore how we might reimagine global cooperation for this critical moment: Stephen Heintz (Rockefeller Brothers Foundation) providing a theoretical framework for system change, Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs) offering penetrating systemic analysis, and Birgitte Bischoff Ebbesen (IFRC Europe) grounding these ideas in the practical reality of humanitarian response.
Opening with Bob Dylan’s observation that “the world seemed sick and hungry, tired and torn, and it looks like it’s dying, and it’s hardly been born,” the conversation examined how our existing international systems, designed in a different era, are increasingly inadequate for addressing today’s interconnected challenges. The dialogue was intentionally structured to explore and seek to bridge the gap between big-picture thinking and ground-level implementation, creating a unique space for exploring how abstract ideas about system change might manifest in practical action.
Exploring the Duality: Philosophy Meets Practice
The dialogue revealed not just two levels of thinking, but the essential relationship between them. At the meta level, Stephen Heintz opened by identifying three concurrent existential threats – climate crisis, nuclear arms race, and hyper-disruptive technologies.
“The system is anachronistic. It’s inefficient, it’s ineffective. Some parts of it are simply obsolete… we cannot expect a system designed by our grandparents to serve the needs of our grandchildren.”
Elizabeth Sawin emphasised a crucial point about this framework itself: “I think it is important to not narrow the past to the western past… if this is a stream of human thinking that has taken a wrong turn, it is important to not conflate that with all of humanity, human worldviews and human potential.”
This theoretical framing found immediate resonance in Birgitte Bischoff Ebbesen’s description of how the Red Cross’s 16 million volunteers worldwide are already grappling with these abstract challenges in their daily crisis response.
“What kind of resilience will we need in a rapidly cascading complexity of very interconnected crisis,” she asked, describing how their network has had to adapt to multiple concurrent crises from COVID-19 to the Ukraine conflict.
Bridging Theory and Practice: Emerging Tools for Change
From this productive tension between theoretical understanding and practical response emerged two crucial concepts that might help bridge the gap. The first, signal spotting, represents a systematic approach to detecting early warnings of systemic change through grassroots observation. Indy Johar described how this methodology allows organisations to transform their front-line workers into sensors for emerging change. The IFRC’s vast volunteer network, as Birgitte noted, provides a perfect testing ground for this approach, potentially transforming how we understand and respond to emerging crises before they cascade into larger systemic failures.
The second bridging concept, planetary resilience financing, emerged from Johar’s stark observation that “there is no pathway to mitigation if we don’t have resilience.” He explained how we lose one major food basket at 1.7 to 1.9 degrees of warming, which would trigger systemic social instability well before our mitigation technologies could take effect. This led to his proposal for new financial mechanisms at a planetary scale to maintain critical systems through transition, suggesting that “instead of just saying 2.5% of spend has to be on defence… 10% of that should be on resilience financing as a foundational security of energy through water systems for every society.”
This provocative idea sparked rich dialogue about how we might create new financial mechanisms that embody a different worldview than current systems. Elizabeth Sawin posed the crucial question: “What would the design principles be for a fund that embodied a different world view than the competing set of cascading loops?”
The Devaluation of Human Worth: A Systemic Crisis
The conversation then turned to what Indy Johar identified as a fundamental crisis: the systematic devaluation of human worth in our current economic systems.
“The return on assets in capital is now J curving away from the value of being human,” he explained, pointing to the $200 billion investment in generative AI as evidence of “the fundamental disruption of what it means for the value of labour.”
This systemic critique resonated with Heintz’s analysis of the neoliberal paradigm:
“We measure progress by GDP alone. We minimise the role of the state in managing economic affairs on behalf of people and planet. And greed is good, essentially, and we need to move away from the logic of neoliberalism to the logic of planetary and human well-being.”
A Crisis of Value and Values
This analysis of human devaluation sparked one of the richest threads of dialogue. Lauren Higgins from New Pluralists noted how this systemic perspective differed from typical discussions of dehumanisation that focus on political violence and minority rights. Johar responded by drawing a historical parallel: “When the UK abolished slavery in 1833, it didn’t abolish it because of moral awakening alone, but because the cost of holding a slave was too expensive.” This historical insight illuminated our present moment, where the economic logic of human value is again approaching a critical threshold.
Tom Athanasiou raised the crucial question of inequality and redistribution, but Johar challenged the frame itself:
“When we talk about equality and redistribution, we have to ask: redistribution of what?” He argued that if we price things at their true social and environmental cost – a $5 beef slice becoming $28, a £45 shirt becoming £450 – most of what we consider affordable becomes revealed as non-viable. “Don’t see it as a concentration of wealth,” he suggested. “See it as a concentration of debt” – moral, ecological, and social debt that must be accounted for in any future system.
Reimagining Response: The Red Cross Experience
The conversation then grounded these theoretical insights in the practical experience of the Red Cross network. Birgitte Bischoff Ebbesen described how their organisation had to fundamentally rethink its approach during COVID-19, when the crisis impacted not just health but “our economy, our logistics systems, our food security… our social fabric.” The network responded with remarkable agility, digitalising services to reach isolated individuals and attracting entirely new profiles of volunteers who “wanted to be part of something.”
This practical experience demonstrated what Stephen Heintz had argued – that we need both “radical solutions at the local level” and new frameworks for understanding and responding to crisis. The Red Cross’s experience with the Ukraine crisis further illustrated this dual requirement, as national societies had to rapidly adapt their services while maintaining their fundamental principles of humanity and impartiality.
The Political Challenge: Beyond Short-term Thinking
The dialogue confronted head-on the challenge of political systems trapped in short-term thinking. Stephen Heintz shared a telling anecdote from his early political career: “In politics, short-term planning is the next budget, and long-term planning is the next election.” This reality presents a fundamental obstacle to addressing systemic challenges that require generational thinking.
Yet the conversation revealed deeper political questions beyond electoral cycles. The dissatisfaction of millions of voters, as Heintz noted, reflects not just disagreement with particular policies but fundamental anxiety about global challenges and the manipulation of that fear to “blame the other.” This observation resonated with Indy Johar’s call to examine our own tendency toward “othering” – even among those working for change. “There is no other side,” he reminded participants. “It’s just all us.”
The Power and Potential of Community Action
The dialogue revealed new ways of thinking about collective action and community response. Frido Herinckx’s observation – “We are not caught in a traffic jam, we are the traffic jam!” – sparked rich discussion about agency and collective responsibility. This metaphor illuminated how we might move beyond seeing ourselves as victims of systems to understanding our role in creating and potentially transforming them.
This understanding found practical expression in the Red Cross network’s approach to community engagement. Birgitte Bischoff Ebbesen emphasised the importance of understanding “how people themselves see their lives, both during crisis, but also in between crisis.” This ground-level perspective, combined with strategic foresight capabilities, offers a way to bridge immediate needs with long-term transformation.
Finn Woodhill added crucial insight about funding dynamics, arguing that “communities should be funded directly to do rather than experimented on to consider scaling. The learning will come from the impact and value of what they do.” This challenged traditional approaches to scaling and implementation, suggesting that learning and transformation might emerge more organically from supported community action.
This funding challenge was further highlighted by Emma Beals, who noted “There is also a general lack of funding for this kind of conceptual, cross-cutting work. Most funders have withdrawn almost entirely from peace and security work, rights, or anything ‘conceptual’, just as it’s most needed.”
Particular emphasis was placed on youth engagement and intergenerational perspectives. As Gurpreet Singh asked, what kind of “collective infrastructure” do we need to “collectively bring the poly crisis into attention and to guide action?” The answer, many suggested, lies partly in engaging youth as key agents of change and bringing their perspectives into these crucial conversations about our shared future.
Towards a New Logic: Pre-empting Rather than Responding
As the dialogue moved toward conclusion, Joan Diamond noted a significant omission: the word ‘uncertainty.’ “How do we ’embrace’ the future without acknowledging that fundamentally it is uncertain?” This question pointed toward what Stephen Heintz identified as the core challenge: moving from response to pre-emption.
“The history of systems design has been a history of responses to catastrophe,” Heintz observed, citing the League of Nations and United Nations as examples. “What we need today is to pre-empt catastrophe… And that is an order of magnitude more intellectually challenging and more politically challenging than even responding to major catastrophe.”
A Call to Action and Love
The conversation concluded with a surprising turn toward love – not as sentiment but as practical necessity. Louis Klein asked simply: “What if love was the answer?” This prompted Stephen Heintz’s reflection on how to “kindle love and infuse love in all the things that we do… to incorporate not only love for our fellow humankind but love for the nature that sustains us.”
This return to fundamental human values, far from representing a retreat from practical action, suggested a new basis for both theory and practice. As Indy Johar had noted earlier, “Life chooses life… it’s more of a duty than a choice.” The challenge ahead requires us to hold both meta-level reimagining and practical implementation in productive tension, while finding new ways to bridge the gap between them.
The conversation ended not with resolution but with recognition that this was just the beginning of an ongoing dialogue about reimagining global cooperation for an interconnected world facing unprecedented challenges. The task ahead is to weave together, as Heintz put it, “radical solutions at the local level that we can experiment with, test and examine… into compelling narratives” that can inspire and guide transformative action.
