Politics and Power

New Podcast about the Future

For some reason, throughout life I’ve been preoccupied with Time, as an astrologer and studying both the past and the future. In 1999 I wrote a world history, and in 2017-8 I wrote a report called Possibilities 2050 – a concise assessment of the potential state of our world mid-century. It was about the mid-term future.

I was leafing through it today, and the chapter on Politics and Power jumped out at me. Partly because I’m brewing a new Aha Class, to happen in June, here in Penzance, all about the future. And this podcast is a prequel to it. There might be one or two more to come.

We’re faced with a big question: how to balance effective governance with popular participation.

Every kind of system needs to embrace everyone unless we want a world where some thrive and others suffer – the world is crowded, interdependent and networked, everything is affected by everything else and we live in a time of amplifying consequences.

This is an age of throngs. Occasionally people mass in the streets or online, swaying unpredictably between the wisdom of the majority and the madness of crowds.

A kind of democratisation and dispersal of power is re-shaping political process, causing authoritarian regimes to become more responsive to their publics (despite appearances otherwise) and democracies to become more confused by them.

This bypasses conventional party, class, local and sectoral loyalties, articulating emergent public instincts, hopes, issues or grievances more than it shapes coherent ideologies.

There’s a legitimacy struggle going on in the world’s body politic. Social trust and good governance are in poor supply.

This podcast covers power in society, governance, oligarchies, socio-political change, gender politics and artificial intelligence – big issues in our time.

And you might find it a wee bit interesting!

With love, Palden

www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html
www.possibilities2050.org