About this class

Power in the hands of a few has long challenged our societies. In today’s global, technological world in which information and communication have become even more important in the development of our societies, many of us must navigate complex forces associated with the global economy, with large corporations, governments, and cultural organizations consolidated around fewer hands with often far-reaching powers.

It should come as no surprise that as the digital transformation of our societies continues, indeed intensifies as a result of the pandemic, we cannot be as confident about who makes the rules and who gets to rule as we can about the tools at our disposal..

In the first part of these two classes on cultural problem solving, “centralized power” was chosen as the number one problem we face. In this second and culminating part, we explore the solutions to the longstanding and increasingly challenging problem of unaccountable “powerhouses” in our societies, in the words of one student. The student who suggested that centralized power be addressed puts the issues this way:

“According to Dr. Yuval N. Harari, culture is an evolutionary adaptation, which serves to allow humans to adjust their behavioural patterns, without requiring the inter-generational process of evolution. We are therefore able to rapidly adapt to new threats, while also being able to introduce upgrades to our lives. Some of these upgrades include science, technology, medicine, art, religion, and agriculture, among many others. The transcendence of biologically coded behaviour has shaped our world, and allowed for radical, widespread changes in our lifestyles. The gravest consequence of this is the removal of evolutionary selection; we adopt and maintain behaviours that provide short term benefits, ignorant of their longterm effects. We’ve indiscriminately introduced new facets to society, and our lives, thus resulting in the excessive complexity of daily life. How do we resolve the onslaught of problems we have created for ourselves? The threats to our environment, mental health crises, modern health issues, war, tyranny, and many other large scale issues are largely man made. The solution? Unplug from the matrix, in other words, decentralize.”

How power is exercised on our little planet has been and will likely remain one of humanity’s great struggles, as Frodo Baggins well knows. If we don’t understand the problem and what to do about it, who then?

Host

Lon Appleby, Durham College

Founder, Professor

Resources