In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where even after a break away, we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and very much your fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And I’ve been away for a while. We did stack up some recordings so that hopefully you didn’t notice the gap, but I’ve been to Islay and then to Glasgow and then visited three different places in Norfolk and finally to Henbant in Wales. And so this is by way of saying hello to everybody that I met. And if I list you all by name, it will take up the entire podcast. So I’m sorry, I’m not going to. But you know who you are, and I am so grateful to have met you and still surfing on all of the ideas that we shared in all of these places. So many doors opened, so many ideas are taking root. It’s going to take me a long time to process them all. But we’re back now and exploring new ideas in new company. One of the bits of neuroscience that I picked up in the last few weeks is that we can only create new ideas by fitting together the Lego bricks in our brains of the old ideas that we already have in new structures.

Manda: Or perhaps a better metaphor is to clear out the Lego bricks and plant seeds of new ideas that can grow if we water and tend them. The key is we won’t get to new places if we don’t open our minds to new ideas. And very much, that’s where I want this podcast to head. And this week in particular, we’re in the company of someone who is exploring narrative shift. The question of how the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other, and our place in the web of life, shape who we think and how we are. So how can we craft narratives that can shift the way we see and experience the world? Is this even the best leverage point to start off with? Or is there a deeper, wider, more effective acupuncture point that we could explore, as we evolve to become whatever it is we need to become that is greater than the sum of our parts? And even that is unclear. What are we actually aiming for? What or who do we want to be, and how might we reach the places that we can’t even express? And do it in the face of a world where narratives are becoming more black and white, more constrained by circumstances, more held and wielded against us by those with power. In a week that’s seen our world become both more complex, more ugly, more beautiful, more simplistic at times, we are talking to story crafter and narrative explorer Paddy Loughman.

Manda: Paddy’s work explores the role of narrative and communications in navigating beyond our current predicament. He’s curious about how we might come together to appreciate what science and wisdom traditions reveal about our entangled relational reality, and the potential of more viable, beautiful worlds. He works independently, Collaborating with activists, academics, philanthropists, creatives, community organisers and anyone who is orienting us towards just, transformational change. He has co-initiated a number of efforts, including Inter-Narratives with Ella Saltmarshe. He has worked as a strategist in commercial and political communications, before jumping into climate campaigning with a wide range of organisations, from the UNFCCC (The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) to grassroots activists. And once upon a time he trained as an actor. This is my first conversation back, after life changing times away from the desk, and it was a genuinely generative, consciousness expanding conversation. I am currently in that space where reality, dream and experience are overlapping seamlessly, which is interesting. And Paddy felt like one of those people who can stand on the edge of all our spaces, and with great heart and huge generosity of spirit, look into what we might become and how we might get there. So with this as your baseline, please do join us in our exploration of possibility. People of the podcast, I give you Paddy Loughman of Inter-Narratives and so much more.

Manda: Paddy Loughman, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this bright September morning?

Paddy: Thank you Manda. It is a great pleasure to be here with you and with everyone listening or watching. I am in Glasgow, in Scotland. I am well, I am at the end of a long period of intensity, where like all the buses come at once. So I’m slightly strung out by that, but feeling good about much of the stuff that’s happened. Apart from maybe the stuff in the wider world, which we’ll probably get into a bit. It is a nice day here in Glasgow currently.

Manda: Yay! You live very close to where I went to school, which is quite exciting actually. I was looking on a map and remembering walking across Maxwell Park to get to the trains. And I was quite young and I took two, sometimes three separate trains and then quite a long walk to a bus stop and then a bus home. And I’m not sure that kind of thing happens anymore. But, you know, I’m still here, we made it. Alrighty. So you and I are both pretty dedicated to the idea that humans are a storied species, and that the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other, and our place in the more than human world, are how our culture describes itself and how it brings itself continuously into being. And the stories, it seems to me, are becoming more extreme by the day in various polarities. Our polarities are becoming more polar, shall we say. So tell us a little bit about how you became interested in narrative as an agency of change, if I am right in that being how you see the world.

Paddy: Yeah. It’s a long question or a long answer rather, but I’ll try and make it a brief one. I was at university studying English because I couldn’t study psychology, because I didn’t have very good maths. And the reason I didn’t have very good maths is because I was moved up a year when I was seven, having been living in Africa and then at boarding school in England, and missed a whole year and never caught up, and it became disastrous for me. I’m actually capable of it, but I just had this deep trauma of not being able to do maths. So when it came to choosing a subject, I wanted to do psychology because I was very interested in how people understood themselves and each other in the world and wanted to get into that, but I didn’t have the maths to do the stats side of that. Maybe a blessing in disguise. I ended up doing English instead. My partner now, my wife Shaunie, she did psychology and wished she’d done English, so we kind of traded that a little bit. Then I got into acting actually, which is where I met my wife, Shaunie. And acting at university was sort of a way out of a whole bunch of trauma I was experiencing at the time, as a result of my upbringing, that I hadn’t processed, was trying to process. And acting really gave me some belonging and something to be doing. And it really gave me a sense of the power of story. It was very addictive process, acting. I mean, any kind of performance where you’re in front of people and that moves them in some way, you’re hooked for life, really.

Paddy: So I got into that and then carried on through university doing that. Went into the world of work trying to do it, went to drama school. And that itself was a very kind of destructive process, really. The school that I went to is now shut down. It was nicknamed the Trauma Centre at the time, so that might give you some idea why. Although it produced some incredible actors over time. But the process of that was very destabilising and I left it wanting to be an actor, but not really psychologically cut out for it. And found my way into initially corporate innovation, which was sort of emerging out of advertising at the time, as a kind of newish discipline for how to basically help businesses make more money. But it involved a lot of behavioural science, and a lot of the people involved in it come from advertising, of course, that kind of storytelling.

Paddy: And alongside that, the climate was kicking off and my dad was a top exec in shell, and I was very aware of that. And I became curious about the role of communications in that. And that led me to leave that innovation agency and end up at a company called Wolff Olins, which is a brand consultancy, and their basic premise is that brands are stories that live in our heads, and they’re put there by every interaction we have in the world with that organisation or company or product or whatever it is. And so I basically got a very kind of fast and quite intense and high level, really, introduction into a lot of different understanding that helped me to kind of arrive at this position; that story is a fundamental part of our reality and the stories we encounter and tell ourselves all the time are shaping what we do and how we do it, and the world around us. And since then, really, I’ve just continued to explore that. As I left that corporate world and went into kind of campaigning and climate related work and then beyond that, that understanding has sort of continued with me and evolved as I’ve brought in many other inputs to try and further it. So, yeah, that’s sort of how it began.

Manda: Okay. And actually, we could probably spend at least a podcast unpicking various other sections of that and never get on to anything else. I want to unpick two bits: drama as the trauma centre. Okay, so let me say where I’m coming from. I’ve been away for six weeks, which gives me an amount of time of thinking. And one of the things that’s arising at the top of my awareness is that we need to do the inner work. We need to do the, at least what Dick Schwartz says, almost all of us, all of the time, are walking around in a state of internal civil war. And some of that civil war we have created ourselves, quite a lot of it was installed by our childhood, and quite an amount of it we inherited depending on our past history. And I’m remembering our story before we recorded, about your dad being a top executive at shell as a response to what his dad was doing, which was as a response to what his dad was doing. And I’m really interested in that kind of generational reactivity. And yet, our parents generation didn’t have the tools that we have now for self-healing, and very likely our children’s generation will have more and better tools.

Manda: But at the moment we have tools that might actually work in ways that previous generations didn’t. And it seems to me incumbent on all of us to do the work. We can’t say necessarily where that’s going to take us, but we can look around and see there’s a lot of us responding from very wounded, triggered places to the world, and that healing those wounds so that we don’t act out of trigger would be a good thing. And I’m really curious as to why anybody thinks that creating a drama school that is called the trauma centre is a useful way to help you into something. Acting seems to me, as an outsider who’s never done it, to be a form of empathic exploration of what it is to be somebody else, which is the opposite of trauma. Can we just unpick that in terms of looking at healing? And if you want to bring in your generational lineage, then go for it.

Paddy: Mhm. Yeah. I mean I think it was a nickname, the official name was Drama Centre. But what happened there was there were a few different schools of thought that were informing practice, that were informing that school. One of which was Stanislavski’s method, sort of well known as method acting, which is very much about returning to traumatic events in your past to kind of mine them for feeling and material, really, to then bring into a scene as another person, as another character. And what I think what was happening at the school at the time was the recognition that, you know, basically that came about because Stanislavski was jealous of imaginative actors and wanted to sort of basically kind of hack a way of being a good actor. And so that was the sort of the system he developed. There are famous stories of him demonstrating, I think it was Michael Chekhov in, in an exercise where he asks Michael Chekhov to perform a scene where it’s very sad and there’s a lot of upset, and Chekhov does this. And then at the end, Stanislavski is like, well done, well done. And what did you do for this? What emotional recall did you bring to the scene in order to perform so well? And Michael Chekhov says, well, yeah, I’m just remembering my dog dying in the road and holding him as his last breath kind of escaped his body. And he never had a dog. So he just imagined it in the scene. And it sort of demonstrated exactly this. So there were other schools. Meisner was one that we were we were working with. But I think there was a lot of people being put through stuff. And a lot of people, in my case certainly, like returning to very traumatic wells of anger and not really being held in the process of dealing with those.

Manda: Okay.

Paddy: There was a lot of camaraderie, but it was also a system of preparation for people to go and become individually successful. So it was problematic I’d say.

Manda: Horrible.

Paddy: Yeah. Pretty horrible. Yeah.

Manda: And the trauma culture validating trauma as a way of finding truth, instead of healing trauma as a way of expressing the totality of being.

Paddy: Yes, yeah.

Manda: I guess. One can see why it’s closed. I’m kind of hoping that drama schools are different now, but maybe they’re not.

Paddy: I think there is improvement. But one of the things that goes on with that is by reusing a memory, a traumatic memory, you have to keep enhancing it every time to make it continue to work. And so I think it’s true of Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe in particular. It’s been suggested that they kind of fell victim to this and basically retold their own stories to themselves so extensively, and we can do this, we can change them to the extent that they became more traumatic for them

Manda: That sounds almost guaranteed in that system, unless you somehow manage to wall off. All right, let’s not head all the way down that rabbit hole, because that would probably take us the rest of the hour. You moved into a place where you were taught that branding is about story. It sounds like you were getting a very rapid psychology degree, or at least explanation of how our limbic systems work and how we relate to narrative. Is it possible for you to synthesise bits of that for us to then use as platforms to step off into how we might use narrative in a different way, or explore narrative in a different way?

Paddy: I think so. It’s a very live question at the moment. And I’m involved in a project that’s been doing some research into what many people have been calling Deep Narrative, which is the idea that there’s something deeper than the surface narratives we are dealing with in our media and our storytelling much of the time. And so this question of what narrative change is and what we’re referring to in that, is quite a live one, really. I suppose what I took from that process at Wolff Olins, which is still permeating through now, actually, is the recognition that when we think of branding, we think of logo, we think of colours, we think of the visual kind of surface assets, if you like, of a thing. And maybe the story being told literally in the advertising for that organisation or in the tagline, let’s say. But what we recognised was that actually the brand that we’re seeking to influence as an organisation, trying to steer a company to be successful, is living within the person and between people. And that thing that we call brand or that we might call narrative here, is the sum total of all interactions those people are having with each other, with the world around them, with that organisation, with other organisations.

Paddy: That’s what’s generating that. And I suppose what brand strategy became about was trying to close the gap between the rhetoric of the organisation and the reality that exists within the person. I mean, fascinating stuff about where that can live in people. I think they identified that a really strong brand love, like a sort of Apple fan person or Nike fan person, lives in the same part of the brain or next to it that their kind of familial love exists. So there’s a kind of very close relationship to that. And again, it makes sense, you know, we’re seeking belonging, we’re seeking connection and denied it much of the time. And we look for it where we can. So that kind of becomes that. But how that then applies to the sort of wider concept of narrative change, and what we’re talking about using narrative to change our cultures and our systems more broadly, ultimately any branding effort is typically working into the existing systems, not not trying to change them really. It might be trying to tweak things a little bit, but when we’re talking more fundamentally, that’s when it becomes somewhat of a different task, shall we say. But there are learnings.

Manda: Yes. I’m thinking a lot of things. I’m thinking as an Apple fan. What I find interesting about Apple is, because I got on board, I think I bought my first Apple computer in 1984, which is probably before you were born, but there we go. I was writing my books on a little Apple Mac thing, where the screen was an integral part of this little chunky computer and was the size of our current mobile phones, basically. And a part of me still conceives of Apple as this edgy, radical, slightly hippie off the edge of normal capitalism, started in a garage by a couple of blokes, thing that I enjoy because it is all of those things. While the rest of my conscious mind knows that it’s a multi-billion dollar industry that gives Donald Trump a gold bar with his face on it. Sorry. That makes me very cross. And those two, the bit that’s cross and the bit that still thinks Apple is edgy and lovely and off the edge of capitalism coexist in my head. And they don’t clash that often unless I actually explicitly choose to. It’s a really interesting experience. And I still, working with you on an Apple computer, partly because once you’re locked in there, it’s really hard to mix and match with anything else. And why would Microsoft be any better? Let’s not go into that one. So what narrative is, what we tell ourselves and how we look at it. I’m bringing together, I’m looking at the Stories for Life website and people it’s an amazing website. It’s totally worth an amount of your time to go into it. And you’ve got a quote on the front page from someone whose name I’m going to completely murder; Wangari Maathai:

Manda: “There comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. That time is now.” And I think that’s where you and I are both going. I think that Conscious Evolution the evolution of our consciousness, consciously chosen has to happen, or my narrative is we’re f***** basically. Because it’s not hard to see how totalitarian narratives are taking hold because of their overt simplicity and all the rest of it. And yet, I’m watching quite a lot of people in the space that we both occupy who have narratives of change, who have narratives of indivisibility and inseparability and who are still, we are all still locked in a system that sees humanity as separate from the rest of the world. And our provision of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, however we define it; our shelter, our food, our water, our tribal securities, are all embedded in a system that is the megalith taking us straight over the edge of the cliff. And we can create all the stories we like and we’re not seeing, yet, behavioural change. So I’m really interested in that concept of shifting consciousness as possibly a fractal thing and an emergent thing, and potentially there being a tipping point in consciousness, which then would create systemic shift in a way that we cannot predict. Because if we can predict it, it’s not systemic shift. That’s leaping quite a long way from branding to consciousness shift, but it feels like you’re one of the few people I know who is exploring at that liminal edge between narrative and consciousness. Does that make sense, and can you take it deeper and further?

Paddy: It really does. And of course, we’re into questions of what is consciousness and the rest. But to just begin with that branding again, a kind of very simplistic example of the kind of changes that might be being talked about here, is we worked with Tesco, that was the first thing I did working for that company. And when we started working with them, they were the most hated brand in Britain by quite some margin.

Manda: Why? Why did we all hate Tesco’s and not Sainsbury’s or Aldi or Waitrose?

Paddy: Tesco’s were seen as this sort of cold monolith, corporate, unpleasant, impersonal, dominating force in society and people didn’t like them.

Manda: Okay. And for people not in the UK, I just need to say that Tesco is one of our major supermarket brands, probably a bit like Walmart in the US, but not quite as much of an overwhelming fungus.

Paddy: Yeah. But the task was to sort of re-enchant people with Tesco basically.

Manda: That’s hard.

Paddy: Yeah. And that became a process of simplify and amplify, was the kind of approach we took to that. So one of the things I was doing was reducing the number of brands they had. For example, they had 150 different brands they were running at once to kind of cover all these different products they were making. And we kind of brought that right down to a much simpler structure. And then most importantly, the logo didn’t change. And this is obviously telling in all of this, but the experience was a big emphasis of what we then looked at. The digital experience, the store experience, the signage, the interaction with people, the tone of voice through all of that. Just all that. Basically any time someone was having an interaction with Tesco, the work we were doing was sort of guiding that to be something different. And the other sort of strand to that which was being done by an ad agency, was the stories that were then being told through advertising, which, of course reaches a lot of people. And that then needed to work with what was happening with the experience. And basically, as a result of all of that careful, thoughtful work, three years later they were one of the top most-liked brands in Britain.

Manda: Oh. That’s interesting. Okay.

Paddy: You know, that happened quickly.

Manda: Nothing material had changed, really?

Paddy: Well, that depends on how you think about it. A lot materially had changed because people’s experience on a daily basis of that organisation had fundamentally shifted to be something quite different.

Manda: But it’s still basically selling you the products of capitalism at a reasonably discounted rate, because they’re still shafting the farmers and they’re still acting the way they behave.

Paddy: Oh yeah. So the reason I’m using this as an example, I think, is just because it shows how plastic, how pliable things can be. And also how much of that perception is resulting from experience; resulting from the sum total of experience. And there’s been a bit of an evolution, I guess, in what we would call narrative change or kind of stratcoms. From a long time ago, people saying, well, if we just tell people information, then they will think differently and do differently.

Manda: Which is still the attitude that left wing politics takes. Let’s just explain to people why they’re wrong and they will completely understand. And then they will think like we think. And it has never worked and it isn’t going to work. Okay. Sorry.

Paddy: And it’s not that information doesn’t play a role. It does. Of course it plays a role in the conversation. But I think what has become more understood is where it plays a role, and that certainly we can’t lead with it and assume this is, I think it’s known as the information deficit model, that we just need to give people the right information. And there’s a really, really interesting history behind why we end up in that position of thinking that. I think Adam Curtis talks about it really well somewhere along the line. But we won’t go into that now.

Manda: Give us a real edited highlight, because I think it is interesting, because a lot of left wing, politically aligned people do still think that you just explain to people why they’re wrong and they’ll understand. And it’s not going to work.

Paddy: It’s grounded in enlightenment rationality, which we know is a sort of mistaken interpretation of what indigenous communities were doing at the time in what’s now northern Canada. I think David Graeber talks about that well with David wenlow in their book Dawn of Everything.

Manda: Yes. Essential reading.

Paddy: Yes, so good isn’t it! But it was partly an understandable reaction to what I was just describing about the world of brand, the kind of dark arts of PR and branding and advertising are very, very manipulative. They are using emotion and kind of human desire and division as well, and kind of competition too, to foster interest in and behaviours towards buying things and whatever. I think people who are more pro-social, more what’s still called progressive, were kind of wary of and they didn’t want to engage in those dark arts. They opted out of it in order to sort of double down on we trust people. We trust people. If we give them the information, they will do the right thing. And unfortunately, that’s just not how we work.

Paddy: And that’s become clearer as we’ve understood through the science and so on. But I guess one way to think about it is it’s like playing a game of tennis, right? And if you’re choosing to not do what they have disparagingly called dark arts, then you’re basically putting your racquet down and you’re opting out of playing altogether. If you opt out of playing, then you will lose, it’s as simple as that. So you need to play that game, because that game is human consciousness, human behavioural psychology, it’s not something we can kind of get out of. You can cheat at the game. And the way that people cheat at the game is through deception mainly. So I think what we see more and more is people recognising that we have to play this game, but we do it with as much kind of integrity and as much good intention as possible. Where so often the bad actors are operating out of some kind of deception intention in order to serve their own ends somehow.

Manda: Oh, yes. Let’s unpick this. It’s not where I thought we were going, but this is a new avenue. Okay, so back in 2017, I had just done the master’s at Schumacher, and I’d written my thesis on the cognitive neuroscience of information and narrative, and the 2017 election arose and Jeremy Corbyn was there and it looked like he was riding a wave. And I had an in to Labour transiently and almost accidentally. And I wrote them a selection of things of here’s my understanding, I’d just read a few things on metaphor, Lakoff all the rest; if you want to really reach people, here’s what will hit the limbic system. And one of them was you show Theresa May, who was the UK prime minister trying for re-election, and Donald Trump, who was sadly the US president at the time, walking across a symbol that we all recognise, probably a Union Jack flag, trailing dogshit across it, and you’re hitting disgust and revulsion and shame and all of those things, and they will be forever tied to these people. It wasn’t huge integrity and I got an email back from somebody going, I’m sorry, I’ve just done too much therapy, we can’t do that. And that was good. I can absolutely see that we don’t want to play the game in the way the right plays it, which is absolutely the race to the bottom of the brainstem and going for the lowest common denominator.

Manda: But we still lost that election. And the world is where it is. And if I ever had time and was able to clone myself, I would write the novel of the counterfactual of what would the world look like if we’d won, not including a coup on day one by the military. And Steve Bannon, back in 2011, when asked by Michael Moore for a bit that got cut from, I think Fahrenheit 911; he was asked why does the right always win? And he said we know exactly what we want and there is nothing we will not do to get it. And what they want is a white supremacist, patriarchal theocracy run along the lines of the Inquisition. And, he said, we are going for headshots and you guys are all still in a pillow fight. And I watch modern politics and in conversation with people who are politically active and in the House of Commons at the moment. And they’re not even picking up the pillows. Well, we’ll have a petition for PR. Have you not looked at the world? That’s so not going to Land. We have to change our game, but we don’t want to play the lowest common denominator.

Manda: And I get to the point of thinking we cannot compete. There is nothing they will not do. There is no low they will not go to. And we do have scruples. That’s what Bannon was saying: there are things you will not do. And they have as many people with PhDs in neuroscience as we do. They know how to hit the lowest common denominator. They own parts of the social networks. They are just in the process of buying CNN. They do understand that narrative shift is possible and there is nothing they will not do. How do we play that game in a way that has integrity? Or can we just step off and go, you know, that’s not a game we’re playing. We’re going over here, to a completely new game that is based on different rules, where what we who are pro-social wish to do is going to get traction. This is a conundrum I ask myself all the time. And I have no answer to that, to be honest, other than consciousness evolution, narrative shift. Which can quite easily end up in, I watch some really flaky things on Facebook. Guys, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re not that. And it’s basically if we just sit here and hum and think nice thoughts and only think of beauty, we will ascend with the coming ascension and that’ll be okay. And that’s magical thinking.

Paddy: Yeah. Spiritual bypassing.

Manda: Yeah. Totally. Yes.

Paddy: Post-modern. Kind of mistaken. So yes I mean you’re right. That kind of to some degree puts paid to the tennis metaphor, because in that sense we’re talking about having to work within the kind of the realm of what is possible from a kind of human cognition and relational reality point of view. But we’re also having to work within hegemony and the existing systems being as they are and where they are and as well funded as they are in this moment. And that, of course, is somewhat stacked against us. We are very much swimming against the current. Well, it depends on how you look at it. We’re swimming against the current of the existing systems, but those systems are swimming against the current of basic reality. So they cannot, I mean, they won’t continue. I guess we’re in the time of the question of how bad that coming to an end is. But I think we need to learn from what they’re doing. We need to learn about how well they operate with the recognition that people are seeking belonging, that people want to feel heard. I think certainly the centre, sort of technocratic elite, the people at the top end in the big institutions have basically ignored people. Either out of fear or out of some kind of superiority or whatever, they have ignored where people are at. And as a result, those people have had nothing to turn to, and they’ve gone to the only people that sound like they’re listening to them.

Manda: Yeah. Which are often the same people. Elon Musk was at the march, the 100,000 people in London, and they all think he’s on their side.

Paddy: Yes, exactly.

Manda: Which is weird. Anyway. Go on.

Paddy: I mean, it’s because they’re desperate, right? People are in dire straits, and they’re looking for the only kind of thing to hold on to, and that’s where it is. It’s not coming from the centre. It’s not coming from the technocratic elite. It’s not coming from any of the institutions they have in the past, maybe trusted a bit. The trust has evaporated. That has been encouraged, of course, by those bad actors, as it were. But I think the thing we can learn from them as well, because we can’t do the top down thing that they do, we can’t do the singular thing that they do, we can’t do the hoarded wealth thing that they do. We need to be bottom up. We need to be plural, we need to be sharing resource, etc. But the other thing we can learn from them I think, various people are talking about this at the moment, Dave Snowden being one of them, I think he was on your podcast recently. He makes a really interesting point that these people seem to understand the complexity science quite well, either intuitively or they’ve done the investigation themselves. And recognise that reality is not, well, this is what the claim is, but not causal but rather dispositional. And that in order to intervene in it and change things and shift things, you have to do so obliquely. So not head on, granularly. And sort of following the adjacent possibles in the situation.

Paddy: If you look at how, what we call the right, some people have described it as the Me group versus the We group. Again, that’s that’s a binary, which is unhelpful, but it’s to some degree helpful to understand what we’re talking about. They they have basically been very strategically opportunistic about selecting things like abortion, for example, as an issue to run with. Because it was a really great way to build a base that was already there, to animate it, to create division in society, to create outrage, and then eventually to sort of make it a kind of litmus test for people to be in the party or not, and bring others over to the party from, say, in their case, the Democrats into the Republicans. So there’s something for us to learn from that. I think we tend to be much more thinking at the level of the whole system, a lot of the time; system change, not climate change, like that’s accurate. But if we try to change the system and if we try to do so via massive multilateral processes, we’re likely not going to manage because reality is too complex for that to be really feasible. And I’m massively simplifying that. But that is seemingly what’s coming through. So I think the story from my background in branding and what I’m doing in narrative now is how do we intervene in the conditions that people are in, that are leading to the narratives that emerge from those conditions? And what are the adjacent possibles in that sense that we can operate with? Where can we offer people the belonging and the sense of feeling heard and the sense of liberation Deliberation that they also sorely seeking? Where can they offer that themselves?

Manda: Whoa. Okay.

Paddy: Yeah, that’s a sort of set of questions.

Manda: So let’s define some of what we’re up against. We’re up against an economic system which is fundamentally broken and which is shovelling power to the top very fast. The people at the top understand the nature of narrative, and they are shaping narratives that are designed to fragment us and to isolate people so that their only source of safety comes from those controlling the narrative.

Paddy: A technical point on this, the system isn’t broken, it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Manda: Yes. No, that’s very true, actually. Yes. You’re right. I say that at the beginning of all my talks; the system is not broken, the system is doing exactly what the system was designed to do. And there was a brilliant quote. I found this the other day From Gramsci: ‘fascism is capitalism’s emergency solution when the ruling class can no longer govern through liberal democracy’. And liberal democracy was only ever a way of hoarding power for the few. And it was a story that we were told that alleged to give everybody a say in what was going on, while very carefully assuring that that say did not happen. Democracy in both the US and the UK and other Western countries around the world has only ever been a sham. And I think this is one of the things I get really frustrated about with people who are trying to tweak the very edges of Westminster or any other democracy around the world, of guys that’s not going to take us where we need to go. We need a whole new democratic system, a whole new agreement of who we are. And I watch what Audrey Tang does of giving trust to gain trust, and it isn’t hard. We have the models. So Yes. Okay. So democracy, the system is doing exactly what the system was designed to do, which is shovelling power to the top. It is predicated on the idea of money, which anyone who’s worked within the economic space for any time understands it’s treated as if the laws of money are the laws of physics. And I read somebody in the very recent past saying, no, the laws of money are more like a theology.

Paddy: Yes, exactly.

Manda: It’s an idea. I think that was probably on your website. It’s an idea, and we could have another idea tomorrow. We could abandon all of the existing currencies and create new ones that had totally different rules. And as long as there was a flow of value and storage and accounting throughout, it would be fine. And we are facing extinction. I’m reading a whole bunch of things, but one of the things I’m reading is Roger Hallam’s book that he wrote in a week, in his last week in prison recently, and it’s acting as his input towards the formation of your party. And he’s quite explicit on how fast: we are beyond 1.5 degrees, we are accelerating towards three degrees. Everything that I understand is if we hit three degrees, it’s game over. We cannot pull back from that. And yet, I had a conversation on Facebook yesterday with somebody who was telling me that the climate was no different now than it was 100 years ago, who obviously genuinely believed this, because the misinformation is huge and effective, and it hits the parts of us that want to believe that. We are, at heart, still limbic beings. I read somewhere while I was away that the amount of decision making that happens in our cortex is 0.05% of our overall decision making.

Manda: And that’s when we’re doing arithmetic or fundamental maths. It’s not our beingness. And so consciousness shift. We come back to we need to evolve. We need to grow up. We need to move, as Bill Plotkin says, from early adolescence to elderhood in a generation, very, very fast. And I said that on a stage several times, actually, while I was away and watched people get really triggered and really upset. That I was suggesting, first of all, that we were not all adult and that we should do the work and that it was possible to do the work. And their take away from that was that I was accusing them of being lazy, basically, which is possibly true. I need to look at my own stuff there. But we need to do the work. And if that’s accusing people of being lazy, I don’t think that really matters. And if we get triggered by that, we need to do the work. So where am I taking this? That narrative shift in consciousness shift are indivisibly linked, that we are actually facing people who understand this and who are doing their best. I don’t understand fully where the Bannon Musk people, other than they want to take us back to the time of the Inquisition because that was the last time the world was aligned the way they want it.

Manda: But that’s not a sustainable world, unless they are assuming that there’s going to be the same number of people in the world as there were at the time of the Inquisition, and that most of them will be peasantry, which is possible. But I don’t see how that stops us getting to three degrees. And they must know, however much they’re in denial, there must be a level at which they know we’re heading over the edge of the cliff. And yet I still think there is time to turn. So in your view of the world, how do we help shape shift, move our consciousness in a way that, I’m back to fractal shifts; that the very slow ‘we wait until a community is in crisis, and then we go and help them work out how to not be in crisis’ seems to me to be locked within the old paradigm. It’s not taking us to new paradigm thinking. Which is one of the ways, I perhaps misunderstood Dave Snowden, but it seems to be within very old paradigm thinking and I think we need completely different paradigm thinking. Where does that take you?

Paddy: A few different places. So first of all, I think the interaction with people where they are being triggered by what you’re saying is in a sense a part of what the complexity science points to, that we can’t go head on we have to go obliquely, and plant seeds within people. Having done that, that will have planted a seed within them, unless they’ve gone very strongly against what you’ve said, in which case they would have doubled down in the other direction, which we know happens. But one thing that I found quite useful, I think it was in Anand Giridharadas’ book, The Persuaders, where he talks to various people, including a great comms genius in the US who refers to the Golden Gate of Retreat. Basically that when encouraging somebody to do something that is very different to what they’re already doing, and that might implicate them in some harm in their recognition that they need to change, which of course, is where we all are, because Vanessa Andreotti quite rightly points out, our systems are fundamentally and inherently violent and unsustainable. An unfortunate by-product, that’s what they depend on to exist. So all of our lifestyle.

Manda: This is the trauma culture.

Paddy: Yeah. And that separability that underlies that. Belief in separability. So there’s something about how we provide the conditions for people to have epiphanies that they can then sort of own to some extent, and find themselves into their own journeys of healing. Because, as we know from any trauma or recovery process, and I think cult recovery is a very interesting process for us to be paying attention to, and addiction recovery in particular, is it has to be self-selecting. Otherwise it doesn’t work. You won’t go into it.

Manda: You have to give people agency in their own recovery, or else you’re just manipulating them again and there’s still the same person.

Paddy: Yes. And that comes back to the question of if narrative is emerging from the conditions that we’re in, if it’s a product of that, if you like. If it’s emerging between us as our mechanism for attempting to make sense of complex reality, with our fundamentally limited cognition, even as we understand it to be more distributed and embodied and ecological than we have in the past, it’s still limited. And so if narrative is that and it’s emerging from those conditions and that’s the world we’re wandering around in; the houses we’re living in, the cars we’re driving, the shops were going into, the hospitals we visit, the technology we use, all of that stuff. If that’s all providing the conditions for the narratives to emerge from, we are in a sort of chicken or egg situation, where those conditions really need to alter in order for for the narratives to alter.

Manda: Right. But the narratives have to alter in order for the conditions to alter and how do we intervene in that closed system?

Paddy: Well, I guess so. It depends on what we mean by narratives in that sense, because there’s the narratives that exist between us and we can’t actively change those, really. Again, we can work on the conditions to try and bring about something different emerging, but there’s the other kind of narrative, which is the literal narratives we create in our pop culture, in our storytelling, in our political messaging, in our journalism and we can change those. I think a lot of what narrative change work seems to have been about, recently at least, is change the media narrative. And that is more doable because you can get enough people saying something different by giving them the right materials to say something different. And that will have an effect. That’s part of the conditions people are in, from which narratives are emerging between them. And they really need different words for these things. I think part of the problem here is ‘narrative’, that word gets used to mean a lot of different things. But in that sense, as storytellers, as people who are just wandering about in society, we can influence those conditions by telling different stories. But we have to be cognisant that at the end of the day, unless those conditions fundamentally change as well as that happening, then the narratives that emerge between us will stay the same. Our consciousness won’t be going anywhere because it’s being held habitually in this set of conditions. And I think the other thing that is helpful to talk about here is habit and habit forming. And I’ve certainly found it helpful myself to think of narrative formation as a bit like how habits function for us in the brain.

Manda: Yes. So consciousness shift, let’s look at this. So one of the things that I have internalised, which may be untrue, is that when we’re in sympathetic or dorsal vagal overload, our capacity for creativity is much less. And we need that creative space to begin to to weave things together differently in our brain, to create new narratives. Otherwise, we default to the narratives that are locked most deeply in our limbic systems. And that one of the things that the right is very good at doing is creating sufficient stress and trauma, that we lose our creative capacity. And I’m sure that’s not accidental, but I’m also sure that’s been happening for many thousands of years. That’s the nature of the trauma culture, is to lock us in sympathetic overload so that we cannot be creative. That’s why Rob Hopkins says that capitalism is a disimagination machine. However, I’ve recently been reading Jane Mcgonigal’s book Imaginable, and she has an idea which has really taken off in my head, that when we are looking at the present or the past, when we’re recycling the existing Lego blocks inside, basically, we’re using five parts of our brain and she lists them and it doesn’t really matter, but it’s hippocampus, then dorsomedial prefrontal and then limbic system. To imagine a future that does not exist yet, so if I ask you what you’re going to do tomorrow, it will basically be a reiteration of everything you’ve done in the past few days, but probably looped together slightly differently because tomorrow’s a different day. If I say, okay, ten years from now. What we do on a neurocognitive level is go into our hippocampus and look at all the Lego blocks that are available and try to stitch them together in a way that we think might stand up ten years from now.

Manda: And actually, we can’t do that because the world is changing very fast now. But we cannot imagine things that are not already there. Then we go to our medial prefrontal cortex and go, how does this fit with my aims and desires, my philosophy, my sense of who I am as a human being? And then we check with our limbic system of basically, does that feel good or does it feel bad? And it takes 11 parts of our brain to do that future casting. Where the ‘what am I doing tomorrow?’ is basically past casting forward takes five parts of our brain. And that’s a huge cognitive load that fundamentally, evolutionarily, we’re not that keen to do, because we like to do the things that are straightforward. And if what you and I are trying to do is basically take the Lego bricks and just go, okay, Lego bricks, not a good thing here; can we plant seeds of something that’s completely different? We’re asking people to do enormous cognitive work and nobody can do anything other than stitch together what’s already in there. We can reconfigure it in new ways, but we’re not creating de novo. And so what you and I are trying to do, I think, what we can do is take stuff in. This is what Rob Hopkins talks about future casting, is here, let me give you a whole new set of ideas to begin to plant seeds in your brain or create Lego bricks of a different colour, whatever metaphor we’re using. Such that when I ask you to do that 11 parts of your brain really hard cognitive work, you’ve at least got material to work with.

Manda: And when you check with your prefrontal cortex and your limbic system, it will feel good. And in order to do all of that, I have to have the cognitive space. And the more stressed I become, the less cognitive space I have. And that you and I could create as many new little Lego bricks and/or seeds as we like, but if people are stressed, they cannot, it’s actually a physiological impossibility, to take those bits in. And therefore that one of the things we can do that’s most useful, this is one of the things I was thinking about this morning, what happens if we create the energetic space? This was related to something that you put up on LinkedIn recently with Lance and Burroughs Jones Junior about ‘neuroscience just confirmed Superconsciousness as a gamma wave state ignition, uniting brain, heart and body and coherence quantum state’. And this seems to me we’re edging now towards the edge of where cognitive neuroscience meets mysticism, meets energetics, meets narrative shift. Which is we actually need to be in phase shift. We need to be in a different energetic space. If our capacity to change shift, changes the way state of our brain, and therefore changes the energetic state around us, we have the capacity to help other people make that phase shift.

Manda: In the same way that the right manages to get everybody very afraid and very deep into limbic reactivity, that is very tribal. And you reduce and reduce and reduce what people’s tribes are, so you end up with this kind of distilled nature of tribalism, so that, let’s say only the straight white men are allowed to have power, and that that ripples outwards. That’s one phase state. And I can feel even saying that, that my brain goes into defensive mode. Whereas if we can create cognitive state where we are linking in to heart-mind and our connection to the more than human world and our connection between each other, which exists even on zoom. We’ve noticed doing the shamanic work that we can link people, you know, someone in Massachusetts with somebody in New Zealand, and they can do extraordinary energetic work together. Probably better than when they’re in the same room, because there’s something about being in your home space that lets you feel more energetically open and coherent. And so we know this is possible. And I would say my theory of change at the moment, of who we are as a human species, the consciousness shift that we need to make, is that we can shift into that gamma state somehow and create gamma resonance such that people for whom those words would never land,(and that’s not a pejorative thing, it’s just that’s not where their minds are at), are given the energetic space whereby Conscious Evolution might work. First of all, is this making sense? And second, how is it landing? And third, where does it take you?

Paddy: It’s making perfect sense. I think it addresses, you know, we talk about spaces for healing, but what we don’t often acknowledge the need for necessarily following that is spaces to remain healed in. Because as we know, you can’t heal from something within the conditions that caused the original harm. So that causes a problem for us, as we try to essentially create kind of pockets within harmful systems within which to remain healed, having gone through some kind of process of healing. So how to sort of create a sort of constancy for people as they go on this journey? The recent Nobel Prize that talks about nonlocality is sort of maybe explaining some of what’s happening on the zoom there. I had a similar experience here with an intuitive healer in Glasgow who can do phenomenal things somehow through a zoom screen, which I can’t understand and can never hope to really, I guess. But where it also takes me is that everything you just said is super fascinating and very much what I love thinking about, but we’re in a situation where ordinary people are being pulled over to these forces that are deeply destructive for them and everything else, because they have immediate material pain and grief that they are not able to resolve through our existing system. So what the version of that is on the ground where ordinary people are right now is a crucial thing for us to be orienting around. There was a great article that someone I admire greatly, Amara Spence, wrote this week, which I think has been shared about quite a bit, called who is organising poor white folks towards liberation?

Manda: Yes.

Paddy: In which she said, “this is not about saving poor white people, it’s about refusing to let fascism monopolise their grief. It’s about refusing to cede the terrain of belonging, ritual and story to the far right”. And that feels like an imperative to sort of grapple with. And I looked at people like Immy Kaur and others around the country who are, in this country at least, doing extraordinary work at the level of community, to give people the experience of something different. Those different Lego bricks, you know, putting them in their hands to actually have that experience of a different future. PThe saying is always there in climate, that people can’t think about the end of the world when they’re worried about the end of the day or the week. So trying to think ten years down the line is hard. We need to make it here and now. I thought Kate Raworth put it well, you know, the Milton Friedman quote.

Manda: The ideas that are lying around are the ones that get picked up. Yeah.

Paddy: And she was like, why are they lying around? Let’s get them on their feet. And that is happening more and more. There’s a project called antidote, which I’m a bit involved in, which is trying to surface stories of people just getting on with it where they are. Building different ways of being, all of which offer the opportunity for the kind of healing, I suppose you could call it, that you’re describing there from that LinkedIn post. And I think what is difficult is that for so many of us, and I include myself in this of course, who have come from a tradition like I did, in a sort of ivory tower, literally ivory tower, of kind of handing down strategy from on high and thinking in words and language and that that’s going to kind of fix it all. There’s an uncomfortable process of us getting onto the ground, getting our hands into the soil, like this is what we’re talking about here is the soil of everything, and we need to get our hands in it. And that can be difficult. I don’t know how to do that. I haven’t done that before. I’m not a community organiser, I’ve got no experience of that. But I’m sort of recognising that that’s more and more where I need to be, whilst also acknowledging that I have privilege and a position and and a set of skills that can be useful in some kind of other way in that process. But I think that piece in particular from Amara recently was very kind of galvanising with this in mind.

Manda: Brilliant.

Paddy: So yes, I was saying earlier about the deep narrative work, we’ve been talking to people about that a bit. And, you know, there’s so much fascinating research. That word ‘deep narrative’ encompasses myriad concepts from various different sciences and indigenous wisdoms and all sorts of other places. And this person we were talking to was like, yeah, you’re going to have to make that much simpler if you’re going to get people to understand it. And that’s a big part of our challenge. Like how do we bring about sufficiently simple understanding in an inherently unknowable complexity? Not just unknown, but unknowable complexity. To be able to act in a moment and heal in a moment where we risk everything coming down. And that’s a very animating question. And there are suggestions, but definite answers? I’m not sure.

Manda: Gosh, this opens up so many doors, doesn’t it? So one of the things that’s floating to the top of my head, of two things. First is Jonathan Haidt who did a lot of work a long time ago about the fact that righteous anger is one of the most addictive things on the planet. It’s the equivalent of a nose full of cocaine, the first time. And cocaine is a, there’s always that law of diminishing returns. But righteous anger seems to hit it every single time. And yet I’m thinking of Zack Polanski, who is increasingly impressing me, the new leader of the Green Party in the UK. And he put out a podcast that I listened to yesterday. It’s out fairly recently with someone called Jemmy the Giant, who used to be a Tommy Robinson follower and is now a member of the Green Party and a working class white lad. And Zach, as soon as he was elected leader of the Green Party, went to Clacton, which is Nigel Farage’s constituency (for those not in the UK, Farage is basically one of the billionaire fascists trying to take over the UK. He never goes there, but technically he’s MP). And Zack walked around with a microphone and talked to people, and one of the people he talked to was an Irishman who said, yes, obviously I am an immigrant. I came over from Ireland and now I’m in Clacton, but look at this place, look around, it’s a (expletive deleted) mess and I am resorting to the only thing I know.

Manda: And they had a good conversation. He said, do you want to come on the podcast? And yes. But then two days before he wrote and said, sorry, I can’t, I’ve got a shift at work. And so instead, they had Jemmy the Giant, who is also a working class East London lad, I think, who is now really exploring the narrative within his straight, white, working class lad framing. And I also then went to Audrey Tang’s work on giving trust to gain trust. There’s huge creativity there, and very few people consider themselves to be innately evil and consider themselves to be deliberately doing harm. They’re going with the options that they believe to be open, and that somewhere along the line, I’m looking at the work that Our House is doing on the People’s Charter, going round all the places that they can think of, and giving people a chance to consider what would you like the charter to be in your constituency?

Manda: I’m looking at the way Your Party, the Corbyn-Sultana party in the UK. So for people not in the UK, this is Jeremy Corbyn who used to be leader of the Labour Party. And just for a little fraction of time, there was a glimmer of hope that Labour might not be a far right institution. And he joined with Zarah Sultana and they are, it sounds to me like really trying to create a narrative of difference and a different way of being political that is still shoehorned into the existing system. Because absent a revolution, you have to work with the system that you’ve got.

Manda: And each of these is about giving individuals and community a sense of agency and community, and that when people have a sense of community in which they can feel pride, then we are working with a different set of neurochemistry; that pride meets our serotonin system and the serotonin mesh is enduring and additive, and all of the things that dopamine hits aren’t. And it works against the dopamine farming that seems to be most of what the Right is aiming for; outrage and and reactivity and defensiveness. Whereas serotonin is about inclusion and connection. And that somewhere in that you and I both exist. We exist in a space where we have the privilege of being able to think about stuff and occasionally being able to meditate and do the things that help us to reset the zeros on our own triggered neurocognitive systems. Where other people are, exactly, as you said, basically trying to get to the end of the day and survive and feed their kids and not get kicked out of a house that they’re renting by some landlord who has decided they can get twice the rent from somebody else. Our entire system is not fit for purpose. And helping people to imagine what a fit for purpose system would look like, while giving them ideas that are not simply the ones currently in circulation, seems to me what narrative shift is about. It’s about presenting different concepts of how the world could be that are prosocial.

Paddy: Yeah. My colleague Ella and I have been talking about a kind of model to think about different roles for story. And we think about the role of modelling, of demonstrating possible futures and how to get there, importantly, the kind of thrutopian idea, and bringing those to life. And in the form of story that is possible. But ideally people are experiencing that. People are doing it. They’re on the ground. It’s in their hands. It’s not some distant, faraway thing. It’s something that’s here and now because their needs and their grief and their pain is here and now. And then also signalling, showing where that’s actually already alive, and that’s again what the antidote project is doing a bit of. But there is a key dimension underneath all of that which is tending. Which is bringing and cultivating that soil that is healthier, essentially, that is full of the values and the mindsets and the other things we might think of down there,that are pro-social, that are healed, that are oriented towards different futures. But recognising that those things are constantly in motion, constantly in flux.

Paddy: There’s an article called ‘Stop Trying to Change Mindsets. Do this instead’ and I’m so conscious of that because I have good friends who work in exactly that, in changing mindsets. And I don’t think it’s saying that what they’re doing is wrong. But it’s understanding, as they say, that the individual action is the collective action; that the relational quantum mechanics, the ecological systems theory, all of this stuff is revealing we are all one thing. We’re all kind of talking to ourselves, talking to each other, talking as one sort of existence, one consciousness maybe. And thinking about the intra work as well as the inner work is therefore maybe a way of thinking about what we’re doing here; recognising how we are all participating in the continuous creation of this dream we call reality. And how we might dream something different. What it would take to do that, what conditions are required for that?

Manda: Okay, you have to go. Paddy, please let’s do this again. Let’s have a rematch. I’m booked for the next six months, so it would be next spring. But please, let’s do this again, because it feels like we have so much else to talk about. But thank you for your time today and Dreaming our way into a new reality is exactly what we’re about, and then giving it the stories that help people see how amazing it could be. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast and we will definitely do this again.

Paddy: Thank you Manda.

Manda: And there we go. That is it for another week. Thank you so much to Paddy for all that you are and do. Speaking with you is always an education and a delight. I learn so much from how you think and your connections out into the world. We’ve put links in the show notes for I hope everything that Paddy mentioned. Please do follow them up. We didn’t talk much about Stories for Life, but that website (https://stories.life/) is absolutely packed with ideas for narrative shift; what narrative is, how it evolves, how we could evolve it. So please do have a look in the show notes and pick out whatever sings to you and explore. And if you’re on LinkedIn, I totally recommend that you follow Paddy there too. Again, I put a link in the show notes. He’s really well connected in the world of narrative shift, of how the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other, and our place in the world are what will change us. So have a look. And if you take nothing else away from this podcast, the stories that we put into our minds, the ideas that we draw in and take apart and re-examine and look at from different angles, these are what allow us to fashion new stories. We can’t build without the building blocks. So do whatever you can to bring in as many building blocks as makes sense to you, as are rooted in a world of generative change, in a world of integrity, compassion and generosity of spirit or whatever values are the bedrock of your existence.

Manda: Think what those are. Bring them to bear. Gather as widely as you can from the ideas that exist now, so that together we can co-create new ideas for new ways of being. Because heaven knows our world needs new ways of being quite urgently. Anyway, that’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with another conversation.

Manda: And in the meantime, thanks as ever to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for editing the YouTube videos. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for all of the tech that keeps Accidental Gods afloat, and for so much of the sharing of ideas behind the scenes. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to know about how stories can shape our world, then please do send them this link. Word of mouth remains our best way of contacting people, though. If you have time to give us a like and subscribe on the podcast provider of your choice, that too helps the algorithms. And that’s it for this week. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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