The Balance Restoration Story
A new political story for 21st century society
Humans are creatures of balance. Everything in our biology, our evolution and our experience tells us that we are healthiest and happiest when we achieve balance. And yet, the current story we live by sets us up to live in extremes — we are told that to get through life best we must take part in extreme competition and, by and large, neglect our want to help others. This story is damaging with two big impacts. It is causing us deep psychological misery and it is destroying our living planet. Our new politics needs to restore the balance we all need: the balance between competing with and helping others.
George Monbiot has laid down a challenge. We need a new story for our times because stories are the most powerful tool we have to reform society. The 2008 financial crisis showed that neoliberalism is not fit for purpose and yet it is still with us. Why? Because there has been no new restoration story to come in its place. Restoration stories are so powerful that they have accompanied nearly all successful major religious or political changes in human history. You’ll no doubt recognise the structure— it is the same story that we all know through Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Narnia. It goes something like this:
The Restoration Story
- Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces, working against the interests of humanity. This disorder is causing misery to almost everyone
- Although it seems impossible, a hero rises up against this disorder, fights the powerful forces, and against all the odds defeats them and restores order to the land
This is the story structure of the two most dominant Western political theories of the last 100 years: social democracy (Keynes) and neo-liberalism (Hayek and Friedman) — just, the roles are different in each.
In Keynes’ restoration story — social democracy — the powerful and nefarious forces are the economic elite, pocketing all the money. Order and harmony is achieved when no-one is living in poverty. The hero is the working and middle classes who revolt, defeat the economic elite, and lead to the vast distribution of wealth, restoring order and harmony.
In Hayek and Friedman’s restoration story — neoliberalism — the powerful and nefarious forces are the overbearing state who create vast collectivism and smother freedoms. Order and harmony is achieved when all are able to live lives of freedom and autonomy. The hero is the entrepreneur who creates new wealth and liberties for all through innovation, rolling back the state, restoring order and harmony.
Actually, it isn’t quite true that there is no 21st century restoration story. There is. It’s the one told by the likes of Trump, Farage, Orban, Le Pen and Duda (the extreme nationalists). They have a powerful restoration story that says ‘the global intellectual elite’ are the cause of all our issues and they — the nationalists — are the heroes, restoring national identity, borders (and with it xenophobia) to the land. With this simple and powerful story and no counter narrative to spar with it, they are winning.
George Monbiot puts forward a new and different story for our time. What I’d like to do here is amend it slightly to get it to a place that it can do battle with the nationalists. George’s story goes something like this:
The Altruism Restoration Story
- Disorder afflicts the land — we are pushed to be the most extreme, individualistic and competitive versions of ourselves, leading to psychological misery for many and the destruction of the planet. There are many forces causing us to be this way, best characterised by the current dominant story: neoliberalism
- But it does not have to be this way. Humans are altruistic creatures. We survived on the savannahs of our evolutionary history by our special ability to cooperate with other humans in our tribe
- Against all the odds, normal people build systems of togetherness and belonging using a new economics which values the commons, overthrowing the market and state forces that push us to be individualistic and competitive, restoring order to the land
I broadly agree with this story. But there is something in it that does not quite resonate with me. To focus on the idea that humans are just altruistic doesn’t feel true. There are countless examples when we are not. This story feels too ‘nice’. Keeping the same core ideas, but with different packaging, here is the balance restoration story:
The Balance Restoration Story
- Disorder afflicts the land — we are pushed to be the most extreme, individualistic and competitive versions of ourselves, leading to psychological misery for many and the destruction of the planet. There are many forces causing us to be this way, best characterised by the current dominant story: neoliberalism. Let’s call the people causing the disorder, pushing us all out of balance: the extremists.
- But it doesn’t have to be this way. Humans are creatures of balance, of homeostasis: we are happiest and healthiest when we live in moderation. In particular, we need balance between competing with and helping others. We survived on the savannahs due to our ability to cooperate within our tribe and defeat other tribes (like it or not, we all have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other)
- Against all the odds, people recognise that the system in its current form imbalances them to wildly exaggerate the competitive and individualist side of themselves. So, working together they build new systems that reprioritise the commons and domestic spheres, creating new value around our drive to care for others, and overthrow the dominant forces of neoliberalism (advertising, social media, growth-above-all-else). This creates balance of competition and helping others, restoring order to us psychologically and to the world around us. Let’s call these people, the heroes who restore order to the land: the resilient. To be resilient we must have a secure, stable and balanced foundation. Resilience is a form of strength based on equilibrium — on balance.
In essence, this story is very similar to George Monbiot’s. The only difference is in our understanding of how humans need to be to thrive. The altruism story says altruism is the end point. The balance story says balance between competing and helping others is the end point, which I think is closer to the truth of how humans are. You cannot deny humans love to compete: whether it be the gladiators in Ancient Rome or in a Football World Cup today. A society without competition would feel just as un-human as a society without care and kindness. We did live in tribes helping each other on the savannah, but we also lived between tribes — and we had to know how to defeat the other tribe.
This is the psychological version of the story told by Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics. To thrive in the 21st century, we need to achieve balance within societies across a number of metrics, keeping above fundamental social foundations, while living within the planetary boundaries afforded to us by the ecosystem that we live in.
Doughnut Economics is the 21st century story economic story of balance to go with the 21st century political, social and psychological story of balance outlined here. To thrive as a society, in the same way to thrive as people, we need balance rather than eternal growth.
Throughout our 12,000 year human history, many human societies have known this simple truth: that balance is the key to a healthy and good life. The restoration of this balance — between competing and helping others — is, I believe, the story for the 21st century which we need to not only to survive, but to thrive.
Extension (28.06.20)
The idea of balance being the route for a good life goes way beyond the balance of care and competition. If you look for it in human history, across societies, it is not difficult to find!
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a balance of material and psychological needs. Aristotle’s 12 virtues are each a balance between two vices. Ying and Yang, the balance between chaos and order. Homeostasis: a balance of temperature, blood sugar levels, blood CO2 levels, blood O2 levels, blood pH. It’s everywhere you look!
My plan now is to make a doughnut for the individual. One that describes the areas of a good and balanced life, which can be nested within the Kate’s Doughnut, giving us each a doughnut compass by which we can get through the 21st century.
Extension (30.06.20)
The Human Doughnut
In medicine, in primary care, it is taught that there are always three components to someone’s illness:
- A Biological (or physical) component,
- A Psychological component, and
- A Social component
With this wholistic view to the health and wellbeing of an individual, this feels like the perfect framework to start with for the individual human doughnut. We find ourselves to be unwell if any of our biological, psychological, or social is out of balance. Done well, the human doughnut will be a compass for how to live a good, healthy life — through applying the principle of balance — while also enabling us to live as part of a society organised with the principles of doughnut economics, so that we can not only survive, but also thrive, through the 21st century. Here is version one of the human doughnut:
Extension (04.07.20)
Applying the Human Doughnut
So this is all very well as a story. But how does it play out in reality? How do we reorganise society around this new fundamental organising principle of balance? Let’s take a dive into some examples to see how things might look a little different if we organised society based on the doughnut.
The Doughnut and the NHS: The Health and Treatment System
NHS: Background and fundamental purpose
Let’s take the NHS as an example and start with a closer look at the core principles used to design it: in the National Health Service 1946 Act. The designing principles of the NHS, set out in the Act, are to:
- Secure the improvement of health, and (not by)
- Provide prevention, diagnosis and treatment
This is a balance between securing health and providing treatment.
This balance of health and treatment can be linked back to the start of medicine and medical thought — in Greek mythology. The staff and snake of the Greek God Asclepius, God of Healing, has come to represent medicine — or treatment. The cup and snake of the Greek Goddess Hygiea, Goddess of Health, has come to represent pharmacy — or good health. The two — health and treatment — are often pictured together to represent the health care profession.
In the UK’s health service, the NHS, these concepts exist in institutions. Hygiea is Public Health England. Asclepius is NHS England (and NHS Improvement). Recent work by the UK government titled “Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s” acknowledges that ‘health care’ (i.e. NHS England/Improvement) accounts only for 10% of whether a person dies before their time:
In terms of the contribution to how healthy someone is during their life, the ‘health care’ system (NHS England/Improvement) contributes 25%. 15% is biology, leaving the remaining 60% to other factors in our (society’s) control:
Okay so that’s what we know from academia about what a balanced health and treatment system should look like. Let’s compare that to where we find ourselves today.
Where are we now, with the current story of extremes?
If we take a look at where we are now, we can see that as an overall health and treatment system we are way out of balance towards the treatment end of the scale. We fund NHS England/Improvement (Asclepius — treatment) about 38X more than we fund Public Health England (Hygiea — health):
We can see this out-of-balance prioritisation within the health and treatment system in more detail in this Office of National Statistics chart of UK Healthcare spending:
The dark blue shows that 2/3rd of all healthcare money is spent on acute curative or rehabilitative care, with a further 15% spent on long-term care (orange). This brings total treatment spending to 80%. In contrast, preventative care (light blue), which is the current term used for health spending, is 5% of total UK Healthcare spending. Again, we see the spending is way out of balance, with about 40X more spending on treatment than on health.
Where could we be, with the story of balance?
If we restore balance to this picture, and reorganise the health and treatment system — as it was intended to be as set out in the National Health Service 1946 Act — around the fundamental core principles of balance between securing health and providing treatment, we would get a very different (and I believe much better) picture of what the NHS does and how it functions.
Work on this has already begun, with calls to Build Back Better by bringing together the ideas of the Green New Deal and Public Health to rebuild society in the post-Covid world. This work builds on the WHO’s frameworks of the social determinants of health, to equate social justice and climate justice and to bring into the equation ideas of health inequalities (aka health justice). These ideas in the framework of balance are about a balancing of power across the social space — a topic so broad and important that it deserves its own chapter. These principles resonate strongly with Kate Raworth’s Doughnut, which is a balance between climate justice (living within the ecological ceiling) and social justice (living above fundamental social foundations).
The question now is: how do we reorganise the NHS — the health and treatment system — around the principle of balance? A balance of funding between health and treatment that recognises the determinants of health would be a good start. To rename, more accurately, the parts of the system we have would help here too: ‘Public Health’ to become ‘Health’ and the ‘Healthcare System’ to become the ‘Health and Treatment System’, with two parts: ‘Health’ and ‘Treatment’.
Extension (11.07.20)
But hang on… it’s all very well talking about restructuring the NHS, but I thought this was about the human doughnut. What do big institutions like the NHS have to do with us all living balanced lives as individuals?
Very good point! It’s simple: the human doughnut says we should all take a balanced approach to how we look after ourselves. If we do — if we take a balanced approach to life across the human doughnut — we are doing the best we can for our health and wellbeing. The NHS as a societal organisation is an application — a descriptor or mirror if you like — of society’s values. And as society is made up of individuals and communities, it is a good reflection of our average values collectively as individuals. If the NHS were structured in a balanced way between health and treatment, we could be pretty sure that we too as individuals across society were living to balance. It’s a two way street of course! If we can enable the NHS to be more balanced, it will help us as individuals, communities and society to become more balanced too.
The Doughnut and Parenting
I’ve been teaching a lot recently to 6th form students wishing to apply for psychology at university. This has led to many interesting discussions, from visual, circadian and social cognitive neuroscience to child psychology, attachment theory and psychotherapy. These discussions have led to me to think there is a very important place for parenting and childhood on the human doughnut.
The brain and the mind are two sides of the same coin and so it is wonderful to have discussions from both perspectives about the same topics. To take an approach of balance sees these two disciplines not as separate to each other, but complementary to each other — they enrich each other. Take empathy for example. Studies using ‘neuroscience’ methods (e.g. fMRI) seem to show a particular importance for the right temporoparietal junction (aka TPJ… if our heads were cubes, this is at the right back top corner) in its role for empathy. This area is also interesting for its link to other concepts, such as reorienting attention, seeing agency in others and theory of mind. While at first glance these concepts don’t seem linked to empathy, when you think about it a little longer they really are — they are what helps us carry out empathy. It’s a nice example of how neuroscience can inform psychology and vice versa. To empathise with someone, we need to be paying attention to them (reorienting attention), thinking about what it feels like to be in their shoes (theory of mind), and affording them a sense of agency — a part of respect, and of love.
We know from many pieces of evidence that if a child is not given a nurturing upbringing from a loving caregiver, their capacity to feel empathy throughout life is reduced including when they come to parent themselves. This results in a very sad chain effect of a lack of nurturing and a lack of empathy through families. Evidence tells us there are ‘critical periods’ within development, which means that we need to have certain environmental cues and events happen to us within a certain time window in our development for our brains to develop certain capabilities. For empathy as a capability, it seems that this critical period — this time window within which children need to experience a nurturing care giver for their empathy capacity to develop—is between 0–5 years old, with particular importance in the earliest years.
On top of our genetic predisposition, most of our adult characteristics — including most of what causes us psychological turmoil, difficult relationships and negative impact on our quality of life — can be traced back to how we were treated as children; how we were parented. The best gift anyone can receive in life is a good childhood, leading to secure attachment. A secure attachment sets us up to have healthy relationships, a healthy sense of self-esteem and typically a good level of resilience. It seems that the most important factors for this are being nurtured (loved, cared for, physical and emotional needs met) and being given structure (rules, timetables, discipline, and boundaries) by the caregiver. If parents can achieve this, then they set up their child for a good life psychologically.
These ideals can be described in parenting styles through the balance of control. Here’s a great explainer from Crash Course Psychology which goes into more detail. Along the spectrum of parenting control, from too much, to just right, to too little, you have three styles:
- Authoritarian (too controlling)
- Authoritative (a good balance of setting rules and boundaries while affording agency and freedoms to the child with care and love)
- Permissive (too lax)
With a lot of evidence to back this up, the key to good parenting, which will leave the child with a positive sense of self, is to find the culturally appropriate sweet spot — the balance — on this spectrum.
A quick and important note: the cultural sweet spot is an important idea to touch upon. It shows us that while all people need balance in a certain set of categories and between a certain set of extremes, where that balance lies for different individuals who live within different cultures will be different, sometimes very different. That is not just okay, it is to be celebrated. For if our balance points were all the same we would lose the richness of society which diversity affords all of us.
If we take this to be true — that how we are treated in childhood is the most important set of experiences we have for a good life and so the parenting styles that people enact to their children are of utmost importance for the overall wellbeing of society — then we should be organising our society of balance with parenting and a good childhood with very high priority. We should be organising our society — our institutions, our systems, the ways we live, our principles — in a way which enables every parent to treat their children with a balance of control: the authoritative style.
When parenting is done well, it leads to an emotionally-healthy and psychologically well child. Here is a lovely video by The School of Life, to show what that looks like:
Parenting well within the Doughnut — a short diversion to the Domestic and the Commons
So what would such a society look like? Well, parenting is a great example of how the human doughnut can be nested very happily into the economic doughnut — to see how these ideas are linked. We know that we want to reorganise society that can enable good parenting. How do we do it?
There is a recognition in the doughnut economic model that there are four parts of any economy: the state, the market, the domestic and the commons. You will have heard of the state and the market. You are less likely to have heard of the domestic and the commons (spoiler: the four are not in balance), although they will probably make intuitive sense to you:
The domestic is everything that happens at home — caring and bringing up a child, cooking, cleaning, housework, teaching (to an extent) and more. It has been overlooked as an important part of society, the reason for which can quite uncontroversially be linked to the idea that we exist in a male-dominated society, which has an organising principle of competition. An organising principle of balance — balancing competition with care and cooperation — would help us to bring up our appreciation of the domestic to be, in our minds, just as important as the market and state.
The commons is anything that is shared by everyone, with no single owner—the definition online is:
The Commons = land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community
Some commons are obvious, like a local park that is called a common, or a natural space which is entirely open and free to the public and is shared and maintained by a community — like Port Meadow in Oxford or Hampstead Heath in North London. Some commons (or things that could, perhaps should, be commons) are less obvious: the internet, the monetary system, the air we breathe, the atmosphere of the Earth. These are commons to which the extremist forces of neoliberalism have led to the breaking up into pieces of, and introduction of ownership to, which has to led broadly to negative outcomes for most people. The takeaway message is that when a few individuals try to own and make money from a commons, they tend to destroy it or at least much-reduce its positive impact on the world.
Let’s have a look at some of these examples in more detail. The internet has the potential to bring a huge wealth of positivity, progress and prosperity to the world. To Tim Berners-Lee’s credit — who is trying to redesign the internet so that we each, rather than big tech platforms, own our own data and decide who has access to it (a mechanism which would truly make the internet a commons) — there are today many wonderful and shared benefits of the internet. It does, in part, act as a healthy commons. However, through the process of ownership and monetisation of and within the internet, driven fundamentally by the neoliberal story of extremist competition, we have a situation where a lot of the internet is not a commons, to dire consequences. We now live in the attention economy, where global tech businesses are each incentivised to better create products and services which will keep our eyeballs on their screen for longer, because that’s how Ad money — their entire business model — works. The rise of the attention economy has led to an increased drive in behaviours online of ‘short-termism’ pleasure-seeking. This can be seen in a number of areas: betting, porn, the Daily Mail sidebar of shame, Instagram to name a few. Each of these satisfies a psychological need but only in a short term and surface level way: in betting we are seeking the achievement of goals and progress, in porn we are seeking sex and connection, in the tabloid gossip section we are seeking more in depth understanding of the social dynamics of our tribe, in Instagram we are seeking connection to friends, loved ones, and those we aspire to be like. Each of these drivers — these psychological needs — are very powerful to us and therefore very affective at attracting our attention. But none of these internet services or products leave us better off fundamentally. They are strong enough to attract our attentions but they not enough to satisfy our deep psychological needs in any long term or sustaining sense. This is just one example of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and why it isn’t a good idea for us to allow the neoliberal extremist story to organise our societies. It’s not the path to a psychologically healthy society.
There are plenty of other examples. It is important to quickly touch upon the monetary system. The monetary system — the system by which we all (ideally!) have money to use as an exchange mechanism to trade goods and services — is an example of what should be a great public good — a commons — but, at the moment at least, it is under the influence of neoliberal extremism, which prevents it from being so. What has been for so much of the history of the financial system a public good — and has been run by democratically-backed organisations on behalf of the public — the monetary system is now in the hands of a few organisations: globalised banking. The result of this has led to a very small handful of individuals within those organisations feeling incentivised (as they believe the neoliberal extremism story is the one to follow for a good life) to acquire a lot of personal wealth, at the broad expense of the health of people in society and the health of the planet. I would argue they also do this at the expense of their own wellbeing, as they are broadly leading an unbalanced life (with not enough time spent with family and not enough sleep being two imbalances that particularly stand out). In order for our societies to be reorganised around the principle of balance, the monetary system should be reorganised, back to how it has been for so much of recent human history, to be a public good — a commons — that is run for the wellbeing and health of all of society, rather than being owned by a few individuals, which results in only a very few number people accumulating lots of 0s in their bank accounts.
But this is a section on parenting… what does the domestic and the commons have to do with it? This diversion to the domestic and commons is useful in the next step we take in how this all joins together, which is to link up from the human doughnut — which says that we need to parent in a balanced, authoritative, way — to the economic doughnut, in how we organise our societies. Good parenting is at the heart of the domestic section of our economy (with the commons, such as giving access for children to healthy public spaces, playing an important role too). An organising principle of Doughnut Economics is to bring the domestic and the commons on par with the state and the market. When this is achieved across society — when the domestic is prioritised as part of a balanced economy— we will live in a world where it is far easier and more likely that most, nearly all, parents will parent in a balanced and healthy authoritative way, passing on the gift of a good childhood to most people, setting them up well for a balanced and good psychological life. Good parenting is the practical application of the domestic part of the economy having the respect and shared appreciation it deserves.
Here is a slide from one of Kate Raworth’s presentations about how the Doughnut Economy lives within the planetary boundaries and within a society that treasures the domestic (aka household) on an equal footing to the market, state and commons. On top of enabling a society where good parenting is more valued and enabled, this model — of a balanced economy across the four sections — shows what an economy looks like when competition is balanced with care. Parenting is perhaps the most important application in all our lives of this balance between competition and care. It is essential that we put good parenting and a good childhood at the heart of the Human Doughnut and our Doughnut societies.
What would this look like in practice?
Taking these principles and playing them out in time, let’s have a think about what society would actually look like with good parenting and a good childhood at the heart of society. This is just one idea of how it could look. Of course there are many ways that this could be achieved.
For starters, we have a limited resource of time. Time spent parenting (and sleeping well) is time not working. It’s time not commuting. It’s time not doing other things other than spending time with your children. For some parents — who already spend most time with their children — this will mean very little change. But for others, and often those in high-power jobs — those who have a greater power to shape society than most — it will mean more time with their children. So this means less time at work. It means working closer to home. It means more time empathising with their child: more time paying attention to them, more time imagining what it’s like to be in their mind, more time affording them a sense of agency. It means more time for stories, more time for play, more time cooking with them, more time in nature with them, more time creating and exploring with them. And reading this you know its right because it feels right.
It’s a silly example, but think of the film Elf. Buddy is the child in all of us who hasn’t had enough care and love and attention from his father, who is a businessman. The story turns feel-good when the father recognises that spending time with his child is more important than spending time at work, with a lovely linking narrative device of a Christmas storybook for children as the way in which the father has this epiphany. This may be obvious to many of us, but for this to happen at scale — for parents (typically fathers) — to spend the balanced amount of time (i.e. more than they do now) with their children — empathising with them and caring for them, through play, story-telling and more — then we need to reorganise the fundamental principles behind what keeps them at work for longer than they should be: the organising principle of growth and the eternal drive for higher GDP. This incessant drive for growth — as told by the instruction manual of neoliberalism we are currently following — is damaging our ability as a society to create emotionally-well people. And so again, this brings us nicely back to the idea that we should redesign society around the organising principle of balance.
