The Predominant Paradigms in the Way of a Participatory Future

Summary

Starting at the deepest of Donella Meadows’s ‘places to intervene in a system’, Ben Redhead names four myths that keep us deferring rather than co-authoring: the consumer mindset, the ‘brilliant man’ theory, technocracy and meritocracy. Together they “produce a culture of control and deference”; shifting them is “a slow, reflective practice. Learning to notice the water we are swimming in.”

Rationale

We’d look for his myths of technocracy and the ‘brilliant man’ in practice as well as story: in the assumptions “around authority or expertise” a citizens’ assembly can carry.