/ SPRING BREAK 2020 /

Jan Ritsema

Some people think that after Covid we are ready to create a better world.

Under the pressure of the pandemic they see it emerging already: people show to be helpful, to take care, to recognise the pain of others and to help to relieve it. They say: we are solidary, empathetic, together. They see us gratefully clapping hands to thank the heroes who risk their lives, of which many literally lost it. They say we are all in the same boat in the same war, dramatically called as such, fighting and sacrificing. And that we behave accordingly: supportive, generous, helpful.

We are praised. They say: we showed the real stuff we are made of: we are touchingly and intrinsically a good and helpful human specimen. It is in our national DNA, they say. It is what lives deep inside the nature of us humans.

They say: the world, dominated by the virus, is ill and we will heal it, together we can. And if necessary, they say, we will sacrifice ourselves for it, give our lives for to show, as a nation, that we are good in our deeds and in our hearts. As, after all we are human.

I always learned that when all insects die, everything else in the world would die, but when all humans die everything else in the world would blossom. 'Human', my ass.

But apparently there is hope. Covid, they say, will change us, Covid will reveal all that is good in us. Covid will be the trauma that will change us forever to be better. Yes, there is hope. Hope made of the hope we hope. A fata morgana, an illusion of hope. Franklin D.Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, both operating in times of a real war, taught that for hope to be realised we have to work for it, we have to do something. Hope needs to be helped. Its realisation does not fall for free from heaven. Illusions fall for free from heaven.

How solid and sustainable will all this 'good' be that emerges from us now, as we got it for free from Covid, from the killing threat of Covid, the invisible, supposedly endangering all of us equally? It invaded us, it threatened us, and through this, it ties us together. It binds us against the common enemy. We feel all in the same boat (which is obviously not the case, as, the elderly, the differently abled, those with no or low wages and the systemically marginalised are by far the most vulnerable).

Changes in behavior, induced from the outside, won't last. As soon as the circumstances change back to normal, exit Covid, we will change back to normal. We did not change the circumstances, the circumstances changed us. As soon as the threat is over, circumstances will flip back to how we knew them. As soon as the doors are open again, society will return to the rat-race in the competitive, over-consumptive, usurping society and will reproduce old behaviors and habits. This, despite, normal life becoming too heavy, too horrible, too stressful, too painful, too unhealthy for too many.

How can we ever change this? Impossible it seems. We are split apart, fundamentally. We think we are too small to implement change. We think, we think too differently from one another, we disagree fundamentally about what is right and the right way to do. We are convinced, stubborn, resistant. Some think even that individualism is in the DNA of being a human.

What we forget here is that we are also able to change, adapt, repair, learn and be social.

But for society to change sustainably, we need to infect it, we need to do something, work for it, struggle, try. We need to be the agent of change ourselves.

Behavior is not something that you freely choose, also ethically induced behavior not. It is not that you wake up and think let me do something good. You want to do something good because you slept well, you got tea in bed, awoke with a feel for energy, you have no other priorities, you want to feel good and what is a better way than to do good. What a person thinks and does is a product of circumstances.

When circumstances change, people change. The way they think and the way they organize life, changes.

People behave differently, even against their basic values, when a cinema starts to burn or a plane crashes, we run over each other to safe our own lives, then, when we feel in paradise, in a world full of abundance of everything for everybody, we will act differently and if you want it or not, we will think differently, differently about ourselves and about our relation to others.

Abundance of everything is available when people are able to share resources instead of appropriating them and make them exclusively for their use only: my car, my bike, my mirror. These people are surrounded by a cemetery of dead (not used) objects. And that creates scarcity, scarcity of the available resources. And scarcity leads to competition and competition leads to suspicion and to fear of the other(s). L’enfer c'est les autres, Sartre, the others are the hell. Not you yourself, not you are the cause of scarcity, the others are, you think. We easily swift from perpetrator to victim and back again, turning effect into cause and back again. Mentally supple acrobats. Jugglers of the mind.

Plastic elastic. Changeable, modulable. We know, and at the same time we are scared of it, of this, in principle, wonderful elasticity. It induces a desperate need for solidity and stability and where do we find this better than in convictions?

Political parties are based on ideas, principles, abstracted representations of different strategies of how to divide the common cake and how to deal with what we are scared of. These political parties are grosso modo organized around two different strategies. Those who think that we-the-people and the ways we cooperate and share are the best shield against the fears of life, socialists, the more social-oriented people. And those who do not trust the other, most probably neither themselves and who opt for shields to protect people from people, through walls, police, prisons, differences in wealth, the individualists. More oriented towards the creation of structures, organizations and organisms to execute separation between people, because, 'I can only trust myself and my family’, (as long as they are loyal to me).

• These different political strategies are based on strong convictions, which are deeply engraved in experience, proven by the practice of living. And that practice produces habits and addictions, which solidify the convictions, no longer, easy, if not impossible, to change. The practice of living engraved convictions in the bodies and souls of the people. Just like the medium, the structure is the message.

When ideas of people, are born from the way the same people practice life, then changes in the practice of life can change the way people think about life and living.

Given the presumption that practicing the way we do things between us differently could change the souls and minds of people, then, only experiments that lead to another practice might be relevant to aim for. This means to restructure, rethink, rebuild the instruments of life, like the way we school, hospitalize, imprison, live in homes, entertain ourselves, hierarchize, submit, etc.

But how do we get there?

Not by asking people to share, not by convincing them to do so, but by the creation of other circumstances, by building changes in the physical structures we live in, as these structures implicitly direct how we organize life among us.

An example is the creation of the roundabout. Before the roundabout we used traffic lights for every more or less busy crossing point. The traffic lights decided for us and we could put our brains on zero. A reductive tool reduced us. But operating the more efficient and complex roundabout forces us to cooperate in order to make the flow of traffic go smooth. We are addressed not as stupids but to share the common space intelligently, playfully. We are not asked to behave differently, we behave differently, if we want it or not, because the circumstances are different.

The roundabout, a common space with very little rules, offers us to manage its function all together. On the roundabout we change from policed individualists to complex cooperators. Not because more operating freedom was offered, but instead, an instrument, a smart tool, easy to operate for everybody together. And no need for policing.

• Question is if we can imagine, design, structure, build more of such tools? Yes, we can. We can think every function, every instrument in society differently. Take a school, which we can imagine not made out of little separated boxes, classrooms, but as a marketplace, full of clusters of information, tools and mobility. Imagine the different, independent, inventive, cooperative people it will produce. And not because we implemented a set of values but just because we structured and build the concept 'school' differently. From a teaching factory to a marketplace of knowledge exchange, experience and experiment.

The same is thinkable for prisons, hospitals, stadiums, factories, offices, theaters, parks, public swimming pools, entertainment parks, bars, town halls, post offices, traffic, transport. We all can imagine them no longer structured for to serve a repressive top-down society, the traffic lights, but on the contrary, for to support intelligent cooperation, the roundabout.

But how do we get us to go for the construction of such instruments? For sure not by talking and discussing and fighting about the principles and values. Not by political power games, but just by building them, with the help of some friends. It is in our immediate power to create small-size examples. Many are done already, Some show their advantages in a way society can not say no to them anymore. Like the roundabout.

The many small-size experiments in organising life together differently have local influences. But for to change the world we need many more of them. And for this to happen there is no need that we think all the same, all noses in the same direction, to all agree, in order to induce change. We can celebrate differences, and realise different models for different strategies for the same functionality (school, hospital, etc.). We can assess, evaluate, discuss them through how they function. Not a clash of ideas, but an exchange and comparison of different tangible experiences. What is needed is just to start, to do, work, build, create, again: with the help of some friends.

And it is there where change has a chance.

Not Covid, the external enemy, but we-the-people can change and create instruments that change and preferably radicalize our social practices, whether the instruments are schools, hospitals, prisons, stadiums, factories, offices, theaters, parks, public swimming pools, entertainment parks, bars, town halls, post offices, roads, airports, railway stations. We can change them from efficiently operating factories to parks, to forests even, to stroll and exercise, imagine and develop, change and exchange, between us, with us, among us.

What we need is what we have already, the stuff we are made of: imagination, perseverance, resilience, elasticity and endurance.

Imagine we build situations differently that make us, if we want it or not, act differently, think differently.

Hope's only chance to be realized is there where you work for it, preferably work together, as you get more things done, the rest is illusion.

But first we will fall apart.

They lost control, those in power and will want that power stronger back. They will exit the elderly, the differently abled, those with no or low wages and the systemically marginalised. Too expensive and economically useless. Soon we will all feel under threat, ready for protection, for more protection. Economy is not some objective structure as they want us to think it, economy became the art of how to fill your pockets. Those in power, will tighten the control over us, under the disguise of taking care of the people, of to protect them, with the help of the use of big data,

And living will be reduced to functionality and functions, to the life of traffic lights not that of roundabouts.

And I? I will continue building alternative structures, with the help of many friends.

And I think, not hope, we can win. The world is there for all of us and for all that is in it, not just for a couple of egoists narcissists, greedy thieves full of fear for others.

St. Erme, April 8, 2020

Jan Ritsema is founder and director of PAF, Performing Arts Forum, situated in an old convent in the North of France and since four years also of MASSIA, both, alternative residencies for artists, scientists and (media-)activists. Jan Ritsema is a theatre director, contemporary dancer, as well as active in the political scene of the sixties in Amsterdam. His theatre and dance performances are defined by the notion of empowering the people to not let them dream away in illusions but on the contrary to trust them to rely on their observations in order to keep their observation-apparatus sane and reliable. Ritsema wrote numerous articles on these subjects all available on academia.edu. www .pa-f.net / www.massia.ee

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