The recurring saga

Our minds, our hearts and our souls are the stakes here in this attempted awakening, at this crucial inflection point Sri Lanka and the world are going through

Each week I expect to migrate back to global commentary. After all, the world is an escalating mess on the financial, political and social fronts. 

And yet Lanka lures you back, as we can’t quite seem to move on. The widespread collapse has been so terrifyingly comprehensive, fault line after fault line keeps buckling.

And just as the IMF is here, with possibly a financial path forward to offer, the Opposition here boycotts Parliament (a rather odd and capricious democratic strategy at a time when “strikes” seem to be how tantrums are expressed across society, and even just causes get waylaid amidst the clamour and din). So, the PM then has a two front battle, mollify the IMF, and stand taller than the dissenters and try to counter their emotionalism with data and facts.

Not a pretty sight

We have escalating food and fuel prices, and the country is shaken to the core, and was at the risk of unravelling outright. Sri Lanka became the first country in South Asia to default on its debt repayments for over two decades. This sounds truly cataclysmic. However, it was brought about because of the tardy overtures to the IMF and the ultimate realisation that further depletion of reserves should take place under the aegis of debt restructuring.

When $ 7 billion plus in reserves (2019) evaporates to under $ 1 million while facing over $ 50 billion in debt, you have catastrophe writ large. Inflation has now skated past 40%, by far the highest in Asia if not the world, and food, fuel and cooking stoves are the luxury staples of the day. 

Our public health system, once vaunted, now is desperately managing its way, seeking to skirt disaster as medical supplies are so stretched that doctors are forced into heart-wrenching choices. Scarce prescription drugs are escalating in costs. 

And the Opposition other than its “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” boycott, can eviscerate the PM for not having restored the country to solvency in 30 days, but they have yet to offer one substantive idea or game plan anyone could be heartened by. They want the Government to resign on their say-so and then they will swoop in with their “secret” (to date) rescue plan. 

In the meantime, creditors are being assembled, and IMF guard rails are being constructed, and it is perhaps no secret, that no one can take the political theatrics with much more than several bushels of gloom, for the lack of adult political behaviour at this juncture. 

And the President and the entourage of cronies seem unmoved by the slippery slope whereby dreams of becoming Singapore have as Matt Godwin recently commented mutated into the very real risk of a Lebanon-style collapse with the Sri Lankan rupee the worst performing currency in the world. 

We must continue to tell the truth now

The US has surging inflation, rampant shootings, medical fraud courtesy of the Pfizer trial and more. The UK has rail strikes paralysing the country, its own inflation, and public health disinformation galore. And everywhere, journalists, academics and politicians advancing a world view in direct opposition to reality create a legitimacy crisis.  

Why the surprise? Lock down an economy and a society, pay millions to do nothing, spend and borrow and print recklessly tens of billions of pounds and expect no consequences? Pre Putin and the Ukraine, already the consumer price index had hit 6.2% and more.

The “handouts” were actually loans with an extortionate rate of interest. And then on excess deaths, the UK’s rate of 109 per 100,000 was about median among EU member states, but Sweden with drastically fewer restrictions, had just 56 excess deaths per 100,000 at the height of the pandemic and has finished the period with negative excess deaths! 

So the truth is there is no correlation between the speed or harshness of the intemperate regime of “lockdowns” and excess death rates. 

The” voluntarist” Swedish approach, the Japanese (economy essentially open) approach, the Florida “live and let live” approach were clearly intensely preferable. We did not however manage a cost-benefit analysis, while self-destructing economically, and it is this kind of dizzy haze that has afflicted and infected policy making here in Lanka on too many other fronts as well.

And despite claiming here, and abroad, that the economic laws could be summarily suspended, the world is not playing along with these dangerous delusions. Via insane amounts of cash pumped into economies by zero rates, money printing, furloughs, subsidised loans reaching too few, surging inflation and drastically higher prices, are just some of what the derangement has brought in its wake.

Supply chains have yet to rebound, supply of labour has collapsed in many countries, airlines remain dysfunctional, customer service has regressed 20 years, people want to work from home even if they don’t need to. To add irony to insult and injury, we were claiming these “lockdowns” were to protect the elderly, and now wages, in the UK for example, are being slashed in real terms and pensions are rising by 10% and more!  

The same “genius” that went into furlough schemes and could have gone into meaningful tax reform for example, led government after government, and certainly the Sri Lankan government, to embrace gratuitous statism and paternalism. 

Shock after shock

As COVID regulations were set aside, the period of December 2021 to about April 2022 were a great tourist rebound, showing the magnetic appeal of Lanka. However, 13-hour power cuts, no fuel, cars burning in the streets, outbreaks of political violence, soon applied the brakes. 

But, the wrong-headed economic policy, disastrous agricultural decision-making and embracing Chinese infrastructure spending with inadequate ROI follow up, had set up a precarious reality even outside the tourism jolts.

The tax-cutting mania left the Government starved for revenue, and reduced credit ratings that followed, have left it cut off from international debt markets. Gross debt has risen from 91% of annual output in 2018 to 119% in 2019 as per the IMF.

Switching gear and coming awake

Rather than recount the same data points, necessary debt restructuring and constitutional milestones, what will it take us as a culture, a consciousness and a populace to come alive again, to be less malleable and to break the trance?

In our tech culture, our physiology is manically looking for something to “hold,” something to peck at, pings and notifications, a universe beckoning with mass distraction, and virtual landing pods of social familiarity and cohesion.

There is a term now in countries for those seeking relief from this curious plethora of overlapping compulsions, often summed up as “web addiction.” 

And for those who actually toil in those digital fields, being immersed in web consciousness, curating so many minutes during peak hours, catching “breaking tweets”, staying current with various memes, catching scraps of developing stories and fusing them into narratives, are key aptitudes. 

Through this though, without discernment, we are fed fake news, distorting updates that lead us to take on entrenched, untested positions and opinions. 

And those who are mavens, well they lust for “followers” and those insatiable followers need to be “fed” on diets of episodic stimulus/response.

And even those not as actively toiling in the vineyards of digital influencing or fashion, can succumb to their own siren call. Facebook offers faux empowerment by giving everyone a “quasi-blog” and their own audience. Instead of “information” we all go looking for “echo chambers.”

Smartphones deluge people with an online torrent never further away than our own anxieties, or biases, or greed. Those without sustained thoughts can now traffic in “micro-thoughts” on Twitter, gorging on frequency if not calibre or meaningfulness of feedback or reaction. 

Then the Apps landed in our lives and life became detached from everything else, and thinking for yourself, or even “feeling” without socially sanctioned definitions, smacked of banality, or at times, in the land of PC trolls, high treason.

Eminent blogger Andrew Sullivan writes thus:

“If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out. Years later, the joke was running thin. In the last year of my blogging life, my health began to give out. Four bronchial infections in 12 months had become progressively harder to kick. 

Vacations, such as they were, had become mere opportunities for sleep. My dreams were filled with the snippets of code I used each day to update the site. My friendships had atrophied as my time away from the web dwindled. My doctor, dispensing one more course of antibiotics, finally laid it on the line: ‘Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?’”

We are often deluded into thinking we are at the nerve centre, a niche in an evolving global conversation. Unfortunately, everyone else is convinced of the same! We re-invented our instincts alas, have revelled in a lack of sustained concentration, and no longer consider what it is to be human in this context. 

And without exploring what it is to be human today, how can we offer the most vital part of ourselves as a part of a sensible, sentient electorate, seeking to drive change purposefully?

A new life

How shall we distinguish non-living from living? 

Are we enlarged to some extent, able to both immerse in the world and influence it, with our passions and purpose? Or do we cower away in virtual fortresses where we can play-act calling the shots, unable and unwilling to step out into the drama, the adventure, the challenge of being engrossed in actually living, working, interacting, expanding our senses? 

The most typical way of parrying this concern is to solemnly show how the “death of culture” had been forecasted from every advance, from the vernacular English of newly printed Bibles to the mindless cacophony of television in the 50’s, to the kaleidoscope of cable choices, and now all the web “windows” into which and through which we can peer to amuse, bemuse and addle our faculties further. 

So, could it be, this is more of the same, just another cultural off ramp, and not something ominously dystopian? 

But there is a seminal difference. All of our lives are being “wired” into this same circuitry, from education to politics to entertainment. And if we’re not vigilant, so too our health “passports” and even bank accounts.

Our tastes are being tracked, and under the guise of various beneficent service offerings, we are signed up to be surveilled and tracked. Algorithms are being incessantly generated to bait the hook of our attention, so we can witlessly follow, jumping through hoops of ever more intoxicating manufactured “demand.”

There and not there

And the addictive nature is demonstrated, for example, when backpacks come with battery power for smartphones. Of course, if the phone is there for emergency GPS, or calling for help, and we use it for a focused “task” and can readily be without it on the bulk of a hike, fantastic! Then we have enhanced life! 

But if we are “trapped,” constantly photographing every turn, capturing ourselves beaming inanely in front of every destination, as if these are truly attention-exciting social headlines, then we have kidnapped life from ourselves.

Binging on gossip and “information” and overdosing on distractions, numbs and deadens our senses, our awareness, and dampens our ability to just savour sights, sounds, moments, experiences, just as pouring “hot sauce” on chicken broth would disturb that appreciation.

Manically crouching over phones, driving with headphones, being “beeped” while playing with the dogs, scrolling for a confirmation while with the kids. Just look around… in a line for coffee, at the airport, twitching thumbs even in elevators, glazed eyes. No one looks up, and certainly few look “out” or even “in,” we just look down. 

And those who are not “wired”, who are not “connected” get the aftermath of a collapsed culture in which they have neither meaning nor sedation.

At dinner, entire families in their private zombie state, in isolated thraldom, while superficially “together.” The art of conversation lost, the “being” with another person, and taking in the nuances of what they say and what they don’t, picking up cues from body language, just giving the gift of attention… all that seems quaint, alien, shot full of anxious uncertainty.

Hence try to get people to focus on what is needed, and how they can be agents of history in some, small way, at least in their “circles of influence” and watch the anxiety mount.

When all our experience is not ours

As business leaders, as citizens, the experiences we don’t learn from, go through, or invite some measure of insight and enlightenment from, persecute us, imprison us, and recur as patterns or even emotional punishments. 

Either we grow past the past or we defend the outmoded – energy goes to one of those places. And does anyone here in Lanka want a re-run of the recent past?

To the extent that we will not experience the fullness of who we are, the scar tissue of our past failures and traumas delineates our personalities. And when we say “yes” to growing in consciousness, to welcoming and learning, we do not so much “resolve” our challenges, as we start to outgrow them.  

In working environments, we are often asked to bring so little of ourselves to work, that the small fragment that is towed there, is easily burned out, overwhelmed or stymied. In great environments, great performances are forthcoming, as so much more is made room for, invited in and welcomed. 

We consider “informality” proof of our freedom, but that might only be so if we were “free” to be either formal or relaxed and knew and understood both. Then and only then would that be an expansion, rather than a simple collapse of standards and manners. 

Too much of our society and too many of our mores seem remarkably repetitive, in fact, downright derivative. And so we seem to lurch, globally and locally, from well worn calamities to repetitive errors of judgment. It seems we keep voting for Groundhog Day.

The “doing” racket

Not only have we dialled up the “racket” of everyday life, but we have fallen for the “deadly compulsiveness of doing” without understanding “what” we’re doing or “why.” We are frantically active. There is an infinite succession of mindless commitments.

We are human “beings” though and not human “doings” and our beings are nourished where the ego pageant is lessened… on mountaintops, by water, in open spaces and gardens, in woods, in sacred venues, in festive communion with loved ones, admiring art, being moved by music, basking in expressions of devotion and commitment in architecture, embracing great literature and drama, and in the ineffable quiet of sheer contemplative openness in meditation, liturgy, and shared expressions of worship.

But also in vibrant engagement, in doing our duty with dedication, in bringing craftsmanship and meaning to our work, in growing leaders and looking after our stakeholders, in adding value to assets we’ve been entrusted with. As it was said, “The trick is not just to be spiritual in the catacombs, but how to be human in the skyscrapers.”

And the real trick is for private enterprise, percolating up through us to become a conduit for a way forward.

Be here now

Like a safety valve, this releases the pent-up pressures of our wired bedlam. Though easily mockable, it is trying to achieve what our culture once routinely provided, and it reveals, perhaps, that we are not completely helpless in this newly distracted era. 

We can have compassion for our neuroses without congratulating ourselves for them. We can take succour from what Aldous Huxley identified as being part of our human legacy, across culture and time periods: a perennial philosophy. 

We can be grounded, balanced, and therefore we can be equipped to critically appraise what our leaders dole out or seek to drive us towards.

We can interrogate facts peacefully, we can be open to exploring, not compelled to be tribally compliant. 

In Christian tradition, for example, the resurgence of what is being called “Centering Prayer” is easier therefore to fathom with this perspective. 

The person most associated with it in recent years has been Abbot Thomas Keating and the marvellous lay contemplative Mary Mrozowski. Mary indicated the source of these practices as being based on the 17th century French spiritual classic Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Pierre de Caussade. She wrote: 

“To welcome and let go is one of the most radically loving, faith-filled gestures we can make in each moment of each day. It is an openhearted embrace of all that is ourselves and in the world.”

It is a way of being “available” and connecting to the essence of that leadership invitation in our lives again and again, until it becomes a natural place to dock our awareness and consciousness.

And so, we are all invited to “respond”, to be “response-able” at key moments. There are challenges that need our best, crises that required shared leadership, ideas that invite our attention, landscapes asking to be walked, friends and collaborators who would relish real company, life glowing with so many facets to embrace and humbly and openly experience and seek to creatively influence. 

And while our capacity to undermine ourselves is too vast to catalogue, for today’s civilisation, the dissipation of focus, the easy appeal to “misguided” versions of superficial “joy-lite,” the exponential unremitting bombardment of distraction is our special challenge.

Our minds, our hearts and our souls are the stakes here in this attempted awakening, at this crucial inflection point Sri Lanka and the world are going through. Otherwise, we may get so distracted we may “lose” our minds, tarnish our hearts, and as for our souls… well, we may even “forget” we have any. 

Beyond distraction lies the ground of our being and becoming. And if we can bring ourselves fully to this moment, where we must all be heard, where we all must be counted, we may just find that road less travelled, to recovery and growth and beyond.