Are you being a good ancestor?
This episode of How We Future features public philosopher Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor and History for Tomorrow, to explore how we can break free from short-term thinking and start planning in generations, not quarters.
Roman argues we all have two competing forces. The marshmallow brain seeks instant gratification. The acorn brain enables long-term thinking, the kind that built sewers in 19th century London for a much larger future population. History shows what’s possible when we activate that capacity.
Roman shares practical steps to become better ancestors, from giving children your vote to building social cohesion through community action. He offers examples of things that went right in history and the importance of recognizing what we should repeat, not just what we shouldn’t.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
Why long-term thinking is wired into our brains and how to activate it
What it takes for real transformative change to happen
Why social trust matters more than technology for our survival
Roman sees signs of change, from the EU creating an Intergenerational Fairness Index to educators teaching students to think like futurists, not just historians. The future is ours to create together.
Links from the episode:
Roman Krznaric Site
Roman’s new online course: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Term World
Book: The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long Term Thinking
Book: History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity
TED Talk: How to be a Good Ancestor
Long Now Talk: Roman Kzrnaric and Kate Raworth
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This week’s guest is public philosopher Roman Krznaric, whose work focuses on asking the important question: Are we being good ancestors? Roman is the author of The Good Ancestor and, more recently, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity. He spent years studying how we think about time and why we feel endlessly trapped in the tyranny of the now.
In our conversation, we talk about why our brains are actually wired for long-term thinking, what we can learn from history’s bright spots, and practical ways to stretch our time horizon, including a great story about how Roman “gave” his vote to his 11-year-old kids. This is a conversation about slowing down to see further and remembering that the choices we make today echo across generations to come. Let’s jump in with Roman Krznaric.
Roman, thank you so much for joining us today.
Roman Krznaric: Oh, it’s a pleasure and a privilege, and I’m looking forward to the adventure of our conversation.
Lisa: Fantastic. We are going to go through many temporal zones, going back in history, going forward. I can’t help but think of the irony in some ways, Roman, that I am calling you from Silicon Valley, where this is like the tyranny of the now on steroids, like faster time zones, move fast and break things, let’s get it out, let’s ship. You are joining us from across the pond, where you are helping put out ideas in the world that are asking us to take a longer lens.
I can’t think of a more perfect juxtaposition to talk about right now, about what it means to actually slow down and take a longer lens. I wanted to start with really where I first got connected with your work when you wrote the book The Good Ancestor. I wonder if we could just talk a little bit about how you came to that framing about why it’s important for us to think about being a good ancestor.
Roman: Sure. That book, The Good Ancestor, grew out of a sense of frustration, really, a frustration with the politicians who couldn’t see beyond the next election or the latest opinion poll, and that’s still the case, the businesses who can’t see beyond the quarterly report, with myself looking at my phone and clicking the Buy Now button, with the nations sitting around international conference tables and arguing with each other while the planet burns and species disappear. There’s a frustration there with the tyranny of the now, the chronic short-termism of our age, which we know permeates all realms of life.
In a way, this is not a new problem. As you know, in a sense, it goes back to the invention of the mechanical clock in the 13th century in Italy, where that was when we started slicing time up into hours or quarter hours, and by 1600, most clocks had minute hands. By 1800, they had second hands. Now we’ve got the nanosecond-speed share trading of the stock market or TV programs like The Bear, which I’ve been watching the last series recently, where, what has it got up on the wall? “Every Second Counts,” which in a way is the catchphrase not just of the TV series but of our whole culture, at least of Western culture.
All that led me into the idea of The Good Ancestor. Then, of course, the great question asked by Jonas Salk, the immunologist who developed the first polio vaccine back in the ‘50s, where later in life, in fact, in the late 1970s, I came across this incredible question of his, which is, are we being good ancestors? I remember when I came across that, literally, the hair stood up on my arms. I suddenly thought, “Oh, my God. This is the question.”
I’ve only slowly, in a way, come to realize the profundity of it. Part of it, I think, ultimately, is that we can talk a lot about future generations. That can sound quite abstract, whereas being a good ancestor is about me and you, and it’s about us, and it’s about our responsibility. That’s why I think the language we use here is really so important for helping us bridge across time to enable our minds to perform the temporal pirouette that we’re so capable of.
Lisa: I love how you brought up the language because I have to say, when I read your book for the first time, we were just coming out of the pandemic, and I also felt like the hair on the back of my neck stood up because of exactly what you’re talking about, which is the framing of it. I’ve been doing futures work now for decades, and it can be very abstract, out there, removed. Your book is really an invitation to lean in and to take responsibility on some of these huge, complex challenges that can feel out of reach. Increasingly, I’m really focused on what can I do to help people move from this feeling of anxiety to action.
I think your book, The Good Ancestor, and your more recent one, too, about history for tomorrow, gives us on-ramps. It serves as a bridge to try to make some of those connections and to hold up a mirror and say, “Wait, what are you doing today in order to help future generations to come, and how we might activate some of the things that are uniquely human in us, that we are all capable of having a longer-term perspective in spite of some of the short-termism and the tyranny of now that’s coming at our way. I just really want to thank you. I know sometimes you talk about being a public philosopher, and I think we need more public philosophers to challenge us, to say, “We don’t have to accept this status quo.”
Roman: It’s really interesting to think about all the different ways of going at this issue of trying to, in a way, rupture the domination of the present tense. Of course, I try to do it through books, and that’s just one way. In fact, recently I just installed on my kitchen wall a new clock made by a radical horologist called Scott Thrift up in Vermont. He sent me this clock, and it’s an amazing clock. It’s called The Present. It looks like a normal clock, but it’s only got one hand. That one hand takes a whole year to go all the way around.
When it’s pointing upwards, it’s pointing at the twelve o’clock position is the winter solstice, so December the 21st. Then it goes around to the spring equinox, the summer solstice, then to the fall, and then back up around. In a way, it’s a symbol of the challenge that we face. How do we recognize the wild clocks of the cosmos, all these different kinds of time, so exactly that we can think on these longer perspectives and break out of the rupture of chronic short-termism? I’d love that clock to be on the wall in every parliament, every business, as we’re making decisions, trying to think about the choices that we make.
Lisa: It’s such a great concrete reminder of the fact that we are capable of thinking about different time horizons. Of course, you and I are very involved with an organization based out here called the Long Now Foundation, which has been trying to help us think about millennia, even increments of 10,000 years, by creating a concrete mythic project like a 10,000-year clock that’s been in the works and is going to be completed soon.
Even that example that we don’t necessarily need a 10,000-year clock, but we can actually put a different kind of symbolic clock in our kitchens, or the Long Now asks us to put a zero in front of the year. We are not in 2026, we are in 02026, just to remind us that there are many thousands of years to come. It can be a powerful reminder that we don’t necessarily need to respond to every ding, every click, every distraction that narrows and shortens our focus. We actually have the ability to take a longer view on how we think about our days in the context of years, in the context of thousands of years.
Roman: I think also, it’s a very human thing to do this. I think we keep telling ourselves this story that we’re short-term thinkers, that we like immediate rewards and instant gratification, and the algorithms are all built on this to keep us scrolling, to maximize the eyeballs. Actually, if you suddenly just think about your own life, let’s take the year that your grandmother was born. Then, if you happen to have children, you might imagine the year that your grandchild might die. There is a span of probably 200 and 250 years. That’s just on the very personal level.
I remember when I realized that. It’s such a simple thing. I was thinking, actually, about my daughter. I suddenly thought, “My God. She could be alive in the year 2100.” To recognize that that future isn’t science fiction, but it’s something intimate, it’s an intimate family fact, really shifted my thinking. To know that, look, if I care about her life, I need to care about all of life, really, because she’s not alone in that future in 2100. She’s embedded in communities. She’s embedded in the living world, the air she breathes, the water that she drinks.
Just in a very practical sense, I’m talking, for example, to politicians. Not long ago, I spoke in front of the Dutch Senate. There, I’m speaking to people from parties across the political spectrum, from the left to the right, to the Greens, to the others, whatever. They’re caught up in the immediacy of the political crises, whatever the next one they’re going through. I’m trying to talk to them about how to take a longer view of public policy, which is cathedral thinking view, the kind of thing that both of us have been thinking a lot about and working on, how do we get our societies, our economic and political institutions thinking longer?
When you’ve got the senators in the room with you, I’ve found one of the best ways to really open their imaginations is to go in at that personal level to talk about the children, or the grandchildren, the nephews, or the nieces, because wherever you are in the political spectrum, you are an intertemporal being in some sense. You’ve got a legacy with meaning that stretches across the landscape of time. I think in practical way, we need to work with that. While I love the Long Now Foundation, things like the 10,000 Year Clock, because I’m a Long Now research fellow and on their new board, but I think we need, in a way, multiple ways of trying to break out of the now.
Lisa: I totally agree. In fact, your book, I’m not even sure you know this, but I shared your book with my colleagues at the D School. I think we got 50 copies for everyone. One of my colleagues, Louis Montoya, is a brilliant learning designer. He was so inspired about this idea of making the long-term more concrete that he developed a maker’s workshop based on the portrait of a descendant. Works a lot with educators to watch your incredible TED talk on being a good ancestor, which we will link in the show notes, just to set this mode, start to, as you were saying, establish the language of what we’re capable of, that we’re not just in this present moment, we’re also thinking about ourselves as good ancestors.
Then he has them imagine their descendants’ descendants’ descendant. Just as you were saying, basically my child’s grandchild or my grandchild’s child, but in a very personal way. He has them really envision it. Then he has all these materials out on a table and has them actually build out what the portrait of that descendant might look like through these scaffolded questions.
Roman: Wow. That sounds amazing.
Lisa: It’s incredible. Very much based on this incredible Maori experience that you talk about in your book of Whakapapa, of this notion of that we are connected to generations that have come before us and generations that will come, but in order to really establish that connection, to visualize it, and then to make it. The frame represents if they were to look out the window, what might they see, their identity, who they are in the world.
Then that final part where the artist writes a statement to these descendants’ descendants’ descendant. It is transformative. We’ve had the opportunity to do this at South by Southwest. We did it at the Smithsonian Futures Museum. I just really want to thank you for the seed of how we could allow more people to essentially narrow that gap between now and the far future.
Roman: It’s lovely to hear that example. Of course, it’s certainly not only my doing. I’ve drawn on indigenous wisdom. I’ve drawn on writings of thinkers in the 18th and 19th century on all this kind of stuff and thinkers like yourself. I think design is a particularly interesting world to explore this in because design has this multidisciplinary approach, which is absolutely necessary because time is everywhere and it’s in everything.
It’s the kind of invisible sea that we’ve lived our whole lives in. How often do we actually stand back and think about what our descendants’ descendants’ descendants might actually look like? Of course, in these exercises, in a way, it doesn’t matter if you can’t really picture them. The whole point is to try and get us to see where we are now, and that maybe it doesn’t have to be this way, and that our minds and our institutions could be just that little bit different.
Lisa: Absolutely. Even just triggering that, “Wait a minute, whose time is this? Why am I behaving in this way? What else could I do to try to extend a longer span of how I’m thinking about a challenge or an issue?” I love one of the notions of Danny Hillis, one of the founders of the Long Now, who says it is much easier to imagine solving complex problems over a longer time horizon than the short now, which can feel so chaotic and responsive.
This idea that all of us, as humans, and I think you really talk about this and I want to spend a little time talking about it, are capable of that long-term thinking, that we all have the, I think you call it the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain, and that’s within all of us, not just for a select few. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the difference between the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain.
Roman: Yes. I do think we all have wired inside us these two different forms of thinking. Of course, there are many ways to dissect the human brain, but at least one of them is to recognize that on the one hand, while we do have short-term drivers, the dopamine responses, the marshmallow brain, of course, named after that famous 1960s marshmallow test where kids were offered a marshmallow, they can resist it for 15 minutes, they’re rewarded with a second one.
Though most kids did snatch the snack in that famous experiment, it’s not the whole story of who we are because we also have wired into our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the front of our brains, an acorn brain, as I call it, that part of our neuroanatomy, which is about long-term thinking and planning and strategizing, because that is what enabled us to build the Great Wall of China or the sewers of 19th century London, which were built twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time, and that’s why they’re still used today. It’s the acorn brain which has enabled us to voyage into space.
We’re always, though, of course, in a struggle between the marshmallow and the acorn. Do we party today or plan for our pensions for tomorrow? Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone, or do we plant a seed in the ground for posterity? I think what’s really important to remember here is that we’re actually pretty good at this. Other animals do plan ahead a bit, like a chimpanzee that strips the leaves off a stick to turn it into a tool to put in a termite hole, but they won’t make a dozen of those tools and stick them aside for next week, which is exactly what human beings do.
We’ve got to nurture this capacity for long-term thinking and always be remembering what we are capable of. That’s partly why I love history so much, because when you look through the past, you can see all these incredible examples of long-term vision. I’m about to go to Barcelona in a few days. They’ve nearly finished building the Sagrada Família Church, the Basilica, begun in 1882, almost completed 150 years later. Let’s do a bit of that, please, when it comes to dealing with how to wean ourselves off our carbon addictions or to deal with the risks of AI and genetic engineering.
Lisa: Oh, I’ll be so excited to hear about that visit, because I do think there is something about-- Listen, you don’t have to be Gaudi to be the one to imagine La Sagrada Família, but just to even notice it, to have awe for it, to realize that somebody had the wherewithal to think about a cathedral that would take decades or generations to build, an urban plan that would take a long time and just noticing and telling those stories about those visionaries that were willing to plan for long futures is, I think, so important to widen our imagination.
I really appreciate when you talked about Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking, Fast and Slow, that our brains are capable of both, that we also need to be thinking about short and long. Roman, I don’t know if I’ve ever showed this to you, and those of us that are just listening can’t see. I think your book is one of the most dog-eared, lined book I have. As I was reading it, in the back, I started to think about, “My goodness, what if we actually had a mandatory class on long-term thinking or even just time? I’ve been talking to actually Kevin Kelly about this for a while. What if we taught fourth graders, that’s about 10 years old in American schooling, what if we taught them how to think about time, long and short?
Roman: I absolutely agree with you. If you think about kids even younger than that are taught to do this thing called tell the time. What are they really taught? They’re taught about a very narrow form of time, which is time on a clock, 10 past 3, and a quarter to 9. It’s a very abstract and strange thing, even that. Why not teach long-term thinking? Why not make that normal? Because we are capable of it. We develop that capacity even at a very young age to start dreaming about the future and about the past.
That’s why I remember going to see Star Wars as a kid in 1978 or something like that. I was dreaming, though it said it was set in the past, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Actually, my mind, of course, it’s about a future. We all have this capability, but it’s not part of how we’re taught. Of course, you’ve been doing this work at the Stanford Design School and stuff, trying to embed this thinking that’s so fundamental because it needs to spread like a good virus, let’s say, into the minds of a whole generation.
Lisa: Absolutely. It starts with the scaffolding. A lot of times when I’m thinking about helping more students think of themselves as futurists, not to predict the future, but to have agency and making choices that can shift markets, shift our societies, not just for now and not just for a quick return, but over the long term, it is this dance between helping change their mindset, which sometimes starts with a provocative question like, “Are you being a good ancestor,” and also scaffolding it with other experiences that help them notice, “Wait a minute, somebody else made this. Why couldn’t I make this?”
What are some examples of what else could happen, which is, I think, so important and embedded in your work that you don’t just name it. It’s certainly in The Good Ancestor, you’re talking about the time rebels that are taking what’s available to them today and trying to reimagine and ignite different conversations about what could be. Certainly, when you were writing about this, I think Greta Thunberg is a great example of a young time rebel that was willing to say, “Wait a minute, why are you destroying our planet and really starting with a small movement, but then quickly, as a young person, found herself in front of some of the most important influencers at Davos and others and really launched a global movement.
Roman: Yes, absolutely. I think we need to remember the power of those kind of movements, the disruptive movements for change, we do need the time rebels on the streets. We also need peer-to-peer inspiration, which I think is a very important form of change. If you think, for example, the way some of the new economic thinking has been emerging, for example, the idea of Doughnut Economics, a kind of economics not based on constant growth, but an economy that can thrive within the limits of the planet that began in Amsterdam a few years ago.
Then once Amsterdam city council says, “Yes, we’re going to take on this new model,” then Copenhagen says they’re going to do it. Then Barcelona, then somewhere in Colombia, then in Canada. I think, though my natural instinct is to look for historical examples of where we’ve been longer-term thinkers, we’ve shifted our systems, we can also find them today in that kind of peer-to-peer inspiration that’s so vital.
Lisa: I’m so glad you brought up Doughnut Economics because it gives me a chance to talk about one of my favorite all-time long now talks, which is you in conversation with your brilliant wife, Kate Raworth, talking about what history can teach us about Doughnut Economics. It is one of the singular most brilliant talks I’ve ever heard, let alone a power intellectual couple like you sitting at your kitchen table just like having a Sunday evening dinner. [laughs] Actually, maybe we could jump to that. What was that experience like to have that conversation with Kate? Is that just like what you typically talk about on a Monday night?
Roman: Definitely not. In fact, that was, I think, probably the first time we’ve ever sat down and did a real event together or a conversation together for a public audience. It was really fun, actually, because, of course, over the years, our work has got closer and closer together. We’re not always talking about it. Sometimes we’re just talking about whose turn it is to do the washing up. Because she’s developed the Doughnut Economics theory, and it has become a global phenomenon. In my own work, I’ve been thinking most recently about the lessons of history, my new book, History for Tomorrow.
It was really interesting to think about the confluences. Just to give one example, something that she’s worked on a lot is the idea of how do we create genuinely circular economies, which are reusing, repairing, refurbishing materials, which is so fundamental. I can’t see how we can have a deeply sustainable long-term society without that. From my perspective, it was great to talk to her about the things which I’ve been starting to look into for this book, History of Tomorrow, like how in 18th-century Japan, they basically had what today we’d call a circular economy.
That was partly because in the city of Edo, today’s Tokyo, which was a huge city in the 18th century, far bigger than London or Paris or LA at the time, wherever, they also had a circular economy where they did reuse, repair, refurbish everything. You’d have a kimono and use it till the cloth began to wear out, which you’d then turn into pajamas you’d wear at night. Then you’d turn that into diapers, cut it up. You’d then turn it into cleaning cloths. You’d finally burn the precious cotton as fuel. They partly did that, interestingly, actually, because they had shortages of precious resources like wood and cotton, because they weren’t trading much with the outside world.
They’d also chopped down all their forests, their old-growth forests. They had all these strict regulations on rationing of wood, for instance. That was something we ended up talking a little bit about in that Long Now event because of the really important lesson, I think, to learn from history is that we can be innovative within boundaries, that innovation isn’t just a boundaryless phenomena, but it can happen within limits of certain kinds. If you think that in Japan in that period, they created a thriving culture and economy out of limits, and they innovated in terms of circularity and recycling, reusing.
Equally, pretty much at the same time, but earlier, we had Mozart was composing on a five-octave piano. We know Jimi Hendrix played on a six-string guitar. I think we shouldn’t be afraid of limits. Of course, this is obviously a Silicon Valley issue too. I was recently reading Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, an accelerationist tract, which is giving the opposite message of that. Actually, I think the historical lesson is actually one where we have thrived within in limits. Let’s embrace that in a positive way when we’re thinking about dealing with tech risks, for example.
Lisa: Absolutely. I love that you are focusing on history and been really enjoying your latest book because, while I think it’s the famous Mark Twain quote, “While history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” It can feel so overwhelming any day you wake up just to read the headlines, experience the poly crisis. They seem to be getting more complex, more rapid. You say, “I don’t know what to do. Let me give up.” I think so much of your work is to say, “No, don’t give up. There are models to look at. It may not be exactly what it is, but there’s so much to learn.”
What I often say is there are no facts about the future, but we can visit the future. Part of that visiting of the future is understanding our past and where some of these patterns might have played out to give us hope. I think infused in all of your work is an invitation for radical hope, not based on magic, but based on a different lens or a set of lenses that we can look at what is available to us today, and that includes history. I will say, I do think history is having a moment. It gives me a little hope. I recently discovered The Rest is History podcast, and I have been devouring it.
My family is very funny. They’re like, “Are you spending any time in the present right now?” Of course, my gosh, it’s been around for these two British historians for the last four or five years. They have over 800 episodes at this point. They’re like rock stars in the UK. What I love about what they’re doing is they’re not just telling history in a dry way. They’re, in some ways, teaching us to be anthropologists, to be contextual understanders of different moments in time. I find that incredibly helpful as a grounding for how to interpret this moment and what’s to come. I’m very hopeful that we can actually learn from history, and I think your book is a huge part of that.
Roman: Yes, thanks. I love that podcast, too. The Rest is History is brilliant. When I go on long train journeys, like I’m going to be going tomorrow to Spain and to Germany, I’ve been listening to downloaded episodes of the history of the Titanic and the history of the First World War, and history of Cleopatra, and all sorts of interesting things, because all of those things, whether intended to or not, I think they open our imaginations. We wouldn’t drive a car without looking in the rearview mirror. It’s very important to learn from history.
The way we tend to learn from history is to think about everything that’s gone wrong, captured in that famous aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We do need to learn from the stuff that’s gone wrong, from colonialism and fascism, and those issues really still are playing out today in politics. We also need to learn from what’s gone right, from the positive examples where human societies have managed to rise up and create change and overcome crises, and deal with challenges. That’s what I’ve tried to do in History for Tomorrow.
I’ve gone through the last 1,000 years, which is about as far as my brain could go back, and try to, in a way, curate examples to tell us that the current world doesn’t have to be this way, and you don’t have to be utopian to think of something different. The idea of being a futurist or think about the future needs to be grounded in the past. Of course, futurists often say, “You need to look at least twice as far back as if you want to look forward.” I think we need to go even further than that. Let’s go back 10 times as far, or as long as the records are still of good quality.
Lisa: Absolutely. I agree with you 100% that while our brains are wired to pick up on the threats, which is why we tend to over-focus on the negativity, that putting bright spots out there can also-- It’s actually critical to really help more people realize that they are capable of imagining new futures, as you say, and bringing them to life. One of my favorite questions I ask my students in the beginning of a class, whether I’m teaching Inventing the Future or a new class I just started called View from the Future, where we bring in people that are actually living on the edges of their fields in order to help our students think about their career path, their opportunities, not just over-indexing on the past, but getting a glimpse of people, what I call living in the future.
Roman: That sounds brilliant. What kind of people come along?
Lisa: We intentionally have all kinds of disciplines there to really inspire people to think beyond what they thought they were going to do. We have architects come in that talk about how they’re reimagining the built environment using sustainable materials. I don’t have any architects in my class, but helping them realize that, wow, there are people that are thinking about this in a holistic way, that that’s really valuable. We’ve had people talking about the future of media, where we get our information, what it really means to create. We’ve got a guest coming up talking about the unkillable newsroom.
How do we reimagine business models that actually allow us to have an informed civic politique? We have folks that are coming in talking about the future of fashion, even exploring what does it mean to actually create a moral imagination within a society that seems to be dictated by influencers. This is an incredible executive that has reimagined a cosmetic company that actually has social impact at its core. She said, “Most cosmetic companies are sending influencers to fancy places to take pictures of themselves.” She said, “I send them into disaster areas to actually have them do the work-
Roman: Wow.
Lisa: -and just to model that we don’t need to live in these narrow-minded ways, that we can actually have broad impact.” Again, it’s not about, “Oh, therefore a student will exactly go into that,” but it’s to open up their perspective and the surface area of, “Wow, where else should I be looking? What questions should I be asking? How might I be a part of inventing new futures?” It’s just been so exciting to see what’s possible when you just entertain conversations with people living in the future. I want to talk to you about a few more concepts in your book, History for Tomorrow, particularly around this idea of the disruption nexus, this notion that when we are in the middle of a crisis, it takes a number of different ingredients to find our way out of it.
Roman, this has been something I feel like we’ve been living in the poly crisis for the last five years. One of the things I try to say, not only to students I work with, but leaders, is that we can’t expect the world to just get more simple. We have to change. We have to adapt. It’s folly to think that “When we get over this hump,” I think even recent history has said there is no getting over, there’s only more. If we can’t expect the world to change, we have to change. By looking at history, I know you’ve noticed some patterns about what it takes to get out of these crises. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about it.
Roman: Sure. I don’t know about you, but I certainly get frustrated by the fact that we can have all these crises, we can have melting ice sheets, we can have financial crashes, all sorts of things, and yet still our societies and governments don’t tend to change very much. There’s so much inertia. Occasionally, there are moments where we will enact change at the speed and scale required during a war or during a pandemic or something like that. Outside those very extreme occasions, how do we get rapid transformative change? That’s the question I started asking myself.
The pattern I noticed in history, and this is not like an iron law, it’s more like a rule of thumb, which is that three things really need to come together. It’s a model that you mentioned there, which I call the disruption nexus. Three things need to come together. First, you need some kind of crisis to be happening, financial, economic, ecological, technological. The second thing you need are new ideas or innovative ideas that can replace the old system, which is in crisis. The third thing you need are disruptive movements, which can amplify the sense of crisis.
There are many, many examples of this through history. If you think about why did the Berlin Wall fall in 1989, the collapse of state socialism in East Germany, you had those three things come together. There was a crisis in the leadership of the East German government. They’re all arguing about how to respond to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. Then you had the ideas around freedom of movement, freedom of association, many growing out of the works of the great Czech writer, Václav Havel. Then you had the movements, the people on the streets in Leipzig, and then in Germany in November 1989.
There’d been protests for years in East Germany, but nothing had changed. What happened in 1989, November, was this confluence. I think it’s really interesting to ask yourself as a changemaker where one sits in these three corners, the different parts of the disruption nexus. I think some of us feel at ease with being on the streets, the people who are engaged in direct action. Others feel more comfortable being in the realm of ideas, working in think tanks or in education, which is sometimes bridging the two. I think what the historical story is, is that it’s quite risky to try and create change without the disruptive movements, particularly.
I know people often don’t like them, but people didn’t like Martin Luther King Jr. He was hated in many ways by the white liberal elite. Again, even those basic civil rights legislation wouldn’t have happened. It would have taken a lot longer without the disruption. I think what’s really interesting today in a historical sense is that some of the more radical ecological movements, nonviolent movements like Extinction Rebellion or others in different parts of the world, they get demonized by the press and criminalized by the police.
That’s a failure to recognize the importance of these disruptive movements in history. Going back to slave rebellions in the Caribbean in the 19th century or the movement to overthrow British colonialism in India. Again, I’m not a natural rebel of that kind myself, but I have found myself engaging in some of that more political action because I can’t think of a better way to be a good ancestor.
Lisa: I think it’s so important to point out that you need all of these things. Certainly, the crises seem all around us every day, and we are seeing a lot of movements, certainly protests of various nature. That third part, though, is the part that really captures my imagination, which is the idea part, that reaction and pushback is not enough. It’s critical, but not enough. This idea, and again, why I’m so excited about what Kate is doing with Doughnut Economics as an alternative model to traditional capitalism, to say, “You know what? You can have growth, and you can do it in a way that doesn’t exploit and extract our resources for future generations.
Part of what I am really trying to do in my work and even in How We Future is to surface more ideas and to encourage people to be more bold in their imagination because just reacting is not enough. We can do that at every level. Again, both of your books and even in your other work, and empathy is another huge part of what it will take to come up with ideas to be empathetic for the future, to really think about what are things that we can do right now.
I want to maybe close with some of those more tangible actions that we can do right now to spark that imagination and to spark agency. I know one of the things that you talk about is this idea of getting your children more involved with making decisions about the future by engaging them in voting and participating in the discussions about what’s happening in policy and parliament right now. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, and we’ll talk through some more examples.
Roman: Yes. Actually, a few years ago, my partner and I decided to give our votes in the UK general election to our kids, our twins, who were then 11 years old. We sat around the kitchen table and debated the manifestos of the parties. They told us where to put the X on the ballot sheet, and they still have our votes. They’re 17. Soon, we’ll get our votes back. It was a very practical example of trying to recognize that the way our decisions are made are not taking into account the voices or interests of those generations of tomorrow. I think that’s one thing one can do. That’s a very practical thing.
I think a lot of this is about escaping from the limits of individualism, actually. It’s about doing things together. They can always take very, very different forms. Yes, you might want to block a road in a climate protest, but you might work with your parents from the local parent-teacher association to put solar panels on your roof. It might be about being involved in a community garden or farmers’ markets, all sorts of different kinds of things. I remember once the great environmental campaigner Bill McKibben being asked by someone, “What should I do as an individual?” His reply was, “Be less of an individual.”
I think there’s a fundamental truth in that, that there’s something very important about social cohesion to help us survive times of turbulence, the poly crisis you were talking about. I know this is going to sound obscure and not practical, but it is practical. In the 14th century, there was this Islamic historian called Ibn Khaldun, and he wrote a book called the Muqaddimah. The Muqaddimah was about the rise and fall of civilizations. There’s a word that occurs over 500 times in that book, and it’s asabiyyah. Asabiyyah is an Arabic word meaning collective solidarity or group feeling.
Ibn Khaldun argued that what made a civilization survive through time and thrive was strong asabiyyah, strong social trust. Those societies which crumbled were those that had weak asabiyyah, for example, because of great wealth inequalities that created polarization. Ultimately, the secret, I think, to longevity of a society is social trust. You build that through conversations, through doing things with other people, as well as, of course, doing things like having future generations commissioners in your local county or whatever it is. Let’s try and escape from the inheritance of 20th century individualism and see if we can work out what we can do together to flip that me upside down to become a we.
Lisa: It’s so powerful, and it really echoes a lot of the themes from the conversations we’ve had with past How We Future guests, which is that the future doesn’t necessarily or shouldn’t be dictated by technology. Again, that feels very interesting to be saying that here, sitting in Silicon Valley, but it’s really about the bonds of trust and connection and affection that we build today, the slow way.
We’ve had conversations with Dana Cowin, who is the former editor of Food & Wine for 20 years, that has been on a mission to ignite social cohesion through what she calls progressive hedonist dinner parties, which are essentially potlucks that honor the kind of food we can eat that is plant-based and also builds joy, this idea that we can connect via joy. We’ve had guests talking about the power of play. Jill Vialet started a national nonprofit that has helped children, millions of children learn how to build trust and connection through their recess, this idea that recess, the time between classes, could be the most important time.
We’re really just trying to help elevate these concepts as being core to what it actually means to build a thriving, long-term future society. What I hope for, and I want to maybe end with some things that you hope for, is that we can learn how to talk about these things in ways that get measured for the long-term. Nobody applies to college really and says, “You know what? I’m the greatest social cohesion creator ever. That’s just not a thing. It could be. We need, again, more language to describe it, more ways to talk about why it’s so critical, or even organizations. There was a time when, oh, everyone was talking about not shareholder value but stakeholder value, but we didn’t really do that deeply.
We didn’t really say, “Hey, let us mark you on the good ancestor scale, company XYZ. When you have your earnings reports, here’s how you’re going to talk about it, or in your key performance indicator, of if you’ve been a great employee over the year, how are we going to measure that invisible way that you’re contributing to the culture, to the social fabric, to the trust? I think we have a long way to go, but it’s work like yours and conversations like this that I hope are opening up others’ minds about more holistic ways of thinking about the contributions that we’re making towards a better future.
Roman: What that actually makes me think of very much in brief, though, is at the European Union level, I was recently contacted by them because they’ve decided, partly after having some of their people reading the book The Good Ancestor, to create an intergenerational fairness index to measure the long-term impacts of public policy across all the European nations, which is great, but let’s now take that also into companies as well.
What would the equivalent of an intergenerational fairness index look like that goes beyond just ticking a few ESG boxes but actually is much more embedded in the kind of vision that the Long Now Foundation and others like yourself are thinking about to really enable us to be able to say with a kind of deep truth that we are being the good ancestors that future generations deserve?
Lisa: That it’s possible. I feel like the case studies of good companies to talk about have to be more than just Patagonia. [laughs] What else can we talk about, and how do we get as fluid talking about them as we do with some of these other companies that feel like they’re destroying our future generation? Really bolstering up our vocabulary and the heroes that we look towards, rather than the ones that feel like that they’re getting all the airtime.
I just think it’s absolutely critical, and it’s one reason, Roman, why I continue to be so grateful and want to do what I can to support your work in the world, to support more educators creating exciting and immersive experiences like A Portrait of Descendant, like the one we talked about. I should share one more example. I’ve been working with a number of schools and their civic teachers that used to have capstone projects of thinking like a historian, that there are now also including thinking like a futurist to make the connection between the past and the future, to really prompt that sense of agency.
It’s going to take all of us. We’re so grateful for your time today, so grateful for your work. I look forward to more opportunities to explore how we can support more people, more leaders, more of our next generation becoming good ancestors.
Roman: Oh, thank you so much for the conversation then. We are all just little boats in a great flotilla floating towards a different future. Let’s all do it together in our own ways, and let’s create a plurality of possibilities for a different world. Thank you so much.
Lisa: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Roman Krznaric. If you’d like to try out Roman’s philosophy, here’s something you can do this week. Notice one decision you’re making. Then ask yourself, what would a good ancestor do? It might be small, but it might change everything. If this conversation resonated, please share it with someone thinking about legacy, leadership, and what we owe the future. Check out Roman’s TED Talks and books. They’re full of ideas worth exploring. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time on How We Future.