This is an automatic English translation of the Dutch original.
Post-X Society began with a question: what is our future called? Prompted by the sense that we are letting go of more and more: a fair economy, a trustworthy media ecosystem, an idea of how to live together justly. Without a clear picture of what will take its place. Without a goal in mind. That is what I wanted to work on. On the future itself, not on a corner of it.
And that, as every man and his dog is quick to make clear to you, is exactly what you should not do. So they say.
The guru says: pick one problem
Walk into any startup programme and you will hear it within ten minutes. What is your unique selling point? Which pain do you solve, and for which customer? If you cannot say it in one sentence, you have not got it sharp enough.
Focus, focus, focus. Cut, cut, cut, cut half, then half again. A broad mission is seen as the sign of a confused, wandering mind.
I understand where it comes from. For a company that wants to sell a product in a market, it is excellent advice. But apparently it is expected of foundations too.
Yet it is also a worldview we rarely question out loud. It says: chop the problem up into separate pieces, take the smallest bite-sized piece, and optimise your organisation until you are the best at it. The rest will come later.
That is reductionism. And for a toaster it works fine.
Why that does not work for a society
Reductionism is the idea that you understand the whole by taking it apart. Finding one cause for one effect. Isolate the variables, hold the rest still for a moment. That is how I was trained as an engineer too. But it makes an enormous assumption: that the pieces can be understood in isolation from one another.
It just does not work for a society. A democracy does not let itself be chopped up like that. Inequality, the power of tech companies, the erosion of trust do not play along either. Pull at one end and you notice that everything is inextricably attached to everything else. If you want to tackle disinformation, within a week you run into the capitalist business model of the platforms, and therefore into the whole idea of ownership, power and public debate. That is not scope drift. The many-sidedness is the essence of the problem.
Transition scholars know this. You do not change a system by pulling one part out and optimising it. You have to shift the whole system, or you shift nothing.
A tightly phrased mission is, to me, no sign of focus. It is the outcome of a thought process based on the assumption that your problem can be cut loose from the whole.
At Post-X Society we embrace post-reductionism instead. That does not mean we throw science overboard, but it does mean we cherish the awareness that some things only become visible when you keep them whole. The whole works in a way that the separate parts cannot predict. Emergence is the fancy word for it.
Misunderstood is not the same as wrong
So no, I would rather not pitch our mission in one sentence. Not for lack of sharpness, but because the problem simply does not fit into one sentence. The sharpness lies in other things: we keep the work concrete, keep the mission whole, and do not confuse chopping it up into projects with chopping up reality.
And sometimes I secretly enjoy it a little when someone tries to introduce me. “Well, how shall we describe Pieter?” Then, inside, I hear Hannah Mae singing “misunderstood is not the same as wrong”.
Pieter van Boheemen
Director, Stichting Post-X Society
Photo by Jakub Zerdzicki from Pexels