The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference took place in London this week featuring contributions from well known intellectuals and media figures alike.
The conference, ARC, brought together approximately 4,000 delegates from around the world with a view to continuing the “vital work of restoring and renewing our societies.”
The conference, which is in part the brainchild of Canadian psychologist and internet sensation, Jordan B. Peterson, aims to gather “world-leading thinkers, business leaders, policy makers, and culture formers to interrogate some of today’s most important social, economic, cultural, and moral questions.”
In his final remark to the packed out auditorium, Peterson welcomed the attendees “aboard the arc”.
Among the topics up for debate were prosperity, energy sources, mental health, religious freedom, national sovereignty, AI, the economy of a “pro-human future”, and re-industrialisation, and population decline.
Erica Komisar, a clinical social worker, author, psychoanalyst, psychological consultant, and parent guidance expert with over 30 years of practice, addressed issues related to mental health.
Komisar said that over the last 70 years, “there has been a shift away from a more relational, empathetic, family-oriented approach to life to a more individualistic and self-centred one. The result has been increasing self-orientation and a focus on the freedom to be “me”: my ambition, my desires, my pleasure, my needs.”
She said this means that the “joy of responsibility for one’s own family and caring for others has been replaced with self-centredness, which can bring immediate gratification, but also long-term loneliness and mental health consequences.”
This move from “nurturing our collective well-being to that of the individual,” she says is a “major component of the mental health disorders we see in our children and youth today.”
Komisar says that societal shifts “can impact the mental health disorders which people experience, and the disorders that are diagnosed can indicate societal shifts. The large number of patients suffering from addictions, narcissistic disorders of the self, and personality disorders is a sign that all is not well for the human being in our times.”
She argued that there is an “undeniable tear in the social fabric which has resulted in a global mental health crisis in children, adolescents, and youth. One in five youth will develop a mental illness before leaving childhood, and many will carry this illness into their adult years.”
“There is a great deal of concern and hand wringing over this crisis, but little understanding of its root causes on a deeper psychological level-which are uncomfortable, controversial, and personal.” she said.
Komisar pointed to “an overwhelming drive to attribute the breakdown of our children to social media, increased academic pressure, and shifts in gender and sexual norms. But the inconvenient truth is that although the mental health crisis is multivariable, and outside forces-which do play a part-are stressful, we as parents are primarily responsible.”
“We are raising children who are self-centred, self-focused, and without the inclination or ability to take on responsibility and commitment, or to sacrifice for others. This change is occurring despite the research that shows how happiness is tied to the ability to give to others, and giving to others is tied to happiness.?” she said.
Reindustrialise: “Building capacity, security, and prosperity on a de-globalising world”.
Austin Bishop, GM at Tamarack Global and investor in AI, alongside Blake Seitz, content strategist at Palantir Technologies set out principals designed to “reindustrialise”.
They say the west’s “production problems were ignored and downplayed by politicians and policymakers for many years. Recent events have challenged this posture of denial.” they argued.
Speaking of the west’s “dependence” on foreign imports, they said during the Covid pandemic “Chinese lockdowns and export bans led to acute shortages of personal protective equipment, medicine, and much else. This event alerted Westerners to the fact that our health and wellbeing now depend on fragile, globe-spanning supply chains and the policies-effectively, the whim-of a hostile foreign power.”
“In short, it was a wakeup call about a significant loss of sovereignty.” they argued,
They also pointed to the war in Ukraine saying it “has demonstrated the West’s inability to make weapons in the quantities needed to win a modern war.”
While they say that industrial energy prices in the United States are “low and competitive, thanks to large amounts of base load nuclear power built in the 1970s, and cheap and abundant natural gas and coal.”, the picture “is different in Europe”.
Europe, they said, “has been shuttering nuclear plants for years, increasing reliance on intermittent renewables and imported natural gas. Before the war, much of that gas came from Russia. That supply has since evaporated, due both to Russian coercion and the dramatic sabotage of the Nord Stream Il pipeline in 2022.”
“Europe’s already high energy prices skyrocketed, and manufacturers felt the pain alongside ordinary citizens. An EU report by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi estimates that European companies pay two to three times more for energy than companies in the United States-and four to five times more for natural gas.”
“Getting serious about rebuilding”, they argue, “will require embracing a variety of policies, some of which do not fit neatly in preexisting ideological boxes or have a natural, existing interest group to champion them.”
“The aim of these policies— the goal that unites them despite their heterogeneity-is to enable the manufacture of goods at home, at scale, and at globally competitive prices. Achieving this aim, in turn, will require lowering the cost of inputs to manufacturing, rerouting investment to manufacturing, and rebuilding industrial ecosystems that are essential for innovation and mass production.”
Building economic dynamism: Can the west grow again?
David Frost presented research on the decline of the west saying that almost every western economy is facing “slowing economic growth” or “stagnation.”
He says that the “vicious circle of decline” is “fundamentally” a consequence of the end of the Cold War, “which removed the pressure to remain productive and demonstrate the superiority of free markets and free nations.”
“Complacency in our institutions and among our political and cultural elites set in, and bad policy ideas were not subject to challenge,” he said adding that these “moved in a collectivist direction: an expansion of government, centralisation, regulation, and state intervention.”
The armed that the “growth of “climatism” and the “woke” doctrine further undermined market competition,” adding that “on top of this” there has been “a loss of confidence in capitalism and democracy, and a failure to invest in growing sectors of the economy. A sense of managed decline and despair has prevailed.”
His research paper for ARC “sets out the choices we must make if we are to restore our belief in market economics and revive the nation state, in pursuit of growth.” It argues that we face three fundamental choices:
Accept the status quo and continue on the path of stagnation or decline, or choose to face up to reality and recognise that moving forward is not only possible but necessary if we are to enjoy the rewards of growth;
Discard our heritage and surrender our identity and responsibility to supranational organisations, or recover our national inheritance and revalidate the democratic nation state as the best vehicle for fostering long-term economic growth;
Abandon confidence in free market capitalism, or recover and strengthen a belief in market economics.
Frost argues that, “the right answers to these choices, taken together, amount to a prescription for a form of politics and economics which one might term “markets and nationhood”—a determined effort to re-establish meaningful national democracies with a genuine common sense of history, community, and solidarity as the basis for reforms which lead to economic growth. It requires social, cultural, and political change as well as economic reform. And it requires leadership and a vision to provide a living demonstration of what free economies, free politics, and free peoples could accomplish when allowed to do so. “