Translator: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
It's been a super exciting day today,
and we have heard from many of the speakers today
that we really live in turbulent times.
We live in times of transition and transformation.
The challenges that we are facing today,
of hidden algorithms, globalisation,
migration, Brexit and Trump, and all the rest,
are all expressions, I believe, of one underlying meta-crisis:
our inability, our collective inability
to handle the increasing complexity of our world.
I think that we need, again,
as we have done so many times before throughout history,
update our cultural software of our society.
We need again to increase our collective consciousness.
Not long ago, we had no Internet, no mobile phones.
This is the farm where I grew up in Sweden.
It's me there with my younger brother and my grandfather.
I'm old enough to have started life in a family
where we had no television and no fixed telephone line.
Now, not much later, we are about to enter into a society,
as we have heard,
with artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things,
and all the other wonderful technologies that could give us a world of abundance
within the planetary boundaries, a world of peace, or totally not.
The only thing that is absolutely clear to me
is that the future is not going to be easy,
but also that we are really in charge of the future.
A hundred and fifty years ago, in the middle of the 19th century,
Denmark, Norway and Sweden were
at an equally great technological and societal transition,
the Industrial Revolution.
Back then,
we were very poor, agrarian, non-democratic societies.
Due to starvation and miserable living conditions,
25% of the working population in Sweden emigrated to the US
during the second half of that century.
That is why at the time, all cowboys were blond.
(Laughter)
Just kidding.
Just a few decades later, already before the Second World War,
Denmark, Norway and Sweden had transitioned
into being amongst the richest and happiest countries in the world.
We had managed to become very stable democracies,
and I would say that compared to other countries,
both in Europe and elsewhere,
our way of managing this transition was extraordinary successful.
So, how did that happen?
How did this transition go so quick and peacefully?
And what can we learn from that transition
when we today are facing an equally great transition?
Now, from national industrial societies
into a global digitally connected world.
In the next 12 minutes, I will try to give some answers to these questions.
In times of uncertainty and rapid change, like now,
we all tend to turn towards an outside authority.
Someone or something that we can put our trust in.
We tend to turn towards religion or towards authoritarian leadership.
We did it back then, and we are doing it now again.
But 150 years ago, we had extraordinary visionary leaders
in Scandinavia.
They knew that the only way to build democracy -
and they were totally committed to building democracy -
was to build it from bottom up.
That is why these visionaries wanted to empower
a large part of the population,
not just a little elite or vanguard.
They wanted really to empower a large part of the population
to become active and conscious co-creators
of the new social order that wanted to emerge.
And for that purpose, they created all over Scandinavia
retreat centres for inner growth.
Yes, you heard me correctly.
They established retreat centres for inner growth.
And they did this all over Scandinavia.
It started in Denmark,
moved on to Norway and then to Sweden,
and over the next couple of decades,
it grew rapidly.
And at about 1900, at the turn of the last century,
there were 100 retreat centres like these in Denmark,
75 in Norway and 150 in Sweden.
These centres were all state-financed,
but they were not state-run or state-organised.
Here, young adults with a few years of working experience,
mainly from the farming or working part of the population,
could spend up to six months in retreat
with the expressed aim of not being politically indoctrinated
but rather finding their own inner compass.
Finding themselves in order to resist the sirens' calls
of fundamentalist religion or authoritarian leadership,
to be able to hold the complexity of rapid social change
and become active and conscious co-creators
of the emerging new social order.
A hundred years ago, up to 10% of each generation in the Nordic countries
participated in these four to six months long retreats.
In addition to finding their inner compass,
these retreats gave the participants knowledge about the current technology,
technological development in crafts and farming;
it gave them a sense and feeling for their place in history and culture;
and it gave them basic tools
for organising civic movements and activism.
So,
where did these even for our time radical ideas come from?
Well, they came from here.
They came from Germany.
They came from German thinkers
like Schiller and Goethe here, von Humboldt, Herder
and lots of those idealistic philosophers.
All of these philosophers pointed out
that the enlightenment's idea of our mind -
as a rational decision machine
that somehow miraculously is all ready when we are 18 or 20
and we are allowed to vote -
that idea, they said, is totally wrong.
Totally wrong.
They pointed out, as science does today,
that our mind is not just in our brain,
our mind is embodied in the totality of our bodies
and embedded in our culture,
and that our mind is a complex organic system
under lifelong development.
Under lifelong development, it's never finished.
It never finishes.
These philosophers lived, thought and wrote
in the years after the French Revolution.
And they came to the conclusion
that the only way to avoid future political bloodbaths
was for a large part of the population to find their inner compass
and to become what we today would call inner-directed.
Unfortunately, few of us are able to do this without conscious effort.
Here in Germany,
after that the failed revolutions of 1848
had been forcefully put down,
nobody in any responsible position
dared to implement these new ideas.
Instead, as we have seen, these ideas travelled to Scandinavia
and it was here that the original German ideas
about the connection between inner personal transformation and democracy
came to be implemented on a large scale.
Eventually, this program of human empowerment
followed in the footsteps of the Nordic immigrants to the US,
where it played a part in the civil rights movement.
But that is another story.
Today, not many, not even in the Nordic countries,
know about this fascinating story about democracy building.
That is why my Danish co-author and I,
Lene Andersen and I call it the Nordic Secret.
The retreat centres still exist.
They are called folk high schools.
But after the Second World War,
the focus on personal inner transformation and democracy building was lost.
Now, our folk high schools are mainly used for simply adult education and training.
We somehow forgot about the insights of the lifelong development of our mind,
and we reverted back
to the old view of our mind as rational and fixed.
And democracy was, by then, anyhow mostly taken for granted.
We are now at a point in history
where we again could use some of the insights of Schiller and Goethe,
that were so instrumental in building the Nordic democracies.
Today, neuroscience, adult developmental psychology
and behavioural economics,
all confirm that the old ideas of a rational mind,
or homo economicus,
are deeply flawed.
This old mechanistic view of our mind
can actually dangerously undermine both our society and our democracy.
I firmly believe that we need, again,
to look at the lifelong development of our mind and of our inner world.
We need again to focus on the development of our consciousness.
I have myself gone through and witnessed such inner growth
and in the process became interested
in the connection between inner transformation and societal change.
After I sold my banking business ten years ago,
I started the Ekskäret Foundation,
and Ekskäret means literally, as we heard, the Oak tree island -
even, as you can see on this picture,
there are mainly pine trees growing there today.
Every summer, on our island, we arrange a number of youth camps.
Two week long camps
where the young adolescents are able to spend two weeks
to find themselves.
A few years ago, when I was a leader at one of these camps,
I overheard a conversation between a young participant and a leader.
The young girl was complaining about how stressed out she always felt
about all the things that she wanted to do,
like meeting friends, doing sports, social media and all that -
a situation not unknown to many young people today and even us adults.
The leader, who was just a few years older than she,
asked some open probing questions.
And then, suddenly the young woman said,
"Now, now I see that I do not have to do all the things I want to do."
Something had shifted in her.
For the first time perhaps in her life, she had been able to take her own will
and look at it, look at it as an object,
and relate to it,
and decide what she wanted to with her will.
Her inner awareness had expanded.
She had just experienced inner growth.
Later in life, we can go through similar expansions of our awareness.
We can, for example, stop identifying with the norms and values of our peer group
to actually be able to choose who we want to be
and how we want to contribute to society.
We can become inner directed.
And by doing that we can become authors of our own lives
in a much deeper sense.
But this requires deep inner work, reflection and dialogue.
We live indeed in turbulent times,
times of transition and transformation.
And the challenges that we, as humanity, face today deeply humble us.
The success of the Industrial Revolution was based on an acceptance,
acceptance of the fact that we were ignorant about our outer world.
It was that acceptance and our curiosity about our outer world
that made us discover new continents and put a man on the moon.
The revolution of our time is also about acceptance.
This time acceptance about our ignorance about our inner world.
That acceptance and the discoveries that will follow from that
will be the big step forward for humanity in our century.
In order for us to move into the new social order
that wants to emerge, we need to surrender.
We need to surrender to the fact that we are not fully developed.
That we are in a constantly developing path.
And when we have accepted that, and being in touch with ourselves,
that will be an invitation for us to raise our consciousness, to grow
and hopefully, to become more human.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)