Remember the psychic octopus that made the global headlines last year after correctly predicting, live on camera, the results of 8 matches in the soccer world cup in a row?  The day after the All Blacks won the Rugby World Cup, TV3 ran a news story after their headline report of it which contained a replay of a TAB television ad in which a couple of young guys were shown trying to get a hen to pick the scorer of the first All Black try in the final.  The guys showed the hen photos of Mils Muliana & Cameron Smith & told the hen their names but it failed to react.  Then one of them showed the hen the 3rd photo said “Woodcock” and the hen squawked and leapt up in the air.  The TV3 newsreader then reminded us that the only try the All Blacks got in the final was scored by Tony Woodcock!!

Phenomena like this strike people as significant yet lack rational explanation, so many dismiss them as “just a coincidence”. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychologist, invented the term synchronicity in the 1920s to explain meaningful coincidences. His rationale was that the world is interconnected at a deep level, and he gave this common ground the Latin name unus mundus (one world). In the same decade the discoveries of the leading quantum physicists proved that he was right.  Our experience is superficially of differences between things, yet there is an underlying context of unity connecting everything.

The X Files became a popular cult tv show in the 1990s, and what we most remember from it is it's signature notion that `the truth is out there'.  The truth is usually hidden.  People claim to have found it, but usually only a portion of the human race ends up agreeing with them.  Facts often turn out to be a matter of opinion when you examine them closely.  Right & wrong are categories in our minds, but we usually aren't sure if things are right or wrong.  This alerts us to the fact that traditional dichotomies are best relativised by a 3rd category – partial truth.  Group psychodynamics can be handled with finesse by using a 3rd alternative!

Perception is reality.  This observation has currency in popular culture because the way people see the world structures their personal reality. What about impersonal reality then?  Social reality is structured via consensus.  Physical reality is out there, but we all see it differently even when agreeing on the main features.  When I was a kid everyone referred to an account they didn't believe as “a likely story”, sarcasm being popular back then.  So you can imagine my surprise when I looked up the meaning of myth in the Encyclopedia Brittannica & found the original meaning was “a likely story”.  Myths have been guiding beliefs for human societies throughout history, despite many believing they aren't true.  Truth seems irrelevant.

That movie The Matrix a decade ago, how many of you realised when you saw it that it was a metaphor for our collective reality?  We live in a matrix of shared beliefs that define our view of reality.  As we grow up we get the matrix indoctrinated into our heads, first by parents, then by school and friends, and later as adults by the media and culture.  Something is only real to us if the matrix allows it to be.  Unless or until you escape!

So if you want to get good at group psychodynamics you have to be able to finesse the difficulties most people have when it comes to the interface of belief and reality.  The best way forward is to advocate the both/and approach.  This terminology entered culture in the '70s from computer logic.  A binary switch is either on or off, but signals can be combined via a both/and gate.  Rather than exclusion of alternatives, we get inclusion.  When people come at you with a fervent belief, denial alienates them.  Better to include them in your world-view by neither agreeing nor disagreeing, but instead acknowledging that there may be some truth in their view.  Be sophisticated & reserve judgment.  You can always make your mind up later.

Civilisation has been ruled by binary thinking for the past couple of millennia.  Culture therefore frequently confronts us with false dichotomies.  People have been getting brainwashed into thinking things are either right or wrong for so long we assume it's normal.  We must admit from now on that there's a 3rd category in real life: things that are partly right and partly wrong - plus things that we cannot actually determine the truth value of.  Every time you see a polarity, think of a 3rd alternative that relates it to our common context.  If you triangulate the polarity you can show people that the world is not as simple as they thought.

The philosophy of dualism has immense tradition across cultures due to its survival value – you either correctly identify a looming predator or you don't.  Escape or die.  But the world is not really black & white.  It is coloured.  Even in monochrome there are shades of grey, and it is normal to distinguish between the different shades.  In politics the drama comes from assertions about the nature of reality – claims that things are like this produce opponents who say they're actually like that. Priorities seem either right or wrong, but when it comes to producing a consensus – which is normally the only way people in groups can achieve group success – then the details of any proposal must be agreed.  The devil is always in the details, so success only comes when you arm-wrestle the devil!  This is the practical consequence of triangulating polarities. Negotiating agreement relates the polarised camps to the common ground and the compromise can be formulated in that context.

I've been telling people for decades that the difference between Labour & National is that whereas Labour people are normally brain-dead, National people are normally both brain-dead and morally corrupt.  The current National govt is the first I've seen for 40 years that so far seems an exception to this rule, but wait & see – the 2nd term may reveal their true colours, huh?  I realised at age 21 that both parties were wrong, so there had to be a 3rd alternative, which my generation of rebels would produce.  Didn't happen!  Well, we eventually got the Greens.  They proved to be smart enough to identify themselves as neither left nor right, but in front, which I immediately knew was my stance, so I joined them & did what it took to get them into parliament.  Too bad they turned out to be really just another bunch of mainstreamers.

But hey, there's a natural polarity between the Greens (party members) and the greens (all who self-identify as green but don't want to join the party).  The latter have always vastly outnumbered the former.  Triangulate that polarity and you have the path forward!  Once you start exploring the motivations of each group, you find out why the branding only works for some.  Brands are a key to group psychodynamics – each brand activates a different value psychology (in both adherents and observers).

Just as the greens are a tribe, the Occupy movement is the genesis of a new tribe.  If it gells.  Coming together brings a crash course in group psychodynamics – polarizing of views is a transitional phase so folks first focus on differences, then focus on common ground (both/and) to unite the movement.  People divide themselves naturally into bodies of opinion, but always remember that divide & rule is the traditional strategy of social control systems.  The powers that be always exploit that natural tendency.  The people only prevail when they get their act together!  It's natural for groups to select leaders and for males to compete to be group leaders – but leadership aspiration often arises from the hero syndrome & ego, which are incidental to group success.  That comes when people pull together naturally and operate as a team.  Leaders also become targets for other groups, which means it's better to have several or change them often.  Hard to hit a moving target, right?!

Occupy is a protest movement – against what?  Exploitation, corruption, the social control system (Federal Reserve, Wall St, Bilderbergers, fascism) but members ought to brainstorm their own answers.  Ultimately the movement ought to be for an alternative – brainstorm that next!!  Not all rich folk are enemy:  Soros is a good guy, in my opinion.  Very important to have compassion & goodwill, do reconciliation to enable working together - spirituality ought to be part of political action. Remember that good & evil is a polarity;  most people doing wrong are not evil, merely bad! Business as usual trades goods but socialises bads: they need to pay their true costs. Enforce that feedback to triangulate the economy and make business more ethical.

If the Occupy tribe manages to transcend protest & grievance and gell into a real alternative political movement aimed at solving the problems they are complaining about, I'll be willing to help. You can represent the 99% effectively if you make that transition real - but doing so will require marketing. Marketing works in politics just like in the economy: tell the right story to the people, find the frame that intersects with their world-view, then infect them with your ideavirus.

(written for Occupy Auckland 31/10/11)

I've been liaising with Lisa & Bill since Lisa offered to help the Occupy Auckland movement by providing nightly speakers for an early-evening 15 minute talk.  Seemed a good way for older folk to provide guidance.  Unfortunately the movement remains bogged down in negativity due to the prevailing social pathology in their group culture, so I've decided to pull out.
Essentially oppositionist, the movement has adopted the collective stance of adolescent rejection of the parental authority of the state (the state being controlled by the capitalists, regardless of whether a left or right govt is in control).  This is understandable.  Protest movements are the traditional form of political expression of the angry people when elections don't solve the problem.
I believe the OWS premise is flawed:  protests don't solve the problem either.  What they should be doing is forming an alternative political movement to offer the people a positive alternative to the status quo.  That means formulating an alternative, articulating it, advocating it.  Instead, they remain locked in grievance mode.  A week ago they decided to produce a list of grievances to present to the media, yet this job remains undone.
Various suggested points have been provided by individuals in the movement to the person who they selected to formulate the list.  I have seen some of them notified to the Occupy online site.  They can be interpreted as a list of complaints but they really point to problems.  The next step, which the movement must take if it is to be effective, is to identify the solutions.  Instead, Occupy Auckland follows OWS in the traditional stance of the protest movement.  After 40 years of this syndrome failing to deliver the desired results, my attitude is enough of this shit.  Get over it!  Act like adults instead of adolescents.

At least the Greens have the right approach, as does Lisa with her Awareness Party;  they're both advocating a positive alternative.  I've explained in my earlier essay here that I discontinued all involvement with the Greens in mid '95.  [I may  make the reasons public.]  I've been staunch ever since in avoiding all party members and my aversion has kept me from checking out their website lest it make me angry and disgusted.  Don't like being that negative, but my conscience requires me to tell the truth.  I understand that negative feedback is an essential healthy part of community, but liberal socialists can't handle reality at all and would find my critique too severe.  I'm not inclined to hurt people, so better to cut all ties.
However last night I finally went to look at the Green Party site:  it's nice & user friendly in ambience but content seemed banal.
I know I can feel good about the Greens if they retain support for Tibet & decriminalising cannabis.  When I took over as organiser of the Greens justice and international relations policy working groups in '91 I discovered to my disgust that the justice policy didn't include decriminalising cannabis & the international relations policy didn't include freedom for Tibet.  So I put both in immediately!!  I then drove the policy consensus process through regional adoption to national adoption.  I've been grateful for Nandor Tanzcos  & Russel Norman leading both causes in the public arena in the intervening years.
However, a quick check of the website failed to find a policy statement in favour of either issue.  That's liberal socialists for you - if it's an issue of natural justice, integrity and authenticity they will run & hide every time.

Bemused at the Greens campaign slogan on all the election posters, promising to make us all rich, I then noticed the Nats' election posters were promising a brighter future & the penny immediately dropped!  Obviously the 2 parties have done a deal to swap their respective traditional brand identifications in order to get a blue-green coalition up & running!  Truly forward thinking from John Key, knowing that the Nats have been a shoo-in to win this election since Phil Goff agreed to be their patsy, so he's decided on a strategy that will set him up for retaining power over the next decade or so.
Since everyone wants to be rich, and most people are stupid enough to think it'll happen if they vote for the party that promises to do it for them, the Nats' cabal of strategists figured the best way to help the Greens out of their ghetto of 7% of the voters - where it's been static since the 1990 election - is to give them use of the traditional right-wing slogan that pushes the capitalist get-rich-quick scheme button in the psyche of the voter.
The deal requires the Greens to yield up the vision of a brighter future promised by the sustainable society.  No problem - it hasn't got the party any extra traction over the past 20 years.
So the scenario for creating a durable blue-green coalition has a wide swathe of voters that used to vote blue following the lure & switching to vote green, probably enough to get the Greens up to around 15% of the popular vote & create a sizeable rump of Green MPs in parliament.  National can afford to ditch 8% of the voters and still win handily, owing to Phil Goff's solid reputation as a right-winger going back a quarter century to when he was one of the rogernomes privatising state assets all over the place in the '80s.  Phil is remaining staunch in his stance of being a friendly tory just like John Key to ensure Labour can't be distinguished as a separate brand from National by most voters, in order to keep the Labour vote below 30%. 
Credit has to got to the party hacks in National and the Greens who dreamed up such a sophisticated scheme.  You never thought they could be that clever, eh?  After complaining in my editorial about the Greens being incapable of lateral thinking, looks like they're set to prove me wrong!  Punters may be tempted to respond that the Greens are not being so gauche as to actually promise to make individuals richer.  True enough, the slogan reads For a Richer New Zealand, so the extra wealth is intended for the country as a whole.  Clearly a socialist wolf in capitalist sheep's clothing!!  They've managed to outwit the Nats at their own game, can you believe it??  That's true sophistication in political strategising!  Take a bow, you clever lateral-thinking greenies!

When environmentalism resonated throughout the younger generation in the '60s a cultural wave resulted within a few years in the back-to-the land movement that in the '70s produced alternative lifestyles and in the '80s the green label. These fast learners remained a slow-growing minority in relation to mainstream society which Richard Nixon and then the media called the silent majority (I call them slow learners).

The cultural wave was led by the avante garde, people who like fast progress. The further ahead they got, the more the trend-followers felt like giving up so the latter settled in the vacant space between leading edge and normalcy. The psychology of gradualism took over, so they advocated that progress had to be incremental. The interface with mainstream culture became their domain. They are liberal socialists.

The consequence nowadays is a cultural divide between remnant leading edge thinkers - free spirits – and the occupants of the political correctness mindset, who believe in conformity. The Labour party consists entirely of the latter group, whereas the greens consist of both.

Recently someone posed the question `ought we to ask the Greens to make climate change an election issue?' Immediately beset by so many conflicting feelings that it rapidly became apparent my answer would turn into an essay, I passed on the opportunity to respond. Who's got time to either write or read one these days? Ill health has since forced me into an early retirement but because the question was timely & pertinent it continued to niggle at me - so I have written it! Readers clinging to an idealistic view of the Greens may find my view unpalatable. Too bad! The truth often hurts.

Responses to the query were all over the place (typical greens) – not a good sign when common cause is advanced via like-mindedness, but I have enough natural empathy to see that it reflected the subjective realities of respondents. I will try to transcend my own subjective stance on the issue sufficiently to advance our common cause in the big picture but you will be the judge of whether I succeed.

My instinctive response was to reply `yes, of course'. The need for action is now urgent. Then all sorts of contextual reasons loomed to deny that such a response was wise so I need to digress into the historical context somewhat. The psychodynamics of political groups are such that the past is always playing out in the present - usually to the extent of throttling the future at birth.

Hard to imagine there's anyone left who still thinks that either wing of the Nationalabour party is potentially able to provide a better alternative to business as usual. Business has been trashing the planet, ripping people off & poisoning both our food and environment continuously because ruling parties of the left and right have been condoning it right round the world for at least the past 40 since I started to take notice & probably decades earlier. The left/right collusion has been made explicitly evident since the more-market reforms a quarter-century ago.

Mainstream kiwis keep performing the binary flip/flop at election time like good little robots, but there's a much greater constituency for a 3rd alternative nowadays. Can the Greens capture that constituency? Not while they keep trying to be an alternative Labour party. You'd think they would have learnt from the failure of New Labour in the early '90s. Current polling is promising, but will it again turn out to be a false promise? I advise an intelligent approach, which would require acknowledging that the constituency for a 3rd alternative has existed for years, identifying it explicitly, and electing to represent it effectively. The Greens have a couple of young leaders who come across quite well in the media without displaying any sign of grasping the potential of their strategic situation.

I need now to distinguish two green political constituencies. I've been green consciously since the late '60s – and, in a mystic sense, tacitly since childhood in the '50s. So let's define a green as someone who believes in protecting nature, creating a healthy society & implementing a sustainable economy. We can then define a Green as a member of the Green Party. I was both between Dec '90 & mid '95, otherwise the former for more than 40 years. The Greens are a minor subset of the greens in this country. The greens are likely to vote Green without being motivated to identify with the Green Party! The greens are a political constituency that could be wooed by the main parties if they weren't too stupid to try. Call them a tribe. Having been so long a member of this tribe, I'm happy to speak for them. I could even represent them to this country's media given the opportunity. Nobody else has even done them the courtesy of acknowledging their separate existence to the Green Party so they could be grateful if I did! I always self-identified with the avante-garde, and never approved the trend-followers' later perversion of the message of the movement.

In my view the Greens (politicians & activist members) cannot be credible representatives of my tribe unless they get their act together and provide a genuine 3rd alternative to National/Labour. They seem at times to be trying to, but it's more a semblance than a substantial provision. The need to seem normal, innocuous, & timid is evidently congenital. Hard to see such limp-wristed types beating the slow-learners around the head with the 4 by 2 of climate change, isn't it? Liberal socialists are incapable of being forceful.

Still, if they are serious about solving the problem, the answer must be yes – provided that they advocate the solution. Could be done, with sufficient finesse, but it's a daunting challenge. [You will observe that I'm responding too late for this campaign: I know, the Greens deserve one last chance to make good so I refrained from engaging. It was clear long ago that Key would win this election.] The question still deserves a full answer. The problem is multi-dimensional, so the solution must be also. It'll still be there next election! We (humanity) become victims if we shirk the challenge, therefore we must engage it.

There's been no real sign of intelligence in Labour since Lange & Palmer, and they lacked the cerebral capacity for exploring alternatives (let alone embracing them) anyway. So the Greens acting like user-friendly Labour clones seems pointless. Better to spit the dummy, admit the left is an intellectual vacuum, a tribe bereft of original thought, lacking the wherewithal for engaging the real world in a constructive and effective manner. What's required instead is political leadership that is staunch in outlining the way forward on a common-interest basis.

I'd like to see the greens working together with the Greens but that'll not happen as long as the politicos remain captive to the system. Sure, changing the system from within has always been possible. One can allow that significant gains have been made in improving this country's political culture, and the Greens deserve credit for pioneering that trend. But we hardly need yet another bunch of suit-wearing dorks in parliament. Why should our political representatives be forced to wear an antique 19th century uniform? I grew up rebelling against that shit, along with all the opinion leaders in my generation around the world. Cowardice is hardly a stance worthy of our support. Are they really so stupid as to be unaware that they are visually signally to the world that they are part of the problem rather than part of the solution? Only if they demonstrate the ability to transcend the parliamentary game will there be genuine solidarity between the greens & the Greens. No sign of that yet.

I joined the Greens after they got 7% in the 1990 election. At a regional party meeting in Tuakau in the summer of '91 leading activists told me they were bogged down in a major collective problem. They kept being unable to build the party structure due to being unable to agree to proposed party rules. As someone who can normally figure out how to solve difficult problems, I volunteered to engage the situation & was accepted into the standing orders committee. It was simply a matter of making suitable textual alterations to achieve agreement between the key players and all the problem clauses fell into place. During the process the party made me convenor of the SOC, so I drove the group process through each of the necessary party forums to formalise the agreements. Together we proved consensus decision-making does actually work if you do it right. Then, 4 years later, I posted the newly-adopted Green Party constitution to Sir Geoffrey Palmer so he could register the party with the Electoral Commission, and bailed out.

That registration was the essential legal step to enable the Greens to contest parliamentary elections. If I hadn't spent that part of my life getting that job done those people wouldn't have been playing their parliamentary game ever since. You may think someone else may have been able to do it if I hadn't: based on the impression I formed at the time I have the contrary opinion. The leading activists were a bunch of mainstream primadonnas competing with each other rather than collaborating, and they'd got themselves into a real catch-22. They couldn't make collective decisions because they couldn't agree to the rules for doing so, but agreeing to the rules required collective decisions! As a non-mainstreamer I was able to think outside that square whereas they were in a collective funk due to their mass inability to do so. I'm sure you can see the parallels to our collective situation globally today. Same psychodynamic applies.

I had several good reasons to exit the party but going into them requires another essay. I still vote green as the best of a bad lot. Have they put “none of the above” as a tickable option on the ballot paper yet? Seems like about a third of the country has been clamouring for that for ages – usually they just don't bother voting. I was with them in '75 when the Values Party showed up (yet I voted for it in '78 because Shadbolt joined). I remember watching the launch coverage on the evening news, astonished & then amused that they apparently thought the country would buy the notion of a bunch of mainstreamers being able to implement a radical agenda. Naturally they proceeded to prove that they weren't really radical and thus incapable of doing what was required.

So yeah, the green movement often defeats itself by refraining from adopting the right stance on issues. Hard to feel solidarity with such ongoing incompetence, eh? Anyone who shows up with genuine ability is liable to freak out the activists & followers alike: the activists see someone who gets results as too much competition, the followers get scared when anyone starts advocating radical solutions. Neither bunch has the brains or guts to face up to the fact that the social problems that the green movement engages have always required radical solutions. That's been the case the past 40 years, do you really want it to continue any longer?? Incrementalism has always been a flawed strategy. I've been feeling I need to resume activity among the greens, and flushing out the syndromes that afflict both greens & Greens is a good way to start.

Careerism, for instance. You'd think the more talented people in the movement the better, so why do the leading green activists compete with each other rather than collaborate? Human nature, indeed, but that's not a sufficient excuse. We can only achieve our common goals by transcending such petty behaviour. Ever wondered why so many different environmental organisations? I could never find any that seemed credible enough to join.

The save-the-world syndrome is less evident nowadays than a generation back, but it remains the most powerful tacit factor driving the green movement. Young males grow up wanting to be heroes, rescue someone, slay a dragon. Prior generations went off to be cannon fodder but my lot came up with a widespread agreement that nature needed protection from the capitalist dragon. Later it became evident that the communist & socialist dragons were also destroying nature. I'm still driven by the archetype, and I suspect many others are likewise (can't speak for the women of course). [I've long suspected that it's our reincarnational agenda.] I'm willing to deploy my problem-solving ability on behalf of both greens & Greens to serve the common good. They will have to accept my critique, which will be ongoing. They will need to assimilate it and learn from it in order for us to work together successfully.

As a child I read the account of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot. The story provides an archetypal lesson: a famous knot so complex nobody ever solved it. Confronted by the damn thing the conqueror of the known world whips out his sword and slices through it in a fraction of a second. Multi-dimensional problems such as climate change are similarly so complex that people naturally drift into the assumption that they are insoluble (the remainder are silly enough to believe governments can do it). We can always follow the excellent historical example: think laterally & cut straight through to the solution.

It's often necessary to jolt people out of complacent negativity in order to generate social progress. That's why I felt the need to be audacious and identify the solution to the climate change problem – simply because it was clear that nobody else was doing so. I hoped to be able to introduce it during Jim Hansen's visit but a suitable opportunity failed to present. [You know these academic formats: a specialist informs the audience of his/her views, at the end people can ask questions but not make statements, never any opportunity to brainstorm or even discuss the issues. Hardly surprising nobody ever gets anywhere.] Anyway I obtained the outline of the solution by listing the relevant key points from Storms of My Grandchildren. Hansen himself only identified 2 necessary elements to the solution, but on my first reading I formed the impression there were more that he had implied without consciously integrating, so I went through it again and found 16! I hoped to be able to eliminate some of these contenders - my bias is to be concise - but reviewing them changed nothing. You could argue that my perception of the solution is subjective and I would agree! But it becomes relatively objective if others concur, and agreeing on the solution is the best way forward. Hoping others might be able to critique the list and find good reasons to prune it I circulated it to the Coal Action Network requesting feedback but got none.

Several likely reasons for that: too busy campaigning, aversion to intellectual endeavour, not ready to believe the problem can be solved therefore unwilling to recognise the solution when confronted by it, incapable of genuine like-minded collaboration. So I was reminded again of those syndromes afflicting both greens & Greens. I often withdraw when my peer group lets me down, but sometimes I get provocative and do a bit of stirring in the hope of catalysing a change for the better. Hence this essay.

Most greens are motivated by by tacit common interests, but careerism in the Greens limits their credibility when it becomes clear that their personal interests are motivating them more than the common ground. 40 years of watching well-intentioned idealists fail to get their collective act together & created an effective political force is too much for me to tolerate. It's evident that the save-the-world syndrome doesn't suffice, and reliance on tacit commonality renders us politically impotent. Time to make it explicit instead!

So get your head around the following outline of the solution to this political problem. Our common cause must be to agree on the solution to the climate change problem, then advocate it's implementation. Given that the Greens continue to be lame as usual, accept that the greens can only save the world by operating independently – establishing an alternative political movement that transcends parliamentary politics, and getting in behind it to drive it forward until it succeeds. The design of such a group has been clarifying in my head the past couple of years, last year the concept was put through workshops locally, and I have spent recent months compiling it onto this site.

A design is merely a complex meme. We know a meme will go viral in any culture if it resonates with people. The time is right: the common-interest basis for human survival is so vast that any feasible design will snowball globally no problem. The test of feasibility is feedback from others capable of envisioning viability. Remember the climate change solution isn't something I invented, so best not to yield to any temptation to dismiss it as my personal fantasy. I didn't dream it up - it derives from the resonance between Hansen's psyche & mine, generated by the book. If the design resonates likewise with you folk, we're on the way...

People wedded to the status quo normally come up with typical mindless objections to better options: `it can't be done', `that'll never work' etc. Humanity would still be living be living in caves if such turkeys were allowed to prevail. You will need to do better than that with any negative feedback; you'll need to actually identify a valid rationale for any objection or critique to seem credible.

There were several other interventions I made that significantly affected the development of the Greens. In the late '80s the trend toward blue-green environmentalism had bothered me, so I spoke up early at a meeting in '91 when it felt to me that an accommodation with National was in the air. Alienation caused by Rogernomics probably explains that trend, but I knew the Nats would be the kiss of death for the greens and was satisfied when the trend subsequently vapourised. I accept that I may have inadvertently precipitated the too-fervent left-alignment I complained about earlier in this essay! Nothing wrong in working with the Nats now that the ideologues are in hiding & their pragmatists are running the show. Just remember the old saying `to sup with the devil, you need a long spoon'.

As a teenage rebel in the '60s I used to wonder why adults acted like sheep. It was particularly evident when you hit them with comments about significant stuff going on, such as the implications of news headlines. Their congenital aversion to real life got dramatic a few years later if you started talking about politics. It was weird seeing grown men get so evasive as to display fear. I had a knack for sincerity and getting to the point real fast, so maybe that's why. I never suffered the `tall poppy' syndrome!

My political consciousness dates from 1970, when it became clear to me that western governments of the right were essentially fascist and the older generations were too stupid to see it. The following year I realised the left were merely a lame version of the right pretending to be good guys, rather than a credible alternative. You couldn't choose between right & wrong - they were both wrong! Many of us became apolitical & got into personal & cultural development instead. A decade later the greens emerged as a tribe from the environmentalist matrix with the notion that they were `neither right nor left, but in front'. I felt that it was an entirely correct diagnosis and a political slogan I was happy to identify with. I kept hoping they'd realise that it ain't enough to talk that talk – to translate that aspirational slogan into collective action, they actually need to walk the walk. That means making the 3rd alternative explicit. Continuing to keep it tacit ensures that the stance remains impotent. I'm not into associating myself with such incompetence.

I accept responsibility for having helped the Greens to go mainstream via playing the parliamentary game, but they must accept responsibility for the fact that their collective performance has kept their public poll support exactly where it was when I joined the party more than 20 years ago. [Since I wrote the first draft of this essay last winter it has floated up a couple of points – time will tell if this is merely due to hot air.] The public has been correct in concluding that they have failed to provide a genuine alternative to National or Labour. They must expand their constituency sufficiently to seem substantial: a comparable 3rd force. It makes sense that they start by reconnecting to the greens. Then they ought to go beyond that, and establish solidarity and consensus with all of this country's environmental groups. That done, the public would sit up & take notice. Media & politicians would be impressed by such political savvy & the result. If it was done on the basis of solving the climate-change problem, it would give the younger generations hope for the future. However the design of a sustainable economy likewise languishes as a job half-done, so I advise recognising that as an essential part of the requisite 3rd alternative approach to politics.

I've always been a potential recruit for a political movement that is staunch & accurate in advocating solutions to social problems & I'm confident I'm far from alone in that. The Greens have done much that is good thus far, but that vehicle is stuck in 2nd gear. The complacency has gone on way too long. People need to see them as a viable part of government, but they seem afflicted by the delusion that they can do that by pretending not to be a threat to business as usual. Either that or they're genuine about not threatening business as usual – hard to tell which of the two options is worse, really! Can't save the world with either handicap. Are they addicted to greenwash?? That's a threat to our survival in itself: pretending to be part of the solution while covertly enlarging the problem. The Greens must become an authentic part of the solution – pretence is no longer good enough.

If they do ditch the pretence, embrace the solution & extend their constituency base they'd promptly move into 3rd gear and I would confidently predict poll support to consolidate in the double figures and trend upward. Embed that via serious determined solidarity in collaboration for a few years & I'd expect it to escalate to 20%, at which point the sheep are likely to disengage the traditional right/left electoral oscillation. When folks discern that a significant movement away from business as usual is happening, they will start to wonder if they ought to follow. That's how sheep operate.

Getting a third of the country behind a better alternative will require something more – political linkage to a global context. The green consensus that has been emerging round the world is that context, and it remains but to formalise the common ground. Why does it need to be formal – why can't we just be lazy & let it remain tacit? Because if you formalise strategic agreements, the media report them and the public can see you're actualising what has previously merely been potential. Actual achievements impress the public. Credibility enhancement inevitably translates into electoral support.

Any greens with intellectual capacity ought to get their heads into doing this work ahead of the trend, so we can ride the wave with ease when it arrives. I've learnt from my experience with the Greens that contenders are thin on the ground, but I propose a call for volunteers anyway. It would help for green politicos in different countries to acknowledge the need for such communal enterprise and organise a suitable online process for participants. Once everyone sees concerted action happening round the world, the idea of a new global trend will take hold in the media. Coverage & discussion will catalyse perception of the greens as a genuine 3rd political force and a viable alternative to the traditional left/right. Getting the third option into everyone's heads will enable kiwis to identify with it readily. Business as usual keeps failing. People want a better option.

Dennis Frank, 11/10/11