Auspicious Reasoning: Can metadesign become a mode of governance?

Why has rational logic remained so appealing to the western mind? It is probably because of its high level of consistency. Unfortunately, internal consistency does not always lead to practical consistency, and this has encouraged the development of bureaucratic, negative, cynical and solipsistic modes of reasoning. Moreover, whereas the logic of nature is non-linear, rational logic tends to be linear. As such, it is inauspicious. The world needs wisdom, but although governments consult some of the brightest thinkers, collective human actions frequently turn out to be dysfunctional. In maintaining a bureaucratic, ballot-box system of governance, our society has evolved a reasoning process that limits civic responsibility to the making of critical, often negative choices, rather than inspiring future-based, imaginative reflection. This decision-oriented mindset is now ubiquitous within the economic and political domain. As voters and consumers we are merely invited to choose, never to dream. Although this democratic style of capitalism may seem characteristically modern, its origins can be found in the strongly truth-oriented philosophies of the early Greeks. This article argues that the mindset it produced is inauspicious if it encourages citizens and governments to regard facts, statistics, or scientific laws as less important than imaginative thoughts and emotional experiences. In politics, the claim to being part of the so-called real world is common. Ironically, this idea evolved from within the western idea of a world that is independent from the thinker, yet is also, somehow, amenable to truth-oriented inquiry by the rational mind.

This dualistic approach was implicit in the idealism of Pythagoras and Plato, and in the categorical reasoning of Aristotle, all of whom, in different ways inspired the notion that data, numbers, forms or sets might represent a higher mode of reality than the experiential world. Many legal, bureaucratic and political systems still reflect this kind of alienation. This article argues that it should be every citizen's duty to envision beneficial ways of living. This would require a radical overhaul of the education system and an alternative to the political and economic discourse that has led us to the brink of disaster. Where this may be useful to individuals who wish to formulate a truth-claim, or to defend a rhetorical position, it is less helpful for facilitating actions that are attuned to the ecosystem. This article asks whether design thinking, incorporated within metadesign, might inspire a more sapient form of governance. Where precedent-based legislation manages society at the level of textual and categorical logic, traditional design methods do similar things by managing forms and anticipating the behaviours they might inspire. What is most urgently needed in the twenty-first century is a more collective, imaginative, incentivizing and outcome-centred mode of reasoning that will support new, co-creative forms of democracy. This new mode of reasoning may need to be highly situated and contextualized, because an ethics of creative engagement would need to eclipse an ethics of standing-for a particular cause, or belief. By exploring design-thinking as a possible basis for further development, we may therefore create a richer type of ethics that is eudemonic, synergy-enhancing and, above all, auspicious.