This text was written by the LiFT-team and edited by by Klara and Michael - as a summary of our learnings during the EU-Project LiFT 3.0. So when we say "we" - that's us.

- From managing our material needs to an invitation to care. -‍

In order to really serve us, it's not enough for politics to administrate or regulate. It needs active and courageous leadership in order to meet the great societal transitions ahead of us.

So far, our political representatives have mostly tried to manage our world for us. They have focused on the phenomena that were present in our material world in the form of crises, needs and sometimes shared visions or projects. In benevolent times and circumstances, the core wish of politics was to reduce suffering in our world, to manage it, to “make it go away”. Yet what we witness now is a deep longing to approach this suffering in a new way. Instead of managing it, we can embrace it. Instead of mentioning suffering or pain as a side note or the legitimation for our actions, we can apprehend it. This takes courage and grounding. To many of us it could, at first, seem overwhelming. Yet what we found during the past years is that a constantly growing number of people know in their hearts that this way of being in life, this way of relating to our collective world, holds the promise of real change.

Writing this, we realise that we have left the old grounds already. We dare to use the word “heart” in the context of politics. We dare - and we must. Because new politics “includes the totality of humanness”, the fulness of ourselves. In this new paradigm we stop to consent to the seeming separation between an internal, apparently individual experience - and our outside, apparently collective worlds.We recognize that everything that occurs in our physical, phenomenal world has been seeded within. We recognize, too, that while we appear to be in life as individuals, our being is collective in essence. We are interconnected and entangled with all of humanity, all of earth, all of life.This knowledge is expressed in many different ways and forms. What they have in common is this radical embrace of the fullness of life and the willingness to be available to it.

In other words: New Politics is not a thing or a given set of practices and patterns of behaviour “out there”, shaped by others like the system, the media and the people who are officially representing that system (Politicians). Rather, we as a project group were able to experience New Politics from different perspectives through different approaches and formats and we discovered that we are part of it. Our belief is: That everyone can discover that they are part of Politics and that there are uncountable ways of expressing that.

Intensive engagement has led to a deeper recognition and, for some of us, to a new, emerging notion of politics as a living field, a rich landscape comprising many smaller, different lived experiences of what politics could also be. This landscape is closer, less abstract, and more accessible than what many of us have known as Politics so far. Our inner, felt sense and picture of it is by no means complete.  There are many different approaches, perspectives and opinions. They may not be fully aligned, but they may be or become coherent.

The simple party political system of today cannot adequately hold this opening of a field of awareness and growing agency. New forms are arising that have not yet taken shape as a visible system, but are emerging day by day.

Deeper, Wider, Longer.

‍In 2020 we invited people into a digital survey and asked: “What would a political system that serves people, communities and the planet look like?” What we found are three meta-learnings:

There is a longing for politics to go deeper: To include the problem behind the problem, the feeling beyond the feeling, the layer beneath the layer. Superficial answers are recognized to treat symptoms only. This is no longer appealing.

There is a longing to change the temporal perspective of politics and make it become more long term; “long term” meaning centuries. We can include what we think of as our past and our future into the present. We can connect to the human experience and potential and include much more into our awareness and into our actions.

And there is a longing for politics to become wider. To include more perspectives, to allow in the fullness of life in terms of inclusion and diversity. Not only in terms of how we differ as humans, but also animals and nature. This is, for example, reflected in the growing importance of digital tools like sensemaker or pol.is, as well as the increasing number of citizens’ assemblies and in approaches that want to recognize the rights of rivers, forests, mountains and animals.

These movements of reaching deeper, wider and more long term could help us, for instance, to find a new way of meeting what we experience as polarities in our society. Take the debates around Covid as an example: What if we stopped arguing with each other about right or wrong? We might, instead of arguing, allow ourselves to feel the suffering that is represented in these tensions and debates. We could inquire within ourselves and with each other, what the deeper layers are in this conflict, that are - until now - unseen and unmet. If we were able to include these layers and reconnect to them, we might be able to create frames that are wide enough to hold all of the different experiences that we are interpreting as polarities today. We believe that there is much potential here, ready to be explored by all of us.

‍If there is a “new” politics, it must, by definition, differ from a politics that is “old” or “current”. So what is the “new” that differs from the old? 

The politics we describe as “old” is based on hierarchy – a small group with power decides for or over many who have less power. This power is held in place by a system. The powerful and the less powerful have together created the system and hold it in place. Democratic systems are variations on the same theme. It is all decision-making that answers a basic question: who gets what? Politics is about power and systems that determine where this power lies – in a group, an organisation, a community or in society. 

The current “system” values rational thinking over both feeling and skill (doing or work). Analysis and scientific methods are particularly valued. (Which is ironic because most decisions are based on emotion and later justified by rational arguments). Painfully, it values certain groups of people over others. There is still an underlying belief that certain cultures are more advanced than others; that certain professions are better than others; that one sex is better than the other. (All this, while using the rhetoric of and often the superficial belief in equality). It excludes certain groups – those that are not equally valued – from power. This is done more, or less, openly. Systems are created that (sometimes unintentionally) cement this exclusion. Moreover it operates with a limited time perspective. It favours self over future generations. It values fast over slow.

In contrast, new politics aims to include the whole human being – thinking, feeling and doing. It is broader than the party-political systems we have today.  It also includes intuition, inspiration, imagination, being comfortable with not-knowing and more. It includes all perspectives and thus different ways of seeing the same reality. It includes the humility to recognise that we only see part of the whole and that we need others to help us gain a more complete understanding. It includes our grandchildren and their grandchildren – which implies that we refrain from thinking only about ourselves and our current lifestyles. It includes nature and recognises that we are part of nature and that the earth is not there for us to exploit. It includes both the conscious and the unconscious (from a psychological viewpoint) in both individuals and groups. That is relevant, since there are always two processes in motion: the primary process is what we see and hear while the secondary process is all that is disavowed, suppressed, marginalised, censored or regarded as taboo.