‘Turn him to any cause of policy, the Gordian Knot of it he will unloose, familiar as his garter.’
William Shakespeare — Henry V, Act 1 Scene 1
While selecting this week’s episode of The Hypnotist, ‘The Hypnotic Gordian Knot to solve an unsolvable problem’, it became clear that a similarly radical and unconventional approach is needed to resolve the myriad of seemingly unsolvable problems with which we are surrounded today, the most pressing of which are conflict, climate change and intense polarisation of wealth.
For those unfamiliar with the Gordian Knot, this is an ancient Greek legend regarding an immensely complex knot ‘so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how it was fastened’. Whoever succeeded in releasing it was destined to rule all of Asia. When Alexander the Great solved this challenge in 333 BC, it led to his conquest of Asia, as far as the Indus and Oxus rivers.
Today’s Gordian Knots are all critical to the future of humanity, but they all share a common origin — the motivations of fear and greed. If seen in this context, they immediately lose much of their mystery, but the big challenge remains: how to set fear and greed aside in the interest of peace, a re-balanced environment and the opportunity for all people to achieve their potential in life.
The recognition that the world's most serious challenges are rooted in fear and greed warrants some further explanation.
When considering conflict, it's easy to see how they drive the killing fields. In the Middle East it is generally fear, as both Israelis and Palestinians live in fear of the threat to their continued existence. In other areas such as Russia, the drive to re-establish empirical control is driven by greed, and this looks back to millennia full of such ambitions, for not only Russia but many other countries, including the United Kingdom.
Whether through high-level negotiations in Alaska or in indeterminable discussions in Qatar, conventional approaches to resolving conflicts do not appear to be producing any meaningful results.
Meanwhile, climate change has been powered by the uncontrolled pursuit of economic growth over the past two hundred years, the result of an intensive drive for profits and national progress so strong that it is only now, in the face of repeated scientific warnings, that we realise how close we are to a cliff-edge of seismic proportions — and some leaders, such as Donald Trump, still fail to accept this.
In our commentary of 7th March 2022, just a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we showed how these two outcomes of conflict and climate change are so deeply intertwined.
The international community still struggles with making any significant headway with climate change, as average temperatures push through the ‘1.5° above pre-industrial’ levels, and as conferences arranged by the United Nations fail to reach meaningful results.
Fear and greed lie not only behind all this, but also behind the third of our modern-day ‘Horsemen of the Apocalypse’, the polarisation of wealth.
It is a key part of Share Radio's mission to find ways to tackle widespread poverty and, in particular, inter-generational cycles of deprivation, which are becoming more acute with every decade. Few secular initiatives, including Communism, have made any significant inroads into its grip on humanity and the immense contrast in people's wealth, which is itself a key driver of the fear and greed which fuel both conflict and climate change.
Conventional answers are not delivering solutions to these massive Gordian Knots with which we are faced.
There is, however, a solution which was first laid before us two thousand years ago, a solution so radical that it remains hard for its followers to understand. It's called unconditional love for others, no matter how different or how unfriendly they appear to be. Love can conquer both fear and greed — it just needs courage, determination, confidence and decisiveness of the kind to which Adam Cox refers towards the end of his Hypnotist episode. He describes radical, unconventional solutions as ‘swords of clarity’.
Love provides solutions at all levels — personal, societal, national and international. On 30th June we described the ‘linguistic poverty of love’: so, let us be clear about what type of love we are speaking. It is what the Greeks call agape (άγάπε), the love of which Jesus spoke when he told us to love our neighbour as ourselves and to love our enemies.
As C.S. Lewis wrote, true humility ‘is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less’. Both fear and greed are driven by intense self-interest; unconditional love is driven by selfless generosity of spirit.
Love does not resort to killing in order to find solutions to conflict (Patriarch Kirill: please take note). Love does not entertain discounting the future so that our descendants have to live in a thoroughly degraded world (Donald Trump: please take note). And love means searching hard for a more egalitarian form of capitalism, including embedding inter-generational rebalancing into the constitutional fabric of our public and philanthropic policies, both nationally and internationally (tech giant autocrats: please take note).
Unconditional love can be the equivalent of Alexander the Great's sword which he wielded in resolving that Gordian Knot over two thousand years ago. It can change the future in every respect; we just need to embrace it, and to be confident, determined and decisive in so doing.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio