Dear Owais,

We first published the Manifesto for Now in April of 2023.

And today I learned about the Stockdale Paradox.

James Stockdale was an American POW during Vietnam, and when asked how he made it through 8 years of captivity he said: “I never lost faith in the end of the story… I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Admiral Stockdale lost a lot. 

He also said “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” 

Philosophically, existentialism (or insert  most eastern influenced thinking here) is  – in part –  a recognition of our incarcerated selves. Sartre famously said: “man is condemned to be free.” Different stages of my life bring this sharp insight into HDTV clarity; ugly, flat, precise.

Like now.

The world has changed. We are living in a new geo-political reality. With that has come a renewed fervour for a TOTAL Canada. This is both weird and wonderful. Both powerful and oppressive. Regardless it is current. It is clear. And I have changed too. I have a clearer concept of my edges. I have become less of an optimist and more of a realist. 

Returning to Sartre for a minute, he called “bad faith” an avoidance of our responsibility to acknowledge our freedom and our entrapment. His famous example was of an excellent waiter who forgot that they had other identities. That through this abnegation of responsibility, this waiter was living/acting in bad faith. 

How are we in the arts and culture sector acting in bad faith? How am I? What have I chosen not to see?

Stockdale said that during his time as a POW, the optimists didn’t make it. They kept hoping that they would be released tomorrow, and in the end, the continuous disappointment broke their hearts.

I want us to make it. Point 9 in Manifesto for Now was to be our culmination. 

When we started it felt urgent. We were captivated by how Canada had the whole world living in it. And we were frustrated that we  – in the cultural sphere –  were unable to harness this incredible opportunity. And now, suddenly,  it feels  like the world that Canada houses is precipitously close to being toppled. If this is true, then developing a new definition for a culture plan might have been more prescient than we thought and even more important than we had imagined. Why? Because tonight we find ourselves in the dark. We need to light a fire and create a map. And we need a plan. And unlike its 1951 predecessor, this culture plan needs to reflect the totality and complexity of the land and people north of the 53rd parallel. We need to see ourselves now and work fast to tell each other all the ways we are who we are. We have much. We need to understand both how to share our bounty and to help one another feel better because of it.

For me it started with writing this letter to you. To remind myself of all that I value and how our connection has helped untangle some of the knots. 

It has felt like a worthwhile quest.  And to quote  – very loosely – from my new friend:  “I never lost faith in the end of the story.”

And with eyes wide open I think we will get there, but for that we need more minds and hearts to join us. 

SGS

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Dear SGS,

I recently asked some friends at dinner, what will you do if we are actually invaded by the US? A third refused the premise as too outlandish to entertain. A third enthusiastically promised to die for Canada. A third remained silent. As I sat there, thinking about my unborn child due in a few weeks, I was afraid to answer my own question.

Black swans. Nassim Taleb coined this phrase to explain random outlier events with catastrophic consequences, that have the particular characteristic of humans always feeling the need to try and explain them retroactively. It feels like the rate of black swan sightings in our world is increasing. Is that true? Or is it just the vibe? Has the randomness increased? Or catastrophic-ness? Or has our baseline just changed of how much predictability we expect, nay, we demand, of our universe? 

Through this writing, and our asking each other so many questions that have stumped each of us, I think we have come closer to what we want for culture. We had proclaimed wanting a “new definition for culture plan” – one that had much broader visions of what culture was, who it was for, where it lived. I think I have learned that I need to add to that hope a new want: I want a cultural plan that helps heal our culture. Not in a sideways accidental incidental way. I want it to directly tackle our wounds. There’s been something growing, that I can only call “the vibes” that feel like something has been going off. Everyone I know, everywhere, in every station, is feeling various degrees of bad. Everyone seems anxious or stressed or exhausted or lost. Yet, the progress train is travelling at hyperspeeds. My AI assistants are already more productive than me. We got Ozempic. And Succession. So why are we so gloomy? So gloomy that some of us decided to willingly, voluntarily give the steering wheel of the world’s most powerful country to a reality tv show host. 

Some other wants: I want a culture plan that makes it easier for us to come together and break bread. That makes it more likely that I meet people who are different from me and that we share ideas in real time and space. I want to laugh loudly and with other people. I want to take my 8 month old niece and 4 year old nephew to magical places that inspire them and fill them with awe and wonder. I want my aging parents to feel like they belong. I want my neighbours to love each other. 

I don’t know how long the trade war will last. I don’t know if actual physical war is in our cards. There are too many possibilities that have gone from black swans to gray swans, and we can’t pretend they don’t exist. But I do know that we are in a full blown culture war. We are fighting, above all, for values, for mythologies, for grand narratives. I want a culture plan that recognizes that’s what we are fighting for, and arms us accordingly. 

As we come to an end of this thinking-out-loud experiment that is Manifesto for Now, I want to challenge our sector to not give into the despair and the doom scrolling. It’s gonna be rough. It’s gonna be scary. But I think we will emerge stronger on the other side. I think our job now, us who call ourselves artsworkers, is to support the troops. The troops in this case being the ordinary Canadians who are going to struggle with the Herculean task of keeping our hearts soft and open in the face of hate and fear. I think of the Holland Festival in Amsterdam, a major international cultural festival that was created as a response to WW2, because the leaders of that time didn’t want their people to become afraid of outsiders after the war. I think of how proudly Canadians sponsored Syrian refugees. I think of how people came together to help each other during the pandemic. We can do this, but we will need to constantly be offered reminders of our shared humanity. 

I leave you with one of my favourite quotes: “The bad news is that we are falling without a parachute. the good news is there is no ground”. Chogyam Trungpa.

Owais