The Maholian Way - Part Two: The Maholian Way in the lives of two

Overall, these systems have notched up great successes in that, worldwide, they have played a large part in the meeting of human needs to a perhaps unprecedented degree.

However, the systems have serious flaws as well, as the array of issues faced by Carla, George, Tracey and those around them demonstrates. Considered collectively, the issues that feature in their lives cover a large proportion of problems faced the world over: poverty; unemployment; social isolation; degraded common spaces; poor public transport; substance abuse; crime; ineffective responses to disability or mental illness; boredom and purposelessness; educational failure; family violence; overwork and poor work-life balance; poor pay, working conditions and job security; work dissatisfaction; unserviceable debt; health problems; relationship problems; lack of community; social division; pollution; and resource depletion. (And this list doesn’t even include more severe problems encountered in the Third World, such as war, malnutrition and fatal infectious diseases.) Clearly there is much scope for improvement in our organising systems.

This is where relationalism comes in. What it focuses on is the quality of relationships between people, especially in situations where their actions have an impact on each other, such as in families, neighbourhoods, workplaces, the market, and relations between citizens and government. It doesn’t replace markets or governments, but rather enhances their effectiveness.

Relationalism starts with the fact that having good relationships with others meets critical psychosocial needs for us. We need to have the company of others and to be included as part of the group. We need to love and be loved. As well as receiving contributions from others we want to contribute to them. In fact neuroscience has discovered through brain scans that we derive more pleasure from activities we engage in with others for mutual benefit than from things we do for our own benefit.

We are interested in other people’s lives and stories, and in sharing our own. Our beliefs and values, our likes and dislikes, our fears and dreams are shaped in the context of other people’s. We model our behaviour on that of others, and want to be recognised and appreciated for who we are and what we do. Our identity and our life purpose are very much determined in a social context. We are deeply social beings.

So not only must we cooperate for all sorts of material reasons related to sharing the Earth’s bounty and maintaining our complex ways of life; we are driven to cooperate by our critical psychological need for good relationships. There is thus an elegant complementarity between these two aspects of our being, a complementarity that can act as a counterbalance to any tendencies to self-centredness we may have. This point needs to be emphasised, because it is central to relationalism. The complementarity between our practical and our social needs means that an often-cited dilemma – namely, that human selfishness has us act in one way while social imperatives call us to act quite differently – can be substantially reduced and even eliminated. All it needs is the creation of the right circumstances that foster sociability and mutual caring, and the creation of these circumstances is what the Maholian Way is all about.

• Page 8