Carne Ross on the Leaderless Revolution

In the last decade you’ve moved from being a British foreign service officer to a member of Occupy Wall Street’s general assembly. What are the causes of this metamorphosis?

It's a long story that's told in my book but it started with what I saw in my own [foreign service] work on Iraq – that government was capable of misleading its own population to an extraordinary extent. I found that a profoundly disillusioning experience. It was a shock. There was another emotional component to it: One of my colleagues whom I worked very closely with on the issue of Iraq and WMD [weapons of mass destruction], a British weapons scientist [David Kelly], was driven to commit suicide after he was named as a journalist’s source for the fact that the Number 10 dossier on WMD had been exaggerated.

Up until then I was more or less happy being a British diplomat. But that triggered a process of exploration about what was wrong with government – not so much why people lie but why people take bad decisions. Without getting too complicated, my exploration of theories of knowledge led me to the belief that government basically cannot understand the complexity of the world. A much more devolved system of power is therefore necessary to cope with a complex world.

Newspaper front pages offer plenty of evidence that traditional methods of governance are fraying. What’s your evidence?

There are two very contemporary examples. Everybody but a few mad people recognises that climate change is a great threat to humanity’s future, but the governmental process to address it has totally failed. They're meeting right now in Durban and nobody expects that meeting to come up with an agreement on eliminating carbon emissions. So it's quite clear that government is in this case not capable of producing a solution.

The same problem is very clear in what's going on financially with the tremendous economic volatility we're experiencing. National governments and international bodies that were supposed to arbitrate these problems are not proving effective. The G20 met to discuss the eurozone crisis. It did not produce a meaningful decision to deal with it. It's becoming clear to people that we're confronting very new problems that are a function of globalisation, and that the old methods of dealing with them – looking to national governments and international bodies like the UN or the G20 – are inadequate. It’s a dramatic and scary thing but it leads to some very clear conclusions.

It led you to advocate for a “leaderless revolution”, which is the title of your new book. Please tell me about it.

The book is about my own journey to the conclusion that self-organised systems are best for the 21st century, but it's also a call to arms and a suggestion of principles that people might follow. It proposes a method of politics rather than any particular ends. That method is: Do stuff for yourself rather than asking a government or others to do it; address political concerns directly to those in power; use nonviolent methods and always act as if the means are the end; and embody the political principles you're trying to promote. The book proposes guidelines but it also gives examples of how this might happen in practice. So I hope that it might be seen both as an analysis of what's going on in the 21st century and a handbook for how to go about addressing it the most effectively.