The long now and liminality: will we create communitas ? A macro-social perspective of COVID-19

Abstract

The ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has changed society are the source of widespread discussion. But references to a ‘new normal’ are mostly confined to hybrid working and a possible four-day working week. Should future-scoping remain so narrow, a major opportunity for fundamental rethinking will be lost. This commentary seeks to take up and expand the argument of a 2021 article on the effects of COVID-19 by exploring the wider social implications and the opportunity presented by this existential crisis. Specifically, this critical analysis explores whether COVID-19 and its impacts have created a moment of liminality – a time of “transition during which the normal limits to thought are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction, and destruction” potentially leading to what Victor Turner refers to as communitas in which we can rethink the issues of our time and in which new social structures and understandings can form.

Illumination through liminality

Despite major challenges facing contemporary society, such as climate change, some researchers have suggested that in the early 2020s the human race is poised at a moment of liminality. Thomassen defined this as a state or time “of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction, and destruction” (2014: 1). Some suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is a phase of “macro-liminality” (Thomassen, 2014: 94), potentially leading to what anthropologist Victor Turner (1991) refers to as communitas.

In a 2021 paper in the International Journal of Communication, Chad Van De Wiele and Zizi Papacharissi applied these concepts to the COVID-19 pandemic that affected most of the human race. They described communitas as a “previously unrecognised universality of the human condition” (Van De Wiele and Papacharissi, 2021: 1144) that “emerges where social structure is not” (Turner, 1991: 126). Van De Wiele and Papacharissi say that by disrupting and reimagining traditional social boundaries “new social structures, patterns of understanding, and fellowships may begin to take shape” (2021: 1144).

Similar to other cataclysmic events that occurred over substantial periods of time such as World War I, World War II, and The Plague, Van De Wiele and Papacharissi observed that “long shadows are being cast in history” during the COVID-19 pandemic and that such phases of history create a “long moment in between … the fall of one state of being and the emergence of a new status quo” (2021: 1144), which they refer to as “the long durée” (2021: 1142).

During the long moment (or moments) of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Arundhati Roy (2020) refers to as a portal – a doorway from one world to the next – Van De Wiele and Papacharissi say “we are forced to reconcile and transcend our past”. During this period, “liminality represents an opportunity for renewal, for seeing the world anew” (2021: 1143).

These views are ambitious, it must be acknowledged, with inertia and counter-forces at work. The hierarchies and power elites of contemporary societies are deeply entrenched. Despite almost 200 countries in the world adopting democracy in one form or another (Marsh and Miller, 2012), and the fall of major authoritarian regimes such as the Soviet Union, neoliberal capitalism has spread its mantra and myths such as ‘trickle-down economics’ across almost all developed societies.

However, after the great promises of democracy and free enterprise, in our most developed and allegedly advanced societies wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities remain subjected to poverty, discrimination, and even violent oppression (e.g., the killing of George Floyd by police that triggered outrage in the USA – the ‘land of the free’ – and the perilous state of Australia's Indigenous communities). Privacy is systematically invaded such as in the scandalous Cambridge Analytica and Facebook affair in which the personal details of more than 80 million Facebook users were illegally accessed for political campaigning (Goodwin and Skelton, 2019). The Cambridge Analytica scandal was not the first and not the last such colonisation of the digital world to serve the greedy ambitions of multinational corporations and corrupt governments, according to investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. She observed that investigations that followed “lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on an industrial scale” (Cadwalladr, 2020: para. 2). So-called ‘social’ media engage mostly unrestricted in distribution of misinformation and disinformation, promotion of extremist views, and cyberbullying. The most urgent and pressing threats to human society such as climate change have been ignored for decades despite overwhelming scientific evidence, buried in politics beholden to petrochemical companies and coal mining that powered the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Most recently, increasingly widespread use of algorithms to drive automation and rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) pose major threats as well as benefits for society. Algorithmic filtering has been shown to perpetuate large-scale bias leading to social inequities, contribute to the distribution of disinformation and hate speech, and potentially create ‘filter bubbles’ that skew knowledge and understanding (Rainie and Anderson, 2017). Business spending on AI is forecast to exceed US$100 billion in 2024 (Pazzanese, 2020: para. 3). While recognizing undeniable benefits such as reducing menial tasks, researchers point out that there is almost no regulatory oversight of AI developments in countries such as the USA and only fledgling controls in other countries. Many express deep concern about bias, discrimination, surveillance, and breaches of privacy and – perhaps the most important consideration of all – subjugation of the role of human judgment shaped by morals and affective as well as cognitive processing (Pazzanese, 2020).

In their 2021 essay, Van De Wiele and Papacharissi are not naïve. They say that “liminal moments … do not guarantee the success of a social, cultural, political, economic, or structural revolution.” But they argue that liminality enables conversations to happen (2021: 1145). They suggest that these conversations might make knowable “forms and exercises of power that seldom penetrate our collective consciousness” – to see what is often unseen in the daily milieu of life. They go on to point out that:

Together with our media and our politicians, we become entrapped in debates that pit capitalism versus socialism, left versus right, good versus bad. We talk, live, and breathe in a world of civic extremes. Every gesture must fit one of our binaries. (Van De Wiele and Papacharissi, 2021: 1145)

Wang (2018) suggests that, far from enjoying a postmodern and socially advanced world, we are imprisoned in “carceral capitalism”, which Van De Wiele and Papacharissi describe as applying “a barely postmedieval economic logic to postmillennial markets”, referring to issues such as predatory lending and concentrated poverty based on race and class (2021: 1146). They note that many systems that govern contemporary societies “were invented in centuries past and no longer serve our democracies”, pointing to examples such as mass incarceration. They conclude: “we bend new technologies to fit the mould of centuries past” (Van De Wiele and Papacharissi, 2021: 1146).

Why? Van De Wiele and Papacharissi say that we find comfort in the seeming permanence of stasis” and that we are uncomfortable with uncertainty (2021: 1146).

However, when a long durée occurs – a long moment in between a seeming normality and a possible return to that normality – there is the opportunity for the reflection that conversations about change require. As one of the chief proponents of neoliberalism that contributes to our crises today, Milton Friedman, said: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change” (1982: 7).

As COVID-19 is slowly brought under control, we have the opportunity to question whether we want to return to the normality that preceded it. In daily life, this is already being exercised in discussions about working from home versus going to work in offices, often requiring long commutes. Companies, government agencies, and even universities are reviewing their office space requirements, seeing potential for major cost savings in encouraging or even mandating flexible working arrangements for employees who do not need to be physically present in designated locations to do their work. This is increasingly bringing the industrial-age notion of the five-day working week under scrutiny. In mid-2022 a number of companies in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA commenced four-day working week trials. The trials were coordinated by not-for-profit organisation 4 Day Week Global in partnership with researchers from Auckland University of Technology, Boston College, Cambridge University, Oxford University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Sydney (Kollewe, 2022). Several reports have indicated that a number of the companies will make a four-day working week permanent (“Firms in four-day week trial will make it permanent”, 2022).

COVID-19 also changed public behaviour in many daily routines, normalizing practices such as regular hand washing and self-isolation and even mask wearing when one has symptoms of a respiratory infection, in place of previous ‘soldier on’ attitudes and expectations that people with colds and flu should go to work.

However, will we have the deeper conversations that Van De Wiele and Papacharissi optimistically predict? Has the long durée of the COVID-19 pandemic afforded sufficient headspace for visions of a different and better society to form?

Also, we need to know if the proposed conversations will occur spontaneously. If not, who will start them? And how will they enter the public consciousness given the penchant of major media empires such as NewsCorp and its subsidiaries like Fox and Sky to doggedly support conservative policies and views?

The communitas that Thomassen speaks of, and which Van De Wiele and Papacharissi call for, makes addressing these questions worthwhile – even an imperative. Communitas is not Nirvana, but it “reflects an unveiling of structurally conditioned ambivalence toward the ‘other’; a renewal of our ethics” (Van De Wiele and Papacharissi, 2021: 1151), based on recognition of “a deeply bonded human collectivity” (Thomassen, 2014: 84).

It must be recognised in such a project that humanity does not have a ‘golden mean’ to recover or recreate. Human history is littered with wars and violence, oppression, racism, sexism, exclusion, inequality, and other social afflictions, along with environmental destruction. Alleged Golden Ages have been ‘history written by the victors’ and the successful.

This somewhat lengthy introduction is not written to be negative or depressing, but to provide a review of the proposition put forward by Van De Wiele, Papacharissi, and Thomassen and recognise the challenges as well as the opportunities that society faces. The further challenge, if we accept the merit of the argument put forward in the essay by Van De Wiele and Papacharissi (2021), is to begin to explore how we might respond during the long durée created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and how communitas might be realised. While opening up an intriguing discussion, Van De Wiele and Papacharissi, like Thomassen's earlier treatise on Liminality and the Modern and his hopeful prediction of communitas, do not address the ‘how’. How will societies take advantage of the imminent in-between to rethink and reshape society? What will be the catalyst for the ferment; the spark that leads to illumination?

Communicating for communitas

Several possibilities are identified in the following discussion, none of which offers a guaranteed path to communitas. But, even if this discussion eliminates possibilities, it opens a conversation and contributes to understanding of the public sphere today and how it might need to evolve in order to sustain democratic societies as envisaged by Habermas (1989, 2006) and expounded by Fraser (1990), Mouffe (2002), and others who identify the characteristics and ingredients of a “fully functioning society” (Cooper (2016: 581).

Voice and speaking up

A traditional view of how the public sphere operates, enshrined in the foundations of democracy, is that the voice of citizens (vox populi) will be listened to by their representatives and that the three branches of government – the legislature (i.e., parliament, Congress, etc.), the executive (government departments and agencies), and the judiciary, collectively forming the kratos – will respond to majority views of the demos (the people). Couldry (2010) made the case strongly that “voice matters”. One can argue that the voice of citizens works, at least to some extent, through elections, referenda, and in some policy making.

However, the existential issues confronting contemporary societies – just some of which were mentioned in the preceding discussion – show that simply speaking up and speaking out as citizens is not achieving the changes that many social leaders and many citizens identify as essential. A 2021 review of public communication by governments worldwide conducted the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Open Government Unit reported that governments are preoccupied with speaking to inform, persuade, and promote and routinely fail to listen (OECD, 2021).

In some circumstances and on some issues, research indicates that the voices of people, even large majorities, are being routinely and systematically ignored (Macnamara, 2016a, 2016b, 2019). Climate action is one example in which actions by some governments including those of the USA (a leading contributor to greenhouse gases) and Australia (a major supplier of coal) have fallen far short of the expectations reflected in majority public opinion. However, it is not only on major global issues that the voice of large numbers of people are ignored. Research has shown that hundreds of thousands of submissions to formally-convened public consultations on important matters such as public health are ignored by governments (Macnamara, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2019). Recent research also reports that employees are not listened to by their employers (Neill and Bowne, 2021). Voice without listening is ineffective and valueless. John Dewey's (1927) pronouncement of the “eclipse of the public” was arguably premature, but there is considerable evidence to say such as eclipse has occurred since. More work needs to be done on organisational listening before affordance of voice leads to change, particularly by the organisations and institutions that form the superstructure of developed societies.

Enlightenment

An optimistic possibility is that the power elites that govern and control society through the legislature, executive arms of government, and the judiciary, influenced by other institutions such as political parties, the Church, and the ‘fourth estate’ of media will at some point experience an epiphany and engage in a new enlightenment galvanised by scientific evidence and public opinion. However, despite rising public anger in relation to issues such as policing and treatment of African Americans and massive outpourings of public concern in relation to climate change, there is little evidence that such a transformation is imminent, or even possible. Despite the long durée of the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive social and economic upheaval that it has caused, power elites remain deeply entrenched with worldviews and ideologies that appear to be, at least in many cases, impenetrable. Few hold out hope for top-down social, political, and economic transformation at scale.

Grassroots movements

In The City and the Grassroots, Manuel Castells placed hope in bottom-up collectives of ‘ordinary’ people raising collective voice to seek political self-determination. Castells (1984) reflected the dynamics of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s. However, some note that Castells conceptualised “idealistic and sometimes quixotic movements of the information age” (Susser, 2006: 212). While Castells and some historians have presented case studies of mostly urban grassroots movements creating change, many such movements have been localised in their focus and impact. As Jacobsson and Korolczuka say in a recent review of urban grassroots movements:

Many mobilisations around urban questions are … small-scale, low-profile, self-organised, and focused on mundane everyday problems, such as heavy traffic on local roads, the closure of kindergartens in the area, or plans to demolish a building to which people attach value (2020: 130).

Dewey called for a return to “localism” that characterised early American townships and communities and their equivalents elsewhere where people knew each other and engaged face to face (2016: 111) in place of “the machine age” (2016: 157) with its centralisation and institutionalisation of politics; big business dominating policy making; and mass media focussed on entertainment that distracts people from politics and civic life and duty. But a return to a past age is impossible in industrialising and post-industrial societies and it is not what liminality is about.

In any case, while people at the grassroots of society are well-meaning and motivated, many lack knowledge and expertise in relation to the complex issues facing society, often engaging at an emotional level without evidence and well-formulated arguments. Despite several decades of grassroots movements, the fact that society faces continuing and even escalating threats, suggests that grassroots organizing cannot create the force for change required.

Medha Patkar of the National Peoples’ Alliance, who was involved in three decades of campaigning in India against mega-dams and other forms of unsustainable and exploitative development, says society needs “massroots organisation”, not grassroots organisation, pointing out poetically that grassroots are shallow and easily pulled out (Patkar, 2018: para. 3). She emphasises the importance of local leadership as well as mobilising at scale – concepts that are reflected in the following strategies.

Mass mobilisation

The magnification of voice through mass mobilisation has been a characteristic of contemporary social movements, exhibited in industrial strikes and mass protest rallies such as in opposition to the Vietnam War and, more recently, marches by up to two million people in Hong Kong in opposition to proposed undermining of judicial independence and new national security laws. However, such mass mobilisations are commonly met by heavy police interventions, arrests, and imprisonment of participants.

The large-scale protests in the USA following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police and ongoing movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo give some hope that mass mobilisation can bring about change. Such change remains slow, however, and is triggered in most cases only when critical incidents and flashpoints occur that receive wide media coverage. Mass mobilisations seldom if ever occur in the becalmed period of a long durée.

Furthermore, mass mobilisations represent a threat to established elites such as politicians, elected and appointed officials, police, intelligence and security agencies, and the social, legal, and regulatory structures that they seek to uphold, often based on a genuine sense of civic duty. Mass mobilisation, therefore, creates its own resistance. As Foucault said, “where there is power, there is resistance” (1990: 95). As minority groups and silent majorities seek power through mass mobilisation and direct action, they invoke reactionary countermanding and counterbalancing forces that, because of the superior resources of the state, have an advantage in resisting, crushing (e.g., criminalising certain forms of protest), or simply outlasting challenges to the status quo.

Revolution

If the powers of the state and elites become unbearable, Marx proposed that the ultimate and even inevitable force for change is revolution. Marx believed that the proletariat (the common people, generally seen as the working class) should and would rise up against and overthrow the bourgeoisie (the middle and upper classes who typically occupy positions of power). Some revolutions have proven to be peaceful, such as Velvet Revolution in what was Czechoslovakia in late 1989 which led to the relinquishment of Communist control and transition into two countries – The Czech Republic and Slovakia. But most are violent and bloody. The French Revolution stands as a pinnacle of what can happen when a ruling class alienates and antagonises large sections of the general population, becomes disconnected, and implements policies and laws that favour elites and disadvantage large numbers of citizens. As we know from history, people eventually rose up and chopped off the heads of their rulers. Revolutions also often lead to suffering by many and often years and decades of instability. Thus, violent solutions are denounced, but this potential pathway is noted as a reminder to the intransigent and the insufferable. If concerns reach boiling point, extreme actions can result.

Leadership and advocacy

Mobilisation and change, particularly mass mobilisation, require leadership and advocacy, which has been evident in major movements. The advocacy of Martin Luther King Jr. was a beacon for the American civil rights movement, along with others such as Malcolm X. Similarly, women's rights and feminism were given direction and momentum by prominent leaders such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem building on the pioneering efforts of First Wave feminists and succeeded by feminist icons and leaders today.

Leaders continue to emerge, such as Greta Thunberg's international championing of climate action along with the long-standing advocacy of David Attenborough and other environmentalists and conservationists.

However, leadership traditionally falls to a few, and it rests on their physical and intellectual shoulders as a heavy burden. Only a relatively small number of people can devote the time and energy to leadership as it is currently conceptualised and practiced. Also, current models of leadership are predominantly elite leadership, such as politicians groomed through the ranks of political parties or unions and frequently from wealthy backgrounds and families with ‘connections’. Our relatively small cadre of leaders today are CEOs, mandarins in high government places, elite sports stars, university Vice Chancellors, and others from the 1%. The 99% (https://99-percent.org) mostly follow and yearn for a better way.

The emergence of critical leadership studies challenges hegemonic perspectives on leaders and followers (e.g., see Collinson, 2011). Supporting and extending such critiques opens up another option in facilitating change through mass distributed leadership in which advocacy is undertaken broadly within society, not centrally convened such as in protests and rallies and restricted to parliaments, congresses, and boardrooms, but within and through the fields of practice, channels, and platforms of the participants. In such an approach, lawyers would advocate through their representations in the courts; business leaders would call for reform in financial services and banking; chefs and food critics would champion health; farmers would seek reform in environmental policies such as water management and use of antibiotics in animals; public/civil servants would lobby for policies and regulations that are equitable and speak up in the public interest; and so on. It might even be that tradesmen and tradeswomen paint messages for reform on their vans and cleaners call for the use of only environmentally friendly chemicals and materials. Builders could offer discounts and incentives for the use of sustainable materials. Academics in universities could en masse join and lead public debate and contribute public scholarship, particularly in fields such as communication, media, and politics (Waisbord, 2020). Journalists could lift their game and cease relying on press releases (Macnamara, 2014) and creating sensational headlines as clickbait (Macnamara, 2020), instead becoming the ‘watchdogs’ of society and the ‘fourth estate’ that they purport to be.

Some already do these things. This must be acknowledged – and hats off to them. But many don’t. Many business leaders are fixated on short-term profits and their own bonuses at the expense of employees and customers, such as the recent controversial decisions and actions of the Board and former CEO of Australia's once beloved national airline (Karp, 2023; Verrender, 2023). Many farmers are only too happy to accept irrigation licences when river systems are over-extended and use antibiotics in their animals to maximise production despite alarming antimicrobial resistance. Public/civil servants mostly sit comfortably behind non-disclosure policies and standing orders as silent servants of governments, irrespective of how ineffective or even corrupt their political masters are. Many academics are narrowly focussed on being published in journals read by a handful of their colleagues and getting a grant to fund their personal research ambitions.

It would be naïve to argue that all lawyers, business leaders, chefs, food writers, farmers, civil servants, etcetera will or can speak up and speak out. But what if vast numbers of leaders emerged across all sectors of society who are outspoken, eloquent, informed, and motivated? What if, instead of a few hundred or a few thousand leaders in a country, there were a million, or millions?

Mass distributed leadership includes and will be largely realised through micro leadership rather than relying and resting on the laurels of a dedicated and extraordinary few. If such a step-change in society is considered unrealistic, the COVID-19 pandemic and other major crises have shown otherwise. For example, a study of health communication campaigns aimed at refugee and early migrant communities in Australia during the pandemic found that individuals stepped up in these communities to distribute information and advice and were the most trusted sources of information in their communities. Some were local faith leaders or office-bearers in community associations, but many were private citizens (Macnamara, 2022). In the devastating 2022 floods in northern NSW, reports showed that “it was locals in their private boats who saved the majority of people, not the emergency services” or the Federal Government represented by the Prime Minister who arrived late on the scene (Raper, 2022).

International studies support these empirical and anecdotal findings. A 2022 UK Government study of crises reported that most people cooperate and support each other – “even go out of their way to help others” – during a crisis (Government Communication Service, 2022: 8). Significantly, a 2022 OECD study of COVID-19 strategies in four Asian countries found that collaborating with community leaders produces better results than top-down strategies, reporting that “tailored messages via relatable, trusted voices … are more likely to resonate than mainstream channels and content” (Alfonisi et al., 2022).

The power and importance of leadership is well documented in literature. But it is not only leadership by ministers, members of Congress, CEOs, directors, and clergy in a pulpit that shape society for the good. Leadership can be cultivated at every level of society in every profession and trade and calling. Evidence indicates that ethical, informed, and motivated leadership embedded in our culture is the key to a sustainable future and a fully functioning society. In short, the future depends on you and me and the people around us. As W. Lance Bennett (2021: 169) says in Communicating the Future in which he suggests solutions in relation to the environment, the economy, and democracy: “In the final analysis, we are all change agents”. We can no longer rely on representation and delegation. While participatory democracy with direct involvement by large numbers of people has been pooh-poohed by some as unrealistic, it is time to rethink Western reliance on liberal and representative models (Davis, 2019).

Integration of humanities, social science, science, and technology

At an intellectual level, a pathway can be created, and leaders supported, through closer and meaningful integration of humanities, arts, and social science (HASS) thinking with science and technology teaching and research, commonly referred to as the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) or as STEMM, adding medicine as a separate field.

HASS-STEMM integration has been widely discussed in universities for decades. But, in most instances, it fails to materialise in practice. Specialisation and institutional arrangements such as the structures of universities divided into faculties and schools and departments that often compete for status and resources rather than collaborate, and the vast array of often narrowly focussed publishing outlets, along with ideological factors, maintain siloes of thinking.

Integration of HASS-STEMM thinking has the potential to open up new ways of seeing the world and addressing human problems. While science and technology offer much to society, the application of social science and particularly humanities to developments in science and technology can reflect the needs of people and communities to ensure human rights, privacy, and dignity are protected. Universities have a key role to play as public institutions. Silvio Waisbord's recent call for academics to practice public scholarship that engages with non-academic publics rather than “preaching to the choir” (2020: 94) at academic conferences and in academic journals read by their peers is an enabling call to be heeded at an individual level.

Institutionally, in reviewing the Excellence for Research in Australia (ERA) framework, government is expected to place further emphasis on societal impact in awarding research funding following developments in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK. Rather than rhetoric such as statements of support for interdisciplinary research (Australian Research Council, 2018) and trying to enforce HASS-STEM integration top-down such as through the establishment of standalone transdisciplinary schools or faculties in universities that create division rather than integration and collaboration (e.g., University of Technology Sydney, 2023), interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are more likely achieved via incentives such as creating a specific category of grants and awards for such projects.

Conclusion – seizing the long durée

The options discussed suggest that there is no ‘silver bullet’ and no one size fits all. If revolution is agreed as unlikely and undesirable because of inevitable negative consequences, and doing nothing is ruled out because of the raft of evidence for change confronting modern societies, one or a combination of other approaches offer a viable way forward. Given that speaking up at grassroots level and mass mobilisation remain important, but have so far produced insufficient results, and a sudden enlightenment among the power elites that govern and control most of the world's resources is unlikely, we need to turn to leadership. However, individual reformist leaders and advocates face formidable vested interests and inertia. Therefore, mass distributed leadership is needed to support the often struggling and over-burdened cadre of existing leaders and add momentum to widely expressed desires for social, political, economic, and environmental change.

Mass distributed leadership is facilitated through education that not only fosters technical skills to serve the engine of economies, but which facilitates critical and creative thinking. Education in HASS as well as STEMM disciplines is the charter and challenge for schools and universities, but can also take place in cafés and clubs, small businesses and corporate boardrooms. It can take place around dinner tables and water coolers, in pubs and political party rooms, and in podcasts and webinars.

Such mass distributed leadership will require leadership development. But not only support for existing and emerging leaders: new leaders need to be invited and enabled from public spaces where there are gaps in representation and equity. Our social and political ‘black holes’. The silent leaders in waiting and the unled need a trumpet call and an instrument to play a role. That calls for distributed leadership programs: instead of sending in pre-selected and self-selected leaders to ‘help’ disadvantaged and marginalised communities, foster and bring out leaders from those communities. Such a project has its catalyst in the volunteers who have shown their propensity to step up to major challenges.

While the development of mass distributed leadership will take time to achieve, an opportunity unprecedented in recent history is before us – a period of liminality to look beyond and do more than ‘tinkering at the edges’ of the edifice, such as hybrid working that is still bound within industrial laws and customs that date back to the nineteenth century. It is a time to reflect, think, and rethink on macro-social issues and conspire to create communitas.