Publications
Professor Ajeet N. Mathur
published a paper “Whose Future? Dilemma of the Gandhian Eskimo” in an international journal, Futures
Volume 39 September, 2007. 895-901.
This paper questions the notion that everything is manageable
and what appears unmanaged or unmanageable can be hushed. The central idea is
that hope and despair are two threads of anxieties that belong to paradoxes of globalisation and it is just as important to engage with
dynamics of despair as with gung-ho hope. Pathological behavioural processes in groups reinforce fragmentations of
human consciousness raising illusions of different futures for different
groups. Weakened prospects of global civil society are due to inadequacy of
natural empathy among humans and the spirit of community that originate in
collective defences against anxieties. These defences induce politics of engagement
for facilitating sustainable and desirable futures in ways that anticipation of
patterns of repeated splittings of groups into
factions inhibit investments and engagement by members
of large groups. The prospects for social innovations to design institutions
that foster new coping responses to circumvent discontinuities and
disengagement are limited by the cement of society which is essentially
behavioural. Insights through the prism of Bionian
basic assumption groups can expand our understanding of social and political
processes for the design of institutions that affect choices for trajectories
into the future.