Chapter 6 moves us into the second half of the book and, with it, a more specific vision for what a psychology-informed progressive world might look like, and the concrete steps that might get us there. In Chapter 5, we saw how, across different levels of organisation, increases in wellbeing were associated with more cooperative relationships. This chapter develops this analysis – building on work presented in my previous book1 – by looking, more specifically, at how such synergetic relationships can be established. As with Chapter 5, the focus here is on identifying common processes across different levels of organisation: from the intrapersonal focus of therapy to the international conflict resolution domain. My aim, here, is to describe a set of systemwide, generic principles for how we can create ‘better’. Some of these principles, as stated earlier, will be familiar to progressives. Here, what I hope to do is to demonstrate support for a progressive perspective by showing how such strategies are underpinned by a wider, more encompassing logic. Some of these principles, however, like being assertive and genuine dialogue, may be newer (and potentially more controversial to progressives). In this way, the aim of the chapter is to lay out a particular, ‘re-visioned’ way of thinking about progressivism. This is an approach to progressivism that is psychological and relational, as well as socioeconomic, in nature. It is a progressivism of how we are with those close to us and ourselves, as well as how we act and think on more macro planes. This is a wider, more encompassing, more integrated progressivism: one in which the personal and the political become closely aligned.

See the ‘bigger picture’

Lose– lose strategies are characterised by ‘agencies’ (whether parts of a person, people, communities, or nations) thinking individually in interdependent contexts. That is, they ask, ‘What is best for me?’ rather than ‘What is best for us?’ and paradoxically, in doing so, fail to find the best solution for themselves. More specifically, lose– lose strategies demonstrate a failure to appreciate the larger whole: that I, and the other, are locked together into an interdependent system (at a higher level of organisation); and that ‘there is no best strategy independent of the strategy used by the other player’.